Quotes about nature (10000 quotes, page 66)

“I borrow some subject or other from life or from nature, and, using it as a pretext, I arrange lines and colors so as to obtain symphonies, harmonies that do not represent a thing that is real, in the vulgar sense of the word, and do not directly express any idea, but are supposed to make you think the way music is supposed to make you think, unaided by ideas or images, simply through the mysterious affinities that exist between our brains and such arrangements of colors and lines.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1870s - 1880s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 109

Life , Music , Color , Way

“"When I published my book "The Origins of the Bulgarians" in 1907, from which it came out that the Bulgarians were something better than what was being thought of for them, I was declared a patriot and, therefore, which is outside the law. Everyone who criticized me has criticized me not in content, not because the data I have stated is untrue, but because I was a patriot who reported facts that the Bulgarians were both valiant and cultural when, in the opinion of my opponents, it was obvious that the Bulgarians were created by nature as a fertilizer on foreign fields … My chauvinism, proving that Thrace and Macedonia were old Bulgarian lands, threatened on the one hand Russia, which aspired to South Thrace as a hinterland of the Dardanelles and on the other hand - Pannonian Slavs who aspired to Thessaloniki. The opinion of Paninese Slavs was also supported by Bulgarian scientists.”

Gancho Tsenov (1870–1949) Bulgarian historian

Books , Law , Support

“Difficult trials will naturally evoke powerful emotions in us. How would your circumstances look today if you chose to focus first on God’s promises?”

James MacDonald (1960) American pastor

Source: Always True (Moody, 2011), p. 121

God

“There is no more important object in nature, no object more worthy of contemplation, and if a famous philosopher and statesman of the past declares agriculture to be the worthy business of a free citizen (Cic. de off. I. 42.) it would also be an equally worthy business for him to get acquainted with the soil, without which agriculture is not conceivable.”

Friedrich Albert Fallou (1794–1877) German jurist and lawyer

Es giebt ja in der ganzen Natur keinen wichtigeren, keinen der Betrachtung würdigeren Gegenstand und wenn ein berühmter Philosoph und Staatsmann der Vorzeit (Cic. de off. I. 42.) den Ackerbau für das würdigste Geschäft eines freien Bürgers erklärt, so muß es auch ein ebenso würdiges Geschäft für ihn sein, sich mit dem Boden bekannt zu machen, ohne welchen kein Ackerbau denkbar.
in Pedology or General and Special Soil Science Prospectus, Dresden 1862. http://books.google.com/books?id=ng8-AAAAcAAJ&pg=PP5. Translation by Google Translate
Omnium autem rerum, ex quibus aliquid adquiritur, nihil est agri cultura melius, nihil uberius, nihil dulcius, nihil homine libero dignius.
'For of all gainful professions, nothing is better, nothing more pleasing, nothing more delightful, nothing better becomes a well-bred man than agriculture'
Cicero De officiis (On Dutiable Action). Book I, Section 42. Translation by Cyrus R. Edmonds (1873), p. 73

Business , Past

“Nature is to us like an inﬁnite ballot-box, the contents of which are being continually drawn, ball after ball, and exhibited to us. Science is but the careful observation of the succession in which balls of various character present themselves; we register the combinations, notice those which seem to be excluded from occurrence, and from the proportional frequency of those which usually appear we infer the probable character of future drawings.”

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) English economist and logician

Source: The Principles of Science: A Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method (1874) Vol. 1, p. 169

Appearance , Science , Success , Future

“The executive in every walk of life, whether he knows it or not, directs social forces and determines the destiny of countless people, not only those who work in his immediate organization but among the larger public as well. He should comprehend this and recognize his responsibility. The role of statesman is thrust upon him by the nature and demands of the position he occupies. To fulfill it he mnst be a philosopher. But he cannot be a successful philosopher unless he understands the inherent life of institutions, the reasons why people in institutional situations behave as they do. This knowledge is the philosophy and technique of management.”

Marshall E. Dimock (1903–1991) American writer

Source: The Executive in Action, 1945, p. 1, as cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 418-9

Life , People , Understanding , Knowledge

“The natural instincts of men seem to be to alternate between periods of love relationships and periods of hedonistic bachelorhood, with some traumatized kids thrown in as an evolutionary imperative.”

Neil Strauss (1973) American writer

Rules of the Game: The Style Diaries (2007)

Love , Men

“And because the nature of inner being is bliss, infinite happiness, therefore the mind during TM takes that inward course in a most spontaneous manner.”

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1917–2008) Inventor of Transcendental Meditation, musician

Quoted from: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi - Lake Louise, Canada (1968) - MaharishiUniversity http://www.bienfaits-meditation.com/en/maharishi/videos/mechanics-of-the-technique

Happiness

“This is not the Cayce material, with information seemingly coming from some vast storehouse of knowledge. In those terms no such storehouse exists. Knowledge does not exist independently of the one who knows. Someone gave Cayce the material. It did not come out of thin air. It came from an excellent source, a pyramid gestalt personality, with definite characteristics, but the alien nature of the personality was too startling to Cayce, and he could not perceive it.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 417, Page 317
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 8

Knowledge , Personality

“You're basing your laws and your whole outlook on natural life on mythology. It won't work. That's why you have all these problems in the world. Name them: India, Pakistan, Ireland. Name them-all these problems. They're all religious problems.”

Jack Kevorkian (1928–2011) American pathologist, euthanasia activist

Quoted in "Years of Minutes"‎ - Page 339 - by Andy Rooney - 2004
2000s, 2004

Life , World , Law , Problem

“Civilizations and social orders have not been geared to the fulfillment of human potential (even now, for all of our liberal thought), but to the suppression of abilities that did not fit in with the basic assumptions about the nature of the self. We inhibited any such evidence from conscious awareness, developing a kind of one-line official consciousness. Opposing data did not disappear, but formed powerful undercurrents that composed the unofficial knowledge of the race.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 275

Knowledge

“A significant observation regarding… architectural representations is that each is of a different nature than the others. They are not merely a set of representations, each of which is an increasing level of detail than the previous one. Level of detail is an independent variable, varying within each architectural representation.”

