Quotes about nature
page 81

“Human nature, human nature acts as it acts when it is identified when there is an identity but it is not human nature that has anything to do with that it is that anybody is there where they are, it is that that has to do with identity, with government and propaganda with history with individualism and with communism but it has nothing nothing to do with the human mind … because the human mind writes what there is and what has identity go to do with that … nothing at all.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Quoted in Really Reading Gertrude Stein : A Selected Anthology with essays (1989) by Judy Grahn (Crossing Press ISBN 0-895-94380-8, p. 253

History, Communication

“To think with fear of the end of one's life is pretty general with human beings. It is one of the means nature uses to conserve the life of the species. Approached rationally that fear is the most unjustified of all fears, for there is no risk of any accidents to one who is dead or not yet born. In short, the fear is stupid but it cannot be helped.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to Eileen Danniheisser (1953), quoted in Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel by Banesh Hoffman (1973), p. 261 http://books.google.com/books?id=sdDaAAAAMAAJ&q=%22think+with+fear%22#search_anchor. The exact date, or the name of his correspondent, is not given in the snippet of the book available online, but the quote appears after the letter to the Queen of Belgium from 12 January 1953, and is prefaced by "Nine months later, in words that recall the beliefs of an early atomic speculator, the Roman poet Lucretius, Einstein had written to an inquirer", followed by the quote. The name "Eileen Danniheisser" is given in Time: Volume 144, where it is mentioned in the snippets here http://books.google.com/books?id=JDAnAQAAIAAJ&q=%22obsessive+thoughts%22#search_anchor and here http://books.google.com/books?id=JDAnAQAAIAAJ&q=%22think+with+fear%22#search_anchor that she had written Einstein "about her obsessive thoughts of death as a child". 1950s

Life, Stupidity, Fear, Thinking

“I appreciated the sense of drama he wanted to inject into my existence and I was flattered that he thought I, or at least some essential if somewhat abstract principle within me, was worth saving.I also felt surging within me a fierce need to be independent. Of course I responded to the appeal of divine hydraulics, this system of souls damned or crowned or destroyed or held in suspense, these pulleys and platforms sinking and lifting on the great stage, and I recognized that my view of things seemed by contrast impoverished, lacking in degree and incident. But the charming intricacy of a myth is not sufficient to compel belief. I found no good reason to assume that the ultimate nature of reality happened to resemble the backstage of an opera house.”

Edmund White book A Boy's Own Story

Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter Six (p. 203).

Soul, Reality, Sense, Housing

“Man's conception of what is most worth knowing and reflecting upon, of what may best compel his scholarly energies, has changed greatly with the years. His earliest impressions were of his own insignificance and of the stupendous powers and forces by which he was surrounded and ruled. The heavenly fires, the storm-cloud and the thunderbolt, the rush of waters and the change of seasons, all filled him with an awe which straightway saw in them manifestations of the superhuman and the divine. Man was absorbed in nature, a mythical and legendary nature to be sure, but still the nature out of which science was one day to arise. Then, at the call of Socrates, he turned his back on nature and sought to know himself; to learn the secrets of those mysterious and hidden processes by which he felt and thought and acted. The intellectual centre of gravity had passed from nature to man. From that day to this the goal of scholarship has been the understanding of both nature and man, the uniting of them in one scheme or plan of knowledge, and the explaining of them as the offspring of the omnipotent activity of a Creative Spirit, the Christian God. Slow and painful have been the steps toward the goal which to St. Augustine seemed so near at hand, but which has receded through the intervening centuries as the problems grew more complex and as the processes of inquiry became so refined that whole worlds of new and unsuspected facts revealed themselves. Scholars divided into two camps. The one would have ultimate and complete explanations at any cost; the other, overcome by the greatness of the undertaking, held that no explanation in a large or general way was possible. The one camp bred sciolism; the other narrow and helpless specialization.
At this point the modern university problem took its rise; and for over four hundred years the university has been striving to adjust its organization so that it may most effectively bend its energies to the solution of the problem as it is. For this purpose the university's scholars have unconsciously divided themselves into three types or classes: those who investigate and break new ground; those who explain, apply, and make understandable the fruits of new investigation; and those philosophically minded teachers who relate the new to the old, and, without dogma or intolerance, point to the lessons taught by the developing human spirit from its first blind gropings toward the light on the uplands of Asia or by the shores of the Mediterranean, through the insights of the world's great poets, artists, scientists, philosophers, statesmen, and priests, to its highly organized institutional and intellectual life of to-day. The purpose of scholarly activity requires for its accomplishment men of each of these three types. They are allies, not enemies; and happy the age, the people, or the university in which all three are well represented. It is for this reason that the university which does not strive to widen the boundaries of human knowledge, to tell the story of the new in terms that those familiar with the old can understand, and to put before its students a philosophical interpretation of historic civilization, is, I think, falling short of the demands which both society and university ideals themselves may fairly make.
A group of distinguished scholars in separate and narrow fields can no more constitute a university than a bundle of admirably developed nerves, without a brain and spinal cord, can produce all the activities of the human organism.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Scholarship and service : the policies of a national university in a modern democracy https://archive.org/details/scholarshipservi00butluoft (1921)

Life, Men, God, Pain

“The one Reality takes manifold names and forms as a result of human ignorance. It is one and the same Thing that a Bhakta calls God, a Jnani calls Brahman, a Shakta calls Shakti, an Atheist calls Nature, a Scientist calls Force or Energy, a Christian calls Father in Heaven, a Mussulman calls Allah, some others call Infinity or Truth and a Vedantin calls Atman or Self. Whatever different names there may be, the fact remains that the Thing is one and the same. The difference is only in names. The Absolute Thing, which is beyond name and form, is birthless, growthless, decayless, deathless, sexless, All-pervading, All-knowing, All-blissful, without beginning, without end, changeless, beyond time, space and causation. The One Thing or the Ocean of Consciousness by Itself is ever the same — One only without a second.”

Swami Narayanananda (1902–1988) Indian guru

Source: A Practical Guide to Samadhi (1957), p. 166

God, Truth, Reality, Time

“The significance of a work of art is determined then by the quality of its growth. This involves intangible forces inherent in the process of development. Although these forces are surreal (that is, their nature is something beyond physical reality), they, nevertheless, depend on a physical carrier. The physical carrier (commonly painting or sculpture) is the medium of expression of the Surreal. Thus, an idea is communicable only when the surreal is converted into material terms. The artist’s technical problem is how to transform the material with which he works back into the sphere of the spirit.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 40
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Art, Idea, Problem, Reality

“How can you look at this and not see it as the symbol for the self-referencing nature of progressive evolution.”

