Quotes about books
page 49

“I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens – you know, until it finds its own plot – because you can't outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it's a slow way of working.”

Nelson Algren (1909–1981) American novelist, short story writer

"The Art of Fiction No. 11" (1955)

Way

“The blackbirds are in this book, they're both pro the kids and against the kids. Just like fate. Sometimes it goes your way. Sometimes… and also a blackbird is from my passion for Schubert songs and his blackbirds and his birds of doom or birds of good. … some people were baffled that in the last big picture of that book, there's a crucifix on the wall of the children's house. Everybody assumes the hero and heroine are Jewish and the mother is Jewish. They're not. They're not. — That was my point. Those kids were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And all children were in the Holocaust. Everybody was in the Holocaust. So, I made sure my hero and heroine were not Jewish children. That was too easy. That was too easy.”

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012) American illustrator and writer of children's books

NOW interview (2004)

Fate, Children, People, Way

“If books were sold as software and online recordings are, they would have this legalese up front:
The content of this book is distributed on an 'as is' basis, without warranty as to accuracy of content, quality of writing, punctuation, usefulness of the ideas presented, merchantability, correctness or readability of formulae, charts, and figures, or correspondence of (a) the table of contents with the actual contents, (2) page references in the index (if any) with the actual page numbering (if present), and (iii) any illustration with its adjacent caption. Illustrations may have been printed reversed or inverted, the publisher accepts no responsibility for orientation or chirality. Any resemblance of the author or his or her likeness or name to any person, living or dead, or their heirs or assigns, is coincidental; all references to people, places, or events have been or should have been fictionalized and may or may not have any factual basis, even if reported as factual. Similarities to existing works of art, literature, song, or television or movie scripts is pure happenstance. References have been chosen at random from our own catalog. Neither the author(s) nor the publisher shall have any liability whatever to any person, corporation, animal whether feral or domesticated, or other corporeal or incorporeal entity with respect to any loss, damage, misunderstanding, or death from choking with laughter or apoplexy at or due to, respectively, the contents; that is caused or is alleged to be caused by any party, whether directly or indirectly due to the information or lack of information that may or may not be found in this alleged work. No representation is made as to the correctness of the ISBN or date of publication as our typist isn't good with numbers and errors of spelling and usage are attributable solely to bugs in the spelling and grammar checker in Microsoft Word. If sold without a cover, this book will be thinner than those sold with a cover. You do not own this book, but have acquired only a revocable non-exclusive license to read the material contained herein. You may not read it aloud to any third party. This disclaimer is a copyrighted work of Jef Raskin, first published in 2004, and is distributed 'as is', without warranty as to quality of humor, incisiveness of commentary, sharpness of taunt, or aptness of jibe.”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

"If Books Were Sold as Software" http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&dateissued=20040818#11200, NewsScan.com (18 August 2004) If Books Were Sold as Software (2004)

Death, People, Art, Error

“We must consider the words, "the heavens were opened" (Ezek. i. 1); they give the key to the understanding of the whole. The figure of opening, also that of opening the gates, occurs frequently in the books of the prophets… When he commences to describe the firmament in detail, he says, "the firmament," without adding the words "the likeness of," for he says, "And I looked, and behold, in the firmament that was above the head of the cherubims there appeared over them as it were a sapphire stone, as the appearance of the likeness of a throne" (Ezek x. 1). Here the prophet speaks of "the firmament" and not of "the likeness of the firmament,"…”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.7

Understanding, Appearance

“Some authors state that the last stage in this chain of measurements involves "consciousness," or the "intellectual inner life" of the observer, by virtue of the "principle of psycho-physical parallelism." Other authors introduce a wave function for the entire universe. In this book, I shall refrain from using concepts that I do not understand.”

Asher Peres (1934–2005) Israeli physicist

Life, Understanding, Universe

“When we look at the age in which we live—no matter what age it happens to be—it is hard for us not to be depressed by it. The taste of the age is, always, a bitter one. “What kind of a time is this when one must envy the dead and buried!” said Goethe about his age; yet Matthew Arnold would have traded his own time for Goethe’s almost as willingly as he would have traded his own self for Goethe’s. How often, after a long day witnessing elementary education, School Inspector Arnold came home, sank into what I hope was a Morris chair, looked ’round him at the Age of Victoria, that Indian Summer of the Western World, and gave way to a wistful, exacting, articulate despair!
Do people feel this way because our time is worse than Arnold’s, and Arnold’s than Goethe’s, and so on back to Paradise? Or because forbidden fruits—the fruits forbidden to us by time—are always the sweetest? Or because we can never compare our own age with an earlier age, but only with books about that age?
We say that somebody doesn’t know what he is missing; Arnold, pretty plainly, didn’t know what he was having. The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. Maybe we too are living in a Golden or, anyway, Gold-Plated Age, and the people of the future will look back at us and say ruefully: “We never had it so good.” And yet the thought that they will say this isn’t as reassuring as it might be. We can see that Goethe’s and Arnold’s ages weren’t as bad as Goethe and Arnold thought them: after all, they produced Goethe and Arnold. In the same way, our times may not be as bad as we think them: after all, they have produced us. Yet this too is a thought that isn’t as reassuring as it might be.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Taste of the Age”. pp. 16–17; opening
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

People, Age, World, Education

“The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke M. D.,'… appeared in 1705, containing 'A Discourse of Earthquakes'… His treatise… is the most philosophical production of that age, in regard to the causes of former changes in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature. 'However trivial a thing,' he says, 'a rotten shell may appear to some, yet these monuments of nature are more certain tokens of antiquity than coins or medals, since the best of those may be counterfeited or made by art and design, as may also books, manuscripts, and inscriptions, as all the learned are now sufficiently satisfied has often been actually practised,' &c.; 'and though it must be granted that it is very difficult to read them and to raise a chronology out of them, and to state the intervals of the time wherein such or such catastrophes and mutations have happened, yet it is not impossible.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 36
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Age, Art, Nature, Learning

“Hard Truths was a book based on 32 hours of interviews over a period of two years. I made this one comment on the Muslims integrating with other communities probably two or three years ago. Ministers and MPs, both Malay and non-Malay, have since told me that Singapore Malays have indeed made special efforts to integrate with the other communities, especially since 9/11, and that my call is out of date. I stand corrected. I hope that this trend will continue in the future.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

statement that he stands corrected on how well-integrated Malay-Muslims are in Singapore (Asia One, March 08, 2011 http://www.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne+News/Singapore/Story/A1Story20110308-267055.html) 2010s

Truth, Hope, Communication, Effort

“I am a great admirer of Professor Hayek. Some of his books are absolutely supreme—“The Constitution of Liberty” and the three volumes on “Law, Legislation and Liberty”—and would be well read by almost every hon. Member.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech in the House of Commons (10 March 1981) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104593 First term as Prime Minister