John Zachman (1934) American computer scientist

Zachman (1986) as cited in: Peter Bernus, Kai Mertins, Günter Schmidt (2005) Handbook on Architectures of Information Systems. p. 544

“If we continue to eschew science … we are not going to move forward. We will not embrace natural laws. We will not make discoveries. We will not invent and innovate and stay ahead.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NewsBank, A12, 'Science Guy' Bill Nye defends evolution in debate, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Minnesota, February 5, 2014, Dylan Lovan, Associated Press]

Law , Science

“What is correct invariably develops in the course of struggle with what is wrong. The true, the good and the beautiful always exist by contrast with the false, the evil and the ugly, and grow in struggle with them. As soon as something erroneous is rejected and a particular truth accepted by mankind, new truths begin to struggle with new errors. Such struggles will never end. This is the law of development of truth and, naturally, of Marxism.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

" VIII. ON "LET A HUNDRED FLOWERS BLOSSOM LET A HUNDRED SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT CONTEND" AND "LONG-TERM COEXISTENCE AND MUTUAL SUPERVISION" "
On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People

Truth , Law , Beauty , Error

“Modern man, seeking a middle position in the evaluation of sense impression and thought, can, following Plato, interpret the process of understanding nature as a correspondence, that is, a coming into congruence of pre-existing images of the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. Modern man, of course, unlike Plato, looks on the pre-existent original images also as not invariable, but as relative to the development of a conscious point of view, so that the word "dialectic" which Plato is fond of using may be applied to the process of development of human knowledge.”

Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner

Writings on Physics and Philosophy http://books.google.com/books?id=ueTd4g7pc5MC (1994) 16. "Science and Western Thought" p. 142

Understanding , Knowledge , Sense

“There is thus all the more reason to exercise extreme vigilance … against anything that may lead the being to become "fused," or preferably and more accurately "confused" or even "dissolved," in a sort of "cosmic consciousness" that shuts out all "transcendence" and so also shuts out all effective spirituality. This is the ultimate consequence of all the anti-metaphysical errors known more especially in their philosophical aspect by such names as "pantheism," "immanentism," and "naturalism."”

René Guénon (1886–1951) French metaphysician

Source: The Reign of Quantity and Signs of the Times (1945), p. 288

Error , Exercises

“I began studying the political history of race in America. Having worked in Congress and at the White House, I have some familiarity with the nature of politics and how politicians think. I thought I could use this knowledge to illuminate this one aspect of the race problem in America in ways that might help us better deal with its long, sordid history. What quickly jumped out at me is a fact that seems obvious in retrospect, but which I had never really thought about. Virtually every significant racist in American political history was a Democrat. Before the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the party of slavery. It was based largely in the south and almost all of its leaders were slave owners, including Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson, considered by Democrats to be co-founders of their party.”

Bruce Bartlett (1951) American historian

Source: 2000s, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past (2008), p. viv

War , Way , History , Knowledge

“For we see that man is a civil and political animal, and is naturally inclined to civilization.”

Nicholas of Cusa book De concordantia catholica

De concordantia catholica (The Catholic Concordance) (1434)

Animals

“All versions written for nonscientists speak of fused males as the curious tale of the anglerfish—just as we so often hear about the monkey swinging through the trees, or the worm burrowing through soil. But if nature teaches us any lesson, it loudly proclaims life's diversity. There ain't no such abstraction as the clam, the fly, or the anglerfish. Ceratioid anglerfishes come in nearly 100 species, and each has its own peculiarity.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Big Fish, Little Fish", p. 29
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Life , Tree , Flying

“Epistemology is always and inevitably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing?”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, 1979, p. 93

Question , Heart , Personality

“The study of race differences in intelligence is an acid test case for psychology. Can behavioral scientists research this subject with the same freedom, objectivity, thoroughness, and scientific integrity with which they go about investigating other psychological phenomena? In short, can psychology be scientific when it confronts an issue that is steeped in social ideologies? In my attempts at self- analysis this question seems to me to be one of the most basic motivating elements in my involvement with research on the nature of the observed psychological differences among racial groups. In a recent article (Jensen, 1985b) I stated:I make no apology for my choice of research topics. I think that my own nominal fields of expertise (educational and differential psychology) would be remiss if they shunned efforts to describe and understand more accurately one of the most perplexing and critical of current problems. Of all the myriad subjects being investigated in the behavioral and social sciences, it seems to me that one of the most easily justified is the black- white statistical disparity in cognitive abilities, with its far reaching educational, economic, and social consequences. Should we not apply the tools of our science to such socially important issues as best we can? The success of such efforts will demonstrate that psychology can actually behave as a science in dealing with socially sensitive issues, rather than merely rationalize popular prejudice and social ideology.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

p. 258
Source: Differential Psychology: Towards Consensus (1987), pp. 438-9

Education , Behavior , Intelligence , Motivation

“Please, you don't want to raise a generation of science students who don't understand how we know our place in the cosmos, who don't understand natural law.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NewsBank, 3, Sarah Whitman, Age-old feud: In the beginning, Tampa Bay Times, Florida, February 7, 2014]

Law , Understanding , Science

“If any person, discouraged by these difficulties, should think to relieve himself by rejecting all religion, natural and revealed, he will find, if he reflect at all, that he has miserably deceived himself, and that he is involved in greater perplexity than ever; the scheme he has adopted not only filling his mind with great darkness and distress, but being contrary to some of the plainest appearances in nature, and therefore manifestly irrational and absurd.”

