Quotes about nature
page 50

“Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral…”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Death, Effort, Universe, Parting

“It is only with this prelude that the Declaration of 1776 proclaims the right to revolution. The people do not have an indiscriminate or uncontrolled right to establish or to abolish governments. They have a right to abolish only those governments that become "destructive of these ends". "These ends" refers to the security of equal natural rights. It is only for the sake of security of these rights that legitimate governments are instituted, or that governments may be altered or abolished. And governments are legitimate only insofar as their "just powers" are derived "from the consent of the governed". All of the foregoing is omitted from South Carolina's declaration, for obvious reasons. In no sense could it have been said that the slaves in South Carolina were governed by powers derived from their consent. Nor could it be said that South Carolina was separating itself from the government of the Union because that government had become destructive of the ends for which it was established. South Carolina in 1860 had an entirely different idea of what the ends of government ought to be from that of 1776 or 1787. That difference can be summed up in the difference between holding slavery to be an evil, if possibly a necessary evil, and holding it to be a positive good.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 231

People, Idea, Sense, Evil

“The pattern of sex differences found in our species mirrors that found in most mammals and in many other animals. As such, considerations of parsimony suggest that the best explanation for the human differences will invoke evolutionary forces common to many species, rather than social forces unique to our own. When we find the standard pattern of differences in other, less culture-bound creatures, we inevitably explain this in evolutionary terms. It seems highly dubious, when we find exactly the same pattern in human beings, to say that, in the case of this one primate species, we must explain it in terms of an entirely different set of causes — learning or cumulative culture — which coincidentally replicates the pattern found throughout the rest of the animal kingdom. Anyone who wishes to adopt this position has a formidable task in front of them. They must explain why, in the hominin lineage uniquely, the standard evolved psychological differences suddenly became maladaptive, and thus why natural selection “wiped the slate clean” of any biological contribution to these differences. They must explain why natural selection eliminated the psychological differences but left the correlated physical differences intact. And they must explain why natural selection would eliminate the psychological differences and leave it all to learning, when learning simply replicated the same sex differences anyway. How could natural selection favor extreme flexibility with respect to sex differences if that flexibility was never exercised and was therefore invisible to selection?”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), pp. 142-143

Sex, Exercises, Learning, Animals

“Actually, the mysteries of water are similar to those of the blood in the human body. In Nature, normal functions are fulfilled by water just as blood provides many important functions for mankind.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Living Water

Water

“The cultivated man of today is gradually turning away from natural things, and his life is becoming more and more abstract. Natural (external) things become more and more automatic, and we observe that our vital attention fastens more and more on internal things.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

1910's, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality', 1919

Life

“But neither approach seems to lead to the kind of answer which those who ask the question are seeking. What they seem to want to know is—Are the Modern Greeks the same as the Ancient Greeks? Are their racial and national characteristics the same? Do the Modern Greeks behave in the same kind of way as the Ancient Athenians, Spartans, and Corinthians behaved? If one looks among the Modem Greeks will one find the equivalents of Pericles and Sophocles and Plato? By their nature such questions are vague and contain within them a host of assumptions—about human nature, genetics and race, the influence of environment on behaviour, and the reliability of our knowledge of ancient history—all of which are questionable and some of which are simply unfounded.”

William St Clair (1937) author

Source: That Greece Might Still be Free (1972), p. 15-16.

Way, History, Question, Knowledge

“How many times it thundered before Franklin took the hint! How many apples fell on Newton's head before he took the hint! Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Lives of the Poets : The Story of One Thousand Years of English and American Poetry (1959) by Louis Untermeyer
1950s

Time

“Her haughtiness and habit of domination was, therefore, a fictitious character, induced over that which was natural to her, and it deserted her when her eyes were opened to the extent of her own danger, as well as that of her lover and her guardian; and when she found her will, the slightest expression of which was wont to command respect and attention, now placed in opposition to that of a man of a strong, fierce, and determined mind, who possessed the advantage over her, and was resolved to use it, she quailed before him.”

Walter Scott book Ivanhoe

Source: Ivanhoe (1819), Ch. 23.

Lovers, Strong

“Let him fall if he cannot stand alone! If the Negro cannot live by the line of eternal justice, so beautifully pictured to you in the illustration used by Mr. Phillips, the fault will not be yours, it will be his who made the Negro, and established that line for his government. Let him live or die by that. If you will only untie his hands, and give him a chance, I think he will live. He will work as readily for himself as the white man. A great many delusions have been swept away by this war. One was, that the Negro would not work; he has proved his ability to work. Another was, that the Negro would not fight; that he possessed only the most sheepish attributes of humanity; was a perfect lamb, or an “Uncle Tom;” disposed to take off his coat whenever required, fold his hands, and be whipped by anybody who wanted to whip him. But the war has proved that there is a great deal of human nature in the Negro.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, What the Black Man Wants (1865)

War, Justice, Thinking, Chance

“Religion does not mean to surrender to dogmas and religious scriptures or conformity to rituals. But my religion constitutes an abiding faith in the perfect values of truth and the ceaseless attempt to realise them in the inner most part of our nature.”

Hans Ji Maharaj (1900–1966) Indian guru

Source: Satgurudev Shri Hans Ji Maharaj, (1970) Albion Press

Truth, Faith, Religion, Parting

“It is often difficult to fill an active healthy man's leisure. He is bored when not working; he paces the floor like a caged animal and sinks naturally into vices which are merely the means of getting numberless vivid sensations from his body with which to fill his empty hours. Modern civilization, with its inventions and machines, has increased the number of these hours, and we must learn how to use them.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Learning, Animals

“A definitely undesirable rationale sustaining the cult of simplicity is of a metaphysical nature: namely, the wish to attain the ultimate atoms of experience and/or reality … this drive, which feeds metaphysical fundamentalism, is dangerous because it leads to postulating the final simplicity of some form of experience or some kind of substance thereby barring any inquiry into their structure.”

Mario Bunge (1919) Argentine philosopher and physicist

Mario Bunge, The myth of simplicity, 1963, p, 86-87; As cited in: Colin E. Gunton (1993), The One, the Three and the Many, p. 44
1960s-1990s

Reality

“Different men are moved or left cold by lines according to the difference in their natures. What moves you is beautiful to you.”

Robert Henri (1865–1929) American painter

citation needed

Men, Beauty

“That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

George Mason (1725–1792) American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention

Article 1
Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)

Life, Men, Happiness

“You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track — the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.”

