Quotes about reason (6414 quotes, page 42)

“I understood that it was only the very best in us, our capacity for love and self-respect, that enabled us to survive in a perpetually fragmenting multiverse. Only our deepest sense of justice allowed us to remain sane and relish the wonders of chaotic Time and Space, to be free at least of fear. Further violence would bring only an endless chain of bloodshed and an inevitable descent of our race into bestiality and ultimate insentience. To survive, we must love.”

Michael Moorcock book The Steel Tsar

Book 2, Chapter 7 “A Mechanical Man” (pp. 388-389)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

Love , Fear , Justice , Time

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

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

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

Life , People , Feeling , Understanding

“Homeschooling is radical, in the root sense of the word: in Latin, radicus means root. Compulsory schooling (forced attendance), and now, in the twenty-first century, compulsory education (forced learning) are very recent petals and offshoots of the root way humankind has historically nurtured its young into responsible adults and active citizens. Family, community, religious institutions, and work were all integrated into the daily lives and upbringing of children… The concept of universal compulsory schooling is a very recent idea, one that is not even two hundred years old, yet we act as if it is an ancient, sure-fire way to make sure our children 'learn something.”

Pat Farenga American activist

"
A Brief History of Homeschooling (2002)

Children , Education , School , Family

“[Radhakrishnan describes the state of dejection he experienced as a student at Madras Christian College:] 'I was strongly persuaded of the inferiority of the Hindu religion to which I attributed the political downfall of India…. I remember the cold sense of reality, the depressing feeling that crept over me, as a causal relation between the anaemic Hindu religon and our political failure forced itself on my mind.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Radhakrishnan, 'The Spirit of Man', quoted in Rajiv Malhotra, Indra's Net, p. 316., 1st ed.

Religion , Feeling , Failure , Reality

“I believe we should go to the moon. But I think every citizen of this country as well as the Members of the Congress should consider the matter carefully in making their judgment, to which we have given attention over many weeks and months, because it is a heavy burden, and there is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful. If we are not, we should decide today and this year.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1961, Speech to Special Joint Session of Congress

Thinking , Success , Country

“Must Bantu and European in future develop as intermixed communities, or as communities separated from one another in so far as this is practically possible? If the reply is ‘intermingled communities’, then the following must be understood. There will be competition and conflict everywhere. So long as the points of contact are still comparatively few, as is the case now, friction and conflict will be few and less evident. The more this intermixing develops, however, the stronger the conflict will become. In such a conflict, the Europeans will, at least for a long time, hold the stronger position, and the Bantu be the defeated party in every phase of the struggle. This must cause to rise in him an increasing sense of resentment and revenge.”

Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966) Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966

Speech as Minister of Native Affairs on 5 December 1950, 10 quotes by Hendrik Verwoerd (Politics Web) https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/hendrik-verwoerd-10-quotes-hendrik-verwoerd-politics-web-20-september-2016, sahistory.org.za (20 September 2016)

Communication , Revenge , Time , Future

“Rebellion, revolution don't need dollars
They need this instead
Imagination, suffering, light and love
And care for every human being
You never steal, you never kill
You are a part of hope and life
The revolution goes from man to man
And heart to heart
And I sense when I look at the stars
That we are children of life
Death is small”

Joan Baez (1941) American singer

"The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti, Part Two"
Sacco e Vanzetti (1971)

Love , Life , Death , Children

“The East knows a true lucidity, but to be an inheritor of the West is to hack through jungles of indiscipline, devoured by vile ants and words unstrung from sense, until the dripping foliage of delirium opens out onto a space of comprehensive ruin. This has never been understood, nor can it be. The foulness of our fate only deepens with the centuries, as the tracts of insanity sprawl. From bodies gnawed by tropical fevers we swim out through collapse to inexistence in forever, destined for Undo.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Shamanic Nietzsche" (1995), in Fanged Noumena, p. 223

Fate

“Consider one of the standard "laments" or "stories of wonder" in conventional tales of natural history: the mayfly that lives but a single day (a sadness even recorded in the technical name for this biological group - Ephemoptera). Yes, the adult fly may enjoy only a moment in the sun, but we should honor the entire life cycle and recognize that the larvae, or juvenile stages, live and develop for months. Larvae are not mere preparations for a brief adulthood. We might better read the entire life cycle as a division of labor, with larvae as feeding and growing stages, and the adult as a short-lived reproductive machine. In this sense, we could well view the adult fly's day as the larva's clever and transient device for making a new generation of truly fundamental feeders.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 356
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Life , Sadness , History , Nature

“I got the idea to paint people, in the way I see them. From one face I take to my own idea some very characteristic features of it and then I make of the whole a picture in colors and lines, in the way how I meet that person. The whole thing becomes not at all a portrait in the usual sense... I have tried to make types, but will built in more and more personal qualities and all that kind of things... Everything will be figured out fully abstract of course, it is just a personal feeling and no system at all.”

Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) Dutch painter

translation from German, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
(original version, written by Jacoba in German:) Meine Idee ist es die Menschen zu malen, wie ich sie sehe. Ich nehme aus einem Gesicht einige meiner Ansicht nach am meisten sprechende Züge und ich mache dann vom ganzen ein Bild in den Farben und Linien, wie die Person mir entgegentritt. Das Ganze ist gar kein Porträt im gewöhnlichen Sinne.. .Ich habe mich bemüht, jetz noch Typen zu machen und werde mehr und mehr persönliche Eigenschaften und alle mögliche hereinbringen.. .Alles muss man sich natürlich ganz abstrakt denken, es ist ein persönliches Gefühl und gar kein System.
in a letter to Herwarth Walden, 6 Feb. 1918; as cited by Arend H. Huussen Jr. in Jacoba van Heemskerck, kunstenares van het Expressionisme, Haags Gemeentemuseum The Hague, 1982, p. 20
1910's

People , Color , Way , Feeling

“This is the kingdom of the chemical elements, the substances from which everything tangible is made. It is not an extensive country, for it consists of only a hundred or so regions (as we shall often term the elements), yet it accounts for everything material in our actual world. From the hundred elements that are at the center of our story, all planets, rocks, vegetation, and animals are made. These elements are the basis of the air, the oceans, and the Earth itself. We stand on the elements, we eat the elements, we are the elements. Because our brains are made up of elements, even our opinions are, in a sense, properties of the elements and hence inhabitants of the kingdom.”