Joseph Priestley book Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion

Vol. I : Preface (1772)
Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (1772–1774)

Religion , Thinking , Appearance , Personality

“The primordial Buddhas are saying,
: "Not doing wrong action,
Sincerely doing every kind of good,
naturally clarifies this mind.
This is the Teaching of all the Buddhas."
This is the universal precept of the Seven Buddhas, our Founding Ancestors, and is truly transmitted by earlier Buddhas to later Buddhas and is received by later Buddhas from earlier Buddhas. It is not only the Teaching of the Seven Buddhas but of all the Buddhas. This principle must be investigated and mastered through practice.”

Dogen (1200–1253) Japanese Zen buddhist teacher

"Shoaku makusa : Not Doing Wrong Action" http://wwzc.org/dharma-text/shoaku-makusa-not-doing-wrong-action as translated by Anzan Hoshin roshi and Yasuda Joshu Dainen roshi (2007)

Universe , Sincerity

“As non-scientists, most gardeners deprived of atomic-ray spectrometers, a battery of reagents, and a few million research dollars must look to signs of health such as the birds, reptiles, worms, and plants of their garden-farm. For myself, in a truly natural garden I have come to expect to see, hear, and find evidence of abundant vertebrate life. This, and this alone, assures me that invertebrates still thrive there. I know of many farms where neither birds nor worms exist, and I suspect that their products are dangerous to all life forms.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 8.12

Life , Health , Bird

“Our wants are various, and nobody has been found able to acquire even the necessaries without the aid of other people, and there is scarcely any Nation that has not stood in need of others. The Almighty himself has made our race such that we should help one another. Should this mutual aid be checked within or without the Nation, it is contrary to Nature.”

Anders Chydenius book The National Gain

The National Gain, §2, 1765.

People , Help

“The danger is that we shall become a nation of pedants. I use the word literally and democratically to refer to the millions of people who are moved by a certain kind of passion in their pastimes as well as in their vocations. In both parts of their lives this passion comes out in shoptalk. I have in mind both the bird watchers and nature lovers: the young people who collect records and follow the lives of pop singers and movie stars; I mean the sort of knowledge possessed by “buffs” and “fans” of all species—the baseball addicts and opera goers, the devotees of railroad trains and the collectors of objects, from first editions to netsuke.
They are pedants not just because they know and recite an enormous quantity of facts—if a school required them to learn as much they would scream against tyranny. It is not the extent of their information that appalls; it is the absence of any reflection upon it, any sense of relation between it and them and the world. Nothing is brought in from outside for contrast or comparison; no perspective is gained from the top of their monstrous factual pile; no generalities emerge to lighten the sameness of their endeavor.”

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian

Source: The Culture We Deserve (1989), p. 118

People , World , School , Star

“Women, to be very attractive to all sorts of different people, must have great readiness of sympathy. Many have it naturally, and many work hard in acquiring a good imitation of it. In the first case it is against the nature of such persons to be monopolized for more than a very short time; in the second all their trouble would be thrown away if they allowed themselves to be monopolized. Once in their lives, indeed, they will be, and ought to be, and that monopoly lasts, or should last for ever; but instead of destroying in them that which was their great charm, it only deepens and widens it, and the sympathy which was before fitful, and, perhaps, wayward, flows on in a calm and healthy stream, blessing and cheering all who come within reach of its exhilarating and life-giving waters.”

Thomas Hughes book Tom Brown at Oxford

Source: Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Ch. 27

Life , Women , People , Water

“The key is to find out whether being gay is an illness that requires medical treatment or whether it is a natural phenomenon which was unfortunately misunderstood over the years because gay people consisted of a relatively smaller proportion of the human population. If scientific evidence supports the former statement, I would defend the current law, which maintains that marriage is a commitment between a male and a female; but if science proves the latter to be correct, I would argue that current law violates gender equality and thus must be amended.”

Hsu Tzong-li (1956)

Hsu Tzong-li (2016) cited in " Hsu Tzong-li approved as Judicial Yuan pres. http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/national/national-news/2016/10/26/482156/Hsu-Tzong-li.htm" on The China Post, 26 October 2016.

Marriage , People , Law , Support

“In the villages of my constituency, old people, venerable people used to smoke marijuana. Today, by imposing ban on natural substances, which people have been using for ages, from the time of Shiva, we have actually forced a lot of these people to move on to alcohol.”

Tathagata Satpathy (1956) Indian politician

Criticising the ban on marijuana, as quoted in " Tathagata Satpathy: the MP who doesn't mind stirring the pot http://www.business-standard.com/article/specials/tathagata-satpathy-the-mp-who-doesn-t-mind-stirring-the-pot-115121800318_1.html" Business Standard (19 December 2015)

People , Alcohol , Age , Time

“It has become an axiom that, to accomplish results organization is requisite. Nevertheless, there is "organization" and "organization."That this is so appears clearly from the fact that the pure and simmplers have been going about saying to the workers: "Organize! Organize!"and after they have been saying that, and have been organizing"and "organizing" for the past thirty or forty years, we find that they are virtually where they started, if not worse off; that their "organization" parttakes of the nature of the lizard, whose tail destroys what his foreparts build up.”

Daniel De Leon (1852–1914) American newspaper editor

Organization
Reform or Revolution (1896)

Appearance , Past

“Kuhn's recognition that science might cease—leaving us with what Charles Sanders Peirce had defined as the "truth" about nature—made it even more imperative for Kuhn than for Popper to challenge science's authority, to deny that science can ever arrive at absolute truth. "The one thing I think you shouldn't say is that now we've found out what the world is really like," Kuhn said. "Because that's not what I think the game is about."”