Sanjaya Malakar (1989) American reality television personality

Malakar as Bill Vendall, 25 year old graduate student of fine arts, on his ever-changing 'character creation', Sanjaya Malakar. http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/4763

“The advantage of pure, and the disadvantage of impure air are experienced each time we breathe, and all who understand the causes of disease know that an impure atmosphere is most unfavourable to the enjoyment of health, and an efficient cause to shorten human existence within the natural life of man. It is therefore most desirable that decisive measures should be devised and generally adopted to ensure to all a pure atmosphere, in which to live during their lives.”

Robert Owen (1771–1858) Welsh social reformer

3rd Part
The Book of the New Moral World (1836-1844)

Life, Health, Disease, Understanding

“Gladness, in some instances, springs from a natural buoyancy of temperament, and is quite consistent with shallowness and superficiality of character. In other cases it is coincident with the swift flow of the currents of the blood, and ceases when the stream flows more slowly and begins to stagnate. Or it is due to gifts which an exceptional good fortune showers into the laps of favoured mortals. Gladness of this sort comes with happiness and departs with it.
But the purified gladness of which I speak is not dependent on these accidents. It is the mark of the ripest wisdom, and is based on the conviction, gained through experience, that life is worth living, that the victory is assured, and that the ends we pursue are of such excellence as to be incapable of ultimate defeat.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Section 4 : Moral Ideals
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)

Life, Wisdom, Happiness, Spring

“The idea that emotion can be separated from sex is a Christian illusion, one of the most ingenious but finally unworkable strategies in Christianity’s ancient campaign against pagan nature.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 35

Sex, Idea

“Darwin's reply: I freely acknowledge that Mr. Matthew has anticipated by many years the explanation which I have offered of the origin of species, under the name of natural selection. I think that no one will feel surprised that neither I, nor apparently any other naturalist, has heard of Mr. Matthew's views, considering how briefly they are given, and that they appeared in the Appendix to a work on Naval Timber and Arboriculture. I can do no more than offer my apologies to Mr. Matthew for my entire ignorance of his publication.”

Patrick Matthew (1790–1874) British scientist

Gardeners' Chronicle

Feeling, Thinking, Appearance

“We separate color and drawing because we have to. But nature doesn't. She doesn't give something a shape, for coloring it only afterwards. Form and color are inherent properties of the object that we have got as thing to paint. If we neglect one of both, we only give half.”

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:) Wij scheiden kleur en teekening af, omdat wij dat wel moeten. Maar de natuur doet dat niet. Zij geeft niet iets een vorm, om het daarna te kleuren. Vorm en kleur zijn inhaerente eigenschappen van het voorwerp, dat ons te schilderen is gegeven. Verwaarloozen wij een van beide, dan geven wij slechts de helft. Quote of Roelofs, in Elsevier's geïllustreerd maandschrift..., Oct. / Nov. 1891; as cited in an excerpt in the RKD Archive https://rkd.nl/explore/excerpts/219, The Hague undated quotes

Color, Drawing, Painting

“For man seeketh in society comfort, use, and protection: and they be three wisdoms of divers natures, which do often sever: wisdom of the behaviour, wisdom of business, and wisdom of state.”

Francis Bacon book The Advancement of Learning

Book II, xxiii
The Advancement of Learning (1605)

Wisdom, Business

“Evolution is a theory of organic change, but it does not imply, as many people assume, that ceaseless flux is the irreducible state of nature and that structure is but a temporary incarnation of the moment. Change is more often a rapid transition between stable states than a continuous transformation at slow and steady rates. We live in a world of structure and legitimate distinction. Species are the units of nature's morphology.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Panda's Thumb

"A Quahog is a Quahog", p. 213
The Panda's Thumb (1980)

People, World, Change

“There are a lot of things we can learn from the Soviet Union. Naturally, we should learn from its advanced and not its backward experience. The slogan we have advocated all along is to draw on the advanced Soviet experience. Who told you to pick up its backward experience? Some people are so undiscriminating that they say a Russian fart is fragrant. That too is subjectivism. The Russians themselves say it stinks. Therefore, we should be analytical.”

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

Strengthen Party Unity and Carry Forward Party Traditions http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_53.htm (30 August 1956)

People, Learning, Drawing

“For those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality.”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion: The Significance of Religious Myth, Symbolism, and Ritual within Life and Culture (1961).

Reality

“Women have ironically enjoyed a greater symbolic, if not practical freedom. Thus it is that male and not female homosexuality has been harshly punished by law. A debater in Lucian declares, “Far better that a women, in the madness of her lust, should usurp the nature of man, than that man’s noble nature should be so degraded as to play the woman.” Similarly today, lesbian interludes are a staple of heterosexual pornography. Ever since man emerged from the dominance of nature, masculinity has been the most fragile and problematic of psychic states.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 125

Women, Law, Freedom, Madness

“To the wild deep-hearted man all was yet new, not veiled under names or formulas; it stood naked, flashing in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature was to this man, what to the Thinker and Prophet it forever is, preternatural. This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers, many-sounding seas;—that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead; the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain.”

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

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

Beauty, Mountain, Fashion, Tree

“Like the calm still surface water that reflects the moon and a flying bird, true living calmness is the condition of our mind that reflects all things clearly. This is our original and natural state. By understanding these principles, we can acquire true living calmness.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

7: Living calmness
Ki Sayings (2003)

Understanding, Bird, Water, Flying

“Man had dominated the Earth by virtue of a single assumption: that an effect could be traced to a cause, itself the effect of a previous cause. Manipulation of this basic law yielded rich results; there seemed no need for any other tool or instrumentality. Man congratulated himself on his generalized structure. He could live on desert, on plain or ice, in forest or in city; Nature had not shaped him to a special environment.
He was unaware of his vulnerability. Logic was the special environment; the brain was the special tool.”