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) British writer and philosopher

Letter to Everina Wollstonecraft (7 November 1787)

“There has been a rush of competitors anxious to be first in the field with a new text-book on the more "practical" lines which now find so much favour. The natural desire of each teacher who writes such a text-book is to give prominence to some special nostrum which he has found successful with pupils. One result is, too often, a loss of a due sense of proportion… It is, perhaps too early yet to prophesy what will be the ultimate outcome of the new order of things; but it would at least seem possible that history will repeat itself and that, when chaos has come again in geometrical teaching, there will be a return to Euclid more or less complete for the purpose of standardising it once more.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements (1908)

Books, History, Sense, Teachers

“Instead of enabling humans to improve their lot, science degrades the natural environment in which humans must live. Instead of enabling death to be overcome, it produces ever more powerful technologies of mass destruction. None of this is the fault of science; what it shows is that science is not sorcery. The growth of knowledge enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Sweet Morality (p. 235)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Death, Knowledge, Science

“For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.—I cannot paint
What then I was.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Stanza 3.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800), Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey (1798)

Pleasure, Animals, Painting

“Law steps in where nature fails: virtually everywhere. Laws create nature - a male nature and a female nature and natural intercourse - by telling errant, unnatural human beings what to do and what not to do to protect and express their real nature - the real man, the real female, the real hierarchy thta natture or God created putting man on top.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 8

God, Law

“His grace,
Sit nature, fortune, motion, time and place. ]] From whence with grace and goodness compassed round,
He ruleth, blesseth, keepeth all he wrought,
Above the air, the fire, the sea and ground,
Our sense, our wit, our reason and our thought,
Where persons three, with power and glory crowned,
Are all one God, who made all things of naught,
Under whose feet, subjected to his grace,
Sit nature, fortune, motion, time and place.This is the place, from whence like smoke and dust
Of this frail world the wealth, the pomp and power,
He tosseth, tumbleth, turneth as he lust,
And guides our life, our death, our end and hour:
No eye, however virtuous, pure and just,
Can view the brightness of that glorious bower,
On every side the blessed spirits be,
Equal in joys, though differing in degree.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Sedea colà, dond'egli e buono e giusto
Dà legge al tutto, e 'l tutto orna e produce
Sovra i bassi confin del mondo angusto,
Ove senso o ragion non si conduce.
E della eternità nel trono augusto
Risplendea con tre lumi in una luce.
Ha sotto i piedi il Fato e la Natura,
Ministri umíli, e 'l moto, e chi 'l misura; E 'l loco, e quella che qual fumo o polve
La gloria di qua giuso e l'oro e i regni,
piace là su, disperde e volve:
Nè, Diva, cura i nostri umani sdegni.
Quivi ei così nel suo splendor s'involve,
Che v'abbaglian la vista anco i più degni;
D'intorno ha innumerabili immortali
Disegualmente in lor letizia eguali.
Canto IX, stanzas 56–57 (tr. Edward Fairfax)
Max Wickert's translation:
He sat where He gives laws both good and just
to all, and all creates, and all sets right,
above the low bounds of this world of dust,
beyond the reach of sense or reason's might;
enthroned upon Eternity, august,
He shines with three lights in a single light.
At His feet Fate and Nature humbly sit,
and Motion, and the Power that measures it,and Space, and Fate who like a powder will
all fame and gold and kingdoms here below,
as pleases Him on high, disperse or spill,
nor, goddess, cares she for our wrath or woe.
There He, enwrapped in His own splendour, still
blinds even worthiest vision with His glow.
All round Him throng immortals numberless,
unequally equal in their happiness.
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Life, Death, God, World

“Should I not be proud, when for twenty years I have had to admit to myself that the great Newton and all the mathematicians and noble calculators along with him were involved in a decisive error with respect to the doctrine of color, and that I among millions was the only one who knew what was right in this great subject of nature?”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Letter to Eckermann (30 December 1823)

Color, Error, Decision

“France is your natural enemy; she is more so as a republic than as a monarchy. We know less at what point a nation will stop than a king.”

Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool (1770–1828) British politician

History of the War in the Peninsula, Under Napoleon, Volume 1, p. 122

“The concept of the « struggle for existence » has been applied to microbial interrelationships in nature in a manner comparable to the effects assigned by Darwin to higher forms of life. It has also been suggested that the ability of a microbe to produce an antibiotic substance enables it to survive Giom. in competition for space and for nutrients with other microbes. Such assumptions ppear to be totally unjustified on the basis of existing knowledge. Before we proceed with a discussion of the formation and activities of antibiotics under natural conditions, we must consider certain fundamental aspects of the problem of antibiotic production under controlled laboratory or factory conditions… All the discussion of a "struggle for existence" in which antibiotics are supposed to play a part, is merely a figment of the imagination, and an appeal to the melodramatic rather than the factual.”

Selman Waksman (1888–1973) American scientist, biochemist, microbiologist who discovered Streptomycin and many antibiotics

As quoted by the Instituto di Microbiologia, (1956). Giornale Di Microbiologia. Volume 2; in proceedings of the First European Symposium on the Biochemistry of Antibiotics

Life, Imagination, Knowledge, Problem

“As Prince Bismarck, in the ’60s, wanted to move the “Acheron” of socialism, … it was of course not love for socialism or knowledge of socialism that led Prince Bismarck to do this. He understood nothing about socialism at that time, and never did understand anything about it down to his death; in fact, he never had any conception of the moving forces of political and social life at all. There probably never lived at any time in any country a “statesman” who was less scientific, who had less knowledge, and who relied so purely on experience and a sort of half-gambler, half-peddler cunning, as Bismarck. Those offers to socialists place in the clearest light the untruthfulness of Prince Bismarck’s claim that he always regarded the social democracy as incompatible with the existence of the state. Bismarck wanted to use socialism for the purpose of breaking up and dissolving the bourgeois liberal opposition, especially the Progressive party. This, in itself, is the most conclusive proof that he had no conception of the real nature of socialism. Of course the fate of the boy magician was repeated. The elemental force which was conjured up grew over the head of the dabbler, and he did not get the best of socialism; socialism got the best of him.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Love, Life, Death, Fate

“A work of art is only of interest, in my opinion, when it is an immediate and direct projection of what is happening in the depth of a person's being.... It is my belief that only in this Art Brut can we find the natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary state.”

Jean Dubuffet book Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Source: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, pp. 203-204

Art, Personality

“1/2 cup of hope and 1/2 cup of kindness seem like a litmus test by asking "Is the glass half empty or half full?" Nature shows us in every waking moment that where there is life, there is hope. And to quote the movie Horns starring Daniel Radcliffe and Juno Temple, "Man is not born evil. The Devil himself was a fallen angel," there is kindness in everyone if you dig deep enough.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

Life, Hope, Angels, Quotes

“The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes.”

