Quotes about nature
page 83

“Nature, exerting an unwearied power,
Forms, opens, and gives scent to every flower;
Spreads the fresh verdure of the field, and leads
The dancing Naiads through the dewy meads.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

Source: Table Talk (1782), Line 690.

Flowers, Dance

“Death is a stage in human progress, to be passed as we would pass from childhood to youth, or from youth to manhood, and with the same consciousness of an everlasting nature.”

Edmund Sears (1810–1876) American minister

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 177.

Death, Youth, Childhood

“It is very clear to an unbiased reader that the Gonda carnage has started with a pre-meditated attack on the procession. Going by the original newspaper reports, some Janata Dal miscreants affiliated with Muslim party leaders were the aggressors, and the processionists were the victims. However, it is in the nature of aggression that the victims get the blame. Thus, a rapist will usually say that the girl had asked for it, that she had provoked him. Here too, it is not stated simply that the processionists were attacked. Rather, it is said in goonda-speak, approvingly broadcast by the secularist press, that the procession has provoked violence and caused riots.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

Girl

“Cultural and ethnic diversity benefit humanity’s future, survival, strength and excellence, promoting what I call cultural vigour, similar to the way in which molecular and genetic diversity promote “hybrid vigor” in nature and thus strength, resilience and a higher potential for a problem-free future.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

The Geopolitics of Culture: Five Substrates, (2014)

Way, Problem, Future

“Two of the most widely adopted models of human resource management are the hard and soft versions. These are based on opposing views of human nature and managerial control strategies. The hard model is based on notions of tight strategic control, and an economic model of man according to Theory X, while the soft model is based on control through commitment and Theory Y. We argue that because these assumptions are so divergent, they cannot both properly be incorporated within a single model of human resource management.”

Lynda Gratton (1953) Business theorist

Catherine Truss, Lynda Gratton, Veronica Hope-Hailey, Patrick McGovern and Philip Stiles (1997). "Soft and hard models of human resource management: a reappraisal." Journal of Management Studies, 34(1), 53-73.

“We have, indeed, in the part taken by many scientific men in this controversy of "Law versus Miracle," a good illustration of the tenacious vitality of superstitions. Ask one of our leading geologists or physiologists whether he believes in the Mosaic account of the creation, and he will take the question as next to an insult. Either he rejects the narrative entirely, or understands it in some vague non-natural sense. …Whence …this notion of "special creations"…Why, after rejecting all the rest of the story, he should strenuously defend this last remnant of it, as though he had received it on valid authority, he would be puzzled to say.”

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

The Development Hypothesis (1852)

Men, Law, Understanding, Question

“This exaltation of man over the entire natural world, however, though easily shown to accord with the teaching of Jesus, and to be clearly prefigured in it, is nearly antipodal to ordinary notions, to the current popular "philosophy" assumed to be founded on science, and to much of traditional theology. But by this fact we must not be disturbed, if we mean to be in earnest about human freedom and human capability of life really moral and religious. And the next step in our inquiry will reinforce this "divinising of the human " very decidedly.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.326

Life, World, Freedom, Science

“Observe where the islands are located, how the continental shelf extends over that area and connects the coast with the islands. It's easy to see the natural correlation between them and the mainland. Indeed, the Falklands belonged, and will belong, to us both historically and geographically.”

Leopoldo Galtieri (1926–2003) Argentine military dictator

Reportaje de Oriana Fallaci a Leopoldo F. Galtieri http://archivohistorico.educ.ar/content/reportaje-de-oriana-fallaci-leopoldo-f-galtieri#sthash.ZQrMQt2O.dpuf, Revista El porteño, August 1982

“The lackluster nature of most multinational corporations emerging market strategies over the past decade does not change the magnitude of the opportunity. The real source of market promise is not the wealthy few in the developing world, or even the emerging middle-income consumers: It is the billions of aspiring poor who are joining the market economy for the first time.”

C.K. Prahalad (1941–2010) Indian academic

C. K. Prahalad & Stuart L Hart, cited in: Jeffrey E. Garten (2002), The Politics of Fortune: A New Agenda for Business Leaders, p. 125

World, Change, Time, Past

“…each individual appeared satisfied to stand alone. It seemed a sign of force; yet to stand alone is quite natural when one has no passions; still easier when one has no pains.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Pain, Appearance, Passion

“Not all desired things are valuable, but rather only those which are worthy of being desired. Whether this worthiness belongs to a thing, however, is not in the particular case yielded from the investigation of the objective nature of the thing, but rather from the subjective consideration of the desire directed at the thing. From the examination of our own mental activity in the act of desire we discern whether this is directed at something valuable or not.”

Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932) Austrian philosopher

Christian von Ehrenfels (1897, 3–4), as cited in: Robin Rollinger and Carlo Ierna, " Christian von Ehrenfels https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ehrenfels/", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2016 Edition, Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

“Students of the human mind have long noted its ability to mimic internally the positive notions and transformations of objects in the external world. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the British empiricist David Hume wrote that to "join incongruous shapes and appearances costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects" and that "this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience."”

Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist

Source: Mental images and their transformations. 1982, p. 1

World, Imagination, Sense, Appearance

“Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Revenge
Essays (1625)

Justice, Law, Revenge

“I didn't know then, and I don't know now, whether she was the owner of the world's best poker face or was just naturally stupid, but whichever she was, she was thoroughly and completely it.”