Peter Atkins (1940) British chemist

Source: Periodic Kingdom (1995), Chapter 1. The Terrain

World , Animals , Country

“What is this world condition? Body is the world condition. And with body and form goes feeling, perception, consciousness, and all the activities throughout the world. The arising of form and the ceasing of form--everything that has been heard, sensed, and known, sought after and reached by the mind--all this is the embodied world, to be penetrated and realized.
…
The fool thinks he has won a battle when he bullies with harsh speech, but knowing how to be forbearing alone makes one victorious.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Gautama Buddha, Samyutta Nikaya [citation needed]
Unclassified

World , Fools , Feeling , Thinking

“Open your newspaper any day of the week and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government … The newspaper reader feels a sickening sense of impotence. Yet if these feelings of disgust could be united into common action, something effective could be done.”

Peter Benenson (1921–2005) English human rights activist

Benenson (1961), in: The Observer, 28 May 1961.
Opening of article, which gave birth to Amnesty International.

World , Religion , Feeling

“We may not be the center of the universe and the telos of evolution, but we are concrete embodiments of cosmic processes in their particular terrestrial variation. And, albeit accidentally, we did happen to evolve a most remarkable property: self -reflection. In virtue of this we may be among the very few species of natural systems in the universe which are able not only to sense the world and respond to it, but to know their own sensations and come to reasoned conclusions about the nature of the universe. To be a man is thus to have the almost unique opportunity of getting to know oneself and the world in which one lives. It is surely shortsighted to disregard this opportunity and confine oneself solely to the business of living. A failure to exploit our capability for rational knowledge is, moreover, contrary to the business of living.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 119.

World , Failure , Business , Nature

“Trade unions, governments, business corporations, political parties, and the like are formal structures in the sense that they represent rationally ordered instruments for the achievement of stated goals.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Organization," 1948, p. 25

Business

“A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.”

E. B. White (1899–1985) American writer

"The Practical Farmer" http://books.google.com/books?id=njRHAAAAYAAJ&q=%22A+good+farmer+is+nothing+more+nor+less+than+a+handy+man+with+a+sense+of+humus%22&pg=PA218#v=onepage ( October 1940 http://books.google.com/books?id=SvAvAAAAMAAJ&q=%22A+good+farmer+is+nothing+more+nor+less+than+a+handy+man+with+a+sense+of%22&pg=PA555#v=onepage)
One Man's Meat (1942)

“In a sense, sexual harassment lawsuits are just the latest version of the female selection process—allowing her to select for men who care enough for her to put their career at risk; who have enough finesse to initiate without becoming a jerk and enough guts to initiate despite a potential lawsuit… In the past, though, the process of his overcoming her barriers was called ‘courtship.’ Now it is called either ‘courtship’ or ‘sexual harassment’.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 291.

Men , Jerk , Past

“We are—proudly—a people with no sense of class or caste. We judge no man by his name or inheritance, but by what he does—and for what he stands.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

1950s, Address at the Philadelphia Convention Hall (1956)

People

“I have not used rhyme, because what is really, in the long run, of most interest to American readers is what the poems say; and if one uses rhyme, it is impossible not to sacrifice sense to sound.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

Translations from the Chinese (1941), p. 1

“This gift… which God gave us in order to enable us to perfect ourselves, to learn and to teach, must not be employed in doing that which is for us most degrading and perfectly disgraceful… Those who employ the faculty of thinking and speaking in the service of that sense which is no honour to us, who think more than necessary of drink and love, or even sing of these things; they employ and use the divine gift in acts of rebellion against the Giver, and in transgression of his commandments.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.8

Love , God , Drink , Thinking

“Alternative medicine people call themselves "holistic" and say it's the "whole" approach. Well, if it's the whole approach, let it be the mind as well. Use logic, use sense, use the incredible five wits you were given by creation.”

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

Room 101, Season 6 Episode 10
2000s

People

“The fundamental error of the theologians of the new faith of the present day consists in this, that they think one can without hesitation acknowledge the validity of the same scientific method in the realm of nature which they refuse to apply to that of history. … What consequence now will follow the application of the doctrine of evolution to the theological consideration of history? First of all, it is evident that it excludes miracles in every sense of the word—not merely the nature-miracle (this the men of the new faith drop without pain) but also just as much the spirit-miracle, i. e. the intervention of a foreign power in the human soul, whereby conditions are produced in it which do not result from the causal connection with antecedent conditions. If it is the methodic cardinal proposition of the science of today that we have to explain every condition as the causally determined development out of a preceding one, this excludes on principle the appearance of a condition, event, action, or personality which is not explicable out of the factors of the preceding conditions.”

Otto Pfleiderer (1839–1908) German Protestant theologian

Source: Evolution and Theology (1900), pp. 8-9.

Men , Pain , Faith , Error

“It's a sort of infantile thing, painting. Paint in a sense is a certain infantile thing. I mean in the handling. I start out using a brush but then I can't take the time because the idea doesn't correspond, it gets stuck when the brush goes out of paint in a certain length of time. So I have to go back and by then I might have lost the rest of it. So I take my hand and I do it. Or I have those wonderful things that came in later: paint sticks... So I had to find things that I could use, like my hands or the paint sticks... And I did those charts, big palettes... two or three paintings with palettes and all of the colours – pink, flesh, brown, red for blood. And I think with most painters you can think and it can change very fast, the impetus of what something is. It's instinctive in a certain kind of painting, not as if you were painting an object or special things, but it's like coming through the nervous system. It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening. The feeling is going on with the task.”

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) American painter

Source: 2000 - 2011, Cy Twombly, 2000', by David Sylvester (June 2000), p. 179

Feeling , Idea , Thinking , Change

“Perhaps the least inadequate description of the general scope of modern Pure Mathematics—I will not call it a definition—would be to say that it deals with form, in a very general sense of the term; this would include algebraic form, functional relationship, the relations of order in any ordered set of entities such as numbers, and the analysis of the peculiarities of form of groups of operations.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), p. 287; Cited in: Robert Edouard Moritz. Memorabilia mathematica; or, The philomath's quotation-book https://archive.org/stream/memorabiliamathe00moriiala#page/4/mode/2up, (1914), p. 5: Definitions and objects of mathematics.

Mathematics

“To understand why George fell for this story, one must remember his stifled romanticism, his sense of personal failure, his deep need to believe. The thing came to him like, or rather instead of, a religious conversion.”

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction

“Time Fighter” (p. 67); originally published in Fantastic Universe, March 1957
Short Fiction, A Pail of Air (1964)

Failure , Understanding , Personality

“Man's most valuable trait
is a judicious sense of what not to believe.”