Law, Reading

“My monograph on visible spectroscopy using molecular orbital notations eventually resulted into a book in 1960.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

How I made it: CNR Rao, Scientist (2010)

“Not many people know this, but on top of writing regularly for every known newspaper and magazine, Anthony Burgess writes regularly for every unknown one, too. Pick up a Hungarian quarterly or a Portuguese tabloid - and there is Burgess, discoursing on goulash or test-driving the new Fiat 500. 'Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.' Even today, at seventy, and still producing book after book, Burgess spends half his time writing music. He additionally claims to do all the housework.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Opening paragraph of his review of Little Wilson and Big God: Being the First Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess, p. 123
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

People, Music, Time

“One who listens to the Qur’an (while it is being recited) will be kept away from the evils of this world; and one who recites the Qur’an will be kept away from the trials of the hereafter. And the person who listens to even one verse of the book of Allah - this is better (for him) than possessing a mansion of gold.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Biharul Anwar, Volume 92, Page 19
Shi'ite Hadith

World, Evil, Personality

“I don't know what to do or where to turn in this taxation matter. Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind. But I don't know where the book is, and maybe I couldn't read it if I found it.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

Remark to Judson Welliver, as quoted in Francis Russell (1968) The Shadow of Blooming Grove.
1920s

Reading

“Like left-liberals, "lite libertarians"—they're the kind that is afflicted with the same spineless conformity; a deformation of the personality euphemized as political correctness—are incapable of appreciating a script or book; a painting or symphony; a stand-up routine, if only because the material and its creator violates the received laws of political correctness.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

ILANA MERCER, " "Cathy Reisenwitz Redux: Steigerwald, Oy Vey Gevalt!" https://thelibertarianalliance.com/2015/01/14/ilana-mercer-cathy-reisenwitz-redux-steigerwald-oy-gevalt/ The British Libertarian Alliance, January 14, 2015 2010s, 2015

Law, Affliction, Painting, Personality

“Khamenei is not the first ruler of Iran with whom poets have run into trouble. For some 12 centuries poetry has been the Iranian people’s principal medium of expression. Iran may be the only country where not a single home is found without at least one book of poems. Initially, Persian poets had a hard time to define their place in society. The newly converted Islamic rulers suspected the poets of trying to revive the Zoroastrian faith to undermine the new religion. Clerics saw poets as people who wished to keep the Persian language alive and thus sabotage the ascent of Arabic as the new lingua franca. Without the early Persian poets, Iranians might have ended up like so many other nations in the Middle East who lost their native languages and became Arabic speakers. Early on, Persian poets developed a strategy to check the ardor of the rulers and the mullahs. They started every qasida with praise to God and Prophet followed by panegyric for the ruler of the day. Once those “obligations” were out of the way they would move on to the real themes of the poems they wished to compose. Everyone knew that there was some trick involved but everyone accepted the result because it was good. Despite that modus vivendi some poets did end up in prison or in exile while many others spent their lives in hardship if not poverty. However, poets were never put to the sword. The Khomeinist regime is the first in Iran’s history to have executed so many poets. Implicitly or explicitly, some rulers made it clear what the poet couldn’t write. But none ever dreamt of telling the poet what he should write. Khamenei is the first to try to dictate to poets, accusing them of “crime” and” betrayal” if they ignored his injunctions.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

When the Ayatollah Dictates Poetry http://www.aawsat.net/2015/07/article55344336/when-the-ayatollah-dictates-poetry, Ashraq Al-Awsat (Jul 11, 2015).

God, People, Faith, Religion

“Trochu's Vianney book makes me shudder. Positively frightening - and the saint too. The first time I read it I was quite horrified…Actually he is a second Simeon Stylites - and how hard and stern he is - and not only against himself: he would excommunicate his parishioners if they even once went dancing or drinking - like the most rigorous Puritan.. For him sin involved personal, direct single combat with Satan…But there's no glove to Vianney's peasant fist. He's really gruesome.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Letters 1951-59.

Drink, Time, Reading, Dance

“To be sure, the Bible contains the direct words of God. How do we know? The Moral Majority says so. How do they know? They say they know and to doubt it makes you an agent of the Devil or, worse, a Lbr-l Dm-cr-t. And what does the Bible textbook say? Well, among other things it says the earth was created in 4004 BC (Not actually, but a Moral Majority type figured that out three and a half centuries ago, and his word is also accepted as inspired.) The sun was created three days later. The first male was molded out of dirt, and the first female was molded, some time later, out of his rib. As far as the end of the universe is concerned, the Book of Revelation (6:13-14) says: "And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind." … Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"The Blind Who Would Lead", essay in The Roving Mind (1983); as quoted in Canadian Atheists Newsletter (1994)
General sources

God, People, School, Home

“These experiences are not 'religious' in the ordinary sense. They are natural, and can be studied naturally. They are not 'ineffable' in the sense the sense of incommunicable by language. Maslow also came to believe that they are far commoner than one might expect, that many people tend to suppress them, to ignore them, and certain people seem actually afraid of them, as if they were somehow feminine, illogical, dangerous. 'One sees such attitudes more often in engineers, in mathematicians, in analytic philosophers, in book keepers and accountants, and generally in obsessional people'. The peak experience tends to be a kind of bubbling-over of delight, a moment of pure happiness. 'For instance, a young mother scurrying around her kitchen and getting breakfast for her husband and young children. The sun was streaming in, the children clean and nicely dressed, were chattering as they ate. The husband was casually playing with the children: but as she looked at them she was suddenly so overwhelmed with their beauty and her great love for them, and her feeling of good fortune, that she went into a peak experience…”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: New Pathways In Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972), p. 17

Love, Children, People, Beauty

“For this reason, all the experiments in this book should be supplemented with a healthy outgoing attitude toward other people and relationships. If you are already a withdrawn, introspective person, you should make efforts to relate yourself with others through outside activities. This will ensure a balanced growth of your abilities, and the gradual acceptance of your inner abilities by your conscious mind.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: How To Develop Your ESP Power (1966), p. 27

People, Effort, Personality

“Tuition costs are outrageous. Fortunately, they gave me a scholarship…so I only had to cover living expenses, books, etc., by working.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)

“Because the book became a freak 'bestseller', because I found myself bracketed with the 'Angry Young Men' of the period, I found myself carried to 'fame' on a wave of publicity -- only to discover that this kind of fame is one of the subtlest forms of obscurity. Everybody knew who I was, and nobody knew what I stood for. The public image meant that nobody was interested in what I had to say, for everyone was convinced that they already knew. I could talk until I was blue in the face about my attempt to revise the pessimistic existentialism of Heidegger, Camus and Sartre; as far as most people were concerned, I was an autodidact who was angry about something or other.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Bicameral Critic (1985), p. 188, George Bernard Shaw: A personal view (1979)

Men, People

“When I was doing a book tour in Japan for Why Men Are The Way They Are, I was told of an institution called the snack. The snack works like this: A man is coming home from work, and has had a bad day. He doesn’t feel that his wife wants to hear about it, so he pays between $50 and $80 for a snack —a sandwich and a drink and an attractive woman who will listen empathetically to him—sort of a beautiful psychologist with refreshments. No men need apply.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 198.

