Quotes about reason (6414 quotes, page 61)

“Many people await the return of the Christ with trepidation and fear. They sense that His appearance will promote great changes in all departments of life. His values, they rightly assume, will necessarily alter their ways of thinking and living and they blanch at such a prospect. Besides, so mystical has been the view of the Christ presented down the centuries by the churches that many fear His judgement and omnipotent power; they await Him as God come to punish the wicked and reward the faithful.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Maitreya's Mission Vol. III (1997)

God , Fear , Faith , People

“Complacency is habit. You in America are born and brought up in a country which is so materialistic in its outlook that complacency is the inevitable result. You are so educated at school and by the media that America becomes the limit of your seeing, your imagination, your sense of the world. It is because America is so big. You have a powerful media service which day after day puts that which is happening in America at the forefront of your consciousness. At school in America you are brought up to salute the flag everyday. This does not happen everywhere. You would not get the national flag saluted by many school children. They would think you were daft. Yet you take it for granted. Also America is so rich compared with many countries that you easily feel in its materialistic atmosphere that you are all right and do not have to think about those abroad. As a young country, you also believe that people have to stand on their own feet and make of life what they can. There is much truth in this but carried to excess it leads to the complacency that threatens world peace.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Source: The World Teacher for All Humanity (2007)

School , Peace , Imagination , Country

“In the ultimate matter of life and death, survival or defeat, the insular position of the British nation has set us apart from the inhabitants of the adjacent continent. This is a political fact which cannot be pretended out of existence. As long as it remains true, or is believed by the British themselves to remain true, the commitment of Britain to any continental combination can never be total. … True, it has often been rumoured that Britain had lost, or was about to lose, that characteristic; but events have hitherto always proved that she had it still, and those events are the most formative element in the folk-memory of the British people. … This is the reason why Britain, which is in many sense as European as any nation, cannot be integrated politically with the European continent.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Source: Speech to The Hague (17 May 1971), quoted in The Common Market: Renegotiate or Come Out (Elliot Right Way Books, 1973), p. 109

People , Memory , Life , Death

“There is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness which comes over persons who are trapped or imprisoned, when all their efforts to attract attention and assistance bring no response. This is the kind of feeling which you in Walsall and we in Wolverhampton are experiencing in the face of the continued flow of immigration into our towns. We are of course in a minority – make no mistake about that. Out of over 600 parliamentary constituencies perhaps less than 60 are affected in any way like ourselves. The rest know little or nothing and, we might sometimes be tempted to feel, care little or nothing. Only this week a colleague of mine in the House of Commons was dumbfounded when I told him of a constituent whose little daughter was now the only white child in her class at school. He looked at me as if I were a Member of Parliament for central Africa, who had suddenly dropped from the sky into Westminster. So far as most people in the British Isles are concerned, you and I might as well be living in central Africa for all they know about our circumstances.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Walsall (9 February 1968), quoted in Still to Decide (Elliot Right Way Books, 1972), p. 290
1960s

School , Housing , Personality , Daughters

“Before more months or years are spent by Ministers, by economic staffs, by industrialists and by trade unionists, in a pursuit which is as foredoomed to futility as filling a sieve or making a rope of sand, it is time to call a halt, and to declare in round and unmistakeable terms that an incomes policy, in any relevant or useful sense, does not and cannot exist—except perhaps in a communist dictatorship.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Birmingham (28 November 1964), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid. The Thinking of Enoch Powell (B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1965), p. 100
1960s

Time , Making love

“Society is much more than a collection of individuals acting together, even through the complex and subtle mechanisms of the free economy, for material advantage. It has an existence of its own; it thinks and feels; it looks inwards, as a community to its own members; it looks outwards as a nation, into a world populated by other societies, like or unlike itself. The Tory Party, with its deep sense of history, has always concerned itself especially with these two aspects of society, and I believe that the British people would instinctively and rightly reject a philosophy which offered them just an economic machine, however efficient and successful.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech in Bromley (24 October 1963), quoted in A Nation Not Afraid. The Thinking of Enoch Powell (B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1965), pp. 4–5
1960s

History , Success , People , Communication

“The power structure in Britain is changing. Authority is no longer obeyed for its own sake. There are severe limits on what government can do, so the way to win the battle against inflation and unemployment is not to try to dragoon the country. If we do we shall fail. We must secure its consent. We are playing for high stakes. In a real sense, adherence to the social contract puts on trial whether our society has the will and determination to solve its problems by democratic means.”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

Speech to the Labour Party Conference in London (27 November 1974), quoted in The Times (28 November 1974), p. 6
Foreign Secretary

Country , Problem , Way , Change

“I must admit, sir, that I have modified the verses a little, to allow for the new things I have learned, so I am an unreliable source of truth, sir, save in its most fundamental sense. Like a majority of poets, sir.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Book 3 “A Rose Redeemed; A Rose Revived,” Chapter 1 “Of Weapons Possessed of Will” (p. 270)
The Elric Cycle, The Revenge of the Rose (1991)

Truth , Learning

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibilites.”

Charles Darwin book On the Origin of Species (1859)

On the Origin of Species (1859)

Imagination , Light , Sun , Nature

“The knowledge that He is ready and anxious publicly to appear to His loved Humanity only adds to the sense of general frustration, and another very vital question arises: For what period of time must we endure, struggle and fight? The reply comes with clarity: He will come unfailingly when a measure of peace has been restored, when the principle of sharing is at least in process of controlling economic affairs, and when churches and political groups have begun to clean house. Then He can and will come; then the Kingdom of God will be publicly recognised and will no longer be a thing of dreams and of wishful thinking and orthodox hope.”