John Horgan (journalist) (1953) American science journalist

Source: The End of Science (1996), Ch. 2 : The End of Philosophy

Truth , World , Game , Thinking

“Do not smile at my advice -- the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder is of true Germanic character; it is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet, it will come and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

"The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany" (1834)

World , Smile , History , Dead

“Veganism started off as a willpower challenge for me from vegetarianism. … I just walked into year three, so I'm still a brand-new vegan, but I've learned so much … and it's done wonders for my entire life. Some of the changes that I've experienced being vegan: I'm no longer anemic. … I don't get sick! And my skin is clear. I lost 30 pounds. … Everything in my life has benefited me just eating natural foods, and the more information about the truths and the harsh realities of treatment of animals as well as the process of manufacturing food or meat products—including seafood, including the dairy industry, which I was oblivious to being a vegetarian—prompted me to continue this journey, which I'm very proud of, but it's impossible to turn back, because I no longer see product—I see process.”

Mýa

“Mýa, Proud Vegan: 'I No Longer See Product—I See Process'”, video interview with PETA (12 October 2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rax-2smxzpk.

Life , Truth , Food , Reality

“The first evil choice or act is linked to the second; and each one to the one that follows, both by the tendency of our evil nature and by the power of habit, which holds us as by a destiny. – As Lessing says, 'Let the devil catch you but by a single hair, and you are his forever.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 152.

Evil

“[I]t makes little difference where we draw the line between the pruning and shaping [of behavior] by natural selection which is genetically transmitted to offspring (the wiring you are born with), and the pruning and shaping that later takes place in the individual (the rewiring you end up with, as a result of experience or training). Nature and nurture blend seamlessly together.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Kinds of Minds (1996)

Behavior , Drawing , Training

“In 1860, the South did not appeal to the right of revolution. They appealed to a right of secession, which they claim to be a Constitutional right under the Constitution itself. In 1776, the colonists did not claim that in breaking with Great Britain they were exercising a right granted by the British Constitution. They had conducted their struggle until that moment by appealing it through the British constitution. But when they decided on independence, they appealed instead to the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

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

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

God , Law , Exercises

“Nature is a temple where living columns
Let slip from time to time uncertain words;
Man finds his way through forests of symbols
Which regard him with familiar gazes.”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.
"Correspondances" [Correspondences] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Correspondances
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

Way , Time

“Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

White Noise (1984)

Death , Pain , Fear , Reality

“My concern is with the rhythms of nature... I work inside out, like nature.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Quoted in Leonhard Emmerling (2003) Jackson Pollock: 1912-1956 Taschen, p. 48
in posthumous publications

“And since every man retains, and can never be deprived of his natural right (founded on a regard to the general good) of relieving himself from all oppression, that is, from every thing that has been imposed upon him without his own consent; this must be the only true and proper foundation of all the governments subsisting in the world, and that to which the people who compose them have an unalienable right to bring them back.”

Joseph Priestley book Essay on the First Principles of Government

Section II, "Of Political Liberty"
Essay on the First Principles of Government, 2nd Edition (1771)

People , World

“This obedience of the delegates to the wishes of their constituents, which in some cases caused them to modify their previous positions, is a matter of great significance. It reveals an orderly process of government in the first place; but more than that, it demonstrates that the Declaration of Independence was the result of the seasoned and deliberate thought of the dominant portion of the people of the Colonies. Adopted after long discussion and as the result of the duly authorized expression of the preponderance of public opinion, it did not partake of dark intrigue or hidden conspiracy. It was well advised. It had about it nothing of the lawless and disordered nature of a riotous insurrection. It was maintained on a plane which rises above the ordinary conception of rebellion. It was in no sense a radical movement but took on the dignity of a resistance to illegal usurpations. It was conservative and represented the action of the colonists to maintain their constitutional rights which from time immemorial had been guaranteed to them under the law of the land.”

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

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

People , Law , Sense , Time

“2911. It is as natural to die, as to be born.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“It is unacceptable, it is forbidden, to harm the innocent […] To have Iraqis confronting the occupation army, this is natural. But if there are American tourists, or intellectuals, doctors, or professors who have nothing to do with this war, they are innocent, even though they are Americans, and it is forbidden. It is not acceptable to harm them.”

Hassan Nasrallah (1960) Secretary General of Hezbollah

Interview with Robin Wright, Washington Post (16 July 2006)
Quote, 2006
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/14/AR2006071401401_pf.html

War

“Science focuses on the study of the natural world. It seeks to describe what exists. Focusing on problem finding, it studies and describes problems in its various domains. The humanities focus on understanding and discussing the human experience. In design, we focus on finding solutions and creating things and systems of value that do not yet exist.
The methods of science include controlled experiments, classification, pattern recognition, analysis, and deduction. In the humanities we apply analogy, metaphor, criticism, and (e)valuation. In design we devise alternatives, form patterns, synthesize, use conjecture, and model solutions. \
Science values objectivity, rationality, and neutrality. It has concern for the truth. The humanities value subjectivity, imagination, and commitment. They have a concern for justice. Design values practicality, ingenuity, creativity, and empathy. It has concerns for goodness of fit and for the impact of design on future generations.”

Béla H. Bánáthy (1919–2003) Hungarian linguist and systems scientist

Source: Designing Social Systems in a Changing World (1996), p. 34-35, as cited in Alexander Laszlo and Stanley Krippner (1992) " Systems Theories: Their Origins, Foundations, and Development http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resourcesPDFs/SystemsTheory.pdf" In: J.S. Jordan (Ed.), Systems Theories and A Priori Aspects of Perception. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1998. Ch. 3, pp. 47-74.

Truth , World , Justice , Imagination

“On the positive side, my anarchism came mainly as a corollary to the estimate of human capacity for self-improvement which I had picked up from Mr. Jefferson. His fundamental idea appeared to be that everyone answering to the zoological classification of homo sapiens is a human being, and therefore is indefinitely improvable. The essence of it is that homo sapiens in his natural state really wishes and means to be as decent towards his fellow-beings as he can, and under favorable conditions will progress in decency.”