Stanisław Lem book The Star Diaries

The Star Diaries (1976)

“The technical literature on structural engineering abounds with theoretical works of a mathematical nature, but few publications are concerned with the various kinds of structures or the fundamental reasons for their existence.”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

p, 125
Philosophy of Structures (1958)

Literature, Mathematics

“What Mathematicians Chiefly consider in Motion is the Mode of Lation or Manner of bearing, and the Quantity of the motive Force. …But because the Quantity of motive Force cannot be known without Time, we must say something concerning its Nature.”

Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician

Geometrical Lectures (1735)

Motivation, Time

“In moments of great anxiety there is a sort of natural superstition about the heart, which the reason rejects in cooler moments.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Traits and Trials of Early Life (1836)

Heart

“Africa is wealthy in natural resources; the problem is they are not optimally utilized.”

Yoweri Museveni (1944) President of Uganda

As quoted in "President Museveni Highlights Ugandan Achievements for Americans: Ugandan leader proud of political opening, economic growth in his country" https://web.archive.org/web/20050927025054/http://news.findlaw.com/wash/s/20050923/200509231521551.html (23 September 2005), by Jim Fisher-Thompson, Washington File, FindLaw 2000s

Optimism, Problem

“The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

H 1
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook H (1784-1788)

“Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Voltaire's Bastards (1992)

“On the question of the "origin of species" Mr. Haughton enlarges considerably; but his chief arguments are reduced to the setting-up of "three unwarrantable assumptions," which he imputes to the Lamarckians and Darwinians, and then, to use his own words, "brings to the ground like a child's house of cards." The first of these is "the indefinite variation of species continuously in the one direction." Now this is certainly never assumed by Mr. Darwin, whose argument is mainly grounded on the fact that variations occur in every direction. This is so obvious that it hardly needs insisting on. In every large family there is almost always one child taller, one darker, one thinner than the rest; one will have a larger nose, another a larger eye: they vary morally as well; some are more poetical, others more morose; one has a genius for numbers, another for painting. It is the same in animals: the puppies, or kittens, or rabbits of one litter differ in many ways from each other - in colour, in size, in disposition; so that, though they do not "vary continuously in one direction," they do vary continuously in many directions; and thus there is always material for natural selection to act upon in some direction that may be advantageous. […] I will only, in conclusion, quote from it a short paragraph which contains an important truth, but which may very fairly be applied in other quarters than those for which the author intended it: - "No progress in natural science is possible as long as men will take their rude guesses at truth for facts, and substitute the fancies of their imagination for the sober rules of reasoning."”

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist

"Remarks on the Rev. S. Haughton's Paper on the Bee's Cell, And on the Origin of Species" (1863).

Men, Truth, Family, Way

“Many a man, who has gone but a few miles from home, understands human nature better, detects motives and weighs character more sagaciously, than another who has travelled over the known world, and made a name by his reports of different countries. It is force of thought which measures intellectual, and so it is force of principle which measures moral greatness.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

World, Travel, Home, Motivation

“The point to be made clear is that, whatever may be our temperament, or our power in the presence of nature, we have to render what we actually see, forgetting everything that appeared before our own time. Which, I think, should enable the artist to express his personality to the full, be it large or small. Now that I am an old man, about seventy, the sensations of colour which produce light give rise to abstractions that prevent me from covering my canvas, and from trying to define the outlines of objects when their points of contact are tenuous and delicate; with the result that my image or picture is incomplete. For another thing, the planes become confused, superimposed; hence Neo-Impressionism (initiated by Seurat and Paul Signac, ed., where everything is outlined in black, an error which must be uncompromisingly rejected. And nature, if consulted, shows us how to achieve this aim.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote from Cézanne's letter to Émile Bernard, 23 October 1905; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 180
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900

Error, Thinking, Light, Appearance

“Today we have media … which actually specialize in the kind of obscenity which the cultivated, not the prurient, find repugnant. … It is contended that such material is the raw stuff of life, and that it is the duty of the organs of public information to leave no one deceived about the nature of the world. The assertion that this is the real world begs the most important question of all. The raw stuff of life is precisely what the civilized man desires to have refined, or presented in a humane framework, for which sentiment alone can afford the support. … One of the great conspiracies against philosophy and civilization, a conspiracy immensely aided by technology, is just this substitution of sensation for reflection.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 28-30.

Life, World, Question, Support

“Midnight is a wonderful thing in a vast city—and midnight was upon Vienna. The shops were closed, the windows darkened, and the streets deserted—strange that where so much of life was gathered together there could be such deep repose; yet nothing equals the stillness of a great town at night. Perhaps it is the contrast afforded by memory that makes this appear yet more profound. In the lone valley, and in the green forest, there is quiet even at noon—quiet, at least, broken by sounds belonging alike to day and night. The singing of the bee and the bird, or the voice of the herdsman carolling some old song of the hills—these may be hushed; but there is still the rustle of the leaves, the wind murmuring in the long grass, and the low perpetual whisper of the pine. But in the town—the brick and mortar have no voices of their own. Nature is silent—her soft, sweet harmonies are hushed in the great human tumult—man, and man only, is heard. Through many hours of the twenty-four, the ocean of existence rolls on with a sound like thunder—a thousand voices speak at once. The wheels pass and re-pass over the stones—music, laughter, anger, the words of courtesy and of business, mingle together—the history of a day is the history of all time. The annals of life but repeat themselves.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Life, Music, History, Business

“The National Enquirer published this thing called the "Chow like Cho Diet," which was this fake diet that I never went on, with all these fake quotes from me, like "When I was a little girl, I was raised on rice and fish. So when I get heavy, I go back to that natural Asian way of eating." That is so Mulan. You can almost hear the mandolin in the background. "When I was a little girl, I grow up on the rice paddy… and although we have no food, I have a tendency to put on weight."”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Tours and CDs, I'm The One That I Want Tour

Food, Way, Quotes, Girl

“We need not suppose that when power resides in an exclusive class, that class will knowingly and deliberately sacrifice the other classes to themselves: it suffices that, in the absence of its natural defenders, the interest of the excluded is always in danger of being overlooked: and, when looked at, is seen with very different eyes from those of the persons whom it directly concerns.”

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) British philosopher and political economist

Source: On Representative Government (1861), Ch. III: The Ideally Best Polity

Personality

“There are many cases of these algebras which may obviously be combined into natural classes, but the consideration of this portion of the subject will be reserved to subsequent researches.”