Men, Beauty, Way, Feeling

“Kevin Kruse in his book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America details how industrialists in the 1930s and 1940s poured money and resources into an effort to silence the social witness of the mainstream church, which was home to many radicals, socialists and proponents of the New Deal. These corporatists promoted and funded a brand of Christianity—which is today dominant—that conflates faith with free enterprise and American exceptionalism. The rich are rich, this creed goes, not because they are greedy or privileged, not because they use their power to their own advantage, not because they oppress the poor and the vulnerable, but because they are blessed. And if we have enough faith, this heretical form of Christianity claims, God will bless the rest of us too. It is an inversion of the central message of the Gospel. You don’t need to spend three years at Harvard Divinity School as I did to figure that out.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

"The Suicide of the Liberal Church", January 24, 2016 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_suicide_of_the_liberal_church_20160124

Money, God, School, Faith

“If I were designing a phony religion, I'd surely include a version of this little gem — but I'd have a hard time saying it with a straight face:If anybody ever raises questions of objections about our religion that you cannot answer, that person is almost certainly Satan. In fact, the more reasonable the person is, the more eager to engage you in open-minded and congenial discussion, the more sure you can be that you're talking to Satan in disguise! Turn away! Do not listen! It's a trap!What is particularly cute about this trick is that it is a perfect "wild card," so lacking in content that any sect or creed or conspiracy can use it effectively. Communist cells can be warned that any criticism they encounter is almost sure to be the work of FBI infiltrators in disguise, and radical feminist discussion groups can squelch any unanswerable criticism by declaring it to be phallocentric propaganda being unwittingly spread by a brainwashed dupe of the evil patriarchy, and so forth. This all-purpose loyalty-enforcer is paranoia in a pill, sure to keep the critics muted if not silent.Did anyone invent this brilliant adaptation, or is it a wild meme that domesticated itself by attaching itself to whatever memes were competing for hosts in its neighborhood? Nobody knows, but now it is available for anybody to use — although, if this book has any success, its virulence should diminish as people begin to recognize it for what it is.”

Daniel Dennett book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Breaking the Spell (2006)

People, Religion, Question, Evil

“International Jews.
In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews. The adherents of this sinister confederacy are mostly men reared up among the unhappy populations of countries where Jews are persecuted on account of their race. Most, if not all, of them have forsaken the faith of their forefathers, and divorced from their minds all spiritual hopes of the next world. This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia) Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemborg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.
Graves: This was written by Winston Churchill, a highly regarded M. P. in England…so, I need hardly remind you that it will take strong evidence to prove the “Protocols” ‘’’a fake!’’’
Raslovlev: At an old bookshop I got a copy of “The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu,” by Maurice Joly, 1864.
I examined what I had. It was obvious that the “Protocols of Zion” was copied from it.
Graves: How did you get this?
Raslovlev: I bought this book from a friend, formerly of the Okhrana, our secret agents in France. They ordered the plagiarism!
When the Bolsheviks came in, we left with what we could take out with us.
How much is it worth to you, or your paper, Mr. Graves?
Graves: Hmm…can’t say yet! …Is Geneva really the place of publication??
Raslovlev: I do know that the “Protocols of Zion: was intended to prove to the Tsar that the Revolt in Russia was a Jewish Plot…it was written by an Okhrana agent…a plagiarist, Mathieu Golovinski!
When it was first published in Russia round 1902, its publisher, Dr. Nilus, claimed it to be notes stolen from an 1897 Zionist congress by French agents!
Graves: But that congress was convened by Theodore Herzl to promote a Jewish state. It was not a secret meeting…Dr. Nilus’s claim is a lie!
Raslovlev: Yes, it is indeed! Let me show you…we will compare the “Protocols” with Joly’s Book.
Raslovlev: Set them side by side Graves, and you will see obvious plagiarism of Joly’s “dialogue!”
Graves: I see…be patient while I go through it…yes! Yes! Yes!”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), pp. 70-73

Men, People, Lie, Secret

“Everyone who came in contact with Xavier seems to have agreed that he was a saint. Men might disagree with him; but in all the extensive records there is not a single word that runs contrary to the general verdict as to his saintliness. There are many references to the long hours that he spent in prayer and in rapt contemplation of his Lord. He disclaimed anything in the way of miraculous powers; in his devotions there was nothing that could be called mystical in any strict sense of that term. He seems to have followed the broad lines of medieval devotional practice, profoundly influenced by the Spiritual Exercises of his master Ignatius. Xavier, like Ignatius, was in all things a medieval man, untouched by any of the new currents of thought in theology or in the daily affairs of life. It is probable that, in the ten years of his sojourn in the East, he never possessed a Bible or even a New Testament. Apart from his breviary and his missal, his sole companion seems to have been the work of Marcus Marulus, Opus de religiose vivendi institutione, a thick book of 680 pages, published at Cologne in 1531. He seems rarely to have based his discourses directly on the Bible…”

Francis Xavier (1506–1552) Navarrese Basque Roman Catholic saint and missionary

Neill, S. (2004). A history of Christianity in India: The beginning to AD 1707. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Life, Men, Way, Exercises

“… From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics and determined to become a theoretical physicist. I had no real idea what that meant, but it seemed incredibly exciting to spend one's life attempting to find the secrets of the universe by using one's mind.”

David Gross (1941) American particle physicist and string theorist

"David J. Gross - Biographical" http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2004/gross-bio.html, Nobel Prize in Physics, nobelprize.org (2004)

Life, Secret, Age, Mathematics

“Léon Bloy, despite his many impressive qualities.. what a hater he was! - wild and implacable, and what power of abuse! Strange don't you think that Ernst Jünger should comment at length in his war-diaries how irresistibly Bloy reminded him of Hitler in his paroxysms of rage and his foul and ribald tongue?.. Yet Bloy was undoubtedly a man with great gifts of vision and perception, and charity, too - even in the midst of his orgies of hatred. And much of what he writes about Our Lady of La Salette in his La Salette book is very fine and often goes straight to one's heart…”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Letters 1951-59.

