Quotes about reason (6414 quotes, page 43)

“.. that dizzy seething of forms and acoustic lights, rowdy and smelly [visible in the paintings at the Futurist exhibition, February 1912 in Paris].... to obtain this total painting which calls for the active cooperation of all the senses: painting of the plastic mood of the universal, you have to paint the way drunkards sing and vomit, sounds, noises and smells.”

Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) Italian painter

Quote in The painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells Carrà, in 'Lacerba' vol. 1. no. 17, 1,Florence, 1 September 1913, pp. 186-187
1910's

Way , Mood , Light , Universe

“The physicist … engages in complex and difficult calculations, involving the manipulating of ideal, mathematical quantities that, at first glance, are wholly lacking in the music of the living world and the beauty of the resplendent cosmos. It would seem as if there exists no relationship between these quantities and reality. Yet these ideal numbers that cannot be grasped by one's senses, these numbers that only are meaningful from within the system itself, only meaningful as part of abstract mathematical functions, symbolize the image of existence.”

Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993) American theologian

Source: Halakhic Man (1983), p. 83

World , Beauty , Music , Mathematics

“The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003) American politician

Family and Nation, ch. 1 (1986)

Love , Men , Family , Peace

“Man is not the creature and product of Mechanism; but, in a far truer sense, its creator and producer: it is the noble People that makes the noble Government; rather than conversely.”

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

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

People

“Leftists (who sometimes understand us better than we understand ourselves) have always sensed this; they know that when we talk about immigration, we’re not really talking about immigration.”

Richard Bertrand Spencer (1978) American white supremacist

Understanding

“Populations interact, some decline to extinction, and some expand. In an ice age the tundra advances on the forest, but in no sense is there a "struggle" between them. As the temperature gets colder, the forest species decline and the tundra species increase; that is all. There is neither effort nor fight. As we move toward the more complex animals, of course, both effort and fighting become more common, but even in the predator-prey relationship, there is catching and eating rather than fighting.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 110

Age , Effort , Animals , Fight

“This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
'My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.”

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) English poet and soldier (1893-1918)

Draft for a preface http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/tutorials/intro/owen/preface.html to a collection of war poems he hoped to publish in 1919 (c. May 1918) and used in Poems of Wifred Owen (Memoir and notes).ed Edmund Blunden (1933).Chatto & Windus 1964.ASIN: B000GLY9CI

War , Truth , Books

“It should now be clear that "wonder" and philosophizing are connected with each other in a more essential sense than may at first appear in the statement, "Philosophy begins in wonder." For wonder is not merely the beginning, in the sense of initium, the first stage or phase of philosophy. Rather, wonder is the beginning in the sense of the "principle" (principium), the abiding, ever-intrinsic origin of philosophizing. It is not true to say that the philosopher, insofar as he philosophizes, ever "emerges from his wonder"”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

if he does depart from his state of wonder, he has ceased to philosophize.
Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, pp. 105–106

Appearance

“It's difficult. [My female protagonists] immediately become the subjects of rorikon gokko (play toy for Lolita Complex males). In a sense, if we want to depict someone who is affirmative to us, we have no choice but to make them as lovely as possible. But now, there are too many people who shamelessly depict [such protagonists] as if they just want [such girls] as pets, and things are escalating more and more.”

Hayao Miyazaki (1941) Japanese animator, film director, and mangaka

1988 interview with Animage, Animage, vol. 125, November 1988. Retrieved June 8, 2007.

Love , People , Girl

“Frege's pair of concepts (nominatum and sense) is compared with our pair (extension and intension). The two pairs coincide in ordinary (extensional) contexts, but not in oblique (nonextensional) contexts.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Source: Meaning And Necessity (1947), p. 124 as cited in: E. Cornell Way (1991) Knowledge Representation and Metaphor. p. 183

“Every presentation of philosophy, whether oral or written, is to be taken and can only be taken in the sense of a means. Every system is only an expression or image of reason, and hence only an object of reason, an object which reason—a living power that procreates itself in new thinking beings—distinguishes from itself and posits as an object of criticism. Every system that is not recognized and appropriated as just a means, limits and warps the mind for it sets up the indirect and formal thought in the place of the direct, original and material thought.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 67
Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy (1839)

Thinking

“[Roosevelt] was always… finding new victims to loot and new followers to reward, flouting common sense, and boldly denying its existence, demonstrating by his anti-logic that two and two made five, promising larger and larger slices of the moon. His career will greatly engage historians, if any good ones ever appear in America, but it will be of even more interest to psychologists. He was the first American to penetrate to the real depths of vulgar stupidity. He never made the mistake of overestimating the intelligence of the American mob. He was its unparalleled professor.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

April 15, 1945
1940s–present, The Diary of H.L. Mencken (1989)

Stupidity , Intelligence , Appearance

“In a musical sense, it seemed like all the good intentions had gone awry, very quickly. I mean, we got back from America and Blur had made The Great Escape, which I thought was a really, truly awful album - so cheesy, like a parody of Parklife, but without the balls or the intellect. And Oasis were enormous and I always found them incredibly dreary. There was this uncritical reverence surrounding the whole thing”

Justine Frischmann (1969) English musician

On the state of Brit Pop
Elastica Limits interview, March 10th 2002 by Andrew Smith, The Guardian http://observer.guardian.co.uk/life/story/0,6903,664759,00.html

Music

“This is a new government, a new environment in that sense. The change of democracy happened peacefully. The harmony that we show and practice is important.”