Euripidés Helen

The Complete Greek Tragedies: Euripides II: Helen. Hecuba. Andromache. The Trojan women. Ion. Rhesus. The suppliant women by David Grene, Richmond Alexander Lattimore (eds.), Modern Library, 1963, p. 73

“I love history. I love art. I like to mix it all together, but in the end it somehow has to all make sense.”

Anna Sui (1964) American fashion designer

Interview Magazine (December 15, 2010)

Love , Art , History

“The balls, the chutzpah, the gall, nerve and impudence of the successful lie that is huge enough never to be questioned is always a source of immense professional pleasure amongst magicians with any sense of the theatrical.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Harry Houdini on Deception (foreword) (2009)

Pleasure , Lie , Question , Success

“I didn't choose to be alone. But I cannot explain this. I could be with a woman in a bed, for weeks even and it would seem to me like three seconds. Or 300 years. There is no time sense because of things that are going on in you. I don't know, there is no explanation of this. But every time, even with someone I…. But whenever I was with a woman, I always sort of want another one. So there was always another one. I can't explain this, but it means that these women, they were not sharing my solitude. I wanted to stay with somebody, but I couldn't, it wasn't possible, because of this thing moving in myself. I had to learn this. I didn't want to be alone, but I had to learn that the dimensions of my feelings are too violent. I had to learn this.”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

Playboy interview

Women , Feeling , Solitude , Learning

“The evidence … is always an exercise in suppressio veri suggestio falsi. For instance, Aurangzeb’s petty donations to 2-3 Hindu temples patronized by some pet Hindu courtiers, are played up with great fanfare. But his systematic demolition of thousands of Hindu temples and defilement of countless images of Gods and Goddesses, throughout his long reign, is never mentioned. Such pitiable attempts at pitting molehills of munificence against mountains of malevolence, go against all sense of proportion in judging a whole period of Indian history.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

God , Exercises , History , Mountain

“If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?…
Those of us who are forced by their own sensibilities to view their lives in this perspective — who recognize that there is no purpose they can comprehend and that amidst a countless myriad of stars their existence goes unknown and unchronicled — can fall prey all too easily to the ultimate anomie. … The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache … This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.”

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

Interviewed by Eric Nordern, Playboy (September 1968)

Love , World , Religion , Star

“Love without marriage can sometimes be very awkward for all concerned; but marriage without love simply removes that institution from the territory of the humanly admissible, to my mind. Love is a state in which one lives who loves, and whoever loves has given himself away; love then, and not marriage, is belonging. Marriage is a public declaration of a man and a woman that they have formed a secret alliance, with the intention to belong to, and share with each other, a mystical estate; mystical exactly in the sense that the real experience cannot be communicated to others, nor explained even to oneself on rational grounds.”

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist

"Marriage Is Belonging" in Collected Essays and Occasional Writings (1973)

Love , Marriage , Secret , Communication

“The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life—to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.”

Archibald Macleish (1892–1982) American poet and Librarian of Congress

Art and Law, Riders on Earth (1978)

Life , Law , Business , Time

“Steward (Spade): [sarcastically ushering passangers off of the plane] Buh-bye. Buh-bye. Buh-Bye [to a fat passanger]Buh-bye. You're very heavy.
Fat Passanger (Chris Farley): What did you say?
Steward: I said buh-bye! I just said buh-bye 40 times in a row why would I say anything else? It doesn't make sense! Did I just say something without knowing it? No! Go! Buh-bye!

Passenger (Adam Sandler): I'm gonna be waiting for you outside in the terminal.
Steward: Great, buh-bye.
Passenger: No, no, no, there's more. I'm gonna pound your face in.
Steward: Okay, Slick. Buh-bye!
Passenger: I'm gonna destroy you!
Steward: Buh-BYE!
Passenger: I am gonna KICK THE CRAP OUTTA YOU!
Steward: YEAH?! BUH-BYE!”

David Spade (1964) American stand-up comedian

Saturday Night Live

Time , Waiting

“If i were a little braver i would have asked her something like, "Do you think Kickass: the movie is a comedy in the traditional, classical sense?" and we could have that conversation and it would lead to other conversations during the flat and lonely times.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Adverbs (2006), Obviously

Thinking , Time

“To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. As black Americans living in a small Kentucky town, the railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality. Across those tracks were paved streets, stores we could not enter, restaurants we could not eat in, and people we could not look directly in the face. Across those tracks was a world we could work in as maids, as janitors, as prostitutes, as long as it was in a service capacity. We could enter that world but we could not live there. We had always to return to the margin, to cross the tracks, to shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town. There were laws to ensure our return. To not return was to risk being punished. Living as we did-on the edge-we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgment that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole. This sense of wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us an oppositional world view-a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity. … Much feminist theory emerges from privileged women who live at the center, whose perspectives on reality rarely include knowledge and awareness of the lives of women and men who live in the margin. As a consequence, feminist theory lacks wholeness, lacks the broad analysis that could encompass a variety of human experiences. Although feminist theorists are aware of the need to develop ideas and analysis that encompass a larger number of experiences, that serve to unify rather than to polarize, such theory is complex and slow in formation. At its most visionary, it will emerge from individuals who have knowledge of both margin and center.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. xvii https://books.google.com/books?id=ClWvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT8.
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Preface

Women , Men , People , World

“Giacomo Rizzolatti… calls these "mirror neurons" and suggests that they provide the first insight into imitation, identification, empathy, and possibly the ability to mime vocalization—the mental processes intrinsic to human interaction. Vilayanur Ramachandran has found evidence of comparable neurons in the premotor cortex of people. …one can see a whole new area of biology opening up… that can give us a sense of what makes us social, communicating beings. An ambitious undertaking of this sort might… teach us something about the factors that give rise to tribalism, which is so often associated with fear, hatred, and intolerance of outsiders.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

People , Fear , Communication

“Nobody can predict the future, but there is nobody in my generation who wants to be on the board of a symphony orchestra or an opera company and raise the kind of money that's needed. I think that the energy that in the 19th century went into opera is, in the 20th century, going into films. Films have that same over-the-top, overwhelming, high impact--all of the senses knocked out--and vast popular following, with stars who are larger than life. Well, that's what opera did in the 19th century.”

Peter Sellars (1957) American theatre director

Source: Mark Swed, "For L.A., History's Knocking", Los Angeles Times, December 26, 1996

Life , Money , Star , Thinking

“In a sense that is a part of the training: surgeons are lonely men.”