War, Thinking, Rage, Heart

“Great books are great teachers; they are showing us every day what ordinary people are capable of. These books come out of ignorant, inquiring humanity. They are usually the first announcements for success in learning. Most of them were written for, and addressed to, ordinary people.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

People, Learning, Teachers, Success

“They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works.”

Robert Burton book The Anatomy of Melancholy

The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Democritus Junior to the Reader

“Thousands of years ago, tribes of human beings suffered great privations in the struggle to survive. In this struggle it was important not only to be able to handle a club, but also to possess the ability to think reasonably, to take care of the knowledge and experience garnered by the tribe, and to develop the links that would provide cooperation with other tribes. Today the entire human race is faced with a similar test. In infinite space many civilizations are bound to exist, among them civilizations that are also wiser and more "successful" than ours. I support the cosmological hypothesis which states that the development of the universe is repeated in its basic features an infinite number of times. In accordance with this, other civilizations, including more "successful" ones, should exist an infinite number of times on the "preceding" and the "following" pages of the Book of the Universe. Yet this should not minimize our sacred endeavors in this world of ours, where, like faint glimmers of light in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of dark unconsciousness of material existence. We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Nobel Lecture

Life, World, Support, Knowledge

“It was difficult to sustain the illusion that education was of value for kids who would not live long enough to use it. They’d never take the standardized tests that they were prepping for. … Free from the constraints of racking up high test scores or getting into colleges, students could learn for learning’s sake—which was how it ought to be. The tick-tock curriculum had dissolved and been replaced by activities improvised from day to day by teachers and parents: hiking in the mountains, doing art projects about the Cloud Ark, talking with psychologists about death, reading favorite books. In one sense Amelia and her colleagues had never been more needed, never had such an opportunity to show their quality.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

"The Casting of Lots"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

Death, Education, Art, Mountain

“More Tales of Boss Ket: An Informal and Unpublished Sequel to the Book, "Professional Amateur, the Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering", Thomas Alvin Boyd, 1969”

Charles Kettering (1876–1958) American inventor, engineer, businessman, and the holder of 140 patents

References

“There are some silly canards that die hard and some that should have been buried long ago such as 'Those that can, do; those as cannot, teach," or the definition of a Professor as a man whose job is to tell students how to solve the problem of life, which he himself has tried to avoid by becoming a Professor; or the more hurtful one that a Professor is a text book wired for sound.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Teachers & Education

Life, Problem, Hurt

“To me, the circle and the square where the sky and the earth, as symbolized by the ancient Oriental religions; they formed a kind of rudimentary alphabet by means of which everything could be expressed with the most limited means. They evoked prehistoric runes and the early I-Ching, or Book of Changes.”

Michel Seuphor (1901–1999) designer, draughtsman, painter

Source: Abstract Painting (1964), p. 98

Religion, Change

“"If we give you a pistol, will you fight for the Lord?"
"But you can't kill the Devil with a gun or a sword!"
"Will you swear on the Bible?" "I will not!" said he,
"For the truth is more holy than the book, to me."”

Sydney Carter (1915–2004) British musician and poet

George Fox

Truth, Fight

“There are two ways you can read the Bible. One is with the light off. By that I mean that you can read it with a proud heart, looking for mistakes, marking seeming contradictions, believing you are intellectually superior to what you are reading. The second way is with the light on. By that I mean with a humble heart, believing that you don't know everything, and that you could gain knowledge by studying the world's greatest-selling book of all time.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)

World, Way, Knowledge, Study

“I'm on a search for the truth," she says during a recent visit to the District to promote her new book, "Objection!," in which the former prosecutor calls defense attorneys "dangerous" and compares them to pigs. The way Grace sees it, prosecutors want to do what's right, whereas defense attorneys are unethical and just want to win. She'd never cross over to what she calls the "dark side" because "I don't really want to have any part of getting guilty people off.”

Nancy Grace (1959) American legal commentator, television host, television journalist, and former prosecutor

Quoted on The Washington Post, "Nancy Grace, Ruling for The Viewer" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/26/AR2005062601211.html, June 27, 2005

People, Truth, Way, Search

“When I thought I was dying in rehab in 1994, 'I Won't back Down' was my mantra. It lifted my up out of the pain and made me fight through it. 'The Waiting'… summed up my life. We can't stand waiting, we rock 'n' roll men and women. Tom Petty's songs are like a great book that you revisit when you need help. His songs make me better.”

Stevie Nicks (1948) American singer and songwriter, member of Fleetwood Mac

"Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers", Billboard, Vol. 118, http://books.google.com/books?id=GBYEAAAAMBAJ No. 12 (25 March 2006), p. 38

Life, Women, Men, Pain

“It all comes down to the great stories. The colorful and interesting characters that people can invest themselves in. The ones that they want to follow. That is the most critical thing for me. The second thing is, you have to have a filmmaker who gets it. Who has a passion for a character. Who has a vision for a character. Someone who really knows how to execute that vision. It's a hard thing to find. And its essential. The third thing is, and I have been in the trenches of Hollywood for thirty-five years, day by day, trying to make them understand this…Comic books and superheroes are not synonymous.”

Michael E. Uslan (1951) American film producer

Executive Producer Michael E. Uslan Talks The Dark Knight Rises! https://movieweb.com/exclusive-executive-producer-michael-e-uslan-talks-the-dark-knight-rises/ (September 19, 2011)

People, Color, Understanding, Passion

“John Cage and I became interested in the use of chance in the 50's. I think one of the very primary things that happened then was the publication of the "I Ching," the Chinese book of changes, from which you can cast your fortune: the hexagrams.”

Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) American dancer

Merce Cunningham, A Lifetime of Dance, 2000

Thinking, Change, Chance

“The Radisha kicked over a pile of books. “I’ve never felt so powerless. I don’t like the feeling.”
Smoke shrugged. “Welcome to the world where the rest of us live.””