Benjamin Peirce Linear Associative Algebra

"Natural Classification", p. 119.
Linear Associative Algebra (1882)

“A second conspicuous landmark… is the enunciation of the fundamental law of radioactive disintegration by Rutherford and Soddy in 1903. This law was in no sense a consequence or development of Planck's theories; indeed fourteen years were to elapse before any connection was noticed between the two. The new law asserted that the atoms of radioactive substances broke up spontaneously, and not because of any particular conditions or special happenings. This seemed to involve an even more startling break with classical theory than the new laws of Planck; radioactive break-up appeared to be an effect without a cause, and suggested that the ultimate laws of nature were not even causal.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Law, Sense, Appearance

“In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), H. G. Wells pointed out that ever since the beginning of life, most creatures have been 'up against it'. Their lives are a drama of struggle against the forces of nature. Yet nowadays you can say to a man: Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but -- what do you do? His real interest may be in something else -- art, science, literature, philosophy. The bird is a creature of the air, the fish is a creature of the water, and man is a creature of the mind.”

Colin Wilson book From Atlantis to the Sphinx

Source: From Atlantis to the Sphinx (1996), p. 346-347

Love, Life, Hate, Family

“Even though something like Danny Hillis' "connection machine" is big, it's nothing compared with Avogadro's number of processors that nature has at her disposal.”

J. Doyne Farmer (1952) American physicist and entrepreneur (b.1952)

The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995)

“Now, Lincoln' position was consistent throughout the debates. A great deal is said—Dr. DiLorenzo says it, but it's been said countless times before—that Lincoln used racist language in the debates. That’s not true. Now what Lincoln argued for in the debates was the recognition of the natural rights of black people, when Douglas said that if the people of Nebraska are good enough to govern themselves, they certainly are good enough to govern a few miserable Negroes. And Lincoln replied by saying, "I doubt not that the people of Nebraska are as good as the average of people elsewhere, what I say is that no man is good enough to govern another without his consent."”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

People, Time

“Here is the basis of the modern critical biblical science, which treats the documents of Christianity and Judaism according to the same principles of historical investigation which are valid in all other historical domains, particularly in that of the history of the ethnic religions.
The attempt has been crowned with brilliant success. Everywhere, where formerly miracles and oracles, the activity of supernatural persons, and the appearance on the scene of supernatural beings were thought to be discerned, there shows itself now a constant succession of events that are natural, i. e. in accord with the universal laws of human experience. The prophets appear no longer as media of supernatural oracles, but as men whose works and words are perfectly explicable from the character regarded in connection with the conditions of their age and environment. They stand, indeed, in a certain respect above their contemporaries, so far as they contest the modes of thought and action of the latter, and hold before them higher ideals of purer piety and morality; yet these ideals were not communicated to them from without by supernatural revelation, but sprang from their own spirit as products of an especially powerful and happy religious-moral nature, which, under the influence of historical relations, had been so developed that they saw clearly what was perverted in the mode of thought of others, and gave to the better a potent expression.”

Otto Pfleiderer (1839–1908) German Protestant theologian

Source: Evolution and Theology (1900), pp. 10-11.

Men, Happiness, Age, Religion

“The knowable is of the nature of etc. The quality of essentiality (Sattva) is of the nature of illumination. Energy (Rajas) is of the nature of activity. Inertia is of the nature of inactivity. These ‘qualities’ are capable of being coloured more or less by proximity to one another. They are ever evolving. They have the characteristics of conjunction and separation. They manifest support by each lending support to the other by proximity…”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

In p. 129.
Sources, The Yoga Darsana Of Patanjali With The Sankhya Pravacana Commentary Of Vyasa

Support

“What excites pleasure in me is the meeting and conversing with old friends. But it is very galling when my friends do not visit me because there is a biting wind, or the roads are muddy through the rain, or perhaps because they are sick. Then I feel isolated. Although I myself do not drink, yet I provide spirits for my friends, […]. In front of my house runs a great river, and there I can sit with my friends in the shadow of the lovely trees. […] When they come they drink and chat, just as they please, but our pleasure is in the conversation and not in the liquor. We do not discuss politics because we are so isolated here that our news is simply composed of rumors, and it would only be a waste of time to talk with untrustworthy information. We also never talk about other people's faults, because in this world nobody is wrong, and we should beware of backbiting. We do not wish to injure anyone, and therefore our conversation is of no consequence to anyone. We discuss human nature about which people know so little because they are too busy to study it.”

Shi Nai'an (1296–1372) Chinese writer

Variant translation by Lin Yutang: "When all my friends come together to my house, there are sixteen persons in all, but it is seldom that they all come. But except for rainy or stormy days, it is also seldom that none of them comes. Most of the days, we have six or seven persons in the house, and when they come, they do not immediately begin to think; they would take a sip when they feel like it and stop when they feel like it, for they regard the pleasure as consisting in the conversation, and not in the wine. We do not talk about court politics, not only because it lies outside our proper occupation, but also because at such a distance most of the news is based upon hearsay; hearsay news is mere rumour, and to discuss rumours would be a waste of our saliva. We also do not talk about people's faults, for people have no faults, and we should not malign them. We do not say things to shock people and no one is shocked; on the other hand, we do wish people to understand what we say, but people still don't understand what we say. For such things as we talk about lie in the depths of the human heart, and the people of the world are too busy to hear them." (The Importance of Living, 1937; pp. 218–219)
Preface to Water Margin

Love, People, Pleasure, World

“A good education would be devoted to encouraging and refining the love of the beautiful, but a pathologically misguided moralism instead turns such longing into a sin against the high goal of making everyone feel good, of overcoming nature in the name of equality. … Love of the beautiful may be the last and finest sacrifice to radical egalitarianism.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

Source: Love and Friendship (1993), p. 15.

Love, Education, Beauty, Feeling

“The chairs and tables around us which broadcast to us incessantly those signals which affect our sight and touch cannot in their nature be like unto the signals or to the sensations which the signals awake at the end of their journey.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

III, p.36
Science and the Unseen World (1929)

“Logic aims to instruct the human mind as to its own nature and processes; it will lay bare the interior working of our mind for our guidance. The object of the study of logic is thought, its nature, and its proper classification.”

Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888) german philosopher

Letter 2
Letters on Logic: Especially Democratic-Proletarian Logic (1906)

Study

“̆̽The argument of the social theory developed in this book [works] out the idea that each imaginative and institutional form of society represents an attempt to freeze, into a particular mold, the more fluid experiences of practical and passionate relationship characterizing the immediate, relatively unreflective, uninterpreted, and undisciplined life of personality. The dogmas and arrangements inform this life and alter it. But they do not completely overcome its recalcitrance or determine its inner nature. The visionary impulse in politics draws much of its persuasive force from the appeal to this defiant experience.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 467

Life, Books, Imagination, Idea

“The dominant concept in Aristotle's philosophy of nature is his notion of causation. …The final cause states that each substance has an inherent purpose. Thus there must be a purpose or design in the acorn such that it always grows into an oak tree. This aspect of existence is indicated by the word entelechy; this means the purpose that guides things to develop in one way rather than another.”