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist

A Little Conserva-tive (1936)

Idea , Appearance

“I knew that the library was also the materialization of a certain level of the psyche, even as our world is. Only there, time is laid out like space is here. The windows of the library coincide with definite places in our space-time. In our world, these points of intersection may appear as natural objects, and these correlate with coordination points in your psyche. Moving toward these coordination points in your mind automatically lines up your consciousness to some extent with this other reality, and stabilizes conditions enough to allow for more or less conscious entry and return.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 41

World , Reality , Appearance , Time

“.. I did a great deal of work [in 1903, Normandy]. And I understood how to transfer nature into colors appropriate to the odor of my soul. I painted a large number of landscapes there, bushes and Breton heads from my window. The pictures were glowing with color. And my inner self was contended.”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

Quote of Jawlensky, c. 1903; as cited by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 114
1900 - 1935

Color , Soul , Painting

“Growing old is natural,” growls the old woman. “When you’ve lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what’s left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you’re taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It’s a monstrously egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 7 (“Curator”), p. 279

Friendship , People , Feeling , Lovers

“But the point, as I argued with Caplan, is not that managers are inherently less intelligent or capable as individuals. Rather, it’s that hierarchical organizations are—to borrow that wonderful phrase from Feldman and March—systematically stupid. For all the same Hayekian reasons that make a planned economy unsustainable, no individual is “smart” enough to manage a large, hierarchical organization. Nobody–not Einstein, not John Galt–possesses the qualities to make a bureaucratic hierarchy function rationally. Nobody’s that smart, any more than anybody’s smart enough to run Gosplan efficiently–that’s the whole point. No matter how insightful and resourceful they are, no matter how prudent, as human beings in dealing with actual reality, nevertheless by their very nature hierarchies insulate those at the top from the reality of what’s going on below, and force them to operate in imaginary worlds where all their intelligence becomes useless. No matter how intelligent managers are as individuals, a bureaucratic hierarchy makes their intelligence less usable.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

Homebrew Industrial Revolution (2010), Chapter 7.
Homebrew Industrial Revolution (2010)

Stupidity , World , Intelligence , Reality

“Basically there is no difference between precognition and telepathy. The apparent difference is the result of an inadequate understanding of the nature of time.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 240, Page 3
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 6

Understanding , Time

“I conceived, developed and applied in many areas a new geometry of nature, which finds order in chaotic shapes and processes. It grew without a name until 1975, when I coined a new word to denote it, fractal geometry, from the Latin word for irregular and broken up, fractus. Today you might say that, until fractal geometry became organized, my life had followed a fractal orbit.”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

As quoted in Encyclopedia of World Biography (1997) edited by Thomson Gale

Life

“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter https://web.archive.org/web/19991115034104/http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl64.htm to William Stephens Smith (13 November 1787), quoted in Padover's Jefferson On Democracy
1780s

Death , God , People , Tree

“A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

"News from the Sun" in Myths of the Near Future (1982)

“It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

Science , Time , Madness

“In 1860 Senator Wilson, like Lincoln, could not ask for recognition of more than the black man's natural rights. But he showed in dramatic fashion that his argument, like Lincoln's, applied ultimately to all rights, civil and political no less than natural.”

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. 228

Fashion

“In a different era, I would have called myself a natural philosopher. All my life, I have enjoyed the reputation of being someone who disrupted prevailing ideas. Now that I'm in my 80th year, I can play on my age and provoke people even more.”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

New Scientist interview (2004)

Life , People , Age , Idea

“Every phenomenon of nature was a word, — the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas. Everything the human being heard from the beginning, saw with its eyes, looked upon and touched with its hands was a living word; for God was the word.”

Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) German philosopher

Sämtliche Werken, ed. Josef Nadler (1949-1957), vol. III, p. 32.

God , Communication , Idea

“Here we reach the demonstration that evolution not only is a fact, and a fact of cosmic extent, but is a necessary law a priori over Nature. But we learn at the same time, and upon the same evidence, that it cannot in any wise affect the a priori consciousness, which is the essential being and true person of the mind; much less can it originate this. On the contrary, we have seen it is in this a priori consciousness that the law of evolution has its source and its warrant. Issuing from the noumenal being of mind, evolution has its field only in the world of the mind's experiences, — "inner" and "outer," physical and psychic; or, to speak summarily, only in the world of phenomena. But there, it is indeed universal and strictly necessary.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Limits of Evolution, p.40-1

World , Law , Learning , Universe

“My own first love was biology. I spent a great part of my adolescence in the Natural History museum in London (and I still go to the Botanic Garden almost every day, and to the Zoo every Monday). The sense of diversity—of the wonder of innumerable forms of life—has always thrilled me beyond anything else.”

Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) British neurologist and writer

Personal correspondence, quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, "Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive, O!", Dinosaur in a Haystack (Harmony, 1995), p. 245

Love , Life , History , Sense

“The Working Man as yet sought only to know his craft; and educated himself sufficiently by ploughing and hammering, under the conditions given, and in fit relation to the persons given: a course of education, then as now and ever, really opulent in manful culture and instruction to him; teaching him many solid virtues, and most indubitably useful knowledges; developing in him valuable faculties not a few both to do and to endure,—among which the faculty of elaborate grammatical utterance, seeing he had so little of extraordinary to utter, or to learn from spoken or written utterances, was not bargained for; the grammar of Nature, which he learned from his mother, being still amply sufficient for him. This was, as it still is, the grand education of the Working Man. As for the Priest, though his trade was clearly of a reading and speaking nature, he knew also in those veracious times that grammar, if needful, was by no means the one thing needful, or the chief thing. By far the chief thing needful, and indeed the one thing then as now, was, That there should be in him the feeling and the practice of reverence to God and to men; that in his life's core there should dwell, spoken or silent, a ray of pious wisdom fit for illuminating dark human destinies;—not so much that he should possess the art of speech, as that he should have something to speak!”