Glen Cook book Shadow Games

Source: Shadow Games (1989), Chapter 29, “Smoke’s Hideout” (p. 153)

World, Feeling

“I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights,'yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. This new psychology looks to me very much like children learning some summary and not very adequate alphabet, exulting in putting their a-b-c-d of the subconscient and the mysterious underground super-ego together and imagining that their first book of obscure beginnings (c-a-t cat, t-r-e-e tree) is the very heart of the real knowledge. They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below, upari budhna esam [Rig-Veda, 1.24.7]. The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above. The self-chosen field of these psychologists is besides poor, dark and limited; you must know the whole before you can know the part and the highest before you can truly understand the lowest. That is the promise of the greater psychology awaiting its hour before which these poor gropings will disappear and come to nothing…. Wanton waste, careless spoiling of physical things in an incredibly short time, loose disorder, misuse of service and materials due either to vital grasping or to tamasic inertia are baneful to prosperity and tend to drive away or discourage the Wealth-Power. These things have long been rampant in the society and, if that continues, an increase in our means might well mean a proportionate increase in the wastage and disorder and neutralise the material advantage. This must be remedied if there is to be any sound progress…. Asceticism for its own sake is not the ideal of this yoga, but self-control in the vital and right order in the material are a very important part of it… and even an ascetic discipline is better for our purpose than a loose absence of true control. Mastery of the material does not mean having plenty and profusely throwing it out or spoiling it as fast as it comes or faster. Mastery implies in it the right and careful utilisation of things and also a self-control in their use…. There is a consciousness in [things], a life which is not the life and consciousness of man and animal which we know, but still secret and real. That is why we must have a respect for physical things and use them rightly, not misuse and waste, ill-treat or handle with a careless roughness. This feeling of all being consciousness or alive comes when our own physical consciousness'and not the mind only'awakes out of its obscurity and becomes aware of the One in all things, the Divine everywhere.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Undated
India's Rebirth

Life, Children, Truth, Secret

“I don't want to offend people right out of the gate. I know that some of you believe and I certainly don’t want to mock the myths that define some of you, but um. I choose not to believe in god. That's ok still, i can do that, right? It's my choice to go through life filled with dread, panic and fear... because I think that's a more objective and real way to live. Just be like…"Aaaaahh' what's gonna happen?!" I think that's needed, honestly. And again I don't want to make fun of what you believe in. I think the reason Jesus is so popular, just on a celebrity level, is that he died at the peak of his career, ok. He was…hear me out…. he was young, he was hot. He was well spoken from all accounts. I really think it would have been different had he lived longer, alright. Say had he gotten old enough to get bitter. Alright, just hear me out. Picture there's a third testament to the bible' alright. This point Jesus is in his 50's. He's got one apostle left. And the book opens with him knee deep in water saying, "I used to be able to do this!" The apostle's saying, "Come on…don't yell at the water, Jesus. Come on in. It's not your day, buddy. Come on. People are gathering for the wrong reason. Can we just go, please. Let's go to the deli…we'll have a sandwich. We'll try again tomorrow. Come on, yes you are god, come on. And again, you know, if you're a religious person, I understand why you believe. It makes you feel better, you know. But a lot of us do not have the patience or disposition to have faith or belief. Thank god there's medication for those people because if you're properly medicated, it will provide roughly the same effect as religion, you know. If you're on the right combination of anti-depressants, it will alleviate your ability to see the truth clearly and provide a false sense of hope.”

Marc Maron (1963) Comedian

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/zt2b7c/comedy-central-presents-faith-medication
Comedy Central Presents (2007)

Life, God, People, Truth

“I am trying to put the distributional question and the study of long-run trends back at the heart of economic analysis. In that sense, I am pursuing a tradition which was pioneered by the economists of the 19th century, including David Ricardo and Karl Marx. One key difference is that I have a lot more historical data. With the help of Tony Atkinson, Emmanuel Saez, Facundo Alvaredo, Gilles Postel-Vinay, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Gabriel Zucman and many other scholars, we have been able to collect a unique set of data covering three centuries and over 20 countries. This is by far the most extensive database available in regard to the historical evolution of income and wealth. This book proposes an interpretative synthesis based upon this collective data collection project.”

Thomas Piketty (1971) French economist

Eduardo Porter, " Q&A: Thomas Piketty on the Wealth Divide http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/11/qa-thomas-piketty-on-the-wealth-divide/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0," economix.blogs.nytimes.com, March 11, 2014. In answer of the question: "Your book fits oddly into the canon of contemporary economics. It focuses not on growth and its determinants, but on how the spoils of growth are divided. In that sense, it reminds us of similar concerns in a book of similar title written 150 years ago: Karl Marx’s “Capital.” What parallels would you draw between the two?"

Question, Sense, Study, Help

“I had an interesting day's reading yesterday, with the sudden sensation of being in close contact with what I was reading. […] But as for reading how curious it is: all these books, their lore of the ages, waiting to be embraced but usually slipping out of one's nerveless hands on to the floor. When one reads properly it is as if a third person is present.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Letter 419, to William Plomer, 12 December 1957
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

Age, Waiting, Reading, Personality

“When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7, p. 678

“On the subject of biblical texts and examples to why you can't do certain things with your body that you wish to, I find that absolutely absurd. I've always been extremely uncomfortable with the idea in any society that the belief is based on revealed truth, that's to say on a text like a Bible or a Qur'an, or whatever it is. It seems to me that the greatness of our culture, for all its incredible faults, is that we have grown up on the Greek ideal of discovering the truth, discovering by looking around us, by empirical experiment, by the combination of the experience of generations of ancestors who have contributed to our sum knowledge of the way the world works, and so on. And to have that snatched away and to be told what to think by a book, however great it may be in places, this is a book that says you can sell your daughter into slavery, it's a book that bans menstruating women from within miles of temples. The fact that it also says that for one man to lie with another man is an abomination, is no more made relevant or important than the fact that you can't eat shellfish.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

Interview with Simon Callow.[citation needed]
2000s

Women, Truth, Lie, World

“Beware of the manipulativeness of rich students who were neglected by their parents. They love to turn the campus into hysterical psychodramas of sexual transgression, followed by assertions of parental authority and concern. And don’t look for sexual enlightenment from academe, which spews out mountains of books but never looks at life directly.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Rape and Modern Sex War, p. 53

Love, Life, Mountain, Parent

“As long as Fortune wanted me
to keep on hoping for happiness
I took pleasure in amorous thoughts
and wrote down how they made me feel.
But Love, afraid that what I write
might serve free hearts as a warning,
clouded my inspiration with torment
to keep his deceits from coming to light.
O you whom Love has made the slaves
of various passions! When you read
in one small book such varied cases
know that they're pure truths, not tales,
and that your own experience in love
will lead you through my verses' meaning.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Richard Zenith, Sonnets and Other Poems (2009)
Lyric poetry, Sonnets, Enquanto quis Fortuna que tivesse

Love, Pleasure, Truth, Hope

“Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

Interview with Amanda Craig, "Grand dame of letters who's not going quietly," The Times, London (23 November 2003) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14449-1132868_3,00.html

Children, Lying, Parent, Reading

“If you haven’t already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people.
In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories (2004)

People, Dreams, Way, Personality

“Films and gramophone records, music, books and buildings show clearly how vigorously a man's life and work go on after his death, whether we feel it or not, whether we are aware of the individual names or not. There is no such thing as death according to our view!”

Martin Bormann (1900–1945) Nazi leader and private secretary to Adolf Hitler

Quoted in "The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations" - Page 446 - by Robert Andrews - Reference - 1993.

