“I have said this to explain the stanza that follows, in which the soul replies to those who call in question its holy tranquillity, who will have it wholly occupied with outward duties, that its light may shine before the world: these persons have no conception of the fibres and the unseen root whence the sap is drawn, and which nourish the fruit.”

Note to Stanza 28 part 4
Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom, Notes to the Stanzas

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John of the Cross48

Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint 1542–1591

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“The highest part of the human soul, which is called the intelligence and which is not the act of any body and does not need for its proper operation a corporeal instrument—this intelligence, if it were not obscured and weighed down by the mass of the body, would itself have complete knowledge from the irradiation received from the superior light without the help of sense, just as it will have when the soul is drawn forth from the body, and as perhaps those people have who are free from the love and the imaginings of corporeal things.”

Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253) English bishop and philosopher

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“What I called the perplexed jungle of Paganism sprang, we may say, out of many roots: every admiration, adoration of a star or natural object, was a root or fibre of a root; but Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

“No one knows the origin of life, or of matter, or of what we call mind. The whence and the whither are questions that no man can answer. In the presence of these questions all intellects are upon a level. The barbarian knows exactly the same as the scientist, the fool as the philosopher. Only those who think that they have had some supernatural information pretend to answer these questions, and the unknowable, the impossible, the unfathomable, is the realm wholly occupied by the “inspired.””

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

"To the Indianapolis Clergy." The Iconoclast (Indianapolis, IN) (1883)

“So much I have learned:
the blossom that fades away,
its color unseen,
is the flower in the heart
of one who lives in this world.”

Ono no Komachi (825–900) Japanese poet

Source: Helen Craig McCullough's translations, Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry (1985), p. 174

“I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

Coth, in Book Four : Coth at Porutsa, Ch. XXVI : The Realist in Defeat
The Silver Stallion (1926)

“The great question which, in all ages, has disturbed mankind, and brought on them the greatest part of their mischiefs… has been, not whether be power in the world, nor whence it came, but who should have it.”

John Locke book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Source: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

U.S. Supreme Court rationale for sterilizing the "unfit." Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 207 (1927) (endorsing Virginia's eugenics program).
1920s
Context: We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

“Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.”

Jonathan Lear (1948) American philosopher

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Harvard University Press: 2008), p. 103

“The Church has two missions. Its first mission is to address its own members; not just those who were baptised but also those who after being baptised have chosen to embrace the Church's teachings and embark on a spiritual journey that passes through the Church. When I speak as the bishop of these people I have to put everything in the light of the Gospel. When I speak to society at large, and I know there are people who embrace this position and others who don't, I have a duty to pass on the Church's message.”

Paul Cremona (1946) Catholic archbishop

Source: Lead us not into temptation https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/lead-us-not-into-temptation.314940 (27 June 2010)

“The chief good is the suspension of the judgment, which tranquillity of mind follows like its shadow.”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Pyrrho, 11.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 9: Uncategorized philosophers and Skeptics

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