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

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

Life , Wisdom , Men , God

“The art of the future will give form to our scientific convictions; this is our religion and our truth, and it is profound and weighty enough to produce the greatest style and the greatest revaluation of form that the world has ever seen. Today, instead of using the laws of nature as a means of artistic expression, we pose the religious problems of a new content. The art of our time will surely have profound analogies with the art of primitive periods long past, without of course, the formalistic similarities now senselessly sought by many archaist artists [Marc rejects abstraction of Cubism, among others]. And our time will just as surely be followed in some distant, ripe, late European future by another period of cool maturity, which in its turn will again set up its own formal laws and traditions. [written at the front of World War 1.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

near Verdun, 1915]
Source: 1915 - 1916, 100 Aphorisms', Franz Marc (1915), p. 446

War , Truth , World , Religion

“It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 3 (p. 72)

Communication , Idea , Light , Grass

“This book reports the findings from a study of job motivation based on a fresh approach to this problem. It is an important study, since the analyses and interpretations of the authors suggest that a breakthrough may well have been made to provide new insights into the nature and method of operation of job attitudes.”

Frederick Herzberg (1923–2000) American psychologist

Source: The motivation to work, 1959, p.vii: Preface ; lead paragraph

Books , Motivation , Problem , Study

“It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature.”

Alice Meynell (1847–1922) English publisher, editor, writer, poet, activist

"The Colour of Life" in The Colour of Life and Other Essays on Things Seen and Heard (London: John Lane, 1896), p. 4.

Time

“It is so by nature that the plant will develop with regularity, that the animal will move purposefully, and that human beings will think. Why should I take exception to recognizing also the last as the expression of an original force of nature, as I do the first and the second?”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book The Vocation of Man

Source: The Vocation of Man (1800), P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 11

Thinking , Animals

“The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First he has his natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial integuments, with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their variously tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons him up as in a loose outside wrapper.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

World , Soul , Time , Box

“The spirit of the nation that should take the lead in this great reform would insensibly become agricultural: commerce, with all its vice, selfishness, and corruption, would gradually decline; more natural habits would produce gentler manners, and the excessive complication of political relations would be so far simplified that every individual might feel and understand why he loved his country, and took a personal interest in its welfare.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book A Vindication of Natural Diet

A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813)

Love , Feeling , Understanding , Personality

“Organization is not only directly linked to unity, but a natural development of that unity. Accordingly, the leaders' pursuit of that unity is also an attempt to organize the people, requiring witness to the fact that the struggle for liberation is a common task.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)

People

“Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.”

Ayn Rand book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 134

“Ebbinghaus: Language is a system of conventional signs that can be voluntarily produced at any time.
Croce: Language is articulated, limited sound organized for the purpose of expression.
Dittrich: Language is the totality of expressive abilities of individual human beings and animals capable of being understood by at least one other individual.
Eisler: Language is any expression of experiences by a creature with a soul.
B. Erdmann: Language is not a kind of communication of ideas but a kind of thinking: stated or formulated thinking. Language is a tool, and in fact a tool or organ of thinking that is unique to us as human beings.
Forbes: Language is an ordered sequence of words by which a speaker expresses his thoughts with the intention of making them known to a hearer.
J. Harris : Words are the symbols of ideas both general and particular: of the general, primarily, essentially and immediately; of the particular, only secondarily, accidentally and mediately.
Hegel: Language is the act of theoretical intelligence in its true sense, for it is its outward expression.
Jespersen: Language is human activity which has the aim of communicating ideas and emotions.
Jodl: Verbal language is the ability of man to fashion, by means of combined tones and sounds based on a limited numbers of elements, the total stock of his perceptions and conceptions in this natural tone material in such a way that this psychological process is clear and comprehensible to others to its least detail.
Kainz : Language is a structure of signs, with the help of which the representation of ideas and facts may be effected, so that things that are not present, even things that are completely imperceptible to the senses, may be represented.
De Laguna: Speech is the great medium through which human co-operation is brought about.
Marty: Language is any intentional utterance of sounds as a sign of a psychic state.
Pillsbury-Meader: Language is a means or instrument for the communication of thought, including ideas and emotions.
De Saussure: Language is a system of signs expressive of ideas.
Schuchardt. The essence of language lies in communication.
Sapir: Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols.”

Géza Révész (1878–1955) Hungarian psychologist and musicologist

Footnote at pp. 126-127; As cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 313-314
The Origins and Prehistory of Language, 1956

Way , Soul , Intelligence , Communication

“I discover that some of the Eastern papers represent me as a great blasphemer, because I said, in my lecture on Marriage, at our last Conference, that Jesus Christ was married at Cana of Galilee, that Mary, Martha, and others were his wives, and that he begat children. All that I have to say in reply to that charge is this— they worship a Savior that is too pure and holy to fulfil the commands of his Father. I worship one that is just pure and holy enough "to fulfil all righteousness;" not only the righteous law of baptism, but the still more righteous and important law "to multiply and replenish the earth." Startle not at this! for even the Father himself honored that law by coming down to Mary, without a natural body, and begetting a son; and if Jesus begat children, he only "did that which he had seen his Father do."”

Orson Hyde (1805–1878) American Mormon leader

Journal of Discourses 2:210 (March 18, 1855).

Marriage , Children , Law , Christ

“Recall the dictum of Rousseau: "It matters little to me whether my pupil is intended for the army, the church, or law. Before his parents chose a calling for him, nature called him to be a man. … When he leaves me, he will be neither a magistrate, a soldier, nor a priest; he will be a man."”