Wan Azizah Wan Ismail (1952) Malaysian politician

Wan Azizah Wan Ismail (2018) cited in " China and Malaysia ties continue to prosper: Wan Azizah http://www.thesundaily.my/news/2018/07/21/china-and-malaysia-ties-continue-prosper-wan-azizah" on The Sun Daily, 21 July 2018

Democracy , Change

“Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general sense and the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reason lies not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

Love , People , Chance , Time

“The appointment (as special envoy to APEC 2016) fills me with a deep sense of responsibility. It is a mission rather than a job. This mission is not about personal glory, but the entrustment of a responsibility to present to the international community the achievements Taiwan has made in the past decades.”

James Soong (1942) Chairman of People First Party, former Governor of Taiwan Province

James Soong (2016) cited in " Beijing knew I would be envoy: Soong http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2016/10/07/2003656671" on Taipei Times, 7 October 2016

Communication , Past , Personality

“Of course, the Russian effort affected the outcome. Surprising even themselves, they swung the election to a Trump win. To conclude otherwise stretches logic, common sense, and credulity to the breaking point.”

James Clapper (1941) US government official

Excerpt from Clapper's memoir Facts And Fears, quoted in [Hains, Tim, James Clapper in New Book: "Of Course" The Russians "Swung The Election To A Trump Win", https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/05/23/james_clapper_in_new_book_of_course_the_russians_swung_the_election_to_a_trump_win.html, 27 July 2018, Real Clear Politics, May 23, 2018]

Effort

“Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end … that's a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)

People , Pleasure , World , Communication

“There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth… than that of the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady.
Prefaces (1907-1909)

Life , Truth , Art , Spring

““Joy is not based on circumstances. You can experience a deep, abiding joy no matter what you have to be happy or unhappy about in your world. Joyful people radiate something deeper, something based in their heart and will. Others sense this joy and feel uplifted. I realized that’s what the phrase Scatter Joy is all about—reflecting that deep and abiding joy to the world. “”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ Live Learn Lead to Make a Difference https://books.google.com/books?id=s0q7mZf9oDkC&lpg=pg=PP1&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2006 p. 61.
On Choosing to be Joyful

People , World , Feeling , Heart

“The foundation of democracy is the sense of spiritual independence which nerves the individual to stand alone against the powers of this world.”

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) English philosopher

Part IV, Ch. 4
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

World , Democracy

“Unlike pure theorists, we shall not assume at the outset that rational behavior exists or that rational behavior constitutes the topic of economic analysis. We shall study economic behavior as we find it. In describing and classifying different reactions, as well as the circumstances that elicit them, we shall raise the question whether and in what sense certain reactions may be called “rational.” After having answered that question and thus defined our terms, we shall study the fundamental problem: Under what conditions do more and under what conditions do less rational forms of behavior occur?”

George Katona (1901–1981) American psychologist

George Katona (1951). Psychological Analysis of Economic Behavior. McGraw-Hill, New York. p. 16; as cited in: Erik Angner and George Loewenstein. "Behavior economics," in: Philosophy of Economics, (2012), p. 657

Behavior , Question , Problem , Study

“It was not possible for us nor did we want to become islands; the just (i giusti) among us, neither more nor less numerous than in any other human group, felt remorse, shame and pain for the misdeeds that others and not they had committed, and in which they felt involved, because they sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species — we, in short — had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.”

Primo Levi book The Drowned and the Saved

The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

Pain , Effort

“The manner in which a paradoxer will show himself, as to sense or nonsense, will not depend upon what he maintains, but upon whether he has or has not made a sufficient knowledge of what has been done by others, especially as to the mode of doing it, a preliminary to inventing knowledge for himself.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Introductory p.4
A Budget of Paradoxes (1872)

Knowledge , Dependency

“Each of us in the US - the long middle finger - must be careful that we extend our arm in either a business or political sense, we take pains to assure that we are giving a hand, not the finger. Unfortunately, I think this is how the reset of the world looks at the US right now. Not as part of the hand-giving strength and purpose to the rest of the fingers –but instead scratching our nose and sending a signal.”

Indra Nooyi (1955) Indian-born, naturalized American, business executive

When she drew compassion with the five most populated of the seven continents of the world in a lectuere which created a furore necessitating an apology from her. Quoted in [. Branson, Douglas M ., The Last Male Bastion: Gender and the CEO Suite in America s Public Companies, http://books.google.com/books?id=wTFSa2qouSwC&pg=PA98, 15 December 2009, Routledge, 978-0-203-86566-8, 98–]

Pain , World , Business , Thinking

“From what can "ought" be derived. The most compelling answer is this: ethics must be somehow based on an appreciation of human nature — on a sense of what a human being is or might be, and on what a human being might want to have or want to be. If that is naturalism, then naturalism is no fallacy. No one could seriously deny that ethics is responsive to such facts about human nature. We may just disagree about where to look for the most compelling facts about human nature -n novels, in religious texts, in psychological experiments, in biological or anthropological investigations. The fallacy is not naturalism but, rather, any simple-minded attempt to rush from facts to values. In other words, the fallacy is greedy reductionism of values to facts, rather than reductionism considered more circumspectly, as the attempt to unify our world-view so that out ethical principles don't clash irrationally with the way the world is.”