John Freely (1926–2017) American physicist

Source: Before Galileo, The Birth of Modern Science in Medieval Europe (2012), p. 291

Way, Tree

“Such cultural homosexuality is an alienation more or less forced upon certain groups of Auden’s society by the form of their education and the nature of their social and financial conditions. Where the members of a class and a sex are taught, in a prolonged narcissistic isolation, to hero-worship themselves—class and sex; where—to a different class—unemployment is normal, where one’s pay is inadequate or impossible for more than one; where children are expensive liabilities instead of assets; where women are business competitors; where most social relationships have become as abstract, individualistic, and mobile as the relations of the labor market, homosexuality is a welcome asset to the state, one of the cheapest and least dangerous forms of revolution.”

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

“Changes of Attitude and Rhetoric in Auden’s Poetry”, pp. 127–128
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Women, Children, Education, Sex

“The imagination is one of the forces of nature.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

Imagination

“Yes! We believe in a higher principle than your virtue and the kind of morality you speak of so paltrily and without much conviction. We believe that there is no imperative or reward for virtue for the soul because it simply acts according to the necessity of its inherent nature. The moral imperative expresses itself in an ought and presupposes the concept of an evil next to that of good. P. 43”

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) German philosopher (idealism)

Philosophy and Religion 1804)

Soul, Evil

“What is called "sponge stone" or "Pompeian pumice" appears to have been reduced by burning from another kind of stone to the condition of the kind which we see. The kind of sponge-stone taken from this region is not produced everywhere else, but only about Aetna and among the hills of Mysia which the Greeks call the "Burnt District," and in other places of the same peculiar nature. …it seems to be certain that moisture has been extracted from the tufa and earth, by the force of fire, just as it is from limestone in kilns.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter VI, Sec. 2-3

Appearance

“The nature of encounter operations required of the commanders limitless initiative and constant readiness to take the responsibility for military actions.”

Georgy Zhukov (1896–1974) Marshal of the Soviet Union

Quoted in "The Military Quotation Book" - Page 49 - by James Charlton - 2002

“The approach that dominates organizational theory, teaching, and practice for most of the twentieth century looked at organizations from the top-down, starting with a view of the CEO as the "leader" who shapes the organization's strategy, structure, culture, and performance potential. The nature of work and the role of the workforce enter the analysis much later, after considerations of technology and organization design have been considered. However, if the key source of value in the twenty-first-century organization is to be derived from the workforce itself, an inversion of the dominant approach will be needed. The new perspective will start not at the top of the organization, but at but at the front lines, with people and the work itself — which is where value is created. Such an inversion will lead to a transformation in the management and organization of work workers, and knowledge. This transformation was signalled by McGregor, but we must go further.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Thomas Kochan, Wanda Orlikowski, and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld. "Beyond McGregor's theory Y," in: Douglas McGregor (1960), The Human Side of Enterprise; Annotated Edition, 2006, p. 366

People, Knowledge

“By science I mean an assemblage of transcendental propositions discoverable by human reason, and reducible to first principles, axioms, or maxims, from which they may all be derived in a regular succession; and there are consequently as many sciences as there are general objects of our intellectual powers: when man first exerts those powers, his objects are himself and the rest of nature; himself he perceives to be composed of body and mind… and in the leisure… his intellect is directed to nature at large, to the substance of natural bodies, to their several properties, and to their quantity… and… arrives at the demonstration of a first intelligent cause; whence his collected wisdom, being arranged in the form of science, chiefly consists of physiology and medicine, metaphysicks and logick, ethicks and jurisprudence, natural philosophy and mathematicks; from which the religion of nature (since revealed religion must be referred to history, as alone affording evidence of it) has in all ages and in all nations been the sublime and consoling result.”

William Jones (1746–1794) Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India

p, 125
"On the Philosophy of the Asiatics" (1794)

Wisdom, Age, Religion, History

“We will work to prevent and repair damage by Saddam Hussein's regime to the natural resources of Iraq and pledge to protect them as a national asset of and for the Iraqi people. All Iraqis should share the wealth generated by their national economy. We will seek a swift end to international sanctions, and support an international reconstruction program to help Iraq achieve real prosperity and reintegrate into the global community.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2003, A Vision for Iraq and the Iraqi people (March 2003)

People, Communication, Support, Help

“I was born in the Realms of Etiquette;
In early years, unprotected and poor.
Alone, I learnt to distinguish between Evil and Good;
Untutored, I toiled at bitter tasks.
The World's Law honours Learning and Fame;
Scholars prize marriages and Caps.
With these fetters I gyved my own hands;
Truly I became a much-deceived man.
At ten years old I learnt to read books;
At fifteen, I knew how to write prose.
At twenty I was made a Bachelor of Arts;
At thirty I became a Censor at the Court.
Above, the duty I owe to Prince and parents;
Below, the ties that bind me to wife and child.
The support of my family, the service of my country—
For these tasks my nature is not apt.”

Bai Juyi (772–846) Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty

"Chu Ch'ēn Village" (A.D. 811)
Arthur Waley's translations

Marriage, Books, World, Family

“When I sat on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and listened to American delegations appealing in behalf of kinsman or old home folks across the seas, I caught the aspirations of nationality, and the perfectly natural sympathy among kindred in this republic. But I little realized then how we might rend the concord of American citizenship in our seeking to solve Old World problems. There have come to me, not at all unbecomingly, the expressed anxieties of Americans foreign born who are asking our country's future attitude on territorial awards in the adjustment of peace. They are Americans all, but they have a proper and a natural interest in the fortunes of kinsfolk and native lands. One cannot blame them. If our land is to settle the envies, rivalries, jealousies, and hatreds of all civilization, these adopted sons of the Republic want the settlement favorable to the land from which they came.”