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

Source: The Reappearance of the Christ (1948), Chapter VII

God , Peace , Time , Housing

“The only excuse for this book is that it is an attempt to penetrate to that deeper meaning underlying the great events in the life of Christ, and to bring into renewed life and interest the weakening aspiration of the Christian. If it can be shown that the story revealed in the Gospels has not only an application to that divine Figure Which dwelt for a time among men, but that it has also a practical significance and meaning for the civilised man today, then there will be some objective gained and some service and help rendered…. A myth is capable of becoming a fact in the experience of an individual, for a myth is a fact which can be proven. Upon the myths we take our stand, but we must seek to re-interpret them in the light of the present. Through self-initiated experiment we can prove their validity; through experience we can establish them as governing forces in our lives; and through their expression we can demonstrate their truth to others. This is the theme of this book, dealing as it does with the facts of the Gospel story, that fivefold sequential myth which teaches us the revelation of divinity in the Person of Jesus Christ, and which remains eternally truth, in the cosmic sense, in the historical sense, and in its practical application to the individual. This myth divides itself into five great episodes: 1. The Birth at Bethlehem. 2. The Baptism in Jordan. 3. The Transfiguration on Mount Carmel. 4. The Crucifixion on Mount Golgotha. 5. The Resurrection and Ascension.”

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

Source: From Bethlehem to Calvary (1937), Chapter One

Time , Light , Personality , Help

“Our future is imperiled, our economy is fragile, and frontline communities are vulnerable to major threats from rising sea levels to lead in our water. A #GreenNewDeal is a common sense, moral solution to fix these issues with the urgency they demand.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (1989) American politician

Twitter post, https://twitter.com/AOC (22 February 2019)
Twitter Quotes (2019), February 2019

Future , Communication , Water , Sea

“There are some of our own people who still think that the Communists are the left wing of the Socialist movement. They are not. The Socialist movement was a movement for freedom in its widest sense. From the point of view of freedom, Communists are on the extreme right—more reactionary than some of the old tyrannies which we knew in the past. What is the thing for which we fight, for which the men with whom we feel the stir of sympathy throughout the ages have fought? Freedom. But that fight changes from age to age and the freedom that some men fought for may turn out to be tyranny. Communists, concentrating solely on the economic aspects of freedom…have produced the ghastly travesty of Socialism in the lands behind the iron curtain.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Glasgow (10 April 1949), quoted in The Times (11 April 1949), p. 4
Prime Minister

Freedom , Past , People , Fight

“The Atlantic Treaty is not aggressive. It is purely defensive. Those who attack it as offensive do so from a bad conscience. They take just the same line as the Nazis did when every attempt by the nations to get together was denounced as the encirclement of Germany. We seek by the pact to gain for the nations a sense of security which they so ardently desire. We seek by the organization of security to make the world safe against aggression and by pooling of strength to reduce the burden of armaments.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Glasgow (10 April 1949), quoted in The Times (11 April 1949), p. 4
Prime Minister

World , Bad luck , Making love

“That it was common to observe that this was an enlightened Age; but he had thought it for a long time past an ignorant Age. Would you, said he, call a Circulating Library a good Library, because it contains so many books? This Age is much advanced in many useless sciences, & much more respect is shewn to Talent than to wisdom; but I consider our fore-fathers as deeper Thinkers than ourselves, because they set an higher Value on good sense than Knowledge in various Sciences, & this good sense was derived very often from as much study & more knowledge, though of another sort.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Present Age, p. 49
Table talk

Study , Time , Past , Knowledge

“The Revolution and Hanover succession had been objects of the highest veneration to the old Whigs. They thought them not only proofs of the sober and steady spirit of liberty which guided their ancestors; but of their wisdom and provident care of posterity.—The modern Whigs have quite other notions of these events and actions. They do not deny that Mr. Burke has given truly the words of the acts of parliament which secured the succession, and the just sense of them. They attack not him but the law.”

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

Source: An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), p. 436

Wisdom , Law , Success

“Most intelligent people of the eighties had developed a type of radio deafness which enabled them not to hear a human voice coming from a loud-speaker, although they could hear and enjoy the then infrequent intervals of music between announcements. In an age when advertising competition was so keen that there was scarcely a bare wall or an unbillboarded lot within miles of a population center, discriminating people could retain normal outlooks on life only by carefully cultivated partial blindness and partial deafness which enabled them to ignore the bulk of that concerted assault upon their senses.”

Fredric Brown (1906–1972) American novelist, short story author

Pi in the Sky (p. 242)
Short fiction, From These Ashes (2000)

Intelligence , People , Music , Age

“A great sense of mission guides us. A great sense of mission guides me. I act day and night in your name, on your behalf, on behalf of our country, on behalf of our people, on behalf of our land!”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

As quoted in, All 3 Major Israeli TV Channels Declare Netanyahu Victor In Election, April 9 2019, The Daily Wire
2010s, 2019

Night , People , Country

“There is no denying existence itself. Something must exist and anyone who says nothing exists at all makes a mockery of sense and necessity. The proposition that there is no denying being itself, then, is a necessary premise. Now this Being which has been admitted in principle is either necessary or contingent… What this means is that a being must be self-sufficient or dependent… From here we argue: If the being the existence of which is conceded be necessary, then the existence of a necessary Being is established. If, on the other hand, its existence is contingent, every contingent being depends on a necessary Being; for the meaning of its contingency is that its existence and non-existence are equally possible. Whatever has such a characteristic cannot have its existence selected for without a determining or selecting agent. This too is necessary. So from these necessary premises the existence of a necessary Being is established.”

