Essay in North Star (November 1858); as quoted in Faces at the Bottom of the Well : The Permanence of Racism (1992) by Derrick Bell, p. 40
1850s
Context: We deem it a settled point that the destiny of the colored man is bound up with that of the white people of this country. … We are here, and here we are likely to be. To imagine that we shall ever be eradicated is absurd and ridiculous. We can be remodified, changed, assimilated, but never extinguished. We repeat, therefore, that we are here; and that this is our country; and the question for the philosophers and statesmen of the land ought to be, What principles should dictate the policy of the action toward us? We shall neither die out, nor be driven out; but shall go with this people, either as a testimony against them, or as an evidence in their favor throughout their generations.
“Be assured, we shall not go to Canossa, either bodily or spiritually.”
Seien Sie außer Sorge, nach Kanossa gehen wir nicht, weder körperlich noch geistig.
Speech to the Reichstag (14 May 1872), Ausgewählte Reden des Fürsten von Bismarck: p. 176 https://books.google.com/books?id=nsjCDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA176&lpg=PA176&dq=Kanossa-rede&source=bl&ots=f3X5xq7raK&sig=Y86H5ZlgredQfpC3Wa_AB2Z-fOM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiIhrCn56zaAhVs3IMKHdBnAWwQ6AEIQTAC#v=onepage&q=Kanossa-rede&f=false, referring to the controversy over the Imperial envoy to the Holy See, Prince Hohenlohe, who had been rejected by Pope Pius IX, which marked the beginning of the Prussian Kulturkampf. The expression highlighted an era of political struggle between the Catholic Church and various secular governments, especially severe throughout the 1870s.
1870s
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Otto von Bismarck 35
German statesman, Chancellor of Germany 1815–1898Related quotes
“Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye.”
Variant translation: Close your bodily eye, that you may see your picture first with the eye of the spirit. Then bring to light what you have seen in the darkness, that its effect may work back, from without to within.
Quoted in The Romantic Imagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany (1996) by Fredrick Berwick and Jürgn Klein, and in "Culture: Caspar D. Friedrich and the Wasteland" by Gjermund E. Jansen in Bits of News (3 March 2005) http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/154/42/
undated
Context: Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards. A picture must not be invented but felt. Observe the form exactly, both the smallest and the large and do not separate the small from the large, but rather the trivial from the important.
Ein Volk, damit es sich geistig freier ausbilde, darf nicht mehr in der Sklaverei seiner körperlichen Bedürfnisse stehn, nicht mehr der Leibeigene des Leibes sein. Es muß ihm vor allem Zeit bleiben, auch geistig schaffen und geistig genießen zu können.
Movement of Production (1843), as translated in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (1988), p. 29
Speech at Meeting in Lausanne (8 December 1931), in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division Government of India, 1999 electronic edition), Volume 54 http://www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/gandhi-literature/mahatma-gandhi-collected-works-volume-54.pdf, p. 272.
1930s
Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Context: Popular imagination presupposes spiritual beings to be utterly independent of gravitation, while retaining shapes and proportions which gravitation originally determined, and only gravitation seems likely to maintain.
When and if spiritual beings make themselves visible either to our bodily eyes or to our inward vision, their object would be thwarted were they not to appear in a recognizable form; so that their appearance would take the shape of the body and clothing to which we have been accustomed. Materiality, form, and space, I am constrained to believe, are temporary conditions of our present existence. It is difficult to conceive the idea of a spiritual being having a body like ours, conditioned by the exact gravitating force exerted by the earth, and with organs which presuppose the need for food and necessity for the removal of waste products. It is equally difficult, hemmed in and bound round as we are by materialistic ideas, to think of intelligence, thought, and will existing without form or matter and untrammeled by gravitation or space.
The Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 31