Daniel Dennett book Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)

World , Way , Nature

“There's always a sense of camaraderie between bands. The only thing that I ever remember that starts to go outside of the normal healthy competition was when Kurt [Cobain] was slamming Pearl Jam. Once you get outside of your local little scene, lot of cases, writers will bait you and lead you down that path as cunningly as they can. I've seen it happen dozens of times. I've had people say, "Well, so-and-so said this about you, what do you say about that?" And they might be misquoting them, or maybe that's not what that person meant, or maybe that person was just in a bad mood. It's provoked out of you. They'll get you in a position where you start firing and they'll throw out little things about different people. But everyone that anyone would know as a successful Seattle band, or even an integral part of the scene, are all friends. Always have been.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Soundgarden Era

People , Mood , Time , Success

“This summer, our new journey begins
I sense a slight discomfort in the distance
We saw that place in our dreams
Today, let's find the road there again.”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Glitter
Lyrics, Guilty

Dreams , Summer

“Dark underbelly to all of this. Sarajevo, where the [Olympic] Games were held in '84, is under threat. The UN and NATO have ordered the Serbs to have their big guns off the surrounding hills by midnight, February 20. All the love that is being manifested in these Games was once manifested in Sarajevo. The cameras pan across the great stadium — bombed out, an empty shell. […] Ten years ago, all that glory gleamed in the center of what is now a cemetery for the dead killed in a ferocious attack. What sense does it make?”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: Bone: Dying into Life (2000), p. 94

Love , Game , Dead

“The outdoor and indoor works are complementary, although I would have to say that nature, the landscape, the walking, is at the heart of my work and informs the indoor works. But the art world is usually received 'indoors' and I do have a desire to present real work in public time and space, as opposed to photos, maps and texts, which are by definition 'second hand' works. A sculpture feeds the senses at a place, whereas a photograph or text work (from another place) feeds the imagination. For me, these different forms of my work represent freedom and richness – it's not possible to say 'everything' in one way.”

Richard Long (1945) artist

Richard Long, ‎British Council (1994). Richard Long: São Paulo Bienal 1994.
1990s

World , Art , Way , Imagination

“""You'll always be powerless to this girl. You'll never be in charge. There's something there," George told me, "that makes you crazy and always will. If you don't cut the connection for good, in the end that something will destroy you. You're no longer merely answering natural need with her. This is the pathology in its purest form. Look," he told me, "see it as a critic, see it from a professional point of view. You violated the law of aesthetic distance. You sentimentalized the aesthetic experience with this girl - you personalized it, you sentimentalized it, and you lost the sense of separation essential to your enjoyment. Do you know when that happened? … I'm not against it because it's digusting. I'm against it because it's falling in love. The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open."”

Philip Roth book The Dying Animal

The Dying Animal (2001)

Love , People , Law , Soul

“I was reading about and looking at Mantegna [Italian early-Renaissance painter]. I can sense how good he is for me. His enormous plasticity - it has such powerful substance. That is just what is lacking in my things. I could do something about that if I could add his substantiality to the greatness of form I'm struggling for. At present I see before my eyes very simple and barely articulated things. My second major stumbling is my lack of intimacy. Mackensen's [her former teacher] way of portraying the people here is not great enough for me, too genre like. Whoever could, ought to capture them in runic script..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

excerpt of her Journal, Worpswede 1898; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 197
1898

People , Way , Teachers , Reading

“Art is merciless observation, sympathy, imagination, and a sense of detachment that is almost cruelty.”

Michael Powell (1905–1990) English film director

Attributed

Art , Imagination

“Sea fighting is pure common sense. The first of all its necessities is SPEED, so as to be able to fight--When you like, Where you like, and How you like.”

John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher (1841–1920) Royal Navy admiral of the fleet

Letter to Churchill, dated 16/1/1912, quoted in The World Crisis, Vol 1, 1911-14 (1923), Churchill, Thornton Butterworth (London), p. 140.

Fight , Speed , Sea

“They have put political correctness above common sense, above your safety, and above all else. I refuse to be politically correct.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, June, Speech about the Orlando Shooting (June 13, 2016)

“I told all four [congressional leaders] that I felt like this election happened for a reason; that it pointed out — the delay in the outcome should make it clear to all of us — that we can come together to heal whatever wounds may exist, whatever residuals there may be. And I really look forward to the opportunity. I hope they've got my sense of optimism about the possible, and enthusiasm about the job. I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don't agree with each other, but that's okay. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier… [Bush laughs out loud, audience laughs out loud] …just so long as I'm the dictator”

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

more laughter
Online NewsHour http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec00/trans_12-18.htm interview, Washington, D.C., (December 18, 2000)' during his first trip to Washington as President-elect. The last sentence is also included in Fahrenheit 9/11.
2000s, 2000

Hope , Optimism , Laughter , Time

“Liberalism, for all its virtues, has begun to develop a sense of entitlement, and needs time to rediscover its soul.”

Stephen L. Carter (1954) American legal academic and writer

Trump and the Fall of Liberalism (November 11, 2016)

Soul , Time

“[Computer science] is not really about computers -- and it's not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not about microscopes and Petri dishes…and geometry isn't really about using surveying instruments. Now the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments: when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use.”

Hal Abelson (1947) computer scientist

Source: Introductory lecture to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQLUPjefuWA

Understanding , Thinking , Science

“All these people come to see the White House and they see practically nothing that dates back before 1948. Every boy who comes here should see things that develop his sense of history. For the girls, the house should look beautiful and lived-in. They should see what a fire in the fireplace and pretty flowers can do for a house; the White House rooms should give them a sense of all that. Everything in the White House must have a reason for being there. It would be sacrilege merely to "redecorate" it -- a word I hate. It must be restored -- and that has nothing to do with decoration. That is a question of scholarship.”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) public figure, First Lady to 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy

Interview with Hugh Sidey, according to Kennedy Library https://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Jacqueline-Kennedy-in-the-White-House.aspx (1 September 1961)

Hate , People , Beauty , History

“Some institutions within the market are associated with exchange and contracts in an elemental sense (such as the legal system and the customs which govern the contract)… These would be present even if a formal market did not exist. Other institutions are specifically to do with the development of a market and the coordination of a large number of exchanges in an organized manner.”

Geoffrey Hodgson (1946) British economist

Source: Economics and Institutions, 1988, p. 174

“An art of expression should begin with childhood, and the lucid use of one's mother tongue should be typical of that art.
The sense of reality should be strengthened from the beginning, yet by no means at the cost of those lofty illusions we call patriotism, veneration, love.”

Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) American architect

Education (1902)

Love , Art , Reality , Childhood

“Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Notes, 1962; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1
1960's

God , Art , Search

“He wrote with great care, and with a sharpness, vivacity, and variety of epithet that give immediate and continuing pleasure, but he was not in any serious sense a novelist or even a writer of fiction. His emotionally injured self is the sole character of his fictions, with everybody else seen through the haze of his paranoia, like figures in a fun-fair mirror.”

Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913) British writer, photographer and historian

Julian Symons, in the Times Literary Supplement, January 3, 1975.
Criticism

Pleasure

“You can't imagine the joy I feel when I hear that something I've said or done or written has helped others to regain their sense of dignity, to motivate them to develop their unique potential, to encourage them to reach out to others in love.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

A Magazine of People and Possibilities interview (1998)

Love , Feeling , Imagination , Motivation

“In introducing the personal computer to the classroom, we shall be breaking a four-hundred year-old truce between the gregariousness and openness fostered by orality and the introspection and isolation fostered by the printed word. Orality stresses group learning, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility… Print stresses individualized learning, competition, and personal autonomy. Over four centuries, teachers, while emphasizing print, have allowed orality its place in the classroom, and have therefore achieved a kind of pedagogical peace between these two forms of learning, so that what is valuable in each can be maximized. Now comes the computer, carrying anew the banner of private learning and individual problem-solving. Will the widespread use of computers in the classroom defeat once and for all the claims of communal speech? Will the computer raise egocentrism to the status of a virtue?”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992)

Peace , Communication , Problem , Learning

“The good side of the world media village was the sense it gave ten billion that each of them had at least some small connection with the whole. The bad side was that no one ever encountered anything, anymore, that was completely new.”

David Brin book Earth

Part V (p. 245)
Earth (1990)

World

“The positive and negative consequences of the various kinds of globalization and of economic growth versus economic stagnation are consistent with the Renewed Darwinism Theory's proposition that one's sense of dA fulfillment is relative to that of other people to whom one compares oneself. The innate insatiable drive to acquire cannot be fulfilled, even by a steady increase in wealth, if one is steadily falling behind others. This may be illogical—a Porsche is a Porsche, no matter what's parked in the driveway next door—but it is the way our minds have evolved to work.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Excerpt from: " The Drive to Acquire’s Impact on Globalization http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-drive-to-acquires-impact-on-globalization," at hbswk.hbs.edu, 23 august 2010.
Driven to Lead: Good, Bad, and Misguided Leadership, 2010

People , Way , Wealth

“If we owe to it [civil society] any duty, it is not subject to our will. Duties are not voluntary. Duty and will are even contradictory terms. Now though civil society might be at first a voluntary act (which in many cases it undoubtedly was) its continuance is under a permanent standing covenant, coexisting with the society; and it attaches upon every individual of that society, without any formal act of his own. This is warranted by the general practice, arising out of the general sense of mankind.”

Edmund Burke book An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs

Source: An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), p. 442

“The war we are fighting until victory or the bitter end is in its deepest sense a war between Christ and Marx.
Christ: the principle of love.
Marx: the principle of hate.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Der Kampf, den wir heute ausfechten bis zum Sieg oder bis zum bitteren Ende, ist im tiefsten Sinne ein Kampf zwischen Christus und Marx.
Christus: das Prinzip der Liebe.
Marx: das Prinzip des Hasses.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Love , Hate , War , Victory

“It can be said, in a qualified sense, that Gentile entertained considerable sympathy for the neo-Hegelian Marxist intellectual tradition.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 93

“Laughter is a mental mechanism which enables us to face reality without falling into despondency or delusion. As people who have sunk in apathy seldom bother us by rushing into print, delusion (leaving aside deceit) constitutes the chief obstacle to the progress of our understanding of society, and in this context is usually assumes the form of doctrinairism couched in a mystifying jargon. A sense of humour is the most reliable external indicator of the likelihood of immunity from this folly, and of the ability to appraise social situations realistically.”

Stanislav Andreski (1919–2007) Polish-British sociologist

Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972)

People , Understanding , Reality , Laughter

“May Heaven, if virtue claim its thought,
If justice yet avail for aught;
Heaven, and the sense of conscious right,
With worthier meed your acts requite!”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book I, p. 29

Justice

“In one sense, I do believe I am "like a man," as Parthe [the writer's sister] says. But how? In having sympathy. … Women crave for being loved, not for loving. They scream out at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving any in return, for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so. … They cannot state a fact accurately to another, nor can that other attend to it accurately enough for it to become information. Now is not all this the result of want of sympathy?”

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing

Letter to Madame Mohl (13 December 1861)
The Life of Florence Nightingale (1913)

Love , Women , Sister

“He who perceives death perceives a sense of the human comedy, and quickly becomes a poet.”

Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living

Source: The Importance of Living (1937), pp. 39–40

Death

“It is a pity that thanks to our thoughtless 'secularism' and waning sense of history, such primary sources of medieval history.. are presently in danger of suppression or total extinction. Instead of launching sustained search and research in this behalf, 'secular' historians are going about dismissing relevant data out of hand, imputing unfounded motive to the recorders themselves. The state in general and the universites in particular must do something to protect and retrieve such invaluable documents from unscrupulous hands.”

Harsh Narain (1921–1995) Indian writer

The Ayodhya temple-mosque dispute: Focus on Muslim sources (1993)

History , Search , Motivation

“What is creative instinct, if not an incessant living sympathy with Nature, a constant craving like that of Nature's own, to fashion something new out of all that comes within the grasp of those faculties with which Nature has endowed us? The qualities of vision, of fancy, and of imaginative power, are no more divorced from Nature, than are the qualities of common-sense and courage. They are rarer, that is all.”