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic

(1964) Fada’ih al-Batiniyya. Edited by Abdurahman Badawi. Kuwait: Muasassa Dar al-Kutub al-Thiqafa, p. 82.

Self-confidence , Making love , Dependency

“The most characteristic custom of tho Nayars is connected with their marriages. Every Nayar girl is married in one sense at a very early age. The tali is tied round her neck before she attains puberty, and it is considered to be disgraceful in her relations not to have this ceremony performed before that event takes place. The tying of tho tali is a great event in each household, and frequently several girls go through this ceremony simultaneously. When this can be managed it enables the family to make a greater display than they would probably be able to afford if there was a separate ceremony for each girl.”

William Logan (author) book Malabar Manual

Malabar Manual, Page 135 https://archive.org/details/MalabarLogan/page/n147
Malabar Manual (1887)

Family , Marriage , Girl , Age

“The way you sustain and improve upon a culture is by fostering a sense of gratitude for what is best about it. You celebrate the good in your story while putting the bad in the correct context. Conservatism is gratitude…”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2019, What's So Great About Western Civilization (2019)

Way , Bad luck , Gratitude

“When you understand the basic change taking place in any one major area, it is easier to make sense of the others. This discovery of a new pattern transcends explanation. The shift is qual-itative, sudden, the result of neurological processes too rapid and complex to be tracked by the conscious mind. Although logical explanations can be laid out up to a point, the seeing of a pattern is not sequential but all-at-once. If a new concept does not click into place for you on first encounter, read on. As you move through the book you will come upon many related ideas, connections, examples, metaphors, analogies, and illustrative stories. In time, patterns will emerge, the shifts will occur. From the new perspective, old questions may seem suddenly irrelevant.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter One, The Conspiracy

Time , Reading , Understanding , Question

“Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda, who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization.”

Edmund Leach (1910–1989) British anthropologist

Sir Edmund Leach. "Aryan invasions over four millennia. In Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches, edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990, pp. 227-245.

Question , Horse , Thinking , Appearance

“Conceiving the defense of freedom, like freedom itself, to be one and indivisible, we hold all continents and peoples in equal regard and honor. We reject any insinuation that one race or another, one people or another, is in any sense inferior or expendable.”

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

1950s, First Inaugural Address (1953)

People , Freedom

“As big countries in the Pacific – Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand – we have a sense of responsibility to the smaller island countries, because displacement of these smaller communities will first and foremost be our neighborhood responsibility.”

James Marape (1971) Papua New Guinea politician

James Marape (2019) cited in: " Australia must help protect Pacific from climate change, PNG prime minister says https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/27/australia-must-help-protect-pacific-from-climate-change-png-prime-minister-says" in The Guardian, 26 July 2019.

Country , Communication

“Dumping is the exporting to this country of goods from a foreign land under the cost—beneath the price at which they are sold in their own country. There could be only one object in doing that, and that is to make war upon a particular industry in our country. That is unfair. … In the interests of fairness, as well as in the interests of British industry as a whole, the Government have decided to submit to Parliament proposals which will effectively deal with dumping in the sense in which I have defined it.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1919/aug/18/dumping in the House of Commons (18 August 1919)
Prime Minister

War , Making love , Country

“They are saying now that Vasyl Slipak was a Ukrainian patriot, a nationalist… He undoubtedly was, but not in the sense that dominates in our society! I’ve never seen him show a prejudicial attitude to other peoples. It would have been absurd to hear this from his mouth. A European person, he performed both in Europe and in Africa and received a warm welcome everywhere.”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

2017
Orest Slipak, the brother of singer. Brother about brother. The Day. Кyiv.ua. - 2017. - 27 April. https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/topic-day/brother-about-brother

Personality , People

“He was really successful, he had very many concerts in Paris. In music circles everyone knew him. I believe that in about five years he would have become a hugely famous singer, because he was getting more and more invitations as an artist. I never saw him in a bad mood, he radiated positive emotions even if things were not going best. Meanwhile, it was not always easy for him, there were various situations concerning his career or money. When we were working on concert programs, he acted very professionally. We had a great relationship as colleagues. We knew and sensed each other well. Also, sometimes we had very personal conversations.”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

2017
Nicolas Krauze, conductor, the Orchestre de Chambre Nouvelle Europe (France). “He loved Ukraine above all”. The Day. Кyiv.ua. - 2017. - 7 March. https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/culture/he-loved-ukraine-above-all

Money , Success , Personality , Bad luck

“It is patent to every student of the closing forty years of the last century, that crowds of thoughtful and moral people have slipped away from the churches, because the teachings they received there outraged their intelligence and shocked their moral sense. It is idle to pretend that the widespread agnosticism of this period had its root either in lack of morality or in deliberate crookedness of mind. Everyone who carefully studies the phenomena presented will admit that men of strong intellect have been driven out of Christianity by the crudity of the religious ideas set before them, the contradictions in the authoritative teachings, the views as to God, man, and the universe that no trained intelligence could possibly admit. Nor can it be said that any kind of moral degradation lay at the root of the revolt against the dogmas of the Church. The rebels were not too bad for their religion; on the contrary, it was the religion that was too bad for them. The rebellion against popular Christianity was due to the awakening and the growth of conscience; it was the conscience that revolted, as well as the intelligence, against teachings dishonouring to God and man alike, that represented God as a tyrant, and man as essentially evil, gaining salvation by slavish submission.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Esoteric Christianity (The Lesser Mysteries) (1914)