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

1920s, Nationalism and Americanism (1920)

World, Jealousy, Peace, Home

“It may be remarked incidentally that the recognition of the relational character of scientific objects completely eliminates an old metaphysical issue. One of the outstanding problems created by the rise of modern science was due to the fact that scientific definitions and descriptions are framed in terms of which qualities play no part. Qualities were wholly superfluous. As long as the idea persisted (an inheritance from Greek metaphysical science) that the business of knowledge is to penetrate into the inner being of objects, the existence of qualities like colors, sounds, etc., was embarrassing. The usual way of dealing with them is to declare that they are merely subjective, existing only in the consciousness of individual knowers. Given the old idea that the purpose of knowledge (represented at its best in science) is to penetrate into the heart of reality and reveal its "true" nature, the conclusion was a logical one. …The discovery of the nonscientific because of the empirically unverifiable and unnecessary character of absolute space, absolute motion, and absolute time gave the final coup de grâce to the traditional idea that solidity, mass, size, etc., are inherent possessions of ultimate individuals.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

Color, Way, Idea, Business

“I often wonder if all the people in this country realise the inevitable changes that are coming over the industrial system in England…owing to the peculiar circumstances of my own life, I have seen a great deal of this evolution taking place before my own eyes. I worked for many years in an industrial business, and had under me a large number, or what was then a large number, of men…I was probably working under a system that was already passing. I doubt if its like could have been found in any of the big modern industrial towns of this country, even at that time. It was a place where I knew, and had known from childhood, every man on the ground, a place where I was able to talk with the men not only about the troubles in the works, but troubles at home where strikes and lock-outs were unknown. It was a place where the fathers and grandfathers of the men then working there had worked, and where their sons went automatically into the business. It was also a place where nobody ever "got the sack," and where we had a natural sympathy for those who were less concerned in efficiency than is this generation, and where a number of old gentlemen used to spend their days sitting on the handle of a wheelbarrow, smoking their pipes. Oddly enough, it was not an inefficient community. It was the last survivor of that type of works, and ultimately became swallowed up in one of those great combinations towards which the industries of to-day are tending.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1925/mar/06/industrial-peace in the House of Commons (6 March 1925). 1925

Life, Men, People, Home

“Although the patriarchal ego prides itself on being reasonable, the twentieth century has been anything but the Age of Reason. In our collective neurosis, we have raped the earth, disrupted the delicate balance of nature, and created phallic missiles of mass destruction.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: Dancing in the Flames (1997), p. 23

Age

“To understand the magic way of thinking you have to know non-magic thinking. If you see that clearly, you will see how many magic thoughts are necessary elements even of natural science today. There seems to be just as much magic thinking in modern thought as in older; only it takes place in other areas.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Quote in Jorn's letter to anthropologist Francis Huxley (1970) - on the magical character of thinking and images
1959 - 1973, Various sources

Way, Understanding, Thinking, Science

“Ambition, like a torrent, ne'er looks back;
And is a swelling, and the last affection
A high mind can put off; being both a rebel
Unto the soul and reason, and enforceth
All laws, all conscience, treads upon religion,
and offereth violence to nature's self.”

Ben Jonson Catiline His Conspiracy

Catiline His Conspiracy (1611), Act III, scene ii

Religion, Law, Soul

“Some fundamental unity was surely to be discerned either in the matter or the structure of things. The Ionic philosophers chose the former field: Pythagoras took the latter. …The geometry which he had learnt in Egypt was merely practical. …It was natural to nascent philosophy to draw, by false analogies, and the use of a brief and deceptive vocabulary, enormous conclusions from a very few observed facts: and it is not surprising if Pythagoras, having learnt in Egypt that number was essential to the exact description of forms and of the relations of forms, concluded that number was the cause of form and so of every other quality. Number, he inferred, is quantity and quantity is form and form is quality.
Footnote2 Primitive men, on seeing a new thing, look out especially for some resemblance in it to a known thing, so that they may call both by the same name. This developes a habit of pressing small and partial analogies. It also causes many meanings to be at attached to the same word. Hasty and confused theories are the inevitable result.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

Men, Drawing, Falseness

“Once animal exploitation was institutionalized and accepted as part of the natural order of things, it opened the door to similar ways of treating other human beings, thus paving the way for such atrocities as human slavery and the Holocaust.”

Charles Patterson (author) (1935) American author and historian

Source: Eternal Treblinka (2002), p. 12

Way, Animals, Parting

“This summer which was now passing—never had anyone lived such a summer! Nature had given him the happiness of a blossom. She gave him love and a palace, and put precious poetry into his mouth; it was all one long, unbroken romance. And now everything was lost, his poems, his love and his palace, withered, burnt; forlorn and helpless, he faced the desolation of winter.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

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

Love, Happiness, Winter, Summer

“One study suggests that the most effective way to increase n Achievement may be to try simply and directly to alter the nature of an individual’s fantasies.”

David C. McClelland (1917–1998) American psychological theorist

Source: The Archiving Society, 1961, p. 417

Way, Study

“Vegan is a term that refers to people who have chosen a way of living guided by ahimsa (nonharming) and reverence for life. … Vegans recognize the value of life to all living creatures and extend to them the compassion, kindness, and justice in The Golden Rule. Vegans see animals as free entities in nature, not slaves or vassals, nor as chattel, pieces of goods to be bought and sold. An animal has feelings, an animal has sensitivity, an animal has a place in life, and the vegan respects this life that is manifest in the animal. Vegans do not wish to harm the animal any more than they would want the animal to harm them. This is an example of The Golden Rule precisely as it should be applied.”

H. Jay Dinshah (1933–2000) American proponent of veganism and Jain ethics

"Go Vegan for the Animals" (adapted from "Let’s Talk about Veganism" in Powerful Vegan Messages, 2014), in the American Vegan Society website http://www.americanvegan.org/animals.html.

Life, People, Justice, Way

“Paint studies of parts, for instance a piece of land, a group of trees or things like that, but always in a way that people can understand these things in relation with the whole landscape, by adding behind that group of trees the air in a right tone color and thereby in connection with the trees... Furthermore studies of a whole, preferably very simple subjects - A meadow with horizon and a piece of air to examine further the general tone color, the harmony of the whole.... and study nature even more by thinking about it than working after it.”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek
(original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) Schilder studies van gedeelten, bv. een stuk grond, een boomgroep of dergelijke maar toch altijd zóó dat men die in verband met het geheele landschap begrijpen kan, door achter die boomgroep de lucht juist van toon en daardoor in verband met de boomen er bij te schilderen.. .Verder studies van een geheel, liefst zeer eenvoudige sujetten - Eene weide met horizon en stuk lucht. Om nog meer de algemeene toon, de harmonie van het geheel na te gaan.. ..en bestudeer de natuur nog meer met er over te denken dan met er na [naar!?] te werken.
Quote from a letter of Roelofs to his pupil Hendrik W. Mesdag, 27 May 1866; as cited by De Bodt, in Halverwege Parijs, Willem Roelofs en de Nederlandse Schilderskolonie in Brussel, Gent, 1995a, p. 238
1860's

People, Color, Way, Understanding

“No collection of people who are all waiting for the same thing are capable of holding a natural conversation. Even if the thing they are waiting for is only a taxi.”