Life, Death, Music, Feeling

“Book-to-screen adaptations must always strive for two things: First, you must find a way to tell the broad story of the original plot; second, you must somehow reflect the spirit and texture of the novel—that is, you must transform a lot of words into a few pictures. All those digressions, inner monologues, thought processes, turns of phrase, all those word pictures, and especially all that un-photographable stuff that made the novel so delicious, must somehow be represented onscreen by use of the filmmaker's tools: moving pictures, dialogue and performance, sets, costumes, music and all the other tricks of the trade. That's the process a writer must go through to create a successful blueprint for a film.”

Tommy Lee Wallace (1949) American film director

Tommy Lee Wallace on Crafting His Miniseries Masterpiece, IT https://dailydead.com/stephen-king-week-tommy-lee-wallace-on-crafting-his-miniseries-masterpiece-it/ (October 27, 2015)

Music, Way, Success

“Conscientiously though we have sought to avoid them, the reader may find errors attributable in part to inaccurate sources and to faulty recollection. To those who may feel themselves wronged, I freely acknowledge that this is in part a book of opinion and that the opinion is my own.”

Omar Bradley (1893–1981) United States Army field commander during World War II

Source: A Soldier's Story (1951), p. viii

Error, Feeling, Parting

“We believe in Allah, we take the Koran as a sacred book. In our land we broke the power of infidel Rum, in his own land we struck down her Sultan whom men called the Pope, in Malta we slew the Knights, sworn enemies of Islam. Inform your people that we are sent by Allah to geld the evil Turk and raise high the people of the Nile.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

Men, People, Evil

“In this age of space flight, when we use the modern tools of science to advance into new regions of human activity, the Bible … this grandiose, stirring history of the gradual revelation and unfolding of the moral law … remains in every way an up-to-date book. Our knowledge and use of the laws of nature that enable us to fly to the Moon also enable us to destroy our home planet with the atom bomb. Science itself does not address the question whether we should use the power at our disposal for good or for evil. The guidelines of what we ought to do are furnished in the moral law of God. It is no longer enough that we pray that God may be with us on our side. We must learn again that we may be on God's side.”

Wernher von Braun (1912–1977) German, later an American, aerospace engineer and space architect

As quoted in Phillips' Book of Great Thoughts & Funny Sayings (1993) edited by Bob Phillips, p. 42

God, Age, Law, Way

““The Devil” is, historically, the God of any people that one personally dislikes. This has led to so much confusion of thought that THE BEAST 666 has preferred to let names stand as they are, and to proclaim simply that AIWAZ, the solar-phallic-hermetic “Lucifer,” is His own Holy Guardian Angel, and “The Devil” SATAN or HADIT, the Supreme Soul behind RA-HOOR-KHUIT the Sun, the Lord of our particular unit of the Starry Universe. This serpent, SATAN, is not the enemy of Man, but He who made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil; He bade “Know Thyself!” and taught Initiation. He is “the Devil” of the Book of Thoth, and His emblem is BAPHOMET, the Androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection.”

Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) poet, mountaineer, occultist

Source: Magick Book IV : Liber ABA, Part III : Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), Ch. 21 : Of Pacts with the Devil

God, People, Angels, Soul

“Things in books' clothing.”

Charles Lamb Last Essays of Elia

Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading.
Last Essays of Elia (1833)

Clothes

“What is your favorite book?”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

“I've seen him a couple of times in the arena, and was profoundly impressed by his virtuosity. Rugby football is more or less a sealed book to me, I never having gone in for it, but even I could see he was good. The lissomness with which he moved hither and thither was most impressive, as was his homicidal ardour when doing what I believe is called tackling. Like the Canadian Mounted Police he always got his man, and when he did so the air was vibrant with the excited cries of the morticians in the audience making bids for the body.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (1963)

Time, Football

“And so it went on, day after day. This was not the first time that those who had at first smiled at him turned their backs on him and began to think of themselves isntead of thinking of him. Sometimes it was as if you understood people's souls; a few days later, you understood nothing. One day you were kissed, and it meant everything; next day, you were not kissed.... He consoled himself by looking at his exercise books with the poems approaching the thousand total soon, and more. Perhaps the world would some day understand that the heart existed. Some day.</b”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

People, World, Smile, Exercises

“If I were asked what book is better than a cheap book, I should answer that there is one book better than a cheap book, — and that is a book honestly come by.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Before the U. S. Senate Committee on Patents (29 January 1886)

“Every one knows that the fine phrase "God geometrizes" is attributed to Plato, but few know where this famous passage is found, or the exact words in which it was first expressed. Those who, like the author, have spent hours and even days in the search of the exact statements, or the exact references, of similar famous passages, will not question the timeliness and usefulness of a book whose distinct purpose it is to bring together into a single volume exact quotations, with their exact references, bearing on one of the most time-honored, and even today the most active and most fruitful of all the sciences, the queen-mother of all the sciences, that is, mathematics.”

Robert Edouard Moritz (1868–1940) German mathematician

Robert Edouard Moritz. On Mathematics and Mathematicians https://archive.org/details/onmathematicsmat00mori, 1914, 1942, 1958; p. v; Preface, lead sentence

God, Search, Mathematics, Question

“The public examination of homosexuality in our contemporary life is still so coated with distasteful moral connotations that even a reviewer is bound to wonder uneasily why he was selected to evaluate a book on the subject, and to assert defensively at the outset that he is happily married, the father of four children and the one-time adornment of his college boxing, track and tennis teams.”

Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist

On Jess Stearn’s The Sixth Man, Saturday Review (April 22, 1961)

Life, Children, Time, Box

“If every pure character in the Old Testament announces the Messiah, if every unworthy person is his torturer and every woman his Mother, does not the Book of Books lose all life with this obsessive theme?”

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) French philosopher

On the doctrine of prefiguration.
Persons or Figures (1950)

Life, Personality

“the correct statement would be, not that I disliked poetry, but that I was theoretically indifferent to it. I disliked any sentiments in poetry which I should have disliked in prose; and that included a great deal. And I was wholly blind to its place in human culture, as a means of educating the feelings. But I was always personally very susceptible to some kinds of it.
Long before I had enlarged in any considerable degree, the basis of my intellectual creed, I had obtained in the natural course of my mental progress, poetic culture of the most valuable kind, by means of reverential admiration for the lives and characters of heroic persons; especially the heroes of philosophy.