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) American writer

"Women, Politics and Murder" (published in Black Mask, September 1924; retitled "Death on Pine Street" when reprinted in the first anthology of Continental Op stories, The Continental Op, published in 1945; subsequent reprintings have used the latter title for this story)
Short Stories

Stupidity, World

“Mind and body were originally one. Do not think that the power you have is only the power you ordinarily use and moan that you have little strength. The power you ordinarily use is like the small visible segment of an iceberg. When we unify our mind and body and become one with the universe, we can use the great power that is naturally ours.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

4 : Unification of mind & body
Ki Sayings (2003)

Thinking, Universe

“Hector had always been known as a great shoemaker. In fact, customers from such far-off places as France claimed that Hector made the best shoes in the world. Yet for years, he had been frustrated with his small shoemaking business. Although Hector knew he was capable of making hundreds of shoes per week, he was averaging just 30 pairs. When a friend asked him why, Hector explained that while he was great at producing shoes, he was a poor salesman -- and terrible when it came to collecting payments. Yet he spent most of his time working in these areas of weakness.
So, Hector's friend introduced him to Sergio, a natural salesman and marketer. Just as Hector was known for his craftsmanship, Sergio could close deals and sell. Given the way their strengths complemented one another, Hector and Sergio decided to work together. A year later, this strengths-based duo was producing, selling, and collecting payment for more than 100 pairs of shoes per week -- a more than threefold increase.
While this story may seem simplistic, in many cases, aligning yourself with the right task can be this easy. When we're able to put most of our energy into developing our natural talents, extraordinary room for growth exists. So, a revision to the "You-can-be-anything-you-want-to-be" maxim might be more accurate.”

Tom Rath (1975) American author

StrengthsFinder 2.0, 2007
Source: Tom Rath, "The Fallacy Behind the American Dream," Business Journal, Feb. 8, 2007 (Excerpted from StrengthsFinder 2.0)

World, Shoe, Way, Business

“Be sure from nature never to depart;
To copy nature is the task of art.
The noblest poets own her sovereign sway,
And ever follow where she leads the way.”

Christopher Pitt (1699–1748) English poet

Book II, p. 69
Vida's Art of Poetry (1725)

Art, Way

“Woman occupies an exceedingly important place in the world. In view of her capabilities, the nature has assigned vast duties to her. If you failed in them, you will not only harm your individual-self but also severely hurt your collective life.”

Fatima Jinnah (1893–1967) Pakistani dental surgeon, biographer, stateswoman and one of the leading founders of Pakistan

Speech at Meeting of the Anjuman Tahaffuz Haquq-e-Nisvan, Lahore, April 1949, quoted in Speech of Mrs. Jinnah, p.10
Source: Speeches, Messages and Statements of Mohtarama Fatima Jinnah, Lahore, 1976, p. 10

Life, World, Hurt

“Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

January 5, 1856
Journals (1838-1859)

Fashion

“Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to love.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

No. 7, Natures Lay Idiot, line 1
Elegies

Love

“The fact is that building a pyramid is fairly easy, aside from the lifting. You just pile up stones in receding layers, placing one layer carefully upon another, and pretty soon you have a pyramid. You can't help it. In other words, it is not in the nature of a pyramid to fall down.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

Footnote: It probably could not fall down if it tried.
The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part I: It Seems There Were Two Egyptians, Cheops, or Khufu

Help

“I fight, with myself in the ring of doubt and fear
The rain ain't gone, but I can still see clear
As a child, given religion with no answer to why
Just told believe in Jesus cause for me he did die
Curiosity killed the catechism
Understanding and wisdom became the rhythm that I played to
And became a slave to master self
A rich man is one with knowledge, happiness and his health
My mind had dealt with the books of Zen, Tao the lessons
of the Koran and Bible,
to me they all vital
And got truth within 'em, gotta read them boys
You just can't skim 'em, different branches of belief
But one root that stem 'em, but people of the venom try to trim 'em
And use religion as an emblem
When it should be a natural way of life
Who am I or they to say to whom you pray ain't right?
That's who got you doin' right and got you this far
Whether you say "in Jesus name" or "Al hum du'Allah"
Long as you know it's a being that's supreme to you
You let that show towards others in the things you do
Cause when the trumpets blowin', 24 elders surround the throne
Only 144,000 gon get home”

Common (rapper) (1972) American rapper, actor and author from Illinois

"G.O.D. (Gaining One's Definition)" (Track 7)
Albums, One Day It'll All Make Sense (1997)

Life, Wisdom, Happiness, People

““I don’t have much confidence,” she said. “A lot of what I’ve been taught isn’t making sense.”
“That’s the nature of teaching. Something happens, and intelligence first apprehends it, then makes up a rule about it, then tries to pass the rule along. Very small beings invariably operate in that way. However, by the time the information is passed on, new things are happening that the old rule doesn’t fit. Eventually intelligence learns to stop making rules and understand the flow.””

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 16 (p. 354)

Way, Confidence, Intelligence, Understanding

“[How is it consistent with what you advocated this evening in terms of a vision for peace, that you continued to allow the building of settlements in the West Bank, during your primeministership? ] Let me tell you, first of all, during my term as a Prime Minister, we have not built a single new settlement. I ordered the dismantling of many voluntary -- I don't know how to call it -- new settlements that had been set on top of hills in different parts of the West Bank, basically. But, I allowed contracts, contracts that had been signed, legally, in Israel, beforehand. To build new neighborhoods in some big cities in the West Bank, cities with 25,000 or 30,000 people. And very few new homes, in small settlements, where youngsters, who came back from the army service, asked to build their home near the home of their parents. Now, Israel is a law-abiding state, you cannot break contracts, there is Supreme Court. If the government behaves in a way that is not proper, any individual can appeal and change whatever we decide. Realizing that this is a sensitive issue from the Palestinian side, I talked to Arafat, at the beginning of my term as a Prime Minister, and I told him: Mr. Chairman, I know that you are worried about it, it creates some problems, in your own constituency. But let me tell you, we have a great opportunity here to put an end to the whole conflict, in a year and a half. When President Clinton that invested unbelievable amount of energy and political capital in trying to solve it, and he's still in power. Now, I understand your problem with settlement if there is no end, there is no time limit, and you are afraid that maybe the accumulation of new settlements will change the nature of the situation, for the worse, from your position. So I tell you, out of our own considerations, independent of you, we have decided not to set even a single new settlement. We will not allow anyone to establish his own private initiatives on the hills, for our own reasons, not because of you. But at the same time I will respect any contract that has been signed, under law, in Israel. But -- and here is a point -- bearing in mind that we can put an end to the conflict, to reach an agreement within a year and a half, why the hell it will matter? To build a new building in Israel takes more than a year and a half, so you won't see any building that is not already emerging from the ground, having it's roof before we can reach an agreement. Now if such a building happens to be in a settlement that will become, under the agreement, part of the new independent Palestine, why the hell you have to care? Take it, use it, put some refugees in it. And if it will happen to be a part of what will be agreed, as Israel, in a mutual agreement that is signed by you, why the hell do you care, if you agree? I believe that that simple answer would not solve his public -- or internal political -- problems, but it would solve the real issue if the will was there to make peace, and not just to politically maneuver and manipulate.”