Ben Elton book Stark

"Airport Rescue"
Stark (1989)

People, Waiting

“There must be no premature renunciation, physical or emotional. The heart, like the body, needs exercise. Naturally there can be no deliberate stirring up of emotion, but why, merely for reasons of age, should one deny oneself those that can be genuinely experienced? Because old men in love are ridiculous? They are ridiculous only if they forget that they are old men. There is nothing ridiculous about two old people really in love. Each still finds in the other those qualities which were admired in youth. Tender consideration, affection, and admiration have no age. In fact, it often happens that, when youth and its passions have vanished, love takes on an asceticism which is delightful. Sensual misunderstandings disappear with physical desire and jealousy with youth; impetuosity wanes with the body's strength. From the remnants of a stormy youth may be created an agreeable old age. Thus the existence of a couple resembles a river which leaps dangerously over jagged rocks near its source, but whose clear waters flow more slowly as it approaches the sea, its broad surface reflecting the poplars along its banks and the stars at night.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old

Love, Men, People, Youth

“He produced a work of art which by its deep appreciation of natural beauty and the melancholy tenderness of its treatment of the ancient legend did more than any single work to bring about the romantic movement in European, and especially in German, literature.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

The Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910-11) vol. 17, p. 268.
Criticism

Beauty, Art, Literature

“The importance of the lesson which this Society was formed to teach would be hard to overestimate. Its main purpose is to impress upon the people the necessity for reverence. This is the beginning of a proper conception of ourselves, of our relationship to each other, and our relationship to our Creator. Human nature cannot develop very far without it. The mind does not unfold, the creative faculty does not mature, the spirit does not expand, save under the influence of reverence. It is the chief motive of an obedience. It is only by a correct attitude of mind begun early in youth and carried through maturity that these desired results are likely to be secured. It is along the path of reverence and obedience that the race has reached the goal of freedom, of self-government, of a higher morality, and a more abundant spiritual life.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Authority and Religious Liberty (1924)

Life, People, Youth, Motivation

“It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Il est à peu près impossible de constituer systématiquement une morale naturelle. La nature n'a pas de principes. Elle ne nous fournit aucune raison de croire que la vie humaine est respectable. La nature, indifférente, ne fait nulle distinction du bien et du mal.
La Révolte des Anges [The Revolt of the Angels] (1914), ch. XXVII

Life, Law, Evil, Indifference

“Whatever in Christ had the nature of satisfaction, was by virtue of His suffering or humiliation; whatever had the nature of merit, was by virtue of His obedience or righteousness.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 489.

Suffering, Christ

“The Good Economist Hayek is the thinker who has mind-blowing insights into just why the competitive market system is such a marvelous societal device for coordinating our by now 7.2 billion-wide global division of labor. Few other economists imagined that Lenin’s centrally-planned economy behind the Iron Curtain was doomed to settle at a level of productivity 1/5 that of the capitalist industrial market economies outside. Hayek did so imagine. And Hayek had dazzling insights as to why. Explaining the thought of this Hayek requires not sociology or history of thought but rather appreciation, admiration, and respect for pure genius.The Bad Economist Hayek is the thinker who was certain that Keynes had to be wrong, and that the mass unemployment of the Great Depression had to have in some mysterious way been the fault of some excessively-profligate government entity (or perhaps of those people excessively clever with money–fractional-reserve bankers, and those who claim not the natural increase of flocks but rather the interest on barren gold). Why Hayek could not see with everybody else–including Milton Friedman–that the Great Depression proved that Say’s Law was false in theory, and that aggregate demand needed to be properly and delicately managed in order to make Say’s Law true in practice is largely a mystery. Nearly everyone else did: the Lionel Robbinses and the Arthur Burnses quickly marked their beliefs to market after the Great Depression and figured out how to translate what they thought into acceptable post-World War II Keynesian language. Hayek never did.
My hypothesis is that the explanation is theology: For Hayek, the market could never fail. For Hayek, the market could only be failed. And the only way it could be failed was if its apostles were not pure enough.”

J. Bradford DeLong (1960) American economist

Making Sense of Friedrich A. von Hayek: Focus/The Honest Broker for the Week of August 9, 2014 http://equitablegrowth.org/making-sense-friedrich-von-hayek-focusthe-honest-broker-week-august-9-2014/ (2014)

Money, War, People, World

“The Natural History Museum is open to the public on Tuesdays and Fridays. Elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus; extraordinary animals! Rubens rendered them marvellously. I had a feeling of happiness as soon as I entered the place and the further I went the stronger it grew. I felt my whole being rise above commonplaces and trivialities and the petty worries of my daily life.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

19 January 1847 (p. 55)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

Life, Happiness, Feeling, History

“Looking carefully, one discovers at last that this gorgeous combination of all the hues of Paradise contains or hides a Last Judgment [....]

To the Virgin and her suppliants, as to us, who though outcasts in other churches can still hope in hers, the Last Judgment was not a symbol of God's justice or man's corruption but of her own infinite mercy. The Trinity judged, through Christ;— Christ loved and pardoned, through her. She wielded the last and highest power on earth and in hell. In the glow and beauty of her nature, the light of her Son's infinite love shone as the sunlight through the glass, turning the Last Judgement itself into the highest proof of her divine and supreme authority. The rudest ruffian of the middle-ages, when he looked at this Last Judgment, laughed, for what was the Last Judgment to her! An ornament, a play-thing, a pleasure! a jewelled decoration which she wore on her breast! Her chief joy was to pardon; her eternal instinct was to love; her deepest passion was pity! On her imperial heart the flames of hell showed only the opaline colors of heaven. Christ the Trinity might judge as much as he pleased, but Christ the Mother would rescue; and her servants could look boldly into the flames.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Love, God, Pleasure, Age

“The incomprehensible richness and loftiness of the Divine Nature, its outpouring generosity toward all in common, fills a man with wonder.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

“It is very conceivable, that the labor of man alone laid out upon a work, requiring great skill and art to bring it to perfection, may be more productive, in value, than the labour of nature and man combined, when directed towards more simple operations and objects”

Alexander Hamilton Report on Manufactures

Report on Manufactures (1791)

Art, Perfection

“As you open up spiritually, your subtle body has a particular effulgence which attracts entities from both the divine and negative natures. You become more sensitive and aware of everything. You become more intuitive and have more experiences in the dream state. If there are messages you should receive, the impressions will always be there, even when you are asleep, and you will act on them without consciously being aware of it. If a communication is really meant for your growth, even though you may forget it or may not be able to understand its significance, it will still have an effect on your consciousness. Ultimately, both the positive and negative experiences are “quality tests” to assess your level of sincerity.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 21

Dreams, Communication, Understanding, Sincerity

“The free enterprise policies that produce solely for waste and for profit and that promote a consumerist mentality rather than one of need are damaging to the environment. I am in no sense defending the centralised economies of eastern Europe. They have polluted the north sea and rivers just as industries in Britain and North America have destroyed rivers, wasted natural resources and ruined people's lives by their form of pollution. It is not good enough to promote an economic system that produces for waste and to promote environmental controls in western Europe and North America to look after our environment if at the same time we transfer that destruction of the environment to poorer Third-world countries, either by exporting toxic waste and letting those countries get rid of it by whatever means they can, because they are desperate for foreign currency, or by promoting the destruction of the rain forests, through raping those countries to collect debt payments, when they can make them only by destroying all their natural resources. We live in an age when we have an opportunity to improve our environment and save ourselves from mass destruction through climatic change and environmental disasters.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/jan/15/environmental-protection-bill in the House of Commons (15 January 1990). 1990s

People, Age, World, Sense

“No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.”