Michael Crichton book A Case of Need

A Case of Need (1968)

Men , Parting , Training

“It is evident that the relation to God with which the Bible is concerned does not have its source in the purple depths of the subconscious, and cannot be identical with what the deep-sea psychical research of our day describes in the narrower or broader sense as libido fulfilment.”

Karl Barth (1886–1968) Swiss Protestant theologian

p, 125
The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928)

God , Sea

“To see the British Prime Minister watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking and even what each was going to say next, and compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor, was to realize that the poor President would be playing blind man's bluff in that party.”

John Maynard Keynes book The Economic Consequences of the Peace

On David Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson, in Chapter III, p. 41
The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)

Men , Motivation , Thinking

“Our first appreciation of music comes through the sounds of the mother, especially her voice and her lullaby. Our earliest musical expression, of which speech is a part, is in a sense a duet with her. And later in life we should still be able to discern the voice of love in the music.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: The Life Energy in Music, Vol. 1 (1981), p. 25

Love , Life , Music , Parting

“Its (Rasayan’s) principles (certain operations, drugs and compound medicines, most of which are taken from plants) restore the health… and give back youth to fading old age… white hair becomes black again, the keenness of the senses is restored as well as the capacity for juvenile agility, and even for co-habitation, and the life of the people in this world is even extended to a long period.”

Al-Biruni (973–1048) Persian scholar and polymath

quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 1 https://archive.org/details/alberunisindiaac01biru/page/188
From Alberuni's India

Life , People , Health , Youth

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 330-31
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Confidence , History , Optimism , Nature

“In America, where many peoples are held together largely by their sense of opportunities and their hope of reward, the subject is of the gravest concern. The attitude and reactions of the native-born American who believes in Americanization, and the one who does not, with all shades of opinion and of feeling lying between the two extremes, are to be considered. There is the man who comes here to stay and the one who in- tends to return. There is the racial solidarist bent upon reestablishing his own race here with as few changes as possible. There is the race which hates another, and for its own independent reasons tries to block its progress in the new land. We have to reckon with a situation created by men who are representatives of powerful foreign corporations, who will spend their lives here, make their homes here, and who never intend to become part of America. There are leaders who manipulate their people in the interest of the country of their origin, as well as those genuinely interested in serving America. In addition, there are factions in each race having no desire to unite with one another; there are races opposed to healing their own differences of centuries ago; and there are groups passionately devoted to their own culture and ideals, to which in their opinion nothing can compare.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Men , Hate , People , Hope

“[…] The feeling is a certain solemnity, power, seriousness, and at the same time also liberation, euforis tied to a sense of boundlessness”

Salvatore Garau (1953) Italian artist

Lóránd Hegyi

Feeling , Time

“All suffering is born of desire. True love is never frustrated. How can the sense of unity be frustrated? (…) Love is a state of being. Sex is energy. Love is wise, sex is blind. Once the true nature of love and sex is understood there will be no conflict or confusion.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Sex
Source: "I am That." P.111.

Love , Sex , Nature , Suffering

“Prokofiev’s music is usually based on a firm sense of tonality. Whatever tonal uncertainty and ambiguity one experiences, mainly in developmental passages, they are mostly short-lived.”

Boris Berman (1948) Russian/American musician

Prokofiev’s piano sonatas : a guide for the listener and the performer (2008), Prokofiev: His Life and the Evolution of His Musical Language

Music

“I wish in closing to emphasize how little corporate philanthrophy (the practical meaning of “creative capitalism,” a terrible expression that implies nonaltruistic capitalism is uncreative) is actually philanthropic, in the sense of being driven by altruism rather than by profit maximization.”

Richard A. Posner (1939) United States federal judge

" Against Creative Capitalism, Part Two https://web.archive.org/web/20080821055810/http://creativecapitalism.typepad.com:80/creative_capitalism/2008/08/against-creativ.html" (2008), published in Creative Capitalism: A Conversation with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Other Economic Leaders.

“The life of Indians, particularly the poor, pictorially…. with a new technique, my own technique…and this technique though not technically Indian, in the traditional sense of the word, will yet be fundamentally Indian in spirit.”

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) Hungarian Indian artist

Her decision after coming to India in 1935.
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

Life

“God gives his grace freely, in the strictest sense of the word, and without merit on the part of man. For if God did not bestow his grace in this perfectly gratuitous manner, but on account of some subordinate contingent uncertain cause, he could not possibly foresee how he should bestow his free gifts.”

Thomas Bradwardine (1300–1349) Theologian; Archbishop of Canterbury

De causa Dei contra Pelagium

God , Parting

“The main difficulty in popularizing quantum physics is that we do not really know how to make images of it in our world. In this sense it is really counterintuitive.”

Alain Aspect (1947) French physicist

La principale difficulté pour vulgariser la physique quantique, c'est qu'on ne sait pas très bien comment en fabriquer des images dans notre monde. C'est en ce sens qu'elle est vraiment contre-intuitive.
Interview http://www.canalacademie.com/Alain-Aspect.html on the occasion of the CNRS Gold Medal Award Ceremony in December 2005.

World

“In a sense, the American Dream was foreigners could come to this country and, through hard work, they could be successful, make a new start, and realise and fulfil their dream despite their caste or their religion in their homelands. So Trump erected a system that denies them all of that. A system that sets castes, restricts religion, prohibits foreigners, and breaks all of the groundwork for small business, and for them to be able to do anything.”