Ehud Barak (1942) Israeli politician and prime minister

Speech at UC Berkeley http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/19324/edition_id/391/format/html/displaystory.html, November 22, 2002

People, Peace, Law, Way

“Nature is objective, and nature is knowable, but we can only view her through a glass darkly—and many clouds upon our vision are of our own making: social and cultural biases, psychological preferences, and mental limitations (in universal modes of thought, not just individualized stupidity).”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

Source: Full House (1996), p. 8

Stupidity, Universe

“Entities other than Brahman can be objects of such cognitions of the nature of joy only to a finite extent and for limited duration. But Brahman is such that cognizing of him is an infinite and abiding joy. It is for this reason that the shruti [scripture] says, `Brahman is bliss’ (Taittitriya Upanishad II.6.) Since the form of cognition as joy is determined by its object, Brahman itself is joy.”

Ramanuja (1017–1137) Hindu philosopher, exegete of Vishishtadvaita Vedanta school

Ramanuja. Vedarthasangraha §241, as quoted by Shyam Ranganathan " Rāmānuja (c. 1017 – c. 1137 CE) http://www.iep.utm.edu/ramanuja/," at Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Accessed May 20. 2014.

Joy

“Man is evil, by nature man is a beast. People have to be educated from childhood, from kindergarten, that there should be no hatred.”

Marek Edelman (1922–2009) Jewish resistance member

"Warsaw Ghetto uprising leader Marek Edelman dies at 90" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/poland/6256830/Warsaw-Ghetto-uprising-leader-Marek-Edelman-dies-at-90.html. The Daily Telegraph. 2009-10-03. Retrieved 2009-10-04.

People, Education, Evil, Childhood

“For scientific endeavor is a natural whole the parts of which mutually support one another in a way which, to be sure, no one can anticipate.”

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

"On Freedom" (1940), p. 12 http://books.google.com/books?id=Q1UxYzuI2oQC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA12#v=onepage&q&f=false 1950s, Out of My Later Years (1950)

Way, Support, Parting

“We have not put our trust in Kings; let us not put it in natural resources, but grasp the truth that exhaustless wealth lies in the latent and as yet undeveloped capacities of individuals, of corporations, of States.”

Harrington Emerson (1853–1931) American efficiency engineer and business theorist

Source: Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and Wages, p. 164; ; Cited in: Morgen Witzel (2003) Fifty Key Figures in Management. p. 80

Truth, Wealth

“The development of technology will leave only one problem: the infirmity of human nature.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

Problem

“Aristotle found support for his thesis in facts drawn from geopolitics or ‘natural law’. Greek superiority had to be proved demonstrably innate, a gift of nature. In one celebrated fragment he counsels Alexander to be ‘a hegemon [leader] of Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants’.”

Peter Green (1924) British historian

Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C.: A Historical Biography, page 58.

Law, Support

“Other people have marveled at the growth and strength of America. They have wondered how a few weak and discordant colonies were able to win their independence from one of the greatest powers of the world. They have been amazed at our genius for self-government. They have been unable to comprehend how the shock of a great Civil War did not destroy our Union. They do not understand the economic progress of our people. It is true that we have had the advantage of great natural resources, but those have not been exclusively ours. Others have been equally fortunate in that direction. The progress of America has been due to the spirit of the people. It is in no small degree due to that spirit that we have been able to produce such great leaders. If coming generations are to maintain a like spirit, it will be because they continue to support the principles which these men represented. It is for that purpose that we erect memorials. We can not hold our admiration for the historic figures which we shall see here without growing stronger in our determination to perpetuate the institutions which their lives revealed and established.”

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

1920s, Address at the Black Hills (1927)

Men, War, People, World

“For all that faire is, is by nature good;
That is a signe to know the gentle blood.”

Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) English poet

An Hymne in Honour of Beautie, line 139

“In the new science of the twenty-first century, not physical force but spiritual force will lead the way. Mental and spiritual gifts will be more in demand than gifts of a physical nature. Extrasensory perception will take precedence over sensory perception. And in this sphere woman will again predominate. She who was revered and worshiped by early man because of her power to see the unseen will once again be the pivot—not as sex but as divine woman—about whom the next civilization will, as of old, revolve.”

Elizabeth Gould Davis book The First Sex

The First Sex (G.P. Putnam's Sons), op. cit., p. 339 (paragraph in full), in ch. 22 - Woman in the Aquarian Age (1971). This is the last paragraph in her book, which explicated the thesis that women were originally the superior and dominant sex.