William Howard Taft (1857–1930) American politician, 27th President of the United States (in office from 1909 to 1913)

Quoted in Robert J. Schoenberg (1992), Mr. Capone, apparently referring to the temperance movement.
Attributed

People, Strong

“We arrive at the point where we, looking over the hundred and twenty five years of independence, can see that the simple government conceived by the revolutionary republicans was a foredoomed failure. It was so because of: 1) the essence of government itself; 2) the essence of human nature; 3) the essence of Commerce and Manufacture.”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

Anarchism & American Traditions (1908)

Failure

“Whatever God desires to do is necessarily done; there is nothing that could prevent the realisation of His will. The object of His will is only that which is possible, and of the things possible only such as His wisdom decrees upon. When God desires to produce the best work, no obstacle or hindrance intervenes between Him and that work. This is the opinion held by all religious people, also by the philosophers; it is also our opinion. For although we believe that God created the Universe from nothing, most of our wise and learned men believe that the Creation was not the exclusive result of His will; but His wisdom, which we are unable to comprehend, made the actual existence of the Universe necessary. The same unchangeable wisdom found it as necessary that non-existence should precede the existence of the Universe. Our Sages frequently express this idea in the explanation of the words, "He hath made everything beautiful in his time" (Eccl. iii. 11)… This is the belief of most of our Theologians; and in a similar manner have the Prophets expressed the idea that all parts of natural products are well arranged, in good order, connected with each other, and stand to each other in the relation of cause and effect; nothing of them is purposeless, trivial, or vain; they are all the result of great wisdom. …This idea occurs frequently; there is no necessity to believe otherwise; philosophic speculation leads to the same result; viz., that in the whole of Nature there is nothing purposeless, trivial, or unnecessary, especially in the nature of the spheres, which are in the best condition and order, in accordance with their superior substance.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.25

Wisdom, Men, God, People

“One of the things I bring to my play is my Indian identity – my ability to shrug off a loss as destiny and hope for better tomorrow. I am often described as a “natural” or “intuitive player.””

Viswanathan Anand (1969) Indian chess player

pages=292-93
Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower

Hope, Loss

“Broader and deeper we must write our annals, from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience, if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History

Way, Boy, Light, Science

“Ours, according to Leibnitz, is the best of all possible worlds, and the laws of nature can therefore be described in terms of extremal principles. Thus, arising from corresponding variational problems, the differential equations of mechanics have invariance properties relative to certain groups of coordinate transformations.”

Carl Ludwig Siegel (1896–1981) German mathematician

[Lectures on Celestial Mechanics, https://books.google.com/books?id=mZtrCQAAQBAJ&pg=PA1] (p. 1)

World, Law, Problem

“Scientific knowledge helps us mainly because it makes the wonder to which we are called by nature rather more intelligible.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Die Wissenschaft hilft uns vor allem, daß sie das Staunen, wozu wir von Natur berufen find.
Maxim 417, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Intelligence, Knowledge, Help

“But the dwellers in the country have little understanding of, and therefore little sympathy with, the longing for green fields which haunts the dweller in towns. The secret dream of almost every inhabitant in those dusky streets where even a fresh thought would scarcely seem to enter, is to realise an independence, and go and live in the country. Where is every holiday spent but in the country! What do the smoky geraniums, so carefully tended in many a narrow street and blind alley attest, but the inherent love of the country! To whom do the blooming and sheltered villas, which are a national feature in English landscape, belong, but to men who pass the greater part of their lives in small dim counting-houses! This love of nature is divinely given to keep alive, even in the most toiling and world-worn existence, something of the imaginative and the apart. It is a positive good quality; and one good quality has some direct, or indirect tendency to produce another.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Love, Men, Secret, World

“I have tried to make clear in this brief sketch of the nature of deductively formulated theories, at least as they occur in economics, that, although their origin lies in common observation and introspection, nevertheless they are capable of a purely mathematical development through the exact statement of a of a set of postulates which, however, since they must inevitably contain assumptions about human behaviour, require to be tested by reference to actual events.”

Richard Stone (1913–1991) British economist, Nobel Memorial Prize winner

Source: The Role of Measurement in Economics. 1951, p. 14-15

Mathematics

“The centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension that no one I know of has been able to imagine their nature.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

As quoted in Genius Talk : Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries (1995) by Denis Brian ISBN 0306450895

Imagination

“The future of great business lies in man’s comprehension of the principle of Balance in Natural Law and his determination to work WITH it instead of against it.”

Walter Russell (1871–1963) American philosopher

The Man who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe

Law, Business, Future

“God's Torah teaches us to refrain from inflicting unnecessary pain on any animal. And not only physical pain; an animal can suffer mental pain too. … It is an important part of Torah education to train children to respect animals as sensitive beings which should not be unnecessarily deprived of the joys of life. Do not forget that the child who crudely delights in the suffering of an injured beetle or the anxiety of a harassed animal will soon be numb towards human pain too. … It seems doubtful from all that has been said whether the Torah would sanction "factory farming," which treats animals as machines, with apparent insensitivity to their natural needs and instincts.”

Aryeh Carmell (1917–2006) British rabbi

Masterplan: Judaism, Its Program, Meanings and Goals (Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1991), pp. 68 https://books.google.it/books?id=uQxdgZikdCcC&pg=PA68-69.

Life, God, Pain, Children

“There should be open competition for all men; and the most able should not be prevented by laws or customs from succeeding best and rearing the largest number of offspring. Important as the struggle for existence has been and even still is, yet as far as the highest part of man's nature is concerned there are other agencies more important. For the moral qualities are advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction, religion, &c., than through natural selection; though to this latter agency the social instincts, which afforded the basis for the development of the moral sense, may be safely attributed.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume II, chapter XXI: "General Summary and Conclusion", pages 403-404 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=420&itemID=F937.2&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Men, Religion, Law, Sense

Quotes about nature page 50

Quotes about nature
page 50