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

Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist https://conatusnews.com/interview-aron-ra-past-president-atheist-alliance-america/, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)

Religion , Dreams , Business , Success

“time in an allegory of itself imparts to us lessons of wisdom which the moment they are formulated are immediately destroyed by the merest flickers of light or shadow which are nothing more than time in its incarnations and disincarnations which are the phrases that I am writing on this paper and that disappears as I read them:
they are not the sensations, the perceptions, the mental images, and the thoughts which flare up and die away here, now, as I write or as I read what I write: they are not what I see or what I have seen, they are the reverse of what is seen and of the power of sight—but they are not the invisible: they are the unsaid residuum;
they are not the other side of reality but, rather, the other side of language, what we have on the tip of our tongue that vanishes before it is said, the other side that cannot be named because it is the opposite of a name:
what is not said is not this or that which we leave unsaid, nor is it neither-this-nor-that: it is not the tree that I say I see but the sensation that I feel on sensing that I see it at the moment when I am just about to say that I see it, an insubstantial but real conjunction of vibrations and sounds and meanings that on being combined suggest the configuration of a green-bronze-black-woody-leafy-sonorous-silent presence;
no, it is not that either, if it is not a name it surely cannot be the description of a name or the description of the sensation of the name or the name of the sensation:
a tree is not the name tree, nor is it the sensation of tree: it is the sensation of a perception of tree that dies away at the very moment of the perception of the sensation of tree;
names, as we already know, are empty, but what we did not know, or if we did know, had forgotten, is that sensations are perceptions of sensations that die away, sensations that vanish on becoming perceptions, since if they were not perceptions, how would we know that they are sensations?;
sensations that are not perceptions are not sensations, perceptions that are not names—what are they?
if you didn’t know it before, you know now: everything is empty;
and the moment I say everything-is-empty, I am aware that I am falling into a trap: if everything is empty, this everything-is-empty is empty too;
no, it is full, full to overflowing, everything-is-empty is replete with itself, what we touch and see and taste and smell and think, the realities that we invent and the realities that touch us, look at us, hear us, and invent us, everything that we weave and unweave and everything that weaves and unweaves us, momentary appearances and disappearances, each one different and unique, is always the same full reality, always the same fabric that is woven as it is unwoven: even total emptiness and utter privation are plenitude (perhaps they are the apogee, the acme, the consummation and the calm of plenitude), everything is full to the brim, everything is real, all these invented realities and all these very real inventions are full of themselves, each and every one of them, replete with their own reality;
and the moment I say this, they empty themselves: things empty themselves and names fill themselves, they are no longer empty, names are plethoras, they are donors, they are full to bursting with blood, milk, semen, sap, they are swollen with minutes, hours, centuries, pregnant with meanings and significations and signals, they are the secret signs that time makes to itself, names suck the marrow from things, things die on this page but names increase and multiply, things die in order that names may live:”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 9

Wisdom , Secret , Feeling , Thinking

“The recurrent problem of civilization is to define the male role satisfactorily enough … so that the male may in the course of his life reach a solid sense of irreversible achievement, of which his childhood knowledge of the satisfactions of child-bearing have given him a glimpse. In the case of women, it is only necessary that they be permitted by the given social arrangements to fulfil their biological role, to attain this sense of irreversible achievement. If women are to be restless and questing, even in the face of child-bearing, they must be made so through education…. Each culture--in its own way--has developed forms that will make men satisfied in their constructive activities without distorting their sure sense of their masculinity. Fewer cultures have yet found ways in which to give women a divine discontent that will demand other satisfactions than those of child-bearing.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 168-169, as cited in F. Carolyn Graglia (1998) Domestic Tranquility: A brief against Feminism.

Life , Women , Men , Education

“His [Trump's] cavalier attitude about nuclear weapons is so deeply troubling. That is the number-one threat we face in the world. And it becomes particularly threatening if terrorists ever get their hands on any nuclear material. So a man who can be provoked by a tweet should not have his fingers anywhere near the nuclear codes, as far as I think anyone with any sense about this should be concerned.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), First presidential debate (September 26, 2016)

World , Thinking

“I was bothered by a sense of entitlement among many Finns, especially younger people. Sirpa Jalkanen, a microbiologist and biotech entrepreneur affiliated with Turku University in that ancient Finnish port city, told me she was discouraged by "this new generation we have now who love entertainment, the easy life." She said she wished the government would require every university student to pay a "significant but affordable" part of the cost of their education, "just so they'd appreciate it."”

Robert G. Kaiser (1943) American journalist

As quoted in "Ten Reasons We Can't, and Shouldn't, Be Nordic" https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/ten-reasons-we-cant-and-shouldnt-be-nordic/ (12 March 2018), by Jim Geraghty, National Review
2000s, "Why can't we be more like Finland?" (2005)

Love , Life , People , Education

“This (precognitive ability) steers the cell through mazes of probabilities, while allowing it to retain knowledge of its own greater fulfillment -- the ideas of itself, which is always alive in any given period of your time. On a different kind of scale, then, each individual has the same sort of idealized version of the self, and so does each species. Here I mean each species, and I am not simply referring to mankind. Obviously these are not apparent to the physical senses, yet they are strong energy centers that to some degree stimulate the physical senses toward activity. To that degree, then, there are indeed "tree gods," gods of the forest, and "gods of being" connected with each person.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The “Unknown” Reality: Volume One, (1977), p. 117; Session 691

God , Idea , Knowledge , Tree

“On each national day of inauguration since 1789, the people have renewed their sense of dedication to the United States.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1940s, Third inaugural address (1941)

People

“The Hindu pantheon has changed to some extent but the old Gods are still active and are still understood though under modified names. Hindu India has a sense of continuity with its past which other nations, that changed their religions at some later stage, lack. It is also known that the Hindu religion preserves many old layers and forms. Therefore, its study may link us not only with its own past forms but also with the religious consciousness, intuitions and forms that prevailed in the past in Europe, in Greece, in Rome, in many Scandinavian and Baltic countries, amongst Germanic and Slavic peoples and also in several countries of the Middle East. In short, the study may reveal a fundamental form of spiritual consciousness which is wider than its Hindu expression.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

The World As Revelation: Names of Gods (1980)

God , People , Religion , Study

“Do not allow yourself to be thrashed by the provoking whip of a beautiful face. How can sense slaves enjoy the world? Its subtle flavours escape them while they grovel in primal mud. All nice discriminations are lost to the man of elemental lusts.”

Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) Indian yogi and guru

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

World , Beauty

“The controlled laboratory studies of Harry F. and Margaret K. Harlow… separated infant monkeys… in single cages in an animal colony room where they could develop social relationships… through seeing, hearing, and smelling, but not through touching or movement. These and other studies indicate that it is the deprivation of body contact and body movement—not deprivation of the other body senses—that produces the wide variety of abnormal emotional behaviors in these isolation-reared animals.”