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) English novelist and playwright

Vague Thoughts On Art (1911)

Imagination , Fashion , Courage , Nature

“Everybody has their own India and I think it’s a nonsense construction, “a real India”. The real India might be the India of the villages and certainly there’s a lot to be said of the fact that India’s heart lies in its villages. But I live 5 miles down the road from Gurgaon with kyscrapers and software companies and backoffice projects and call-centers. And that’s a very real India too, so I think “real India” doesn’t make much sense-- anymore than the real US with apple pie and Thanksgiving and family around campfires; is that anymore real than Manhattan?”

William Dalrymple (1965) author and historian

In Amrita Ghosh, "Author in Focus: An Interview with Dalrymple".

Family , Thinking , Heart

“I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed. Our eyes have evolved for survival purposes. The fact that they can also see the stars is pure accident.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Richter is questioning here the 'picture of reality'
Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 87, note 13

Star , Reality

“I feel the sense of possibilities
I feel the wrench of hard realities
The focus is sharp in the city
-- The Camera Eye (1981)”

Neil Peart (1952–2020) Canadian-American drummer , lyricist, and author

Rush Lyrics

Feeling , Reality

“All our Ideas, or the materials of our reasoning or judging, are received by some immediate Powers of Perception internal or external, which we may call Senses … Reasoning or Intellect seems to raise no new Species of Ideas, but to discover or discern the Relations of those received.”

Francis Hutcheson (philosopher) (1694–1746) Irish philosopher

An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1728), Treatise II: Illustrations upon the Moral Sense, Sect. I

Idea

“By the end of the decade it had become obvious that perhaps the one constant of our variegated and strung-out peer groups was a pervasive sense of self-consciousness that sent us in grouchy packs to ugly festivals just to be together and dig ourselves and each other, as if all of this meant something greater than that we were kids who liked rock 'n' roll and came out to have a good time, as if our very styles and trappings and drugs and jargon could be in themselves political statements for any longer than about fifteen stoned seconds, even a threat to the Mother Country! So we loved and loved and doted on ourselves and our reflections in each other even as the whole thing got out of hand and turned into mud and disaster areas and downs and death.”

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

"James Taylor Marked for Death" (1971), p. 66
Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (1988)

Love , Death , Time , Country

“What happens then when majorities in the directly elected European Assembly take decisions, or approve policies, or vote budgets which are regarded by the British electorate or by the electorate of some of the mammoth constituencies as highly offensive and prejudicial to their interests? What do the European MPs say to their constituents? They say: “Don't blame me; I had no say, nor did I and my Labour (or Conservative) colleagues, have any say in the framing of these policies”. He will then either add: “Anyhow, I voted against”; or alternatively he will add: “And don't misunderstand if I voted for this along with my German, French, and Italian pals, because if I don't help roll their logs, I shall never get them to roll any of mine”. What these pseudo-MPs will not be able to say is what any MP in a democracy must be able to say, namely, either “I voted against this, and if the majority of my party are elected next time, we will put it right”, or alternatively, “I supported this because it is part of the policy and programme for which a majority in this constituency and in the country voted at the last election and which we shall be proud to defend at the next election”. Direct elections to the European Assembly, so far from introducing democracy and democratic control, will strengthen the arbitrary and bureaucratic nature of the Community by giving a fallacious garb of elective authority to the exercise of supranational powers by institutions and persons who are – in the literal, not the abusive, sense of the word – irresponsible.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Brighton (24 October 1977), from Enoch Powell on 1992 (Anaya, 1989), pp. 19-20.
1970s

Exercises , Democracy , Communication , Support

“For as long as I can remember,' I said, continuing to speak to the figure standing in the archway, 'I have had an intense and highly aesthetic perception of what I call the icy bleakness of things. At the same time I have felt a great loneliness in this perception. This conjunction of feelings seems paradoxical, since such a perception, such a view of things, would seem to preclude the emotion of loneliness, or any sense of a killing sadness, as I think of it. All such heartbreaking sentiment, as usually considered, would seem to be on its knees before artworks such as yours, which so powerfully express what I have called the icy bleakness of things, submerging or devastating all sentiment in an atmosphere potent with desolate truths, permeated throughout with a visionary stagnation and lifelessness. Yet I must observe that the effect, as I now consider it, has been just the opposite. If it was your intent to evoke the icy bleakness of things with your dream monologues, then you have totally failed on both an artistic and an extra-artistic level. You have failed your art, you have failed yourself, and you have also failed me. If your artworks had really evoked the bleakness of things, then I would not have felt this need to know who you are, this killing sadness that there was actually someone who experienced the same sensations and mental states that I did and who could share them with me in the form of tape-recorded dream monologues. Who are you that I should feel this need to go to work hours before the sun comes up, that I should feel this was something I had to do and that you were someone that I had to know? This behavior violates every principle by which I have lived for as long as I can remember. Who are you to cause me to violate these long-lived principles?”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

The Bungalow House

Truth , Sadness , Dreams , Art

“I was quite active politically just previous to this, and I'm leading into this time when I was on WPA and there was a group called the Artist's Union which was organized, so that I was extremely active in that. Again that meant more meetings and fighting for artists' rights on the WPA... I would say it gave me an opportunity to continue through a period of where one had a livelihood to deal with and/or painting. This allowed for painting and I'd say in that sense it was extremely influencing.... WPA itself ended after the War Service Project and by way of terminating, it allowed you to take one of several war courses that were being offered. After which you were supposed to be able to go into that field and earn a living. I took drafting.”