God , Religion , Study , Strong

“The main preparation to be made for receiving in the physical vehicle the vibrations of the higher consciousness are: its purification from grosser materials by pure food and pure life; the entire subjugation of the passions, and the cultivation of an even, balanced temper and mind, unaffected by the turmoil and vicissitudes of external life; the habit of quiet meditation on lofty topics, turning the mind away from the objects of the senses, and from the mental images arising from them, and fixing it on higher things; the cessation of hurry, especially of that restless, excitable hurry of the mind, which keeps the brain continually at work and flying from one subject to another; the genuine love for the things of the higher world, that makes them more attractive than the objects of the lower, so that the mind rests contentedly in their companionship as in that of a well-loved friend.”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

The Ageless Wisdom (1897)

Food , Flying , Passion , World

“Our folks understood that there was a war upon us and that school was a weapon that outdid any Glock. Yet the whole process—with its equally spaced desks, precisely timed periods and lectures, with its standardized pencils and tests—felt unnatural to me. But much as I hated their terms, having been impressed into them, I hated more the failing. So I was left with a great unconscious sadness, an emptiness which, even when I was alone, I was not fully aware. But it worked on me like an invisible weight, altered my laughter, posture, my approach to girls. Fuck what you have heard or what you have seen in your son. He may lie about homework and laugh when the teacher calls home. He may curse his teacher, propose arson for the whole public system. But inside is the same sense that was in me. None of us ever want to fail. None of us want to be unworthy, to not measure up.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975) writer, journalist, and educator

Source: The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008), p. 169-170.

School , Home , Time , Hate

“A state of thievocracy is promoted because it permits politically connected taskmasters to redirect wealth to those deemed worthier by the state. In this sense, slavery is the socialization of labor and property, imposed to make the populace subservient to an institutionalized authority that often preaches equalitarianism and altruism but practices a slavery-enriched militarism. To the far statist Left and their slavocracy comrades, individuals have no ownership rights—so humans can be beasts of burden or simply be exterminated in cleansing bouts of genocide. Many leaders of the Democratic Party are still tied to this slavocracy-socialist tradition as a means to steal wages and assets from the citizenry as well as corrode free speech, due process and the presumption of innocence.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

p 484
Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the ‘Free Left’ and the ‘Statist Left', (2019)

Wealth , Making love

“Summarizing his deficiencies, Karl Marx was neither progressive nor enlightened; he was a racist, anti-Semite, a German nationalist, a warmonger, autocratic, anti-freedom proponent, Machiavellian, pro-Black slavery, petty, homophobic, megalomaniac, a bully and slanderer, anti-choice, and a reactionary against liberalism and industrial capitalism. In almost every sense, Marx fit the quintessential image of Hitler like a tight glove, both appearing almost indistinguishable. Like father and son, Marx and Hitler were two social justice warriors, determined to weaponize intolerance, racism, and nationalism for what they call the greater good. In so many ways, considering their almost identical political and social makeup, metaphorically speaking, Hitler could easily be regarded as the son of Marx.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the ‘Free Left’ and the ‘Statist Left', (2019), p. 361

Justice , Freedom , Appearance , Way

“Funk succeeded me and he could not act individually as I could and did. The Reichsbank could give or deny credit under the rules at its own discretion while I was president of it. The very day I left the Reichsbank, Hitler issued a law which obliged the Reichsbank to give any credit he would ask for. It was under that law that Funk took office. Perhaps in that sense Funk was not responsible, but in another sense, of course, he was responsible because he was a willing tool. If he went so far as to take the post, he was willing to obey.”

Walther Funk (1890–1960) German economist and politician

Hjalmar Schacht, to Leon Goldensohn, March 10, 1946

Law

“The un-Germanness in and about us…lies primarily in a lack of racial sense … in international, pacifistic and defeatistic thinking and, finally, in the considerable advancement of the Jewish people within our boundaries.”

Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937) German Army officer and later Nazi leader in Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch

Kriegsführung und Politik (Berlin, 1922), pp. 337-338, quoted in W. W. Coole (ed.), Thus Spake Germany (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. 147

Thinking , People

“Nobody knows what is going to happen because so much depends on an enormous number of variables, on simple hazard. On the other hand if you look at history retrospectively, then, even though it was contingent, you can tell a story that makes sense…. Jewish history, for example, in fact had its ups and downs, its, enmities and its friendships, as every history of all people has. The notion that there is one unilinear history is of course false. But if you look at it after the experience of Auschwitz it looks as though all of history—or at least history since the Middle Ages — had no other aim than Auschwitz…. This, is the real problem of every philosophy of history how is it possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened otherwise?”

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Jewish-American political theorist

The New York Review of Books interview with the French writer Roger Errera (1978)

Friendship , History , Dependency , People

“Should there not be manifest progress and development but in a higher sense than people have imagined it? … No one is in his age alone, he builds on the preceding one, this becomes nothing but the foundation of the future, wants to be nothing but that — this is what we are told by the analogy in nature, God’s speaking exemplary model in all works! Manifestly so in the human species!”