Sex, Way, Science

“Children, by nature, are keen, passionate and curious. What was referred to as laziness is often merely an awakening of sensitivity, a psychological inability to submit to certain absurd duties, and a natural result of the distorted, unbalanced education given to them. This laziness, which leads to an insuperable reluctance to learn, is, contrary to appearances, sometimes proof of intellectual superiority and a condemnation of the teacher.”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Children, Education, Learning, Teachers

“I believe natural instincts “go awry”; what was I really seeking when scoring and using heroin? Heroin is an opiate; opiates are painkillers. I was in spiritual pain. I have come to believe that the reason I was using drugs was to treat a spiritual malady. A flailing, disconnected tendril searching for connection and, failing to find it, I had to be sedated. When I began my life in abstinence-based recovery, living one day at a time without the use of drugs and alcohol, the impulse that drove me to seek out oblivion remained. I believe it is the impulse for union that is denied by our atomized and secular culture.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Life, Pain, Alcohol, Search

“Just as our tools evolved culturally to fit our hands, so too our social roles evolved culturally to fit persisting aspects of the human mind. Roles that jar too violently with human nature are unlikely to persist for long, at least without the application of significant social force. If this is correct, it raises the possibility that some social roles might have evolved culturally to fit traits that, although found in both sexes, are more common in one than the other. This is emphatically not to say that there are some male roles and some female roles. But it is to suggest that there might be some social roles that suit more men than women, and others that suit more women than men — not just because of evolved physical differences but because of evolved psychological differences as well.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013), p. 261

Women, Men, Sex

“The domestic horse world needs to usher in a new order of horsemanship, based upon the paradigm of the natural horse and rider.”

Jaime Jackson (1947) Horse hoof care professional

The Natural Horse (1997)

World, Horse

“The more we learn of the true nature of non-human animals, especially those with complex brains and corresponding complex social behavior, the more ethical concerns are raised regarding their use in the service of man — whether this be in entertainment, as "pets," for food, in research laboratories, or any of the other uses to which we subject them.”

Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist

Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe (2000), p. 245

Food, Behavior, Learning, Animals

“It is the nature of the pig, that if there's nothing to stop her from stepping into abreuvoir - then it will. Nothing will stop bureaucracy from continuing to serve us "good" and protecting us from "evil"”

Janusz Korwin-Mikke (1942) polish politician

if we'll let them do that.
Source: blog, 29 April 2009

Evil

“I have written this work not to teach men what they do not know, but to remind them of what they already know and is very evident to them, for you will find in most of my words only things which most people know, and concerning which they entertain no doubts. But to the extent that they are well known and their truths revealed to all, so is forgetfulness in relation to them extremely prevalent. … It is possible that the reader will find that he has learned little after having read it that he did not know before. Its benefit is to be derived, rather, through review and persistent study, by which one is reminded of those things which, by nature, he is prone to forget and through which he is caused to take to heart the duty that he tends to overlook.”

Moshe Chaim Luzzatto book Mesillat Yesharim

Mesillat Yesharim (1738), Introduction

Men, People, Truth, Study

“The laws of classical mechanics represent a mathematical idealization and should not be assumed to correspond to the real laws of nature. … We now have to realize that errors are inevitable (..) a discovery that makes strict determinism impossible.”

Léon Brillouin (1889–1969) French physicist

[Léon Brillouin, Science and Information Theory, second edition, Academic Press, New York, 1962, 0-48643-918-6, 314]

Law, Error, Mathematics

“In order to better understand object-oriented methodologies in general, it helps to understand the people who make up the "object-oriented community" itself. Far from being monolithic, there is a great deal of diversity within this community. Many object-oriented people, for example, seem to focus almost entirely on programming language issues. They tend to cast all discussions in terms of the syntax and semantics of their chosen object-oriented programming language. These people find it impossible (for all intents and purposes) to discuss any software engineering activity (e. g., analysis, design, and testing) without direct mention of some specific implementation language.
Outside of producing executable "prototypes", people who emphasize programming languages seldom have well-defined techniques for analyzing their clients' problems or describing the overall architecture of the software product. A great deal of what they do is intuitive. If they happen to have a natural instinct/intuition for good analysis or good design, their efforts on small-to-medium, non-critical projects can result in respectable software solutions.”

Edward V. Berard

Source: Essays on object-oriented software engineering (1993), p. 5

People, Communication, Understanding, Problem

“The vanity held by many of us puny humans tends to bolster a belief that we control our own destiny within the universe, or are even masters of our own climate control. Recent events such as the PDO shift remind us that the slow but powerful forces of nature remain in control.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

A reminder to us flyspecks on an elephant's butt http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/05/07/a-reminder-to-us-flyspecks-on-an-elephants-butt/, wattsupwiththat.com, May 7, 2008. 2008

Universe

“The truth [is in his paintings]... When they have a similar structure to and are organized in as truthful a way as nature. When I look out of the window, then truth for me is the way nature shows itself in its various tones, colours and proportions. That's a truth and has its own correctness. This little slice of nature, and in fact any given piece of nature, represents to me an ongoing challenge, and is a model for my paintings.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

In an interview with Christiane Vielhaber, 1986; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Other subjects' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/other-aspects-6 1980's

Truth, Way, Painting

“Democracy has meant to many "natural" rights, "liberty" and "equality." The acceptance of the group principle defines for us in truer fashion those watchwords of the past. If my true self is the group-self, then my only rights are those which membership in a group gives me.”

Mary Parker Follett The New State

Source: The New State, 1918, p. 136

Democracy, Fashion, Past

“I have somewhere found it recorded that as Johann Gottlieb Fichte progressed with his first reading of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," he was moved to tears. To those who have labored through the tortured pages of the great German thinker this would be no matter for surprise, were it not for the quality of the tears: not those of vexation and baffled understanding, indeed, but of enthusiasm and sheer gratitude. For Fichte had fallen into the melancholy persuasion of Spinoza. At least, certain views of this austere thinker of the seventeenth century appeared to Fichte as no less gloomy in their implication than irresistible in the logic which led to them. Irresistible were the reasons which had driven Spinoza to look upon nature as governed by inexorable Fate. In the world as a whole there was no purpose, in its parts there was no freedom.”