James W. Prescott (1930) American psychologist

"Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence" (1975)

Behavior , Study , Animals

“In any proposed external communication from God, the channels of human faculty are never to be got rid of; so, if they do not in their own native quality constitute divine vouchers, they must operate as barriers to any communication with God. Of God, who is essentially supersensible, there can be no such thing as a presentation directly to our senses; and all belief that sensible facts mean his real presence must rest at last on inferential judgments of our reason, while these will be nothing but self-continuing circles, worthless for evidence, unless our reason is granted to have in itself the real revelation of what accords with the Divine mind. An absolutely direct utterance of God in the external world, evident strictly in itself, is thus upon close examination unintelligible and unthinkable. Yet this is what is implied in a consistent doctrine of Authority.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.240-1

God , World , Communication

“Atmosphere is the medium through which we see all things. In order, therefore, to see them in their true value on a photograph, as we do in Nature, atmosphere must be there. Atmosphere softens all lines; it graduates the transition from light to shade; it is essential to the reproduction of the sense of distance. That dimness of outline which is characteristic for distant objects is due to atmosphere. Now, what atmosphere is to Nature, tone is to a picture.”

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) American photographer

Source: 'A Plea for Art Photography in America', Alfred Stieglitz, in 'Photographic Mosaics,' Vol 28, 1892: About Pictorialism.

Nature , Light , Distant

“The freedom of the seemingly false opinion and our tolerance of it and our willingness to meet with it in the open help test the validity of truth while keeping alive the critical sense which is the main spring of all advancement of human thought and is the vital point, the very soul, of all human progress.”

Boris Sidis The Source and Aim of Human Progress

The Source and Aim of Human Progress (1919)

Truth , Soul , Spring , Freedom

“The extreme moment of shock in battle presents in heightened and distorted form some of the distinctive characteristics of a whole society involved in war. These characteristics in turn represent a heightening and distortion of many of the traits of a social world cracked open by transformative politics. The threats to survival are immediate and shifting; no mode of association or activity can be held fixed if it stands as an obstacle to success. The existence of stable boundaries between passionate and calculating relationships disappears in the terror of the struggle. All settled ties and preconceptions shake or collapse under the weight of fear, violence, and surprise. What the experience of combat sharply diminishes is the sense of variety in the opportunities of self-expression and attachment, the value given to the bonds of community and to life itself, the chance for reflective withdrawal and for love. In all these ways, it is a deformed expression of the circumstance of society shaken up and restored to indefinition. Yet the features of this circumstance that the battle situation does share often suffice to make the boldest associative experiments seem acceptable in battle even if they depart sharply from the tenor of life in the surrounding society. Vanguardist warfare is the extreme case. It is the response of unprejudiced intelligence and organized collaboration to violence and contingency.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987), p. 160

Love , Life , War , World

“There are epic impulses everywhere you look in There Will Be Blood; what's missing is character development, focused storytelling and, most significantly (apart from that terrific opening sequence), any sense of raw, intuitive drama.”

Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic

Review http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2007/12/26/blood/ of There Will Be Blood (2007)

“The democratic theory is that those Constitutions are likely to prove steadiest which have the broadest base, that the right to vote makes a safety - valve of every voter, and that the best way of teaching a man how to vote is to give him the chance of practice. For the question is no longer the academic one, "Is it wise to give every man the ballot?" but rather the practical one, "Is it prudent to deprive whole classes of it any longer?" It may be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that the ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong in their heads.”

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

On Democracy (6 October 1884)

Men , Way , Question , Chance

“It is imagination that has taught man the moral sense of color, of contour, of sound and of scent. It created, in the beginning of the world, analogy and metaphor. It disassembles creation, and with materials gathered and arranged by rules whose origin is only to be found in the very depths of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of the new. As it has created the world (this can be said, I believe, even in the religious sense), it is just that it should govern it.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

C'est l'imagination qui a enseigné à l'homme le sens moral de la couleur, du contour, du son et du parfum. Elle a créé, au commencement du monde, l'analogie et la métaphore. Elle décompose toute la création, et, avec les matériaux amassés et disposés suivant des règles dont on ne peut trouver l'origine que dans le plus profond de l'âme, elle crée un monde nouveau, elle produit la sensation du neuf. Comme elle a créé le monde (on peut bien dire cela, je crois, même dans un sens religieux), il est juste qu'elle le gouverne.
"Lettres à M. le Directeur de La revue française," III: La reine des facultés http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Salon_de_1859_%28Curiosit%C3%A9s_esth%C3%A9tiques%29#III._.E2.80.94_La_reine_des_facult.C3.A9s
Salon de 1859 (1859)

World , Color , Soul , Imagination

“I feel a conscious attempt to be more and more related to society. That's what's important to me as a person. I'm not going to let other people make all the changes; and if you do that, you can't curt yourself of... I'm only against the most obvious things, like wars and stuff like that. I don't have any particular concept about an utopian way things should be. I have a prejudice or a bias, it is that there shouldn't be any particular way. Being a complex human organ, we are capable of a variety; we can do so much. The big fear is that we don't do enough with our senses, with our activities, with our areas of consideration; and these have got to get bigger year after year.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1960's, I never thought of it as much of an ability,' (1968)

War , People , Fear , Way

“In 1932… I received a communication from the Tibetan which was published in the fall in a pamphlet entitled, The New Group of World Servers… The position taken by the spiritual Hierarchy on our planet was that a group was in process of formation that had in it the nucleus of the coming world civilisation and was characterised by the qualities that would distinguish that civilisation during the next 2,500 years. These qualities are primarily a spirit of inclusiveness, a potent desire selflessly to serve one's fellowmen plus a definite sense of spiritual guidance, emanating from the inner side of life.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter 6

Life , World , Communication

“Dark comedies are my favorite, because I love that feeling – being happy and scared at the same time. It's my favorite way to feel – when I'm on the edge of my seat but I'm happy, that sense of conflicting emotions. And there's a lot of that in the show, I think.”

Pendleton Ward (1982) American animator

'Adventure Time' creator talks '80s https://www.usatoday.com/story/popcandy/2012/11/01/adventure-time-creator-talks-80s/1672583/ (November 1, 2012)

Love , Way , Feeling , Thinking

“The question of giving workers a sense of belonging, an increased share in the affairs of the industry, has been a topical issue the world over. We gave it official recognition when a specific recommendation in this connection was made in the Second Five-Year Plan.”