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic

"This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity" ["Auch eine Philosophie zur Geschichte der Menscheit"] (1774), as translated by Michael N. Forster, in Johann Gottlieb von Herder: Philosophical Writings (2002), edited by Michael N. Forster, p. 299

God , Imagination , Future , People

“Hinduism at its best has spoken the only relevant truth about the way to self-realization in the full sense of the word.”

Hermann von Keyserling (1880–1946) German philosopher

Count Hermann Keyserling, The Huston Smith Reader, p. 122

Way , Truth , Self-confidence

“First, what do we mean by anguish? The existentialist frankly states that man is in anguish. His meaning is as follows-When a man commits himself to anything, fully realizing that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind-in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility.”

Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and …

Source: Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946), p. 30

Time

“Novalis was cried down as an enthusiastic mystic by the prosaic, and Spinoza as godless by the literalists. It was incumbent upon me to protest against this view of Spinoza, seeing I would review the whole sphere of piety. Something essential would have been wanting in the ex position of my views if I had not in some way said that the mind and heart of this great man seemed deeply influenced by piety, even though it were not Christian piety. The result might have been different, had not the Christianity of that time been so distorted and obscured by dry formulas and vain subtilties that the divine form could not be expected to win the regard of a stranger. This I said in the first edition, somewhat youthfully indeed, yet so that I have found nothing now needing to be altered, for there was no reason to believe that I ascribed the Holy Spirit to Spinoza in the special Christian sense of the word.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799) [original in German]
S - Z

Way , Time , Heart

“Spinoza is the clear and luminous side of Modern philosophy. He is the negation of bourgeois mediation and of all the logical, metaphysical, and juridical fictions that organize its expansion. He is the attempt to determine the continuity of the revolutionary project of humanism. With Spinoza, philosophy succeeds for the first time in negating itself as a science of mediation. In Spinoza there is the sense of a great anticipation of the future centuries; there is the intuition of such a radical truth of future philosophy that it not only keeps him from being flattened onto seventeenth-century thought but also, it often seems, denies any confrontation, any comparison. Really, none of his contemporaries understands him or refutes him.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Translated from the Italian by Michael Hardt. Originally published as L'anomalia selvaggia. Saggio su potere e potenza in Baruch Spinoza (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1981)
M - R

Time , Understanding , Future , Truth

“The philosophy of a purely theoretical thinker, who contemplates all things from the point of view of things in themselves, belongs in the same class as the attempt to apply abstract thought to the entire field of consciousness without meeting any byways or stops. Look at Baruch Spinoza, that true hero of thought, who studied in his own person the way in which the emotions and passions, as expressions of his internal mechanism, transform themselves for him into objects of geometrical analysis! In the meantime, until the heroism of Baruch Spinoza shall become the matter-of-fact virtue of everyday life in the higher developed humanity of the future, and until myths, poetry, metaphysics and religion shall no longer overshadow the field of consciousness, let us be content that up to now, and for the present, philosophy in its differentiated and its improved sense has served, and serves, as a critical instrument and helps science to keep its formal methods and logical processes clear; that it helps us in our lives to reduce the obstacles, which the fantastic projections of the emotions, passions, fears and hopes pile in the way of free thought; that it helps and serves, as Spinoza himself would say, to vanquish imaginationem et ignorantiam.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Antonio Labriola, Socialism and Philosophy (1897) [original in Italian]
G - L

Fear , Study , Religion , Personality

“To believe in God is to long for His existence and, further, it is to act as if he existed; it is to live by this longing and to make it the inner spring of our action. This longing or hunger for divinity begets hope, hope begets faith, and faith and hope beget charity. Of this divine longing is born our sense of beauty, of finality, of goodness.”

Miguel de Unamuno book The Tragic Sense of Life

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God

Hunger , God , Faith , Beauty

“Neither the black boy nor the white will ever be educated in the best and broadest sense of the term who seeks an education merely to reach an office, for, as in nature a stream never rises higher than its source, so in life men never rise higher than their ideals. The education that merely seeks an office must of necessity be limited to the dimensions of that office.”

William H. Crogman (1841–1931) American classical philologist

Source: Talks for the Times (1896), "The Importance of Correct Ideals" (1892), p. 281

Boy , Nature , Education , Life

“The waterbed trend was similar to the fulfillment movement, in the sense that you paid for something that was supposed to bring you happiness, but you wound up with something less fulfilling, in this case motion sickness and water damage.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Source: Nonfiction, Dave Barry Turns 50 (1998), p. 142

Water , Happiness

“Idea or Vision, in its sensuous meaning, would be something that could be perceived only by the bodily eye and not by any other sense such as taste, hearing, etc.; it would be such a thing as a rainbow, or the forms which pass before us in dreams. Idea or Vision, in its supersensuous meaning, would denote, first of all, in conformity with the sphere in which the word is to be valid, something that cannot be perceived by the body at all, but only by the mind; and then, something that cannot, as many other things can, be perceived by the dim feeling of the mind, but only by the eye of the mind, by clear perception.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book Address to the German Nation

The Chief Difference Between The Germans And The Other Peoples Of Teutonic Descent p. 59
Addresses to the German Nation (Reden an die deutsche Nation) 1808, Fourth Address