Edgar A. Singer, Jr. (1873–1954) American philosopher

Source: Modern thinkers and present problems, (1923), p. 63: Chapter 3. A disciple of Spinoza, an illustration

Fate, World, Understanding, Tear

“a) Discontinuance or abandonment of the program, activity, or project (P/A/P) as a result of natural or man-made calamities that hindered the agency from implementing the said P/A/P at any time during the validity of the appropriations;”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

Time

“The ideas set forth by organismic biologists during the first half of the twentieth century helped to give birth to a new way of thinking — "systems thinking" — in terms of connectedness, relationships, context. According to the systems view, the essential properties of an organism, or living system, are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. They arise from the interactions and relationships among the parts. These properties are destroyed when the system is dissected, either physically or theoretically, into isolated elements. Although we can discern individual parts in any system, these parts are not isolated, and the nature of the whole is always different from the mere sum of its parts. The systems view of life is illustrated beautifully and abundantly in the writings of Paul Weiss, who brought systems concepts to the life sciences from his earlier studies of engineering and spent his whole life exploring and advocating a full organismic conception of biology.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Source: The Web of Life (1996), p. 29.

Life, Way, Idea, Birth

“If I have succeeded in explaining in a satisfactory manner, how by laborious and patient investigation, and the successful application of other branches of natural philosophy, the wonders of geology have been revealed—if I have removed but from one intelligent mind, any prejudice against scientific inquiries, which may have been excited by those who have neither the relish nor the capacity for philosophical pursuits—if I have been so fortunate as to kindle in the hearts of others, that intense and enduring love and admiration of natural knowledge, which I feel in my own,—or have illuminated the mental vision with that intellectual light, which once kindled can never be extinguished, and which reveals to the soul the beauty, and wisdom, and harmony of the works of the Eternal, I shall indeed rejoice, for then my exertions will not have been in vain. And although my humble name may be soon forgotten, and all record of my labours be effaced, yet the influence of that knowledge, however feeble it may be, which has emanated from my researches, will remain for ever; and, by conducting to new and inexhaustible fields of inquiry, prove a never-failing source of the most pure and elevated gratification.”

Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) British scientist and obstetrician

Vol. 2
The Wonders of Geology (1839)

Love, Wisdom, Beauty, Feeling

“But a much graver charge attaches itself, if not to our clergy, certainly to those who have the distribution of ecclesiastical patronage. The richest Church in the world maintains that its funds are quite insufficient for the purposes of religion and that our working clergy are ill-paid, and church accommodation insufficient. It calls therefore upon the nation to endow it with larger funds, and yet, while reluctant to sacrifice its own superfluities, it approves of its rich sinecures being given to reward, — not the professional service of its indefatigable parochial clergy, but those of its members who, having devoted the greater part of their time to scientific researches, have political or private interest enough to obtain such advancement. But this mode of rewarding merit is neither creditable to the Church nor advantageous to science. It tempts into the Church talents which some of its distinguished members maintain to be naturally of a disqualifying, if not of an antagonistic nature to the pursuits of religion; whilst, on the other hand, it makes a most unjust and arbitrary distinction amongst men of science themselves. It precludes those who cannot conscientiously subscribe to Articles, at once conflicting and incomprehensible, from the acquisition of that preferment and that position in society, which thus in many cases, must be conferred on less scrupulous, and certainly less distinguished inquirers into the works of nature. As the honorary distinctions of orders of knight hood are not usually bestowed on the clerical profession, its members generally profess to entertain a great contempt for them, and pronounce them unfit for the recognition of scientific merit.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…

Source: The Exposition of 1851: Views Of The Industry, The Science, and the Government Of England, 1851, p. 225-226

Men, World, Religion, Science

“Call it not vain;—they do not err,
Who say, that when the Poet dies,
Mute Nature mourns her worshipper,
And celebrates his obsequies.”

Walter Scott The Lay of the Last Minstrel

Canto V, stanza 1.
The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805)

“India can best develop herself and serve humanity by being herself and following the law of her own nature. This does not mean, as some narrowly and blindly suppose, the rejection of everything new that comes to us in the stream of Time or happens to have been first developed or powerfully expressed by the West. Such an attitude would be intellectually absurd, physically impossible, and above all unspiritual; true spirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our human self-development. It means simply to keep our centre, our essential way of being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve out of it all we do and create.”

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

The Renaissance in India (1918)

Law, Way, Light, Time

“We do not need to be able to say what “human nature” is in order to be able to say that some training is “against human nature.””

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 6.

Training

“In this embrace, in the essential unity of God, are all inner spirits one with God in loving transport, and they are the selfsame one that the essence itself is in itself. And in this sublime unity of the divine nature, the heavenly Father is the origin and the beginning of every work that is done in heaven and on earth”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Love, God

“The Great Commandment demands of everyone the total love of God and the love one's neighbour according to the measure of man's natural self-affirmation. If love is emotion, how can it be demanded? Emotions cannot be demanded. We cannot demand them of ourselves. If we try, something artificial is produced which shows the traits of what had to be suppressed in its production. Repentance, intentionally produced, hides self-complacency in perversion. Love, intentionally produced, shows indifference or hostility in perversion. The means: love as an emotion cannot be commanded. Either love is something other than emotion or the Great Commandment is meaningless.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Source: Love, Power and Justice (1954), p. 4

Love, God, Hostility, Indifference

“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Source: 1900s, Man and Superman (1903), p. xxxi

Life, Happiness, World, Joy

“Soft peace she brings; wherever she arrives
She builds our quiet as she forms our lives;
Lays the rough paths of peevish Nature even,
And opens in each heart a little heaven.”

Matthew Prior (1664–1721) British diplomat, poet

Charity (1703).

Peace, Heart

“The study of inbreeding depression seems to me especially important in the study of human abilities, because inbreeding depression indicates genetic dominance, and the presence and degree of dominance are related to natural selection for the trait in the course of its biological evolution. It was of great interest to me to discover, for example, that of the several ability factors that can be extracted from the various subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, the one that shows the greatest susceptibility to inbreeding depression is the g factor (Jensen, 1983b). This finding indicates that one of our most widely used standard psychometric tests of intelligence yields scores that reflect some part of the variance in the biological intelligence that has developed in the course of human evolution.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

Source: Differential Psychology: Towards Consensus (1987), p. 424

Children, Intelligence, Study, Parting

“Perhaps the central question in our understanding of nationalism is the role of the past in the creation of the present. … For nationalists themselves, the role of the past is clear and unproblematic. The nation was always there, indeed it is part of the natural order, even when it was submerged in the hearts of its members.”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the Reconstruction of Nations. (1994), p. 18: As cited in: Öktem, Kerem. "Creating the Turk’s Homeland: Modernization, Nationalism and Geography in Southeast Turkey in the late 19 th and 20 th Centuries." Socrates Kokkalis Graduate Workshop. The City: Urban Culture, Architecture and Society. 2003.