Jack Vance (1916–2013) American mystery and speculative fiction writer

Infinity Science Fiction (July 1957)
Short fiction, The Men Return (1957)

Law

“Love should make a churlish nature kind,
And not transform to rude a gentle breast.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Canto XXXII, stanza 93 (tr. W. S. Rose)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Love

“How can we address concerns about 'use of force', how can we address concerns about officer-involved shootings if we do not have a reliable grasp on the demographics and circumstances of those incidents? We simply must improve the way we collect and analyze data to see the true nature of what’s happening in all of our communities.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Way, Communication

“Nature is richer than I represent it... Nature is so beautiful that when I am not tortured by poverty I am tortured by her splendor. How fortunate we are to be able to see and admire the glories of the sky and earth; if only I could be content just to admire them. But there is always the torment of struggling to reproduce them, the impossibility of creating anything within the narrow limits of painting.”

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) French painter

Quote from Boudin's Journal, March 1854; as cited in Eugène Boudin, G. Jean-Aubrey & Robert Schmit, Greenwich, New York graphic society, 1968, p. 24
1850s - 1870s

Beauty, Painting

“We must all believe in ourselves and together raise our national banner high as a symbol of freedom so that it can fly sovereignly and definitively over our great fatherland. This will not prevent us from persisting in our tradition as a peace-loving nation and from respecting all world nations, nor will it prevent us from resuming with dignity, through friendly gestures stemming from our natural generosity, diplomatic negotiations which may give an institutional basis to the situation which we have achieved, clearly safeguard- ing those legitimate interests we have always respected. Our arms will always be extended to conclude noble commitments and to forget past offences for the sake of building a peaceful future for the civilized world. Glory to the great Argentine people”

Leopoldo Galtieri (1926–2003) Argentine military dictator

President Galtieri’s address to the nation https://teachwar.wordpress.com/resources/war-justifications-archive/falklandsmalvinas-war-1982/#arg1, 2 April 1982

Love, People, World, Peace

“It is for all who are personally united to Christ to cultivate a contemplative and sanctified spirit. So far from being secular and sordid, they should be sacred and spiritual, having their lives hid with Christ in God, and their whole natures absorbed in the knowledge and love and service of the Saviour.”

John McClellan Holmes (1834–1911) US Christian minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 562.

Love, God, Knowledge, Christ

“Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Tree, Past, Parting

“I think it right to warn my reader, that there are more passages than one in the book, which are of that nature, which will be perfectly understood by my Masonic friends, but which my engagements prevent me explaining to the world at large. My Masonic friends will find their craft very often referred to. I believe, however that they will not find any of their secrets betrayed; but I trust they will find it proved, that their art is the remains of a very fine ancient system, or, perhaps, more properly, a branch of the fine and beautiful system of WISDOM which, in this work, I have developed.”

Godfrey Higgins book Anacalypsis

Preface to Vol. I.
Anacalypsis (published 1833)

Wisdom, Secret, Books, World

“True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights—and I am not against supplying such lures if they draw children into even a transient concern with science. But every classroom has one [Oliver] Sacks, one [Eric] Korn, or one [Jonathan] Miller, usually a lonely child with a passionate curiosity about nature, and a zeal that overcomes pressures for conformity. Do not the one in fifty deserve their institutions as well—magic places, like cabinet museums, that can spark the rare flames of genius?”

Stephen Jay Gould book Dinosaur in a Haystack

"Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive, O!", p. 246
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

Children, Age, Light, Passion

“Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it a matter of social convention: readjust society, eliminate sexual inequality, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign. Here feminism, like all liberal movements of the past two hundred years, is heir to Rousseau.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 1

Happiness, Sex, Problem, Past

“Nature is a wary wily long-breathed old Witch, tough-lived as a Turtle and divisible as the Polyp, repullulative in a thousand Snips and Cuttings, integra et in toto! She is sure to get the better of Lady MIND in the long run, and to take her revenge too — transforms our To Day into a Canvass dead-colored to receive the dull featureless Portait of Yesterday.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Letter to James Gillman (9 October 1825)
Letters

Color, Revenge, Dead

“If by politeness then is meant goodness, it is appreciated by me as I trust it always has been, but if it is to mean the string of ceremonies generally used for concealing ill nature, and which have been found necessary to the existence of every society whose members are wanting in self respect and morality, I detest it more than ever.My prominent idea of a polite man is one who is nothing but polish. It is an unenviable reputation. If there was anything else in him the polish would never be noticed. He is a bad drawing finely worked up, and Gérôme says that every attempt at finish on a bad design serves only to make the work more contemptible.”

Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) American painter

Letter to Emily Sartain (ca. 1867); from Sylvan Schendler, Eakins (1967), footnote, ch. 10.

Idea, Drawing

“The commercial prostitution of love is the last outcome of our whole social system, and its most clear condemnation. It flaunts in our streets, it hides itself in the garment of respectability under the name of matrimony, it eats in actual physical disease and death right through our midst; it is fed by the oppression and the ignorance of women, by their poverty and denied means of livelihood, and by the hypocritical Puritanism which forbids them by millions not only to gratify but even to speak of their natural desires; and it is encouraged by the callousness of an age which has accustomed men to buy and sell for money every most precious thing — even the life-long labor of their brothers, therefore why not also the very bodies of their sisters?”

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) British poet and academic

Love's Coming of Age (1896)

Love, Life, Death, Women

“Three poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed;
The next, in majesty; in both the last.
The force of Nature could no further go.
To make a third, she joined the former two.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Under Mr. Milton's Picture (1688).

Age, Distant

“How can I feel so melancholy for so terrible a past? Maybe it's just the nature of us, ever wishing for things that were and could be rather than things that are and will be.”

Pierce Brown book Morning Star

Source: Morning Star (2016), Ch. 39: The Heart

Feeling, Past

“You, the Poles, have a funny nature. When the people going along the road are attacked by a dog with its insistent and noisy barking, you immediately feel like jumping off the vehicle, standing on all fours and starting to bark back at it. We, in the Vilnius region, let the dog bark because that is what its canine nature is like but we do not stop out journey because of its canine barking and without any war against dogs we calmly continue our journey until we reach our destination. It seems that you care more about barking more than the dog does and about winning the war with any lousy puppy than about reaching the destination quickly.”

Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935) Polish politician and Prime Minister

Jerzy Robert Nowak, Na przekór skorpionom. Wyznania upartego Polaka, Warszawa 2005, p. 52.
Attributed

War, People, Dogs, Feeling

“The participation we have in the knowledge of truth, such as it is, is not acquired by our own force: God has sufficiently given us to understand that, by the witnesses he has chosen out of the common people, simple and ignorant men, that he has been pleased to employ to instruct us in his admirable secrets. Our faith is not of our own acquiring; 'tis purely the gift of another's bounty: 'tis not by meditation, or by virtue of our own understanding, that we have acquired our religion, but by foreign authority and command wherein the imbecility of our own judgment does more assist us than any force of it; and our blindness more than our clearness of sight: 'tis more by__ the mediation of our ignorance than of our knowledge that we know any thing of the divine wisdom. 'Tis no wonder if our natural and earthly parts cannot conceive that supernatural and heavenly knowledge: let us bring nothing of our own, but obedience and subjection; for, as it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that, in the wisdom of God, the world knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe."”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book II, Ch. 12
Essais (1595), Book II

Wisdom, Men, God, People

“We will likely also find that the nature of the problem to be solved will be a principal determinant of the mix. With our growing understanding of the organization of judgmental and intuitive processes, of the specific knowledge that of the specific knowledge that is required to perform particular judgmental tasks, and of the cues that evoke such knowledge in situations in which it is relevant, we have a powerful new tool for improving expert judgment. We can specify the knowledge and the recognition capabilities that experts in a domain need to acquire, and use these specifications for designing appropriate learning procedures.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 137.

Understanding, Knowledge, Problem, Learning

“So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world.”

Stanislav Andreski (1919–2007) Polish-British sociologist

Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972)

World, Knowledge, Thinking, Science

“The self-regulating adaptive disposition of organised life may, in part, be traced to the extreme fecundity of Nature, who, as before stated, has, in all the varieties of her offspring, a prolific power much beyond (in many cases a thousand-fold) what is necessary to fill up the vacancies caused by senile decay. As the field of existence is limited and pre-occupied, it is only the hardier, more robust, better suited to circumstance individuals, who are able to struggle forward to maturity, these inhabiting only the situations to which they have superior adaptation and greater powers of occupancy than any other kind; the weaker, less circumstance-suited, being prematurely destroyed.”

Patrick Matthew (1790–1874) British scientist

On naval timber and arboriculture (1831), Appendix F, part II

Life, Parting

“The most serious flaw of Foucault's system is in the area of sex. I view his hurried, compulsive writing as a massive rationalist defense-formation to avoid thinking about (a) woman, (b) nature, (c) emotion, and (d) the sexual body. His attempt to make the body passive property of male society is an evasion of the universal fact so intolerable to him: that we are all born of human mothers. By turning women into ciphers, he miniaturizes and contains them.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 230

Women, Sex, Thinking, Universe

“We believe that Darwinism is the real Orthodox Church, because Darwinism asks you to believe in things unseen that are incredibly unlikely. Darwinism asks us to believe that out of pure random chance, we got a cell that is as complicated as a Boeing 777. Darwinism asks us to believe that one day there was nothing but mud and ooze, and the next day there was life, and very soon after there was intelligent life. Darwinism asks us to believe that you can destroy genetic material through random mutation and natural selection and yet end up with more genetic material. We don't really ask you to believe anything that difficult; it is sort of innate in mankind to believe that there is a God, a heavenly Father and we're asking you to just follow the consequences of that and see if possibly there could be some scientific validity to that.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed, Assist Ministries News Story: EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed, 10 April 2008, 2008-04-18 http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/2008/s08040068.htm,

Life, God, Intelligence, Chance

“I've spent most of the last few days looking at information to help me reimagine… a history… that digs into the stratum below the ones that carry wars or political affairs… many of the questions are new. …they have to do with our interaction with our ecological landscape, with what we might call the "natural West," as both idea in the mind and as tangible rock, grass, and flesh…”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)

War, History, Idea, Question

“I really don't know why I clicked. I didn't want to be a dancer, I just did it to work my way through college. But I was always an athlete and gymnast, so it came naturally.”

Gene Kelly (1912–1996) American dancer, actor, singer, director, producer and choreographer

Quoted in "Gene Kelly's Musical Memories" by Rex Reed, in The Chicago Tribune (November 29, 1970)

Way

“Where there are large powers with little ambition (which will happen sometimes, though seldom) nature may be said to have fallen short of her purposes; for she has given the machinery without the vis motrix.”

Henry Taylor (1800–1886) English playwright and poet

Source: The Statesman (1836), Ch. 19. p. 132

“The desire that drives an artist to graphic work is perhaps partly the effort to capture the unique and indefinite nature of a drawing in a fixed and durable form. Another aspect of it is that the technical manipulations exercise energies in the artist that he does not use in the far less strenuous crafts of drawing and painting... the mysterious attraction that surrounded the invention of printing in the Middle Ages is still felt by anyone who takes up graphics seriously and performs every stage in the process wit hits own hands.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

as quoted in Expressionism, de:Wolf-Dieter Dube; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 27
undated

Age, Exercises, Effort, Drawing

“I mean, it became particularly acute because Keynes, against his intentions, had stimulated the development of macroeconomics. And I was convinced that not only his particular conclusions, but the whole foundation of macroeconomics was wrong.
So I wanted to demonstrate that we had to return to microeconomics, that this whole prejudice supported by the natural scientists that could deduce anything from measurable magnitudes, the effects of aggregates and averages, came to fascinate me much more. I felt in a way, that the thing which I am now prepared to do, I don’t know as there’s anybody else who can do this particular task. And I rather hoped that what I had done in capital theory would be continued by others. This was a new opening which was much more fascinating. The other would have meant working for a result which I already knew, but had to prove it. Which was very dull.
The other thing was an open problem: How does economics really look like when you recognize it as the prototype of a new kind of science of complex phenomena which could not employ the simple model of mechanics or physics, but had to deal with what then I described as mere pattern predictions, certain limited prediction. That was so much more fascinating as an intellectual problem.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

In a 1985 interview with Gary North and Mark Skousen, in Hayek on Hayek (1994)
1980s and later

Hope, Way, Support, Problem

“Much as we live in an economic and social order that is structured to exploit people, we live in one that is structured to exploit animals. We’re encouraged to understand both are natural and inevitable, but neither are. Both exploitations have long and contentious histories as part of the development of our modern economic order.”