Idea , Dreams , Feeling

“That which the God devoted man may not do for any consideration, is indeed also outwardly forbidden in the Perfect State; but he has already cast it from him in obedience to the Will of God, without regard to any outward prohibition. That which alone this God-devoted man loves and desires to do, is indeed outwardly commanded in this Perfect State; but he has already done it in obedience to the Will of God. If, then, this religious frame of mind is to exist in the State, and yet never to come into collision with it, it is absolutely necessary that the State should at all times keep pace with the development of the religious sense among its Citizens, so that it shall never command anything which True Religion forbids, or forbid anything which she enjoins. In such a state of things, the well-known principle, that we must obey God rather than man, could never come into application; for in that case man would only command what God also commanded, and there would remain to the willing servant only the choice whether he would pay his obedience to the command of human power, or to the Will of God, which he loves before all things else. From this perfect Freedom and superiority which Religion possesses over the State, arises the duty of both to keep themselves absolutely separate, and to cast off all immediate dependence on each other.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 197

God , Religion , Time , Dependency

“What the Greeks sought, and what they obtained, was Equal Rights for all Citizens. In a certain sense, we might even say Equal Privileges, for there was no race favoured by the constitution more than another;—but there existed a great inequality of power, which indeed arose only by accident and not by the constitution of the State, but which nevertheless the State could not remedy;—and in so far there did not exist Equal Privileges.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 186

“When one rational being affects another rational being as mere matter, then the lower sense of that being is also affected, it is true, and is so affected necessarily and altogether independently of the freedom of that being, (as the lower sense is indeed always affected;) but it is not to be assumed that this affection was in the intention of the person who produced it. His intention was merely to attain his purpose, to express his conception in matter, and he never took into consideration whether that matter would feel it or not. Hence, the reciprocal influence of rational beings upon each other, as such, always occurs by means of the higher sense; for only the higher sense is one which cannot be affected without having been presupposed. Our criterion of this reciprocal influence remains, therefore, correct.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Science of Rights 1796, P. 108

Personality , Feeling , Freedom

“Until we establish a felt sense of kinship between our own species and those fellow mortals who share with us the sun and shadow of life on this agonized planet, there is no hope for other species, there is no hope for the environment, and there is no hope for ourselves.”

Jon Wynne-Tyson (1924) British writer

As quoted in Humanimal (2010) by Vergil Z. Ozeca, p. 172

Sun , Life , Hope

“For those who take the vegetarian option seriously and adopt it as their own, it may well connect with their spiritual or religious orientation, even their sense of meaning and purpose in life. Some might see these as grandiose claims, but the point is that vegetarianism sheds light upon, and is in turn reflected by, our philosophical outlook on ourselves, our world, and our place in it.”

Michael Allen Fox (1940)

Source: Deep Vegetarianism (1999), p. 181

World , Life , Light

“I will probably end my life fighting. … I just hope that if it does happen, it will be in an honest and fair competition. My body is fucked but my mind is still here. I’ve still got my senses about me and I know what’s right and wrong, which is the main thing. … I feel proud that I got here without cheating. Proud that I got here without taking any shortcuts and by doing it the proper way. My way. … I’d be champ already if it wasn’t for the cheaters. … We need the Ali Act put in place. Fighters want to know what they’re worth. … These guys don’t get paid jack shit.”

Mark Hunt (1974) New Zealand kickboxer and mixed martial artist

"If I die fighting, that’s fine", in Players Voice (4 July 2017) https://www.playersvoice.com.au/mark-hunt-if-i-die-fighting-thats-fine/#0A07ZKS7jbAZhme6.97.

Cheating , Hope , Fight , Way

“Those who are not in some sense of the younger generation will hardly realize what poignancy there is for us in the news of the death of Randolph Bourne. … Randolph Bourne belonged to us, and stood for us, in a way which he perhaps did not fully know, but which we now very keenly feel.”

Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) American writer

Floyd Dell quotes

Way , Death , Feeling

“Jim giggled when he laughed. His sense of humor could be sly and wicked.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

About, "Jim Henson's Muppets legacy lives on 25 years after his death" by Bill Prady

“I wish I could be near you to hold your hand and explain in some detail the reasons for my death. I know at this point that it has fallen upon you in a way that I wish would not have happened. I wanted to explain to you the night before I left New York that I was really going to Spain, and the reasons why. But I knew that no matter what I might have told you, it would never have made sense to you. I found that trying to explain was an impossibility. I am sorry for that.”

Bill Bailey (Spanish Civil War veteran) (1910–1995) American labor activist

The Kid from Hoboken: An Autobiography by Bill Bailey (1993)

Way , Death , Night

“It only makes sense in an academic culture in which transgression is by definition political and in which any kind of rage against society can be considered radical.”

Nick Turse (1975) American writer

David Farber, on Turse's views about Columbine High School massacre. The Martyrs of Columbine: Faith and the Politics of Tragedy, p. 25.

Making love , Rage

“It is clear, however, that the distinguishing mark of the whole development of theoretical chemistry and physics is the elimination of the anthropomorphic elements, especially specific sense-impressions, from the concepts. This process is called by Prof. M. Planck the objectification of the physical system.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction Note: Max Planck, "Acht Vorlesungen iiber theoretische Physik" (1910)
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)

“He had been an extremely thorough and patient Judge with unremitting industry and keen sense to discover truth and do justice. Law, liberty and justice were upheld with consummate ability and independence by His Lordship. On public controversies, some of his judgments are thought provoking. He disputed the correctness of any attempt to whittle down fundamental rights while making it clear that the right to property was not forever sacrosanct. The distinction between the law and order and the public order, has been brought out succinctly in his reported judgments.”