Understanding, Question, Past, Heart

“Attention, attention, the key to practice, so many teachers have said. It’s true. When we come to know, even a little, this truly miraculous and open nature of our being, we begin to appreciate the jewels and riches in these very simple instructions that come down to us through our teachers.”

Ken McLeod (1948) Canadian lama

Buddha Nature http://www.unfetteredmind.org/buddha-nature. Unfettered Mind http://www.unfetteredmind.org. (Topic: Practice)

Teachers

“I discovered the works of Euler and my perception of the nature of mathematics underwent a dramatic transformation. I was de-Bourbakized, stopped believing in sets, and was expelled from the Cantorian paradise. I still believe in abstraction, but now I know that one ends with abstraction, not starts with it. I learned that one has to adapt abstractions to reality and not the other way around. Mathematics stopped being a science of theories but reappeared to me as a science of numbers and shapes.”

Alexander Stepanov (1950) Russian programmer

Bjarne Stroustrup: Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006. ACM HOPL-III. June 2007., 2008-04-25, http://web.archive.org/web/20071120015600/http://www.research.att.com/~bs/hopl-almost-final.pdf, 2007-11-20 http://www.research.att.com/~bs/hopl-almost-final.pdf,

Way, Mathematics, Reality, Learning

“Somewhat of a babbler, indeed, did people begin to think him; for he was apt to discourse at wearisome length of marvels of mechanism that he had read about… Among them he enumerated the Man of Brass, constructed by Albertus Magnus, and the Brazen Head of Friar Bacon… the automata of a little coach and horses, which it was pretended had been manufactured for the Dauphin of France; together with an insect that buzzed about the ear like a living fly… a duck that waddled, and quacked, and ate… In his idle and dreamy days he had considered it possible… to spiritualize machinery… a beauty that should attain to the ideal which Nature proposed to herself in all her creatures…”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

"The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844)

People, Beauty, Thinking, Reading

“Much of social science has been built as a citadel against metaphysics and politics. Faithful to the outlook produced by the modern revolt against ancient philosophy, the classic social theorists were anxious to free themselves first from the illusions of metaphysics, then from the seeming arbitrariness of political judgments. They wanted to create a body of objective knowledge of society that would not be at the mercy of philosophical speculation or political controversy, and, up to a point, they succeeded. But now we see that to resolve its own dilemmas, social theory must again become, in a sense, both metaphysical and political. It must take a stand on issues of human nature and human knowledge for which no "scientific" elucidation is, or may ever be, available. And it must acknowledge that its own future is inseparable from the fate of society.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Law in Modern Societyː Toward a Criticism of Social Theory (1976), p. 266-7

Fate, Faith, Knowledge, Sense

“The fury of Almighty God against evil is evidence of his goodness. If he wasn’t angered, he wouldn’t be good. We cannot separate God’s goodness from his anger. Again, if God is good by nature, he must be unspeakably angry at wickedness. But his goodness is so great that his anger isn’t confined to the evils of rape and murder. Nothing is hidden from his pure and holy eyes. He is outraged by torture, terrorism, abortion, theft, lying, adultery, fornication, pedophilia, homosexuality, and blasphemy. He also sees our thought-life, and he will judge us for the hidden sins of the heart: for lust, hatred, rebellion, greed, unclean imaginations, ingratitude, selfishness, jealousy, pride, envy, deceit, etc. Jesus warned, “But I say to you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.””

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

The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition (2009)

Life, Men, God, Jealousy

“Nature has done well and wisely, in not permitting a man to live forever and in bringing into the world ever new generations. An old person is a used-up machine [… He] has too many dogmas to […] easily […] believe in a new truth […]; too many sympathies and antipathies […] for him to come to love something unfamiliar; […] too many habits to be able to settle on new ways. Let us add suspiciousness — the fruit of bitter experiences; a pessimism inseparable from all manner of disappointments; and finally, a general decline of powers from exhaustion […].”

Bolesław Prus (1847–1912) leading figure in the history of Polish literature

"Oda do młodości" ["Ode to Youth"], 1905

Love, Truth, World, Disappointment

“The doctrine which thus comes to light, that in art man not only shares literally in the creative office of God, but enriches Nature with new members that express its divine Ground in a still higher form, will seem to many overbold — extravagant and irreverent. But its advocates are neither few nor inconsiderable; it is supported by the greatest names.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.188-9

God, Art, Support, Light

“I am sure that I would not make a good taxidermist; the temptation to improve upon nature would certainly be too strong for me. Think how easy it would be, when stuffing somebody's pet terrier, to slip a couple of human glass eyes into a sockets, instead of the usual buttons. Then the owner would really be justified in saying that his pet looked almost human. If I were stuffing this two-headed calf, for instance, I could not resist making one head smile and the other one frown, so that they looked like masks of Comedy and Tragedy.”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

Smile, Thinking, Strong

“Mathematical physics represents the purest image that the view of nature may generate in the human mind; this image presents all the character of the product of art; it begets some unity, it is true and has the quality of sublimity; this image is to physical nature what music is to the thousand noises of which the air is full…”

Théophile de Donder (1872–1957) Belgian physicist

as quoted by Ilya Prigogine in his Autobiography http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1977/prigogine-autobio.html given at the occasion of Prigogine's 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Art, Music, Mathematics

“It’s in the nature of a good despot to say anything that will convince someone to do as he wishes. Only when he does not need them does he really say what he thinks. And by that time, of course, because he has no need of them, they are usually as good as dead. The secret of becoming a successful tyrant lies in an early ability to be all things to all people.”