Lee Krasner (1908–1984) American artist

n.p.
Oral history interview with Lee Krasner, 1964 Nov. 2 - 1968 Apr. 11

War , Way , Time , Fight

“Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Being Read To, p. 120.
A History of Reading (1996)

Wisdom , Books , Time

“Folk codes of pride and togetherness, pride in both senses, honor, and togetherness. Ring-fenced emotion permitted only at three o’clock for ninety minutes in the sanctuary of the stadium. Can we march that pride out of the gates and into the streets? Can we harness it? Direct it? Use it for something less stymied by white lines and whistles, that could pour from the terraces and into the oak-and-leather chambers, the steel-and-glass towers?”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

“A painting or sculpture not modeled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone.... [but] it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses... [art must be like.. ] fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant or a child in it's mother's womb.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Notes From a Dada Diary, published in 1932; as quoted by Anna Moszynska, in Abstract Art, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p. 113
1930s

Art , Painting

“Childhood, at its best, is a perpetual adventure, in the truest sense of that overtaxed word: a setting forth into trackless lands that might have come to existence the instant before you first laid eyes on them.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Maps and Legends http://exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol42/no2/p35.htm, Architectural Digest (April 2001)

Childhood

“Is the flow of time something real, or might our sense of time passing be just an illusion that hides the fact that what is real is only a vast collection of memories?”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

as quoted by Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (2000)

Memory , Time

“Painting certainly means more to me than everything else in the world. I think my mind becomes clearer when I am in the presence of nature. Unfortunately, the realization of my sensations is always a very painful process with me. I can't seem to express the intensity which beats in upon my senses. I haven't at my command the magnificent richness of color which enlivens Nature... Look at that cloud; I should like to be able to paint that! Monet could. He had muscle.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote in a conversation with Vollard, along the river near Aix, 1896; as quoted in Cezanne, by Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 74
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, 1880s - 1890s

Pain , World , Color , Nature

“There was a time when intellectual meant someone who uses reason and intellect. Today, people who call themselves intellectuals are in a form of mental death spiral: they search for, and find, those index cards that support their world view, and clutch little red books like rosaries in the face of all external evidence. They are ruled by appeals to authority. Their self-image and sense of emotional well-being trumps any and all objective evidence to the contrary.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

RAFTS https://web.archive.org/web/20060621091445/http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000132.html (18 June 2006)
2000s

Death , People , Books , World

“The other major impression to emerge from Magick Without Tears is that -- as odd as it sounds -- one of Crowley's chief drawbacks was his sense of humour. This is a disability he shares with Bernard Shaw: both were driven by a strange compulsion to be flippant. But when he becomes absorbed in an idea, Shaw can remain serious for a sufficiently long time to convince the reader of his intellectual stature. In Crowley, the flippancy has the tone of a schoolmaster trying to be funny for the benefit of the sixth form, or a muscular Christian trying to convince you that he isn't really religious. 'How can a yogi ever feel worried?... That question I have been expecting for a very long time!' (Crowley has never learned that exclamation marks give the impression of a gushing schoolgirl.) 'And what you expect is to see my middle stump break the wicket-keeper's nose, with the balls smartly fielded by Third Man and Short Leg!' It makes us aware that there was something wrong with Crowley's 'self-image.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

He is one of those people who, no matter how hard they try, never feel quite grown up.
Source: Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (1987), p. 150

People , Feeling , Idea , Question

“I have often thought since that there is sound sense in what was once said by the late Lord C. J. Eyre, that the sooner a bad precedent was gotten rid of, the better.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

King v. Stone (1800), 1 East, 648 n. (a).

“In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make.”

Michael Schmidt (poet) (1947) American poet

The Great Modern Poets, London, 2006

Pleasure

“The intervening time to my first inauguration was filled up with wranglings between Congress and the new Executive as to the best mode of "reconstruction," or, to speak plainly, as to whether the control of the Government should be thrown immediately into the hands of those who had so recently and persistently tried to destroy it, or whether the victors should continue to have an equal voice with them in this control. Reconstruction, as finally agreed upon, means this and only this, except that the late slave was enfranchised, giving an increase, as was supposed, to the Union-loving and Union-supporting votes. If free in the full sense of the word, they would not disappoint this expectation. Hence at the beginning of my first Administration the work of reconstruction, much embarrassed by the long delay, virtually commenced. It was the work of the legislative branch of the Government.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1870s, Eighth State of the Union Address (1876)

Love , Disappointment , Support , Time

“Life is experienced holistically with sensations pouring in through every physical and mental organ of perception. Art exists embodied in physical elements—especially meticulously calibrated aspects of sight and sound—which scholarly explication can illuminate but never fully replace. However conceptually incoherent and subjectively emotional, the amateur response to poetry comes closer to the larger human purposes of the art—which is to awaken, amplify, and refine the sense of being alive—than does critical commentary”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

19
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Life , Art

“Transformation does not negate what has gone before; rather, it fulfills it. Creating the context of a world that works for everyone is not just another step forward in human history; it is the context out of which our history will begin to make sense.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

[Lynne Twist, 2003, The Soul of Money: Transforming your Relationship with Money and Life, New York, New York, W.W. Norton., 252, 039305097]
Attributed

World , History

“I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
I can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences
Don't fence me in”

Cole Porter (1891–1964) American composer and songwriter

"Don't Fence Me In" (1934)

“Given the present state of our knowledge, and insufficient thought on my part, my own prescription for the time being is to deal as best we can with individual differences and let the statistical group differences fall where they may. Society’s general concern with race and other social group differences is not the product of research on these matters, but arises from chauvinist-like attitudes of racial group identity and solidarity in connection with political power and economic interest. It might be termed meta-racism. The ‘race problem’ from that viewpoint is lower in my own hierarchy of values than concern with individual justice and alleviation of individual misfortune. Though it would be blind not to acknowledge the reality of certain statistical differences among populations, I would find it difficult to be the least concerned with any given individual’s racial heritage. Perhaps I may be too insensitive on this score, never having felt much sense of racial identity myself.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

Source: Differential Psychology: Towards Consensus (1987), p. 443

Justice , Knowledge , Problem , Reality

“The best company management is one that combines a sense of corporate greatness and destiny, with empathy for - and fidelity to - the average employee.”