Bob Torres American podcaster

Source: Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights (2007), p. 10

People, History, Understanding, Animals

“My mother had naturally spiced the pudding with sixpences and threepenny bits, called zacs and trays respectively. Grandpa had collected one of these in the oesophagus. He gave a protracted, strangled gurgle which for a long time we all took to be the beginning of some anecdote.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Source: Memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs (1980), p. 13

Time

“Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

Pt. I, sec. 6, "The Effect of Poetry Explained"
The Philosophy of Style (1852)

Law

“Nature creates unity even in the parts of a whole.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

25 January 1857 (p. 346)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

Parting

“We are part of nature and it is part of us. Everything about our species, from the shape of our teeth to the size of our brains, has been fashioned over millennia by our interaction with the plants and animals around us. What’s more, our sense of beauty and our greatest artistic achievements have been crafted in response to nature. Our yearning for wilderness is a hankering after the place we have come from, and from which we have become alienated in the headlong march of so-called progress.”

Justin D. Fox (1967) South African author, photojournalist, lecturer and editor

The Impossible Five (2015)

Beauty, Fashion, Sense, Animals

“While there is such a persistency to ordinary observation, it would also appear that nature has a power of producing new varieties, though this is only done rarely. Such novelties of type abound in the vegetable world, are seen more rarely in the animal circle, and perhaps are least frequent of occurrence in our own race.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 281-282

World, Appearance, Animals

“The more gifted by nature is a man, the more is deplorable the abuse that he does by using them to shameful ends. A swindler (or crook) of higher condition is more blameworthy than a vulgar scoundrel; an intelligent eveil-doer, having benefited from a higher education, represent a more saddening phenomenon ("phénomène", Fr.) than an unfortune illiterate fellow having commited an offence.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 48.

Education, Intelligence

“The Inclinations of Men, in this their degenerate State, carry them with great Force to those voluptuous Objects, that please their Appetites and gratify their Senses; and which not only by their early Acquaintance and Familiarity, but as they are adapted to the prevailing Instincts of Nature, are more esteem'd and pursu'd than all other Satisfactions. As those inferior Enjoyments, that only affect the Organs of the Body are chiefly coveted, so next to these, that light and facetious Qualification of the Mind, that diverts the Hearers and is proper to produce Mirth and Alacrity, has, in all Ages, by the greatest Part of Mankind, been admir'd and applauded. No Productions of Human Understanding are receiv'd with such a general Pleasure and Approbation, as those that abound with Wit and Humour, on which the People set a greater Value, than on the wisest and most instructive Discourses. Hence a pleasant Man is always caress'd above a wise one, and Ridicule and Satyr, that entertain the Laughers, often put solid Reason and useful Science out of Countenance. The wanton Temper of the Nation has been gratify'd so long with the high Seasonings of Wit and Raillery in Writing and Conversation, that now almost all Things that are not accommodated to their Relish by a strong Infusion of those Ingredients, are rejected as the heavy and insipid Performances of Men of a plain Understanding and meer Masters of Sense.”

Richard Blackmore (1654–1729) English poet and physician

Essay upon Wit http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13484/13484-8.txt (1711)

Men, People, Pleasure, Age

“The goal to be reached is the mind’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary, … because by nothing less could that all-pervading mind ever manage to become conscious of what itself is — for that reason, the individual mind, in the nature of the case, cannot expect by less toil to grasp what its own substance contains.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book The Phenomenology of Spirit

Preface (J. B. Baillie translation), § 29
The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

“.. that one [a tree study in Gabriël's studio] is from my early times; I don't make them that way anymore; look how the thing is painted..; and those days my teachers told me that nothing would come of me in this way. What kind of folks were they? [o. a. his early and short teacher Koekoek, c. 1844-45] And which guys belonged to them? Well, let's keep mum about that; all those guys are dead already. But those days [c. 1840's] it was the ruling idea to use nature only as a tool; she had to be embellished later with imagination and so on …. imagination …. the stupidest thing in the world. (L. de Haes asked him: Do you think imagination is so improper?) Improper, I think it is simply an unhealthy trait. You see; imagination is the proper way to insanity. Imagine that you start painting from your imagination without knowing nature; after all, there will be no result whatsoever. All those people of imagination imagine so much, and it is the greatest misfortune you can have in life, you know what it is good for: to idealize your faults.”

Paul Gabriël (1828–1903) painter (1828-1903)

translation from the Dutch original: Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch / citaat van Paul Gabriël, in Nederlands: ..da's er een [ een boom-studie] uit m'n eersten tijd; zoo doe 'k het niet meer; kijk dat ding eens geschilderd wezen; en in dien tijd zeiden mijn leermeesters dat er op die manier niets van mij terecht zou komen. Wat een lui waren dat hè [o.a. zijn tijdelijke vroege leermeester Koekoek, c. 1844-45]? En wie waren dat zoo al? Ja daar zullen we maar over zwijgen; die menschen zijn nu al dood; maar 't was toen de opvatting, de natuur alleen als hulpmiddel te gebruiken; zij moest nog verfraaid worden met verbeelding en zoo al meer .... imaginatie.... 't stomste wat er op de wereld is. (L. de Haes: Vindt u verbeelding dan zoo verwerpelijk?) Verwerpelijk, och ik vind het eenvoudig een ziekelijke eigenschap, zie je wel; verbeelding, dat is de weg naar de krankzinnigheid. Verbeeld je dat je uit je verbeelding gaat schilderen zonder de natuur te kennen; daar komt immers niets van terecht. Al die menschen van verbeelding verbeelden zich zoo veel, en 't is 't grootste ongeluk wat je op de wereld kan hebben, weet je waar 't alleen goed voor is: om je gebreken te idealiseeren.
Quote of Gabriël, 1893; as cited by L. de Haes, in 'P.J.C. Gabriël'; published in Elsevier's geïllustreerd maandschrift 3., April/May 1893, pp. 453-473
1880's + 1890's

Life, People, World, Way

“But there are natural temples still for those
Eternal though dethroned Deities,
Where from green altars flowers send up their incense:
This fount is one of them.”