Gulzarilal Nanda (1898–1998) Prime Minister of India

In, P.24.
Gulzarilal Nanda: A Life in the Service of the People

World , Question

“Underneath the shifting appearances of the world as perceived by our unreliable senses, is there, or is there not, a bedrock of objective reality?”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 8, The Oracle of Copenhagen, Science is about information, p. 64

World , Reality , Appearance

“You saw, with what unheard of insolence
The highest heavens they did invade of yore:
You saw, how (against reason, against sense)
They did invade the sea with sail and oar:
Actions so proud, so daring, so immense,
You saw; and we see daily more, and more:
That in few years (I fear) of heaven and sea,
Men, will be called gods; and but men, we.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Vistes que, com grandíssima ousadia,
Foram já cometer o Céu supremo;
Vistes aquela insana fantasia
De tentarem o mar com vela e remo;
Vistes, e ainda vemos cada dia,
Soberbas e insolências tais, que temo
Que do Mar e do Céu, em poucos anos,
Venham Deuses a ser, e nós, humanos.
Stanza 29 (tr. Richard Fanshawe); council of the sea gods.
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto VI

Men , God , Fear , Sea

“[What inspired you to go vegetarian at age 19? ] A taste aversion stopped my eating meat, then my deep love and respect for animals started informing more and more of my decisions. I had an innate sense of wanting to be vegan, but I needed more information. The change was gradual, which let me think through every step. I was still eating dairy when my first son was born; he couldn't tolerate my breast milk, and I realized I had a dairy allergy. So, it kept evolving. I read Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, and that did it.”

Mayim Bialik (1975) American actress, neuroscientist

“One on One with Mayim Bialik”, interview with Vegetarian Times (15 Jun 2011) https://www.vegetariantimes.com/life-garden/one-on-one-with-mayim-bialik.

Love , Age , Thinking , Decision

“Throughout our history we have been challenged to armed conflict by nations which sought to destroy our independence or threatened our freedom. The young men of America have risen to those occasions, giving themselves freely to the rigors and hardships of warfare. But the stamina and strength which the defense of liberty requires are not the product of a few weeks' basic training or a month's conditioning. These only come from bodies which have been conditioned by a lifetime of participation in sports and interest in physical activity. Our struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America. Thus, in a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1960, Sport at the New Frontier: The Soft American

Men , History , Sport , Freedom

“For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquility of mind, while we live here; because Life it selfe is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 6, p. 29 (See also: Rene Girard)
Leviathan (1651)

Life , Fear

“As far as dreams were concerned—well dreams are generated by the random processes of neural oscillation during the brain’s rest phases. What dreams do is cycle and recycle images and feelings, rationalisations and fears. There’s nothing special about that. It’s not the dreams that matter (chaff, mental turbulence, the rotating metal bars moving endlessly through the transparent tub of metaphorical slushy). It is what the problem-solving circuits in the mind make of the dreams. Dreams iterate and test mental schemas, discarding the maladaptive to return the adaptive to the slush to be reworked. Dreams are emotional preparations for solving problems—that is why we have evolved them, because problem-solving abilities are highly adaptive and thus strongly evolutionarily selected. Dreams intoxicate the individual out of reliance on common sense and preconception, and tempt her into the orbit of private logic. Dreams have utility.”

Adam Roberts book Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer

Part 2, Chapter 3, “The Utility of Dreaming” (p. 119).
Jack Glass (2012)

Fear , Dreams , Feeling , Problem

“Question: What is their external behaviour like?
Answer: They have few mannerisms, and they do not talk a lot; their words are simple and direct. They live modestly so that things pass through them without their involvement. They are composed in their use of the senses.
Question: Are all detached people like this?
Answer: More so or less so, depending on accidental circumstances. Essentially, however, they are the same.
Question: Do such people come to a full knowledge of the truth, or do they remain in the realm of opinion and imagining?
Answer: Since they remain basically human, they continue to have opinions and imaginings. But because they have withdrawn from themselves into that which is, they have a knowledge of all truth; for this is truth itself and they ignore themselves. But let this be enough for you. It is important to realize that everyone has five kinds of self One does not arrive at the goal by asking questions. It is rather through detachment that one comes to this hidden truth. Amen”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Little Book of Truth

People , Truth , Imagination , Question

“At the same time we would most like to run the film back and see how the sanctuaries close again and the lights go out and the great powers of nature are once again met with deserved reverence. One can fell an oak in twenty seconds; but in order to become what it now is, it grew for a century.... Progress is but a word without sense, and the cow, which keeps the world alive, will not move faster than three kilometers per hour in the future, either.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote, 1950, in: Fernand Léger - The Later Years, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota, published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, p. 15
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1950's

World , Nature , Light , Time

“I would like this house to join me in paying fulsome tribute to our scientists, engineers and defence personnel whose singular achievements have given us a renewed sense of national pride and self confidence.”

Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1924–2018) 10th Prime Minister of India

Extract from Suo Motto statement made in the Parliament, after India’s underground nuclear tests conducted on 11 May 1998.[Sujata K. Dass, Atal Bihari Vajpayee: Prime Minister of India, http://books.google.com/books?id=N8wnA7EtB0IC, 1 January 2004, Gyan Publishing House, 978-81-7835-277-0, 39]

Confidence , Housing , Self-confidence

“The church in the spiritual and theological sense always contains a current that is hostile to political power, that is revolutionary and anarchical. But this is not the current that society as a whole, and especially the political authorities, recognize as the church. If these many movements have failed, it is primarily because of their intrinsic nature. Spiritual currents cannot last. When they attach political power, this power attacks them in return and proclaims that the true church is that which is in alliance with it.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), p. 132

Hostility , Nature

“The writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats's beast slouching to be born.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Writing and Being (1991)

Truth , Justice

“Philosophy can take us no further than enabling us to command a clear view of the concepts by means of which we think about the world, and, by so doing, to attain a firmer grasp of the way we represent the world in our thought. It is for this reason and in this sense that philosophy is about the world.”

Michael Dummett (1925–2011) British academic and philosopher

Dummett, M. A. E. The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1991.

World , Way , Thinking

“Our culture bombards us with this idea that you’re not that, and if you are that, there’s something wrong with you, and then we’re going to call you that, and then it’s an insult. There is a sense of self-empowerment or recapturing who you are by people calling you ‘fag,’ and being like, ‘Yeah, I am a fag.’ Even though you’re not. What does somebody respond? That dude has nothing to say about that again.”

Peter Wentz (1979) American musician

"This Charming Man," interview, Out.com (August 2008)

People , Idea

“The staff came to enquire after my needs. They were revolting in their obsequiousness.
A disgusting little part of me gobbled it up. A part just big enough to show why some men lust after power. But not for me, thank you. I am too lazy. And I am, I fear, the unfortunate victim of a sense of responsibility. Put me in charge and I try to accomplish the ends to which the office was allegedly created. I guess I suffer from an impoverishment of the sociopathic spirit necessary to go big time.”