Mohammad Hidayatullah (1905–1992) 11th Chief Justice of India

By S.G.Page
Speech By Mr. S. G. Page, Government Pleader, High Court, Bombay, Made OnMonday, 28 September, 1992

Justice , Law , Truth , Making love

“I had interviewed him when he was Chief Minister of UP. As a Jat, a member of caste of small farmers, he had expressed practical ideas about helping poor Indians. But a certain slyness seemed to substitute for any sense of moral principle. Indira knew just the man to go when she felt the time was ripe to break up Morarji’s Janata coalition.”

Charan Singh (1902–1987) prime minister of India

David Van Praagh in: The Greater Game: India's Race with Destiny and China http://books.google.co.in/books?id=kCI4492cHTEC&pg=PA187, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 2003, p. 187

Idea , Time , Help

“Braid passionately emphasised the scientific approach to hypnotherapy. He based his own method upon well-established or common sense principles such as the effect of expectation and vivid imagination, the role of social imitation, and the power of focused attention to increase the effect of certain dominant ideas. These are also emphasised in the modern cognitive-behavioural theory of hypnosis. Braid’s down-to-earth approach therefore provides an ideal foundation for modern scientific study of hypnosis and practical hypnotherapy.”

James Braid (1795–1860) Scottish surgeon, hypnotist, and hypnotherapist

Donald Robertson, in "The Discovery of Hypnosis: The Collected Writings of James Braid" quoted in “The Original Philosophy of Hypnotism”.

Study , Imagination , Passion , Idea

“P. Bernays has pointed out on several occasions that, since the consistency of a system cannot be proved using means of proof weaker than those of the system itself, it is necessary to go beyond the framework of what is, in Hilbert’s sense, finitary mathematics if one wants to prove the consistency of classical mathematics, or even that of classical number theory. Consequently, since finitary mathematics is defined as the mathematics in which evidence rests on what is intuitive, certain abstract notions are required for the proof of the consistency of number theory…. In the absence of a precise notion of what it means to be evident, either in the intuitive or in the abstract realm, we have no strict proof of Bernays’ assertion; practically speaking, however, there can be no doubt that it is correct…”

Paul Bernays (1888–1977) Swiss mathematician

Kurt Gödel (1958, CW II, p. 241) as cited in: Feferman, Solomon. " Lieber Herr Bernays!, Lieber Herr Gödel! Gödel on finitism, constructivity and Hilbert's program* http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/bernays.pdf." dialectica 62.2 (2008): 179-203.

Mathematics

“Another time we had gone to the Kakanakote forest. I had a camera in my hand. I suddenly spotted a tusker and I was very excited. My Daddy with his typical sense of humour said, Enamma, kaielli camera itkondu photone thegithaillavalla.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

What, child, you have a camera in hand and you are not taking a photograph
My daddy, His Highness, the Maharaja of Mysore

Time

“This is why Kapoor and Balmond have emerged as embattled heroes of public art. Their Orbit tower is not consensual, or easy to make sense of. It is wild and unexpected. It is, I believe, the most exciting British public artwork since House. Those who commissioned and created it deserve acclaim for choosing electricity over dull consensus.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

Anish Kapoor's Olympic Park sculpture sends public art into Orbit

Making love , Housing , Art

“Indra can drive as deep and hard as anyone I have ever met, but she can do it with a sense of heart and fun.”

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

Roger Enrcio, Chief Executive, quoted in [Runkle, Beck Sheetz-, Sun Tzu for Women: The Art of War for Winning in Business, http://books.google.com/books?id=Q9V9mNj0Wd0C&pg=PA112, 18 December 2010, Adams Media, 978-1-4405-1178-3, 112–]

Heart

“Rekha, a photogenic girl with seductive eyes, languished in insubstantial roles. The audience was floored when there was a swift change in her screen personality, as well as her style of acting. She paid painstaking attention to her make-up and acting technique. She improved her dress sense and recorded albums to promote physical fitness. What Jane Fonda did for aerobics in America, Rekha did for yoga in India.”

Rekha (1954) Indian film actress

Quoted in Love, anger, the works!, 7 December 2013, Filmfare http://downloads.movies.indiatimes.com/site/june2002/flashback.html,

Girl , Personality , Making love , Change

“I believe he has a sense of integrity…Relatively speaking he has a cleaner record than most politicians in office.”

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

Shoba De, a columnist quoted in “Atal Bihari Vajpayee: Prime Minister of India" page=38

“Sometimes God comes into the soul when it has neither called, prayed, or summoned him. and he instills into the soul and uncommon fire and love and sweetness in which it delights and rejoices greatly. The soul believes that the presence of God himself has cause this consolation, but this is not certain. But then the soul perceives that God is within itself - although it cannot see him inwardly - because it does sense and take delight in that his grace is present. Yet even this is not certain.”

Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) Italian saint

The Memorial and Instructions

God , Soul , Love , Making love

“I always said that the decision to retire would be his alone but now that decision has been taken I feel a sense of sadness. We have lived through some unforgettable times together, some good and some bad, achieving results that will be hard to equal.”

Michael Schumacher (1969) German racing driver

Luca di Montezemolo, Ferrari president, cited in: Planet-F1 (2006) "Todt and Montezemolo hail 'legend' Schumi". on Planet-F1. September 12, 2006 (no longer online)

Time , Bad luck , Decision , Sadness

“A frequent source of misunderstanding has to do with the interpretation of fuzzy logic. The problem is that the term fuzzy logic has two different meanings. More specifically, in a narrow sense, fuzzy logic, FLn, is a logical system which may be viewed as an extension and generalization of classical multivalued logics. But in a wider sense, fuzzy logic, FLw is almost synonymous with the theory of fuzzy sets.”