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

The Thessalian Fountain from The London Literary Gazette (24th January 1824) Fragments, 4th Series
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Flowers

“Pity for poverty, enthusiasm for equality and freedom, recognition of social injustice and a desire to remove it, is not socialism. Condemnation of wealth and respect for poverty, such as we find in Christianity and other religions, is not socialism. The communism of early times, as it was before the existence of private property, and as it has at all times and among all peoples been the elusive dream of some enthusiasts, is not socialism. The forcible equalization advocated by the followers of Baboeuf, the so-called equalitarians, is not socialism. In all these appearances there is lacking the real foundation of capitalist society with its class antagonisms. Modern socialism is the child of capitalist society and its class antagonisms. Without these it could not be. Socialism and ethics are two separate things. This fact must be kept in mind. Whoever conceives of socialism in the sense of a sentimental philanthropic striving after human equality, with no idea of the existence of capitalist society, is no socialist in the sense of the class struggle, without which modern socialism is unthinkable. Whoever has come to a full consciousness of the nature of capitalist society and the foundation of modern socialism, knows also that a socialist movement that leaves the basis of the class struggle may be anything else, but it is not socialism.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

People, Religion, Dreams, Communication

“More than four years after the financial crisis began, the world's major advanced economies remain deeply depressed, in a scene all too reminiscent of the 1930s. And the reason is simple: we are relying on the same ideas that governed policy in the 1930s. These ideas, long since disproved, involve profound errors both about the causes of the crisis, its nature, and the appropriate response.These errors have taken deep root in public consciousness and provide the public support for the excessive austerity of current fiscal policies in many countries. So the time is ripe for a Manifesto in which mainstream economists offer the public a more evidence-based analysis of our problems.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Paul Krugman and Richard Layard, "A Manifesto for Economic Sense" (June 27, 2012)

World, Error, Idea, Support

“We are all like fish that have separated from the sea of divine consciousness. For a person to be happy outside his or her natural relationship with God is like a fish trying to enjoy life outside of the water, on the dry sand. Holy people go to great extremes to help even one person to return his or her natural spiritual consciousness, to the sea of true joy. But the net of maya, or illusion, snatches away the minds of the masses, diverting us from the true self-interest.”

Radhanath Swami (1950) Gaudiya Vaishnava guru

?
The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)

Life, God, Happiness, People

“Experience teaches us that the eye may be subdued and forced into forming and disposing of objects even quite contrary to what it would naturally see them, by pre judgement of the mind or some other persuasive motive.”

William Hogarth book The Analysis of Beauty

The Analysis of Beauty (1753)

Motivation

“Chorus [leader]: Come now, ye men, in nature darkling, like to the race of leaves, of little might, figures of clay, shadowy feeble tribes, wingless creatures of a day, miserable mortals, dream-like men.”

Aristophanés The Birds

tr. Hickie 1853, vol. 1, p. 338 http://books.google.com/books?id=Cm4NAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA338 Birds (414 BC)

Men, Dreams

“Mark at present so much; what the essence of Scandinavian and indeed of all Paganism is: a recognition of the forces of Nature as godlike, stupendous, personal Agencies,—as Gods and Demons. Not inconceivable to us. It is the infant Thought of man opening itself, with awe and wonder, on this ever-stupendous Universe. To me there is in the Norse system something very genuine, very great and manlike. A broad simplicity, rusticity, so very different from the light gracefulness of the old Greek Paganism, distinguishes this Scandinavian System. It is Thought; the genuine Thought of deep, rude, earnest minds, fairly opened to the things about them; a face-to-face and heart-to-heart inspection of the things,—the first characteristic of all good Thought in all times. Not graceful lightness, half-sport, as in the Greek Paganism; a certain homely truthfulness and rustic strength, a great rude sincerity, discloses itself here.”

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

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

God, Truth, Home, Sport

“Perhaps it was better for Mr. Lincoln's happiness that he died when he did. Had he lived, he would likely have been involved in bitter political feuds, owing to his liberal opinions in regard to the reconstruction of the States. He was of too sensitive a nature not to feel the shafts that would have been hurled at him by those whom he thought to be his friends, and he would not likely have been permitted to carry out his ideas. As it was, he died a martyr to a great cause, and venerated by all those who loved the Union; and while the names of many who held high places in the State will be forgotten, the memory of Abraham Lincoln will live in the hearts of his countrymen while the art of printing exists by which his name can be handed down to posterity.”

David Dixon Porter (1813–1891) United States Navy admiral

Source: 1880s, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), p. 320

Love, Happiness, Art, Feeling

“The realist, then, would seek in behalf of philosophy the same renunciation the same rigour of procedure, that has been achieved in science. This does not mean that he would reduce philosophy to natural or physical science. He recognizes that the philosopher has undertaken certain peculiar problems, and that he must apply himself to these, with whatever method he may find it necessary to employ. It remains the business of the philosopher to attempt a wide synoptic survey of the world, to raise underlying and ulterior questions, and in particular to examine the cognitive and moral processes. And it is quite true that for the present no technique at all comparable with that of the exact sciences is to be expected. But where such technique is attainable, as for example in symbolic logic, the realist welcomes it. And for the rest he limits himself to a more modest aspiration. He hopes that philosophers may come like scientists to speak a common language, to formulate common problems and to appeal to a common realm of fact for their resolution. Above all he desires to get rid of the philosophical monologue, and of the lyric and impressionistic mode of philosophizing. And in all this he is prompted not by the will to destroy but by the hope that philosophy is a kind of knowledge, and neither a song nor a prayer nor a dream. He proposes, therefore, to rely less on inspiration and more on observation and analysis. He conceives his function to be in the last analysis the same as that of the scientist. There is a world out yonder more or less shrouded in darkness, and it is important, if possible, to light it up. But instead of, like the scientist, focussing the mind's rays and throwing this or that portion of the world into brilliant relief, he attempts to bring to light the outlines and contour of the whole, realizing too well that in diffusing so widely what little light he has, he will provide only a very dim illumination.”

Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957) American philosopher

Chap XXV.
The Present Conflict of Ideals: A Study of the Philosophical Background of the World War (1918)

World, Dreams, Hope, Question

“The evil in the world is the product of the non-divine minds themselves: the natural evil, of their very nature; the moral, the only real evil, of their failure to answer to their reason with their will.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix B: The System in its Ethical Necessity and its Practical Bearings, p.392

World, Failure, Evil

“Nature abhors imperfect work
And on it lays her ban;
And all creation must despise
A tailless man.”

David Law Proudfit (1842–1897) American writer

Prehistoric Smith, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Nature's purpose in relation to the visual arts is to provide stimulus — not imitation... From its ceaseless urge to create springs all Life — all movement and rhythm — time and light, color and mood — in short, all reality in Form and Thought.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

As quoted in Hans Hofmann (2000) by James Yohe
1970s and later

Life, Art, Color, Spring

“When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written.”