David Packard (1912–1996) American electrical engineer, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, businessman, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense,…

Source: Bill & Dave, 2007, p. 393

“Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.”

Jane Jacobs book Dark Age Ahead

Source: Dark Age Ahead (2004), Chapter One, The Hazard, p. 5

Falseness

“I am often asked if I would have liked to have been involved with Jurassic Park. The plain answer is no. Although excellent, it is not with all its dollars what I would have wished to do with my career. I was always a loner and worked best that way. Since the very beginning I fought and struggled under constant pressure to keep the design and final result within my hands. As time moved on this became more difficult, until I was forced to bow to the fact that my method of working, in the financial sense, was no longer practical. Model animation has been relegated to a reflection, or a starting point for creature computer effects that has reached a high few could have anticipated. However, for all the wonderful achievements of the computer, the process creates creatures that are too realistic and for me that makes them unreal because they have lost one vital element - a dream quality. Fantasy, for me, is realizing strange beings that are so removed from the 21st century. These beings would include not only dinosaurs, because no matter what the scientists say, we still don't know how dinosaurs looked or moved, but also creatures of the mind. Fantastical creatures where the unreal quality becomes even more vital. Stop-motion supplies the perfect breath of life for them, offering a look of pure fantasy because their movements are beyond anything we know.”

Ray Harryhausen (1920–2013) American animator

Ray Harryhausen & Tony Dalton (2003), An Animated Life, Aurum Press, p. 8

Life , Dreams , Way , Time

“the Legion of little Souls does exist, and they did become manifest in the Little Flower. True, they get on our nerves more than they edify us - precisely that awful Martin family with their pompous self-preoccupation, their insufferable family worship, a perpetual mutual admiration society - but, say what you will, such people really do have religion, in the strictest sense of the word - living contact, authentic conversation with God. They do live out of their trust in him, are honestly concerned with seeking and doing his will, they take pains about being kind to their neighbours, for his sake. Is this really not enough? To hell with all esoterics!”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

God , Pain , People , Family

“The enlightened soul is a person who is self-conscious of his "human condition" in his time and historical and social setting, and whose awareness inevitably and necessarily gives him a sense of social responsibility.”

Ali Shariati (1933–1977) Iranian academic and activist

Source: Where Shall We Begin, 1997-2013, p. 1 ; as cited in: Robert Deemer Lee, Overcoming tradition and modernity: the search for Islamic authenticity, (11997), p. 127.

Soul , Time , Personality

“The success of the missions need not have been so meagre but for certain factors which may be discussed now. In the first place, the missionary brought with him an attitude of moral superiority and a belief in his own exclusive righteousness. The doctrine of the monopoly of truth and revelation, as claimed by William of Aubruck to Batu Khan when he said 'he that believeth not shall be condemned by God', is alien to the Hindu and Buddhist mind. To them the claim of any sect that it alone possesses the truth and others shall be `condemned' has always seemed unreasonable. Secondly the association of Christian missionary work with aggressive imperialism introduced political complications. National sentiment could not fail to look upon missionary activity as inimical to the country's interests. That diplomatic pressure, extra‑territoriality and sometimes support of gun‑boats had been resorted to in the interests of the foreign missionaries could not be easily forgotten. Thirdly, the sense of European superiority which the missionaries perhaps unconsciously inculcated produced also its reaction. Even during the days of unchallenged European political supremacy no Asian people accepted the cultural superiority of the West. The educational activities of the missionaries stressing the glories of European culture only led to the identification of the work of the missions with Western cultural aggression.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

God , People , Truth , Education

“As many of you may know, my first chosen career was in the United States Navy, where I served as a submarine officer. At that time, my shipmates and I were ready for combat and prepared to give our lives to defend our nation and its principles. At the same time, we always prayed that our readiness would preserve the peace.
I served under two presidents, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, men who represented different political parties, both of whom had faced their active military responsibilities with honor.
They knew the horrors of war. And later as commanders in chief, they exercised restraint and judgment, and they had a clear sense of mission.
We had a confidence that our leaders, both military and civilian, would not put our soldiers and sailors in harm's way by initiating wars of choice unless America's vital interests were in danger.
We also were sure that these presidents would not mislead us when issues involved our national security.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Post-Presidency, DNC address (2004)

Men , War , Peace , Way

“Through fasting, concentration and prayer, mystics shut out the shifting world of the senses in order to reach a timeless reality. Quite often they find what they seek - but it is only a shadow play, an arabesque of their own anxieties, projected onto an inner screen. They end as they began, stuck fast in the personal time of memory and regret.”

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

As It Is: Turning Back (p. 198)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

World , Reality , Memory , Time

“Man is a creature whose evolutionary environment has been the open air. His nerves, muscles, and senses have developed across three million years in contiguity with natural earth, crude stone, live wood, wind, and rain. Now this creature is suddenly--on the geologic scale, instantaneously--shifted to an unnatural environment of metal and glass, plastic and plywood, to which his psychic substrata lack all compatibility. The wonder is not that we have so much mental instability but so little.”