Michael Moorcock book The Steel Tsar

Book 2, Chapter 7 “A Mechanical Man” (p. 397)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

People, Secret, Thinking, Time

“What I called the perplexed jungle of Paganism sprang, we may say, out of many roots: every admiration, adoration of a star or natural object, was a root or fibre of a root; but Hero-worship is the deepest root of all; the tap-root, from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown.”

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

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

Star

“I am not […] asserting that humans are either genial or aggressive by inborn biological necessity. Obviously, both kindness and violence lie within the bounds of our nature because we perpetrate both, in spades. I only advance a structural claim that social stability rules nearly all the time and must be based on an overwhelmingly predominant (but tragically ignored) frequency of genial acts, and that geniality is therefore our usual and preferred response nearly all the time. […] [T]he center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness", p. 282
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Lie, Time

“Mankind naturally give evidence to the constituted Courts, and reputation is incurably damaged by their decisions, whether erroneous or not.”

James Wilde, 1st Baron Penzance (1816–1899) British judge and rose breeder

Borough v. Collins (1890), L. R. 15 P. D. 85.

Decision

“The thing about herbs is that there is nothing supernatural or implausible about the fact that any particular herb can have a medicinal effect. But the truth of the matter is that herbs are drugs. There's nothing magical about them. The fact that they are "natural" is irrelevant — it's meaningless. They are drugs. They are drugs that have not been purified, identified, … and quantified. … Probably for most plants … there are hundreds of chemicals in there with varying degrees of potency.”

Steven Novella (1964) American neurologist, skepticist

SGU, Podcast #78 – January 15th, 2007 http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/78 The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Podcast, 2000s

Truth

“What is this impulse of two people to build their beastly home? It's you & me, unborn, asserting our presence. All we are is a manifestation of the impulse to family life, and if by chance we have escaped the itch ourselves, Nature forces it upon us another way.”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Part One, Chapter XII
Decline and Fall (1928)

Life, People, Family, Way

“We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.”

Honoré de Balzac book Séraphîta

Source: Seraphita (1835), Ch. 3: Seraphita - Seraphitus.

Men, God

“A guy who's always interested in the condition of the world, and changing it, either has no problems of his own, or refuses to face them… not wanting to face things of his own nature.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Reds (1981)

World, Guy, Problem, Change

“Human love is not love. Love is natural to every body but it becomes human love as the person learns from society to confuse love with sex.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

The Way In (2000)

Love, Sex, Learning, Personality

“Systems science and technology constitute one aspect of systems thinking, but the humanities and arts make up the other. The fact that design plays such a large part in the systemic treatment of problems makes it apparent that art has a major role in it as well. Ethics and aesthetics are integral aspects of evaluating systems… the systems approach involves the pursuit of truth (science) and its effective use (technology), plenty (economics), the good (ethics and morality), and beauty and fun (aesthetics). To compare systems methodology with that of any of the so-called ‘hard’ disciplines—for example, physics—is to misunderstand the nature of systems. The worry is not that the systems approach is not scientific in the sense which physics or chemistry or biology is, but that some try to make it scientific in that sense. To the extent they succeed, they destroy it.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff (1999). "Disciplines, the two cultures and the scianities". Systems Research and Behavioral Science. 16 (6), p. 537. Cited in: Sherryl Stalinski (2005) A Systems View of Social Systems, Culture and Communities. Saybrook Graduate School. p. 5.
1990s

Truth, Beauty, Art, Problem

“As I have noted elsewhere, and with the clarity of hindsight, I think Stan and Jack made a mistake when they decided to make Thor the “real” Thor. “Whosoever holds his hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor(r)!” That was really all I needed to know. But, of course, the rest of the Norse mythology began appearing early on, so it was only natural (if a tad anal) that fans should start writing in wondering what had happened to the real Thor.”

John Byrne (1950) American author and artist of comic books

2007
http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=20511&PN=1&TPN=3
Regarding Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s version of Thor

Thinking, Appearance

“Of all heroes, Spinoza was Einstein's greatest. No one expressed more strongly than he a belief in the harmony, the beauty, and most of all the ultimate comprehensibility of nature.”

John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) American physicist

"Albert Einstein" in Biographical Memoirs (1980) Vol. 51, National Academy of Sciences.

Beauty

“For all the ‘4th Generation of War’ intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc., I must respectfully say, ‘Not really’: Alexander the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying — studying, vice just reading — the men who have gone before us. We have been fighting on this planet for 5,000 years and we should take advantage of their experience. ‘Winging it’ and filling body bags as we sort out what works reminds us of the moral dictates and the cost of incompetence in our profession.”

James Mattis (1950) 26th and current United States Secretary of Defense; United States Marine Corps general

Nov. 20, 2003, Addressing the detractors of untested Marine tactics in Iraq. http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/fiasco/

Men, War, Study, Change

“It is a fact that humans are multicellular eukaryotes with an internal digestive tract. It is also a fact that these criteria match the biological definition of an animal. But because I’m talking to a philosopher, we even have to argue the definition of “definition”. “A good definition explains concisely what something means“, “a statement expressing the essential nature of something“, “a statement of what a thing is“. So any multicellular eukaryote with an internal digestive tract is in fact an animal by definition. Once we determine that the criteria apply, we have no choice to deny the definition connected with that, especially not when the definition is deliberately well-established by expertise as this one is, rather than being an “accident of language” such as the apologist asserted.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Philosophistry http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/04/12/philosophistry/ (April 12, 2017)

Animals

“Undue cultivation of the inward or Dynamical province leads to idle, visionary, impracticable courses, and, especially in rude eras, to Superstition and Fanaticism, with their long train of baleful and well-known evils. Undue cultivation of the outward, again, though less immediately prejudicial, and even for the time productive of many palpable benefits, must, in the long-run, by destroying Moral Force, which is the parent of all other Force, prove not less certainly, and perhaps still more hopelessly, pernicious. This, we take it, is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management of external things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages.”