George Saintsbury (1845–1933) British literary critic

Source: A Last Vintage, p. 172

People, Literature

“You probably think that my future landscapes will be soaked in pessimism, so to speak? Don’t worry, I love nature too much.”

Isaac Levitan (1860–1900) Russian artist

Letter to Sergei Diaghilev, quoted on The Arts Desk http://www.theartsdesk.com/visual-arts/theartsdesk-moscow-isaac-levitan-tretyakov-gallery

Love, Thinking, Future

“John Stuart Mill,
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote "Principles of Political Economy."”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) British writer

Clerihews: Biography for Beginners (1905)

Effort

“One Australian tradition is to cut down the elite and the successful. It had its roots in the era of convicts who naturally opposed those in authority. This levelling or egalitarian tradition continued to flourish on the goldfields in the 1850s when the unusual mining laws gave everyone an opportunity to find gold, and the tradition was accentuated around 1900 by the rising trade unions. The attitude was one of the spurs to Australian democracy.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

The Story of Australia's People: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia (2016)

Law, Democracy, Success

“All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Alle zweckmäßigen Lebenserscheinungen wie ihre Zweckmäßigkeit überhaupt sind letzten Endes zweckmäßig nicht für das Leben, sondern für den Ausdruck seines Wesens, für die Darstellung seiner Bedeutung.
The Task of the Translator (1920)

Life

“I attribute the quarrelsome nature of the Middle Ages young men entirely to the want of the soothing weed.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

"On Being Idle".
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Men, Age

“Secularism, at its absolute best, comprises an unrelenting commitment to judicious and self-correcting critique. … Secularism’s “job” consists of criticizing all collective representations. Its analytical energies should be inflicted on any type of mass belief or empowered orthodoxy, whether it is religious, political, scientific, aesthetic, and so on. … Secularism, as we envision it, is elitist and heretical by nature. When it aspires to become a popular movement, an orthodoxy, or the predicate of a nation-state, it betrays itself.”

Jacques Berlinerblau (1966) Associate Professor, Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service,…

Source: The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (2005), p. 7

“Sadly, many Christians openly embrace big bang cosmology (that the universe essentially created itself) but argue that God is the one who started the process. But this means that God really didn’t do much and was distant from His creation, which is not the way the God of the Bible says He created (this idea also has many other problems as mentioned earlier). But what many of these Christians don’t realize is that the big bang is not just a story about the past—it’s also a story about the future. As this news article reminds us, when scientists start with the presupposition that nature is all that there is and time will eventually take its course on the universe, they are left with bleak predictions. And the prediction of those who believe in the big bang is that the universe will slowly run out of energy and, eventually, became “cold, dark, and desolate.” This does not match with the future described in God’s Word! So what do Christians who have accepted the big bang do? If they (as many do) embrace the secular scientists’ ideas about the past (i. e., the big bang cosmology), then will they also embrace the rest of the secularist belief concerning the heat death in the future? The Christians I’ve met who have compromised God’s Word with the big bang concerning origins don’t accept the rest of the big bang idea concerning the future. Frankly, they are so inconsistent! This highlights why Christians shouldn’t pick and choose which parts of the Bible they want to accept and which ones we will reinterpret to fit fallible man’s ideas. If so, then man is really being an authority over God! This is back-to-front! We need to believe all of God’s Word from the very beginning.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

The Universe Is “Dying” and It’s Because of Sin https://answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2015/08/20/universe-dying-and-its-because-sin/, Around the World with Ken Ham (August 20, 2015) Around the World with Ken Ham (May 2005 - Ongoing)

Death, God, Way, Idea

“Since industrialization, we have moved rapidly out of synchronicity with nature and our own nature.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

“As a protest against the election of Abraham Lincoln, who had received not a single southern electoral vote, secession was a fact—to be reinforced, if necessary, by the sword. The senator from Mississippi [Jefferson Davis] rose. It was high noon. …He was going home. …By nature he was a moderate, with a deep devotion to the Union. …he reserved secession as a last resort.”

Shelby Foote book The Civil War: A Narrative

The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958)

Home

“I’m clearly a small-minded person, with my own petty grievances. Hopefully, my work transcends my own petty grievances and small-minded nature. It’s best for me to remain small-minded on an emotional level and broad-minded on a conceptual level. It doesn’t matter whatever it is that makes me do my work. Neurosis, obsession, wanting people to like me, wanting my parents to feel bad for underrating me, making a lot of money, power, social status, wanting girls to like me or just to meet one girl on a job. All of this doesn’t matter as long as the work that I do to achieve these small-minded needs is a lot more interesting than me and my reasons for making it”

Vincent Gallo (1961) American film director, writer, model, actor and musician

SOMA Interview

Money, People, Feeling, Girl

“And yet there is nothing so badly imagined: nature seems to have provided, that the follies of men should be transient, but they by writing books render them permanent. A fool ought to content himself with having wearied those who lived with him: but he is for tormenting future generations; he is desirous that his folly should triumph over oblivion, which he ought to have enjoyed as well as his grave; he is desirous that posterity should be informed that he lived, and that it should be known for ever that he was a fool.”

Montesquieu (1689–1755) French social commentator and political thinker

Commonly paraphrased as "An author is a fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on boring future generations".
No. 66. (Rica writing to * * *)
Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters, 1721)

Men, Books, Fools, Imagination

“If one assumes, as I do, that battery is caused by the belief permeating this culture that hierarchical rule and coercive authority are natural, then all our relationships tend to be based on power and domination, and thus all forms of battery are linked.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

(1984)

“The cells and fibers of the brain must carry some kind of individual identification tags, presumably cytochemical in nature, by which they are distinguished one from another almost, in many regions, to the level of the single neurons.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

As quoted in "Brain Wiring by Presorting Axons" by Kazunari Miyamichi and Liqun Luo in Science 325 (5940) (31 July 2009) http://stke.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/sci;325/5940/544

“The justification for naturalism is that it works: we have never understood anything about the universe by assuming the supernatural, while assuming naturalism as a working hypothesis has moved our understanding ever forward.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" Is atheism irrational? A philosopher says “yes” http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/is-atheism-irrational-a-philosopher-says-yes/" October 15, 2014

Understanding, Universe

“[the Cubist painters who].. continued to paint objects motionless, frozen, and all the static aspects of Nature; they worship the traditionalism of w:Poussin, of w:Ingres, of Corot, ageing and petrifying their art with an obstinate attachment to the past, which to our eyes remains totally incomprehensible.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

Source: 1912, Les exposants au public', 1912, pp. 2, 3.