Condorcet's Life of Turgot; a book well calculated to rouse the best sort of enthusiasm, since it contains one of the wisest and noblest of lives, delineated by one of the wisest and noblest of men.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)

Life, Men, Education, Feeling

“It was the normal working of the antisuccess mechanism. In our overcrowded modern world a hit record, a best-selling book, a successful film, can reach more people in a week than Shakespeare or Beethoven reached in a whole lifetime. And so fame has become the most romantic, the most desirable of all commodities, the dream for which a modern Faust might sell his soul to the Devil. Once attained, fame is never as easy to hold on to as some people believe. The people who achieve fame by some accident of fashion are usually forgotten within a week; the ones who remain on top have to work to stay there. But few people understand this. The result is that anyone who achieves sudden notoriety arouses envy and hostility. The greater the success, the greater the reaction.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Geller Phenomenon (1976), p. 28

Hostility, People, World, Dreams

“In February 1860 Jeff Davis offered a bill in the Senate wh. passed, making all the territories slave territory. See Davis' book. He was opposed to letting the people decide whether or not they would have slavery – Wm. A. Smith, President of Randolph Macon quit his duties as a teacher and in 1857-8-9-60 traveled all over Virginia preaching slavery and proving it was right by the bible.”

John S. Mosby (1833–1916) Confederate Army officer

Letter to Samuel "Sam" Chapman (June 1907)

People, Travel, Teachers

“To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations — such is a pleasure beyond compare.”

Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350) japanese writer

Tsurezure-Gusa (Essays in Idleness)

Men, Pleasure

“The period I'm going through now is a transition. You know when you're in the middle of puberty and you don't know what to do with yourself? I feel like that now, It will be a transition into something very good if I work hard enough at it. But it is a frustration and an emptiness and a lack of confidence now. I feel young and I feel old. I feel twenty years below zero and old. I put a lot of demands on myself to know this and that, to be here and there. I've got to really do one thing at a time all the way. I've got stop wanting to know and do everything at the same time. It's like you have a home stuffed with beautifull things - statues, books, lamps - that give a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, and you have nothing. And then you go into a house where there isn't a great light and one object and you could sit there all your life studying it, and one discovery about the object would give birth to the next, and it would be totally fulfilling. Right now my life is cluttered and you can't run away from it. If I weren't attached to this body I would have left it long ago.”

Nastassja Kinski (1961) German actress

As quoted in Denise Worrell (1989), Icons: Intimate Portraits.

Life, Way, Feeling, Home

“Do not imagine that there is any bird more easily caught by decoy, nor any fish sooner fixed on the hook by wormy bait, than are all these poor fools neatly tricked into servitude by the slightest feather passed, so to speak, before their mouths. Truly it is a marvelous thing that they let themselves be caught so quickly at the slightest tickling of their fancy. Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naïvely, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.”

Étienne de La Boétie book Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Part 2
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Children, People, Pleasure, Fools

“In the first four centuries A. D. the world was full of Gnostics peddling special revelations, and, of course, Christ was only one of the Saviors: others were Baruch, Gamaliel, Tat (= the Egyptian god Toth), Seth (Egyptian god), Balaam, Ezechiel, Adam (whose books had just been discovered), Moses, Enoch, Marsanes, Nicotheus, Phosilampes, Mithra, Zoroaster, Zervan, et al., et al. In the early centuries of our era, the Near East was a Bedlam filled with the insane ravings of fakirs peddling their Saviors and their forged Gospels, and at this distance it is impossible to tell the difference between madmen, hallucinés who got visions of god from eating the sacred mushroom, Amanita muscaria, and shysters fleecing the yokels with mystic gabble. One cannot read much of the gibberish without feeling queasy and dizzy, but for a quick survey of the stuff that our holy men want to sweep under the rug, see Jean Doresse, Les livres secrets des Gnostiques d'Égypte, Paris, 1959, which surveys the books found at Chenoboskion a few years before. The one significant thing is that the peddlers of all forms of Gnosticism (including Christian cults before the Third Century) were almost all Jews. If you will look in your Scientific American for January 1973, pp. 80-87, you will note that the author has to admit that "it becomes increasingly evident that much of Gnosticism is probably of Jewish origin." He is naturally cautious, wary of offending God's Peculiar People. Although I admit that one cannot identify the race of some of the more prominent Salvation-hucksters, I think it significant that those whom one can identify racially always turn out to be Jews, and I would delete "much of" and "probably" in the author's statement.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Men, God, People, Secret

“The Book of Job is advice on how to live in terms of the absolute power of nature. Leviathan is advice on how to live in terms of the absolute power of the state.”

Donald Phillip Verene (1937) philosopher

Source: Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (1997), p. 188

Nature

“To be honest, I was somewhat disappointed… It's had effects around the margins, of course, but they have mostly been minor. When I wrote it, I really thought the book would change the world. I know it sounds a little grand now, but at the time the sixties still existed for us. It looked as if real changes were possible, and I let myself believe that this would be one of them. All you have to do is walk around the corner to McDonald's to see how successful I have been.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher

Quoted by Michael Specter on the impact of the book Animal Liberation, " The Dangerous Philosopher http://www.michaelspecter.com/1999/09/the-dangerous-philosopher/", The New Yorker, 6 September 1999.

World, Disappointment, Change, Time

“Quote from Rembrandt's 5th letter to Constantijn Huygens (Amsterdam, 27 January 1639), as cited in The Rembrandt Documents, Walter Strauss & Marjon van der Meulen - Abaris Books, New York 1979, p. 167.”

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) Dutch 17th century painter and etcher

What Rembrandt is referring to is a little painting he sent Huygens as a gift together with his letter. This quote clarifies Rembrandt's option about the light and distance, necessary for showing his painting and its colors in the right way.
1630 - 1640

Quotes

“What good are all these books to you? You can't eat them! How can they make you happy?”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

Happiness

“Yet with every allowance, one feels it difficult to see how any mortal ever could consider this Koran as a Book written in Heaven, too good for the Earth; as a well-written book, or indeed as a book at all; and not a bewildered rhapsody; written, so far as writing goes, as badly as almost any book ever was!”

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

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

Feeling

“The tension between making it better and getting it done appears wherever people have work to finish or a product to get out: a computer, a dinner, a term paper, an automobile, a book. We want to get it done and out to the people who will use it, eat it, read it. But no object ever fully embodies its maker's conception of what it could have been. Human frailty, your own and that of others, makes flaws and mistakes inevitable.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Writing for Social Scientists (1986), p. 122.

People, Appearance, Reading

“The General Theory is at once both a book of economic theory and a font of economic prejudices—there are probably few academics in economics and political science who do not have an opinion of it, whether they have read it or not. It has reached the status—which it obtained almost immediately—where the fact of its existence is as important, if not more important, than what it actually says.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

Science, Reading

“When I was younger I really admired people like Warren Beatty who could do one movie every four years. I thought I could do all that: run a theatre company, write a book, make the occasional movie. But life doesn’t work like that, or at least it only does for one or two people every generation. Usually, there’s a little give and take, you know. It took me a long time to realise that I didn’t understand things as well as I thought I did.”