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

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

Law , Parent

“[For the Romans] an essential element of the Law of Nature is the equality of man, specifically, equality before the law, and the principle of human rights, including the rights to property, which antedated the state, and thus are independent of it. Fifteen hundred years later these ideas would furnish the philosophical cornerstone of Western democracy.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Property and Freedom (1999), p.12

Law , Democracy , Idea

“I really enjoy good murder mystery writers, usually women, frequently English, because they have a sense of what the human soul is about and why people do dark and terrible things. I also read quite a lot in the area of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because this is theology. This is about the nature of being. This is what life is all about. I try to read as widely as I possibly can.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Penguins and Golden Calves (2003)

Life , Women , People , Soul

“Complex adaptive systems have the property that if you run them—by just letting the mathematical variable of "time" go forward—they'll naturally progress from chaotic, disorganized, undifferentiated, independent states to organized, highly differentiated, and highly interdependent states. Organized structures emerge spontaneously… A weak system gives rise only to simpler forms of self-organization; a strong one gives rise to more complex forms, like life.”

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

The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995)

Life , Mathematics , Strong , Time

“But on and up, where Nature’s heart
Beats strong amid the hills.”

Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton (1809–1885) British politician and poet

Tragedy of the Lac de Gaube. Stanza 2.

Strong , Heart

“The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position. On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of society as one's autobiography writ large, surely not the path to general truth. On the other, there is the attempt to be general and objective by pretending that one knows nothing about the experience of being human, forcing the investigator to pretend that people usually know and tell the truth about important issues, when we all know from our lives how impossible that is. How, then, can there be a "social science"? The answer, surely, is to be less ambitious and stop trying to make sociology into a natural science although it is, indeed, the study of natural objects. There are some things in the world that we will never know and many that we will never know exactly. Each domain of phenomena has its characteristic grain of knowability. Biology is not physics, because organisms are such complex physical objects, and sociology is not biology because human societies are made by self-conscious organisms. By pretending to a kind of knowledge that it cannot achieve, social science can only engender the scorn of natural scientists and the cynicism of the humanists.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

Sex, Lies, and Social Science (1995)

People , Truth , World , Knowledge

“The vulgar opinion, then, which, on health reasons, condemns vegetable food and so much praises animal food, being so ill-founded, I have always thought it well to oppose myself to it, moved both by experience and by that refined knowledge of natural things which some study and conversation with great men have given me. And perceiving now that such my constancy has been honoured by some learned and wise physicians with their authoritative adhesion, I have thought it my duty publicly to diffuse the reasons of the Pythagorean diet, regarded as useful in medicine, and, at the same time, as full of innocence, of temperance, and of health. And it is none the less accompanied with a certain delicate pleasure, and also with a refined and splendid luxury, if care and skill be applied in selection and proper supply of the best vegetable food, to which the fertility and the natural character of our beautiful country seem to invite us.”

Antonio Cocchi (1695–1758) Italian physician and naturalist

The Pythagorean Diet: for the Use of the Medical Faculty

Men , Health , Pleasure , Food

“Natural" is a very dangerous word to use about sexuality … Our society's notions of normality are completely fake and meta-trendy, since they rely on the changing standards of superstition, religion, Christianity and gender bias to define themselves. Americans, in particular, exhibit very childish reactions to sexual practices that are new to them, much like little kids who are offered a vegetable they haven't seen before: "That's disgusting!" "But darling, you haven't even tried it!”

Susie Bright (1958) American writer and feminist

"I don't care, I hate it, I hate it!
Introduction, Nothing But the Girl, 1996 ISBN 186047005X.

Hate , Religion , Change

“They insist that an author should write in the strictest, purest and noblest language: in short, they expect the Russian language to drop from the clouds, already refined, and that it should come naturally to the lips, so that all they have to do is to open their mouth and stick out their tongue. It goes without saying, of course, that the feminine half of the human species is very wise; but it must be confessed that our respected readers are even wiser.”

Nikolai Gogol book Dead Souls

Dead Souls (1842)

“What is God-given is what we call human nature. To fulfil the law of our human nature is what we call the moral law. The cultivation of the moral law is what we call culture.”

Zisi (-481–-402 BC) Chinese philosopher

Opening lines, p. 104
Variant translations:
What is God-given is called nature; to follow nature is called Tao (the Way); to cultivate the Way is called culture.
As translated by Lin Yutang in The Importance of Living (1937), p. 143
What is God-given is called human nature.
To fulfill that nature is called the moral law (Tao).
The cultivation of the moral law is called culture.
As translated by Lin Yutang in From Pagan to Christian (1959), p. 85
The Doctrine of the Mean

God , Law

“What I assert and believe to have demonstrated in this and earlier works is that following the finite there is a transfinite (which one could also call the supra-finite), that is an unbounded ascending ladder of definite modes, which by their nature are not finite but infinite, but which just like the finite can be determined by well-defined and distinguishable numbers.”

Georg Cantor (1845–1918) mathematician, inventor of set theory

As quoted in Understanding the Infinite (1994) by Shaughan Lavine ~ ISBN 0674921178

“Fulfilled philosophy vindicates our faith in the Personality of the Eternal Ideal, in the reality of God, by vindicating the reality of man the Mind, and exhibiting his legislative relation to Nature and thence to evolution. It thus secures a stable footing for freedom, and for immortality with worth, and thereby for the existence of the Living God who is Love indeed, because the Inspirer of an endless progress in moral freedom.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Limits of Evolution, p.54

Love , God , Faith , Reality

“We must not forget, in all the enthusiasm for computer simulations, occasionally we must look at Nature as She is.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Forgetting

“Man experiences a multitude of needs, on whose satisfaction his happiness depends, and whose non-satisfaction entails suffering. Alone and isolated, he could only provide in an incomplete, insufficient manner for these incessant needs. The instinct of sociability brings him together with similar persons, and drives him into communication with them. Therefore, impelled by the self-interest of the individuals thus brought together, a certain division of labor is established, necessarily followed by exchanges. In brief, we see an organization emerge, by means of which man can more completely satisfy his needs than he could living in isolation.This natural organization is called society.The object of society is therefore the most complete satisfaction of man's needs. The division of labor and exchange are the means by which this is accomplished.”

Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912) Belgian political economist and classical liberal theorist

Source: The Production of Security (1849), p. 17-18

Communication , Suffering , Dependency , Personality

“The New Englander is attached to his township because it is strong and independent; he has an interest in it because he shares in its management; he loves it because he has no reason to complain of his lot; he invests his ambition and his future in it; in the restricted sphere within his scope, he learns to rule society; he gets to know those formalities without which freedom can advance only through revolutions, and becoming imbued with their spirit, develops a taste for order, understands the harmony of powers, and in the end accumulates clear, practical ideas about the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter I-V, Chapter V.

Love , Idea , Understanding , Freedom

“Beside, 't is known he could speak Greek
As naturally as pigs squeak;
That Latin was no more difficile
Than to a blackbird 't is to whistle.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto I, line 51
Source: Hudibras, Part I (1663–1664)

“Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. These two ways are not arbitrary, but are bound up with the phenomenon – developing out of its nature and characteristics : Externally – or – inwardly.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

1920 - 1930, Point and line to plane, 1926

Way

“I was carrying out my duty, as the Japanese high commander of the Japanese Army in the Philippine Islands, to control my army with the best of my ability during wartime. Until now, I believe that I have tried my best for my army. As I said in the Manila Supreme Court that I have done everything with all my capacity, so I wouldn't be ashamed in front of the Gods for what I have done when I have died. But if you say to me "you do not have any ability to command the Japanese Army," I should say nothing in response, because it is my own nature. Now, our war criminal trial is going on in the Manila Supreme Court, so I wish to be justified under your kindness and righteousness. I know that all your American military affairs always have had tolerant and rightful judgment. When I had been investigated in the Manila court, I have had good treatment, a kind attitude from your good-natured officers who protected me all the time. I will never forget what they have done for me even if I die. I don't blame my executioners. I'll pray that the Gods bless them. Please send my thankful word to Col. Clarke and Lt. Col. Feldhaus, Lt. Col. Hendrix, Maj. Guy, Capt. Sandburg, Capt. Reel, at Manila court, and Col. Arnard. I thank you. I pray for the Emperor's long life and prosperity forever.”

Tomoyuki Yamashita (1885–1946) general in the Imperial Japanese Army

Last words. Quoted in "Yamashita Hanged Near Los Banos" - "New York Times" article - February 23, 1946.

Life , God , War , Guy

“Heisenberg now approached the problem from a new philosophical angle. He discarded all models, pictures and parables, and made a clear distinction between sure knowledge we gain from observation of nature and the conjectural knowledge we introduce when we use models, pictures and parables. Sure knowledge… can only be numerical, so that Heisenberg's results were inevitably mathematical in form, and could not disclose anything about the true nature of physical properties or entities.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Mathematics , Knowledge , Problem

“I think one of the interesting things about the Linux phenomenon is that [Linus] has been able to keep some kind of control over such an amazingly extended development environment. I’m certainly glad that I didn’t have to develop C in public, because you get more suggestions than you really want. Being in this nice, small group, you can control that sort of thing. I honestly don’t know the dynamics and the details of the Linux kernel project. However, one of the knocks on Linux is that it is undisciplined. But I think probably the fairer observation is that it is amazingly disciplined, compared to what you would expect, given the nature of the endeavor.”

Dennis M. Ritchie (1941–2011) American computer scientist

Linux Magazine: The Guru, 15 June 2001 http://www.linux-mag.com/id/801/,.
On Unix, Linux, and open-source (2001)

Thinking

“It had always been one of my convictions that Jews and Arabs could live together. Even as a child it never occurred to me that Jews might someday be living in Israel without Arabs, or separated from Arabs. On the contrary, for me it had always seemed perfectly normal for the two people to live and work side by side. That is the nature of life here and it always will be…. though Israel is a Jewish nation, it is, of course, not only a Jewish nation… I begin with the basic conviction that Jews and Arabs can live together. I have repeated that at every opportunity, not for journalists and not for popular consumption, but because I have never believed differently or thought differently, from my childhood on. I am not afraid of Arabs. I feel I can live with them. I believe I understand their problems. I know that we are both inhabitants of this land, and although the state is Jewish, that does not mean that Arabs should not be full citizens in every sense of the word.”

Ariel Sharon (1928–2014) prime minister of Israel and Israeli general

Ariel Sharon, ‎David Chanoff (2002) Warrior: An Autobiography p. 343, 542-3
2000s

Life , People , Feeling , Understanding

“Love is our true essence. Love has no limitations such as religion, race, nationality, or caste. We are all beads strung together on the same thread of love. To awaken this unity and to spread the love that is our inherent nature to others—this is the true aim of human life. Indeed, love is the only religion that can help humanity rise to great and glorious heights. And love should be the one thread on which all religions and philosophies are strung together. The beauty of society lies in the unity of hearts.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

May Peace & Happiness Prevail (2004)

Love , Life , Religion , Beauty

“The difference between the arts arises because of the difference in the nature of the mediums of expression and the emphasis induced by the nature of each medium. Each means of expression has its own order of being, its own units.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Painting and Culture' p. 57
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Art

“Of course, the human soul will always have the power to reject God, for choice is essential to its nature, but I cannot believe that anyone will finally do this.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.287

God , Soul

“Nature does not make leaps.”

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German mathematician and philosopher

La nature ne fait jamais des sauts.
Avant-propos to Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain (1704).
A later, more famous Latin version — "Natura non facit saltus" — is from the Philosophia Botanica (1751) by Linnaeus.
A variant translation is "natura non saltum facit" (literally, "Nature does not make a jump") ([Ökonomische Theorie und christlicher Glaube, Andrew, Britton, Peter H., Sedgwick, Burghard, Bock, LIT Verlag Münster, 2008, 978-3-8258-0162-5, 289, https://books.google.com/books?id=goW6JsEUz4EC] Extract of page 289 https://books.google.com/books?id=goW6JsEUz4EC&pg=PA289).