Age, Art, Past, Painting

“In contrast to the natural sciences, where Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein made their major contributions, most economics masterpieces were written when the authors were middle aged. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and Milton Friedman come to mind. However, Paul started much earlier, in his 20s; and, even now, his new articles influence the fields of economics and finance.”

Michael Szenberg (1934) American economist

4.Paul Samuelson is Unique.
Ten Ways to Know Paul A. Samuelson (2006)

Age, Science

“But when reason and the study of history began revealing the irrationality, the limitations, and the merely transitory nature of the capitalist order, bourgeois ideology as a whole and with it bourgeois economics began abandoning both reason and history.”

Paul A. Baran (1909–1964) American Marxist economist

Source: The Political Economy Of Growth (1957), Chapter One, A General View, p. 4

History, Study

“The self as master is born in the realization that nature can be commanded. Real mastery requires a means. The self develops technique—the idea of work put into the hands of another agency held in bondage to the self.”

Donald Phillip Verene (1937) philosopher

Source: Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (1997), p. 153

Idea

“If we recognize, following the materialist theories, that only the physical nature exist, and that man contain ("renferme", Fr.) no higher essence, divine, which, by one side of his being, raise (promote or improve…) him above his animal nature, it would be a question ("il ne saurait être question", Fr.) neither of obligation, nor of moral responsability; then the supreme good would consist for him, indeed, to satisfy his appetites and his natural inclinations (fondness or partiality, -"penchant", Fr.), to look for the pleasure and flee from (scud, shun, avoid, -"fuir", Fr.) pain. In this case, there could be neither religion nor moral, since religion is precisely what raise man above vulgar (or common, - "vulgaire", Fr.) reality, and that moral is the very negation of selfishness.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 41.

Pain, Pleasure, Religion, Question

“For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

"Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare", Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939)

Truth, Imagination

“Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration.”

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) French mathematician and astronomer

Quoted in I. Gordon and S. Sorkin, The Armchair Science Reader, New York, 1959.

“Nature knows no calendar, the seasons move in a circle.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

February Chapter The Peverel Papers - A yearbook of the countryside ed Julian Shuckburgh Century Hutchinson 1986
The Peverel Papers

Season

“When we come to inanimate elements, the prevailing view has been that time and sequential change are entirely foreign to their nature. According to this view they do not have careers; they simply change their relations is space. We have only to think of the classic conception of atoms. The Newtonian atom, for example, moved and was moved, thus changing its position in space, but it was unchangeable in its own being. …In itself it was like a God, the same yesterday, today, and forever.”

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

Time and Individuality (1940)

God, Thinking, Change, Time

“Tiredness and fatigue are effects caused by ignorance of Nature and disobedience to her inexorable law. You may command Nature to the extent only in which you are willing to obey her. You cannot intelligently obey that which you do not comprehend. Ask of Nature that you may be one with her and she will whisper her secrets to you to the extent in which you are prepared to listen. Seek to be alone much to commune with Nature and be thus inspired by her mighty whisperings within your consciousness. Nature is a most jealous god, for she will not whisper her inspiring revelations to you unless you are absolutely alone with her.”

Walter Russell (1871–1963) American philosopher

The Man who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe

God, Secret, Law, Intelligence

“Good painters imitate nature, bad ones vomit it.”

Miguel de Cervantes book Novelas ejemplares

El licenciado Vidriera [The Lawyer of Glass]
Novelas ejemplares (1613)

“[E]ither everything is illusion, nature as well as revelation, or experience alone can explain faith.”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie book Man a Machine

p, 125
Man a Machine (1747)

Faith

“John Tate and I were asked by Nature magazine to write an obituary for Alexander Grothendieck. Now he is a hero of mine, the person that I met most deserving of the adjective "genius". I got to know him when he visited Harvard and John, Shurik (as he was known) and I ran a seminar on "s". His devotion to math, his disdain for formality and convention, his openness and what John and others call his naiveté struck a chord with me.”

David Mumford (1937) American mathematician

David Mumford. " Can one explain schemes to biologists http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2014/Grothendieck.html," at dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog, December 14, 2014.

Personality

“the place [Dogtown, in Gloucester, Massachusetts] is forsaken and majestically lovely as if nature had at last formed one spot where she can live for herself alone.... [it] looked like a cross between Easter Island and Stonehenge – essentially druidic in it appearance, it gives the feeling that an ancient race might turn up at any moment and renew an ageless rite there.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

Somehow a Past, 1933-c, 1939, unpublished manuscript, Hartley Archive, Yale University; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 90
1931 - 1943

Love, Feeling, Appearance

“For a month now I have been an out-and-out vegetarian. The moral effect of this way of life, with its voluntary castigation of the body, causing one's material needs to dwindle away, is enormous. You can judge for yourself how utterly I [am] convinced of it, when I tell you that I expect of it no less than the regeneration of humanity. All I can tell you is: let yourself be converted to a natural way of living, but one in which you eat suitable food (compost-grown, stone-ground, wholemeal bread) and soon you will see the fruits of your endeavours.”

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) late-Romantic Austrian composer

Letter to Emil Freund (1 November 1880), in Gustav Mahler: New Insights into his Life, Times and Work by Alfred Mathis-Rosenzweig, translated by Jeremy Barham, Ashgate Publishing, 2007, ISBN 978-0-7546-5353-0, pp. 165 https://books.google.it/books?id=VIcSAX6tY1IC&pg=PA165-166.

Life, Food, Way

“Diogenes, in his mud-covered sandals, tramps over the carpets of Aristippus. The cynic pullulated at every corner, and in the highest places. This cynic did nothing but saboter the civilisation of the time. He was the nihilist of Hellenism. He created nothing, he made nothing. His role was to undo — or rather to attempt to undo, for he did not succeed in his purpose. The cynic, a parasite of civilisation, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail. What would become of the cynic among a savage people where everyone, naturally and quite seriously, fulfils what the cynic farcically considers to be his personal role?”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XI: The Self-Satisfied Age

People, Time, Personality

“By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (1997), p. 167.

Time, Personality

Quotes about nature page 81

Quotes about nature
page 81