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

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Age, Soul, Parent, Evil

“I dedicate this book to the man who inspired it — to the man who of all men past and present that I have known has the most exalted moral nature — to Walt Whitman.”

Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) prominent Canadian psychiatrist in the late 19th century

Dedication
Man's Moral Nature (1879)

Men, Books, Past

“We are paramountly concerned, like, I am sure, the bulk of the House—I am sure that the country is also concerned—about what we can do to protect those who rightly and naturally look to us for protection. So far, they have been betrayed. The responsibility for the betrayal rests with the Government. The Government must now prove by deeds—they will never be able to do it by words—that they are not responsible for the betrayal and cannot be faced with that charge. That is the charge, I believe, that lies against them. Even though the position and the circumstances of the people who live in the Falkland Islands are uppermost in our minds—it would be outrageous if that were not the case—there is the longer-term interest to ensure that foul and brutal aggression does not succeed in our world. If it does, there will be a danger not merely to the Falkland Islands, but to people all over this dangerous planet.”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1982/apr/03/falkland-islands in the House of Commons (3 April 1982) after Argentina's invasion of the Falkland Islands. 1980s

People, World, Betrayal, Housing

“Commerce in itself may favour peace, but when commerce is artificially shut out by a decree of Government from some promising territory, then commerce just as naturally favours war.”

John Robert Seeley (1834–1895) British historian

p. 110 https://books.google.com/books?id=Zsm3TLe1cAUC&pg=PA110 The Expansion of England (1883)

War, Peace

“I HAVE no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary.”

Francis Galton Hereditary Genius

Hereditary Genius (1869; 2005), p. 56
Hereditary Genius (1869)

Children, School, Boy, Effort

“One might, for example, speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would imply not a falsehood but merely a claim unfulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God's remembrance.”

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

So dürfte von einem unvergeßlichen Leben oder Augenblick gesprochen werden, auch wenn alle Menschen sie vergessen hätten. Wenn nämlich deren Wesen es forderte, nicht vergessen zu werden, so würde jenes Prädikat nichts Falsches, sondern nur eine Forderung, der Menschen nicht entsprechen, und zugleich auch wohl den Verweis auf einen Bereich enthalten, in dem ihr entsprochen wäre: auf ein Gedenken Gottes.
The Task of the Translator (1920)

Life, Men, God

“The Pythagoreans thought those who teach for the sake of reward show themselves worse than sculptors, or artists who perform the work sitting. For these, when someone orders wood to make a statue of Hermes, search for wood suited to receive the proper form; while those pretend that they can readily produce the works of virtue from every nature.”

Iamblichus (240–320) Syrian philosopher

Life of Pythagoras

“You need only look around you, replied PHILO, to satisfy yourself with regard to this question. A tree bestows order and organisation on that tree which springs from it, without knowing the order; an animal in the same manner on its offspring; a bird on its nest; and instances of this kind are even more frequent in the world than those of order, which arise from reason and contrivance. To say, that all this order in animals and vegetables proceeds ultimately from design, is begging the question; nor can that great point be ascertained otherwise than by proving, a priori, both that order is, from its nature, inseparably attached to thought; and that it can never of itself, or from original unknown principles, belong to matter.”

David Hume book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Philo to Demea, Part VII
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

World, Spring, Question, Bird

“We seek a saviour, someone to rescue us from the problems of the world. A saviour is the simple story, the easy option and that is why it is so compelling. You don't have to do anything except believe. There's no need to negotiate with other people, or figure out how to create a robust system within the bizarre and contradictory parameters of human nature. I must admit I fell prey to this when I first met Julian Assange. He was going to lead the way to a bold new age. Instead I learned that power when concentrated is dangerous no matter who holds it or for whatever good intention. The real revolution happens in our own minds, when we stop believing there is someone or some agency who has all the answers, who is infallible and will save us, and instead come to realise we have that ability within ourselves. We may be susceptible to cults of personality, but we can build a check against this into our political systems.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Pages 237-238.
The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From the Information War, 1st Edition

People, Age, World, Way

“Realizing that life is precious the natural tendency is to trample on it, like laughing at a funeral.”

Lester Bangs (1948–1982) American music critic and journalist

"Peter Laughner" (September/October 1977), p. 222
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1988)

Life

“While the founding fathers agonized over the question 'particle' or 'wave', de Broglie in 1925 proposed the obvious answer 'particle' and 'wave'. Is it not clear from the smallness of the scintillation on the screen that we have to do with a particle? And is it not clear, from the diffraction and interference patterns, that the motion of the particle is directed by a wave? De Broglie showed in detail how the motion of a particle, passing through just one of two holes in screen, could be influenced by waves propagating through both holes. And so influenced that the particle does not go where the waves cancel out, but is attracted to where they cooperate. This idea seems to me so natural and simple, to resolve the wave-particle dilemma in such a clear and ordinary way, that it is a great mystery to me that it was so generally ignored.”

John S. Bell (1928–1990) Northern Irish physicist

"Six Possible Worlds of Quantum Mechanics" (1986), included in Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (1987), p. 191

Way, Idea, Question

“The reason no one has yet been able to come up with a good word to describe the homosexualist (sometimes known as gay, fag, queer, etc.) is because he does not exist. The human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex, many don't; many respond to both. This plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"Sex Is Politics" (1979).
1980s, The Second American Revolution (1983)

Sex

“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage, though this is more to be hoped for than expected.”

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

volume I, chapter V: "On the Development of the Intellectual and Moral Faculties during Primeval and Civilised Times" (second edition, 1874) pages 133-134 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=156&itemID=F944&viewtype=image The last sentence of the first paragraph is often quoted in isolation to make Darwin seem heartless. The Descent of Man (1871)

Life, Men, Marriage, Health