Ethan Hawke (1970) American actor and writer

The Daily Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/7801192/Ethan-Hawke-interview.html (2010-06-10) 2010&ndash;present

Life, People, Understanding, Time

“In the Clunie Public Library in Sacramento, in those last years of a legally segregated America, there was no segregated shelf for Negro writers. Frederick Douglass on the same casement with Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Franklin. Today, when our habit is willfully to confuse literature with sociology, with sorting, with trading in skins, we imagine the point of a "life" is to address some sort of numerical average, common obstacle or persecution. Here is a book "about" teenaged Chinese-American girls. So it is shelved.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Life, Imagination, Girl, Literature

“From the viewpoint of my general purpose, I had come to believe that one way to achieve the education which leads to understanding and compassion is to take some period of the past and to immerse oneself in it so thoroughly that one could think its thoughts and speak its language. The object would be to take this chapter of vanished experience and learn to know it in three if not four dimensions. That would mean coming to understand why certain actions which in the light of retrospect appear madly irrational appeared at that time the indisputable mandate of reason; why things which had been created with pain and care were cast quickly on the gaming table of war; why men who had sat in the senate chamber and debated with syllogism and enthymeme stepped out of it to buckle on the sword against one another. Almost any book of history will give you the form of such a time, but what will give you the pressure of it? That is what I particularly wished to discover.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

"Up from Liberalism” Modern Age Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter 1958-1959), pp. 24, col. 2-25, col. 1.

Men, Pain, War, Education

“If none of us ever read a book that was "dangerous," had a friend who was "different," or joined an organization that advocated "change," we would all be just the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

Speech to his staff (1954)

People, Change, Reading

“The book business is hidebound.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

Source: Lies, Inc. (1984), Chapter 12 (p. 131)(This and the next six quotes are referred to by the author as "Thingisms")

Business

“Here she drew forth a small pocket-book, took from it a card and a pencil and, after meditating a moment, wrote a few words. It is our privilege to look over her shoulder, and if we exercise it we may read the brief query: […].”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

XLIV
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

Exercises, Reading

“It's a crushing right hand and that must finish it! It must finish it! Tyson cannot get up from that, surely. He will be counted out. Lennox Lewis seals his place in history forever and closes the book on Mike Tyson!”

Ian Darke (1950) British association football and boxing commentator

Lennox Lewis vs. Mike Tyson https://listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=kD9Cf_dAVdg (8 June 2002). 2000s, 2002, Lennox Lewis vs. Mike Tyson (June 2002)

History

“We cannot by a little verbal sophistry confound the qualities of different minds, nor force opposite excellences into a union by all the intolerance in the world. … If we have a taste for some one precise style or manner, we may keep it to ourselves and let others have theirs. If we are more catholic in our notions, and want variety of excellence and beauty, it is spread abroad for us to profusion in the variety of books and in the several growth of men's minds, fettered by no capricious or arbitrary rules.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Criticism" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Men, World, Beauty

“What is that sad, black island like a pall?
Why, Cytherea, famed in many a book,
The Eldorado of old-stagers. Look:
It's but a damned poor country after all!”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal

Quelle est cette île triste et noire? C'est Cythère, Nous dit-on, un pays fameux dans les chansons Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons. Regardez, après tout, c'est une pauvre terre. "Un Voyage à Cythère" [A Voyage to Cythera], lines 5-8, trans. Roy Campbell http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Un_Voyage_%C3%A0_Cyth%C3%A8re Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

Sadness, Country

“One day I was sitting one side of the fireplace, and my wife was sitting on the other, and I suddenly said to her, “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to write a story about some boys on an island, showing how they would really behave, being boys and not little saints as they usually are in children’s books.” And she said, “That’s a first-class idea! You write it!””

William Golding (1911–1993) British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate

So I went ahead and wrote it. Introduction to his reading https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYnfSV27vLY of Lord of the Flies in the unabridged audio version (1980)

Children, Boy, Idea

“In any creative field--any creative field--you must first understand that you have no value whatsoever. Your work has no value whatsoever. You are completely worthless. Whatever potential you have is just that--potential--and when you are discussing self-publishing a comic book, you have about the same chance of success as 10 thousand others.”

Dave Sim (1956) Canadian cartoonist, creator of Cerebus

Source: Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing (1997), p. 21

Understanding, Chance, Success

“Thus the theme of Personal Idealism — of an eternal world of many rational beings, all self-active, all arbiters of their own destiny and so alike morally responsible, yet, in the vast round of their combinative being, all harmonised by their coexistence with God and their native attracting apprehension of God's nature — grows from one to another of the ascending evidences for it, as the book advances from the first essay to the last.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix A: The Essays in their Systematic Connexion, p.387-8

God, World, Nature, Personality

“In other words, all of my books are lies. They are simply maps of a territory, shadows of a reality, gray symbols dragging their bellies across the dead page, suffocated signs full of muffled sound and faded glory, signifying absolutely nothing. And it is the nothing, the Mystery, the Emptiness alone that needs to be realized: not known but felt, not thought but breathed, not an object but an atmosphere, not a lesson but a life.”

Ken Wilber (1949) American writer and public speaker

"Foreword" to Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (2000) by Frank Visser

Life, Reality, Dead

“Miss Havisham had told me about Generics. They were created here in the Well to populate the books that were to be written. At the point of creation they were simply a human canvas without paint - blank like a coin, ready to be stamped with individualism. They had no history, no conflicts, no foibles - nothing that might make them either readable or interesting in any way. It was up to various institutions to teach them to be useful members of fiction. They were graded, too. A to D, one through ten. Any that were D-graded were like worker bees in crowds and busy streets. Small speaking parts were C-grades; B-grades usually made up the bulk of featured but not leading characters. These parts usually -but not always- went to the A-grades, handpicked for their skills at character projection and multidimensionality.”

Jasper Fforde book The Well of Lost Plots

The Well of Lost Plots (2003), ch.1, p. 11

Way, History, Business, Bee

“Books should to one of these four ends conduce,
For wisdom, piety, delight, or use.”

John Denham (1615–1669) English poet and courtier

Of Prudence (1668), line 83.

Wisdom

“When you are reading a book in a dark room, and come to a difficult part, you take it to a window to get more light. So take your Bibles to Christ.”

Robert Murray M'Cheyne (1813–1843) British writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 39.

Light, Reading, Christ, Parting

“The only reason I read a book is because I cannot see and converse with the man who wrote it.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Speech in Kansas City (12 May 1905), PWW (The Papers of Woodrow Wilson) 16:99
Unsourced variant: I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.
1900s

Reading