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

Section 5 (p. 177)
Short fiction, Rumfuddle (1973)

Nature

“When we're making music together, it's like five men making love-in a very platonic sense. It's very erotic, because your spirits are intermingling, you're becoming one. It's also why it can get so heated. You're tapping into this electricity that's very primal.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

citing reasons for the band's group therapy Spin (October 2001)

Love , Men , Making love , Music

“It is said that it is not good for man to be alone. This is true, not only in the sense in which our women’s rights’ friends so zealously and wisely teach, but it is true as to nations. The voice of civilization speaks an unmistakable language against the isolation of families, nations and races, and pleads for composite nationality as essential to her triumphs. Those races of men who have maintained the most distinct and separate existence for the longest periods of time; which have had the least intercourse with other races of men are standing confirmation of the folly of isolation. The very soil of the national mind becomes in such cases barren, and can only be resuscitated by assistance from without.”

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

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Women , Men , Family , Time

“In many of Albrecht Dürer’s engravings there are harrowing depictions of his own melancholia; the manic wheeling stars of Van Gogh are the precursors of the artist’s plunge into dementia and the extinction of self. It is a suffering that often tinges the music of Beethoven, of Schumann and Mahler, and permeates the darker cantatas of Bach. The vast metaphor which most faithfully represents this fathomless ordeal, however, is that of Dante, and his all-too-familiar lines still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Ché la diritta via era smarrita.
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.
One can be sure that these words have been more than once employed to conjure the ravages of melancholia, but their somber foreboding has often overshadowed the last lines of the best-known part of that poem, with their evocation of hope. To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists. But in science and art the search will doubtless go on for a clear representation of its meaning, which sometimes, for those who have known it, is a simulacrum of all the evil of our world: of our everyday discord and chaos, our irrationality, warfare and crime, torture and violence, our impulse toward death and our flight from it held in the intolerable equipoise of history. If our lives had no other configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul’s annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease — and they are countless — bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), X

Life , Death , Women , Men

“Logical positivism was progressive compared with the classical positivism of Ptolemy, Hume, d'Alembert, Compte, John Stuart Mill, and Ernst Mach. It was even more so by comparison with its contemporary rivals—neo-Thomisism, neo-Kantianism, intuitionism, dialectical materialism, phenomenology, and existentialism. However, neo-positivism failed dismally to give a faithful account of science, whether natural or social. It failed because it remained anchored to sense-data and to a phenomenalist metaphysics, overrated the power of induction and underrated that of hypothesis, and denounced realism and materialism as metaphysical nonsense. Although it has never been practiced consistently in the advanced natural sciences and has been criticized by many philosophers, notably Popper (1959 [1935], 1963), logical positivism remains the tacit philosophy of many scientists. Regrettably, the anti-positivism fashionable in the metatheory of social science is often nothing but an excuse for sloppiness and wild speculation.”

Mario Bunge (1919) Argentine philosopher and physicist

Mario Bunge (1996). Finding Philosophy in Social Science. Yale University Press. p. 317.
1960s-1990s

Faith , Fashion , Nature , Science

“The problem is that women try to dress like celebrities whose shape they just don't have. When you emulate someone else's dress sense with a different body shape it just doesn't work. And when you look bad, your confidence dips. Our advice is to go shopping armed with our body shape rules.”

Trinny Woodall (1964) English fashion advisor and designer, television presenter and author

As quoted in "Mistresses of the makeover" by Cathrin Schaer in New Zealand Herald (25 February 2008)

Women , Confidence , Problem

“Give me to die unwitting of the day,
And stricken in Life's brave heat, with senses clear!”

Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908) American poet, critic, and essayist

"Mors Benefica".

Life

“It is reason, logic and rationality that machines, said to be soulless, have. In the deontological sense, in fact, morality is evolutionary atavism. It let us survive, that's why it was maintained. As parents were not empathetic, not guided by the good of others, children might have not survived, neglected and abandoned by the group, so morality was promoted in the genes.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Woźniak, Olga; Vetulani, Jerzy (24 December 2011): Stań się dobrym. To się opłaca, interview. Gazeta Wyborcza (in Polish).

Children , Parent

“My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have … "an ambition of transcendence."”

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) American philosopher

Introduction to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume I (1991).

Motivation

“It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?”

Jeff VanderMeer book City of Saints and Madmen

"The Strange Case of X", p. 196
City of Saints and Madmen (2001–2004)

World , Literature , Question , Nature

“There were no roads connecting different colonies and different parts of the same colony in a manner that made sense with regard to Africa’s needs and development. All roads and railways led down to the sea. They were built to extract gold or manganese or coffee or cotton. They were built to make business possible for the timber companies, trading companies, and agricultural concession firms, and for white settlers. Any catering to African interests was purely coincidental.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 327.

Coffee , Business , Parting , Sea

“The fine art of executive decision consists in not deciding questions that are not now pertinent, in not deciding prematurely, in not making decision that cannot be made effective, and in not making decisions that others should make. Not to decide questions that are not pertinent at the time is uncommon good sense, though to raise them may be uncommon perspicacity. Not to decide questions prematurely is to refuse commitment of attitude or the development of prejudice. Not to make decisions that cannot be made effective is to refrain from destroying authority. Not to make decisions that others should make is to preserve morale, to develop competence, to fix responsibility, and to preserve authority.
From this it may be seen that decisions fall into two major classes, positive decisions - to do something, to direct action, to cease action, to prevent action; and negative decisions, which are decisions not to decide. Both are inescapable; but the negative decisions are often largely unconscious, relatively nonlogical, "instinctive," "good sense."”

Chester Barnard book The Functions of the Executive

It is because of the rejections that the selection is good.
Source: The Functions of the Executive (1938), p.194, as cited in in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 626

Art , Question , Decision , Time

“We realize, however, that all scientific laws merely represent abstractions and idealizations expressing certain aspects of reality. Every science means a schematized picture of reality, in the sense that a certain conceptual construct is unequivocally related to certain features of order in reality;”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory, p. 83

Law , Reality , Science

Quotes about reason page 43

Quotes about reason
page 43