“Weight, force and casual impulse, together with resistance, are the four external powers in which all the visible actions of mortals have their being and their end.”
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
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Leonardo Da Vinci363
Italian Renaissance polymath 1452–1519Related quotes
Isaac Newton book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Preface
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687)
Hans Morgenthau book Politics Among Nations
Six Principles of Political Realism, § 5.
Politics Among Nations (1948)
Context: Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe. As it distinguishes between truth and opinion, so it distinguishes between truth and idolatry. All nations are tempted — and few have been able to resist the power for long — to clothe their own aspirations and action in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another. There is a world of difference between the belief that all nations stand under the judgment of God, inscrutable to the human mind, and the blasphemous conviction that God is always on one's side and that what one wills oneself cannot fail to be willed by God also.
Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar
“The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” p. 24.
The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)
William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian
Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect"
“In established interests are the most powerful force of resistance to good.”
Daniel Salamanca (1863–1935) President of Bolivia (1863-1935)
“The power and force of stone reside in its mass, its weight, and its density.”
Fritz Wotruba (1907–1975) Austrian sculptor (23 April 1907, Vienna – 28 August 1975, Vienna)
Source: The Human Form: Sculpture, Prints, and Drawings, 1977, p. 19.
Henry M. Leland (1843–1932) American businessman
Source: Master of Precision: Henry M. Leland, 1966, p. 147; Leland talking about his idea for a V8 engine around 1913-14. Partly cited in: Alexander Richard Crabb (1969), Birth of a giant: the men and incidents that gave America the motorcar. p. 315
“I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.”
Franz Kafka book Letters to Milena
Source: Letters to Milena