“You imagine that what you can't understand is either spiritual or does not exist. The conclusion is quite wrong; rather there are obviously a million things in the universe that we would need a million quite different organs to understand.”
The Other World (1657)
Context: You imagine that what you can't understand is either spiritual or does not exist. The conclusion is quite wrong; rather there are obviously a million things in the universe that we would need a million quite different organs to understand. For example, I perceive by my senses what makes a magnet point north, what makes tides rise and fall, and what becomes of an animal after death. Your people are not proportioned to perceive such miracles, just as someone blind from birth cannot imagine the beauty of a landscape, the colors of a painting or the shadings of an iris. He will imagine them as something palpable, edible, audible or olfactory. Likewise, if I were to explain to you what I perceive by the senses you do not have, you would interpret it as something that could be heard, seen, touched, smelled or tasted; but it is not like that.
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Cyrano de Bergerac 57
French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist 1619–1655Related quotes
... While we await the precise moment when all of capitalism's victims will indignantly rise to destroy the system, we are being devoured. ... Some of us are going to have to take our courage in hand and build a hard revolutionary cadre for selective retaliatory violence.
Source: From Blood in My Eye (1971), pp. 11-12
Record of Proceedings http://www.wales.gov.uk/cms/2/ChamberSession/380313AC00046B17000028C300000000/N0000000000000000000000000042322.htm, National Assembly for Wales, 14 March 2006.
This statement was nominated for, but failed to win, the "Foot in Mouth" award in 2006.
Foreword to Radio Replies Vol. 1, (1938) page ix
Variant: There are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church.
Illusions : The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The New Downing Street (April 15, 1850)
Million Reasons, written by Lady Gaga, Hillary Lindsey, and Mark Ronson
Song lyrics, Joanne (2016)
Source: The Flame is Green (1971), Ch. 9 : Oh, The Steep Roofs of Paris
Context: Listen now to a series of sayings that always come hard to brave people. Our own great movement will grow with its own impetus wherever it is not blighted. We will break up persons of blight and centers of blight. But often, and this will be the hard part for all of you to understand, we will warn and advise before we kill. And quite often we will not kill at all. Try to understand this.
Source: All and Everything: Meetings with Remarkable Men (1963)