Glen Cook book Shadow Games

Source: Shadow Games (1989), Chapter 6, “Opal” (p. 34)

Men , Fear , Suffering , Time

“There are places we all come from — deep-rooty-common places — that make us who they are. And we disdain them or treat them lightly at our peril. We turn our backs on them at the risk of self-contempt. There is a sense in which we need to go home again — and can go home again. Not to recover home, no. But to sanctify memory.”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1986)

Home , Memory

“Common sense is the very antipodes of science.”

Edward B. Titchener (1867–1927) American psychologist

Edward B. Titchener, Systematic Psychology: Prolegomena (1972), p. 48

Science

“I guess I got whacked hard in the mystery department when I was little. I found the world completely and totally fascinating then — it was like a dream. They say that people who think they had a happy childhood are blocking something out, but I think I really had one. Of course I had the usual fears, like going to school — I knew there was some sort of problem there. But every other person sensed that problem too, so my fears were pretty normal.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

McKenna interview (1992)

People , World , Fear , School

“Beethoven’s sonatas, whether show so much variety that one has to ask oneself the fundamental question of what the much vilified word ‘sonata means. Perhaps Beethoven applied the word to entities that are not even sonatas in the strict sense of the term. One has to perceive new law in the highly dramatic musical form. Often in the sonata, feeling eludes form. In Beethoven, that is not the case, for here the two go hand in hand; feeling makes form aware of a hole in the ground and vice versa.”

Elfriede Jelinek book The Piano Teacher

P 151
The Piano Teacher (1988)

Law , Music , Feeling , Question

“The situation also gave U. N. Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali a chance to start the U. N.'s disegagement from Bosnia, something he had long wanted to do. After a few meetings with him, I concluded that this elegant and subtle Egyptian, whose Coptic family could trace its origins back over centuries, had disdain for the fractious and firty peoples of the Balkans. Put bluntly, he never liked the place. In 1992, during his only visit to Sarajevo, he made the comment that shocked the journalists on the day I arrived in the beleaguered capital: "Bosnia is a rich man's war. I understand your frustration, but you have a situation here that is better than ten other places in the world. … I can give you a list." He complained many times that Bosnia was eating up his budget, diverting him from other priorities, and threatening the whole U. N. system. "Bosnia has created a distortion in the work of the U. N.", he said just before Srebrenica. Sensing that our diplomatic efforts offered an opportunity to disengage, he informed the Security Council on September 18 that he would be ready to end the U. N. role in the forme Yugoslavia, and allow all key aspects of implementation to be placed with others. Two days later, he told Madeleine Albright that the Contact Group should create its own mechanism for implementation - thus volunteering to reduce the U. N.'s role at a critical moment. Ironically, his weakness simplified our task considerably.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), pp. 174-175

War , People , World , Family

“In a certain sense the phrase "I am still alive" can never be sent as it cannot be received by the addressee instantaneously…It is only valid at the very instant that it is being written, and in the very next second it no longer is a certainty. If the addressee receives the telegram a few hours or days later and reads it, he merely knows that the sender was alive at the very instant the telegram was sent. But when he is reading the telegram, he is totally uncertain if the content of the text is still relevant or if it is still valid The difference, the small displacement between sending and receiving, is that particular unseizable glimpse of the presence of the artist. Likewise, it is a sentence of self-reassurance…"I am still alive."”

On Kawara (1933–2014) artist

The activity of telling oneself and the world "I am still alive."
On Kawara, "1970 Telegram," as cited in: " On Kawara Today http://greg.org/archive/2014/07/10/on_kawara_today.html," By greg on July 10, 2014 8:27 PM.

World , Reading

“For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.”

Samuel Beckett book Watt

Part II, p. 77
Watt (1943)

God , Way , Time

“I was recently at a meeting of analysts and vendors, and got into a conversation about Apple with one of the ex-Apple executives at the meeting. I got the sense that Tim Cook was hired because he was good at everything Jobs didn't like to do, and Phil Schiller was basically Jobs' internal fan club chairman. In other words, you really don't have a viable company without someone doing what Jobs did.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

No magic, no Apple: Cupertino's identity crisis in the fading afterglow of Jobs http://digitaltrends.com/opinion/no-magic-no-apple-cupertinos-identity-crisis-in-the-fading-afterglow-of-jobs in Digital Trends (10 August 2013)

Cooking

“I lost part of myself to him then, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.”

John Knowles book A Separate Peace

Gene, on the desire to be Finny.
Source: A Separate Peace (1959), P. 85

Freedom , Parting

“You see, I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything. Objects don't exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them or between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence — what I can only describe as a sense of peace, which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Quote from The Power of Mystery (7 December 1957), a London Observer interview with John Richardson, as quoted in Braque: The Late Works (1997), by John Golding, Introduction, p. 10
unsourced variant translation: I made a great discovery. I don't believe in anything anymore. Objects do not exist for me, except that there is a harmonious relationship among them, and also between them and myself. When one reaches this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual void. This was everything becomes possible, everything becomes legitimate, and life is a perpetual revelation. This is true song.
1946 - 1963

Life , Peace

“Luckily for the world economy, however, Gordon Brown and his officials are making sense. And they may have shown us the way through this crisis.”

Gordon Brown (1951) British Labour Party politician

" Gordon Does Good http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/opinion/13krugman.html", New York Times, 12 October 2008.
Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Prize in memory of Alfred Nobel for Economics.
About

World , Way

“Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book Ode to the West Wind

St. III
Ode to the West Wind (1819)

Dreams , Flowers , Sleep , Summer

“Like most philosophers, Kant worked to shore up the conventional beliefs of his time. Schopenhauer did the opposite. Accepting the arguments of Hume and Kant that the world is unknowable, he concluded that both the world and the individual subject that imagines it knows it are maya, dreamlike constructions with no basis in reality. … Schopenhauer accepted the sceptical side of Kant's philosophy and turned it against him. Kant demonstrated that we are trapped in the world of phenomena and cannot know things in themselves. Schopenhauer went one step further and observed that we ourselves belong in the world of appearances. Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer was ready to follow his thoughts wherever they led. Kant argued that unless we accept that we are autonomous, freely choosing selves we cannot make sense of our moral experience. Schopenhauer responded that our actual experience is not of freely choosing the way we live but of being driven along by our bodily needs - by fear, hunger and, above all, sex.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Deception: Schopenhauer's Crux (p. 42-3)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Hunger , World , Fear , Sex

Quotes about reason page 42

Quotes about reason
page 42