Lotfi A. Zadeh (1921–2017) Electrical engineer and computer scientist

In this context, what is important to recognize is that: (a) FLw is much broader than FLn and subsumes FLn as one of its branches; (b) the agenda of FLn is very different from the agendas of classical multivalued logics; and (c) at this juncture, the term fuzzy logic is usually used in its wide rather than narrow sense, effectively equating fuzzy logic with FLw
Zadeh (1995) in Foreword of George J. Klir Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic: theory and applications.
1990s

Problem

“How do I describe the Rajinikanth I know? I would say he is, at the bottom of it all, human. That is the best adjective I have. It is this quality of humanness that stands out. He acts in front of the camera… never behind it. In the sense, he is a natural, unaffected person in real life. He is open, frank, very forthright, very loyal to his friends and family. A great human being.”

Rajinikanth (1950) Indian actor

Rajini acts in front of the camera, never behind it' (22 December 1999)

Family , Personality , Nature , Life

“He is a legend in every sense of the term. He is a writer, singer, director, lyricist and an actor par-excellence. We are extremely honoured to present the Lifetime Achievement Award to Kamal Haasan.”

Kamal Haasan (1954) Indian actor

Shyam Benegal, after Kamala hasan was selected for the honour of the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 15th Mumbai Film Festival for 50 years in the Indian film industry, in Kamal Haasan to be Bestowed with Lifetime Achievement Award (15 September 2013) http://www.ibtimes.co.in/articles/506113/20130915/kamal-haasan-lifetime-achievement-award-film-festival.htm

“What made her talent so great was her capacity to live what she sang. Her music was deepened by her connection to the struggles and the triumphs of the African American experience growing up in her father’s church, the community of Detroit, and her awareness of the turmoil of the South. She had a lifelong, unwavering commitment to civil rights and was one of the strongest supporters of the movement. She was our sister and our friend. Whenever I would see her, from time to time, she would always inquire about the well-being of people she met and worked with during the sixties.When she sang, she embodied what we were fighting for, and her music strengthened us. It revived us. When we would be released from jail after a non-violent protest, we might go to a late night club and let the music of Aretha Franklin fill our hearts. She was like a muse whose songs whispered the strength to continue on. Her music gave us a greater sense of determination to never give up or give in, and to keep the faith. She was a wonderful, talented human being. We mourn for Aretha Franklin. We have lost the Queen of Soul.”

Aretha Franklin (1942–2018) American musician, singer, songwriter, and pianist

John Lewis, "Congressman John Lewis on Aretha Franklin: ‘One of God’s precious gifts’" https://www.ajc.com/lifestyles/congressman-john-lewis-aretha-franklin-one-god-precious-gifts/PRXHP5dgRpjhhuIUdjGEsO/, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (August 16, 2018)

Soul , Faith , Time , Night

“Full of spirit, wit and good sense and as free of humbug as the man himself, The Freethinker’s Prayer Book by Khushwant Singh, is a book of inspiration, comfort and entertainment for every discerning reader.”

Khushwant Singh (1915–2014) Indian novelist and journalist

Quoted in The Freethinker’s Prayer Book by Khushwant Singh – Advance Book Review, 21 December 2013, Latest Book Reviews Net http://latestbookreviews.net/the-freethinkers-prayer-book-by-khushwant-singh-book-review-release-date/,

Books

“Left home in company with John Dixon to attend the internment of George Stephenson at Chesterfield. I fear he died an unbeliever. When I reflect on my first acquaintance with him and the resulting consequences my mind seems lost in doubt as to the beneficial results — that humanity has been benefited in the diminished use of horses and by the lessened cruelty to them, that much ease, safety, speed, and lessened expense in travelling is obtained, but as to the results and effects of all that railways had led my dear family into, being in any sense beneficial is uncertain.”

George Stephenson (1781–1848) English civil engineer and mechanical engineer

Edward Pease, diary entry (1846-08-16)

Home , Family , Speed , Horse

“If the potential of every number is in the monad, then the monad would be intelligible number in the strict sense, since it is not yet manifesting anything actual, but everything conceptually together in it.”

Iamblichus (240–320) Syrian philosopher

On the Monad
The Theology of Arithmetic

Intelligence

“I cannot think of a single answer that I made in the years that I argued before the Court while Justice White sat on it that seemed to satisfy him. While I won a number of cases that I argued before him, and he voted for my side in most of them, I never had the sense that anything I said pleased him. White, a former All-American running back (whose much-repeated college nickname, Whizzer, was one that appalled him), was no fan of press claims for broad First Amendment protection. He invariably asked questions that were both pointed and powerful.”

Byron White (1917–2002) Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, American football player

Floyd Abrams, Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment, (Viking Press, 2005), p. 71.

Thinking , Justice , Question

“He was never interested in conventional beauty. Sober, pinched, reflective, lined and melancholy, his portraits remind us of that. But how many American artists said more about the sense of being in the world? Eakins was that extreme rarity, an artist who refused to tell a lie even in the service of his own imagination.”

Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) American painter

Robert Hughes, "Thomas Eakins," Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists (1990).

Imagination , Beauty , Lie , World

“Reading in the third millennium B. C. may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.”

Julian Jaynes book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Book II, Chapter 2, p. 182
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

Reading

“The first thing that comes to my senses is your tone of your voice, remarkable one, warm, heady and involving.”

Simone Bittencourt de Oliveira (1949) Brazilian singer

Marília Pêra

“And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.”

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

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

Truth , Idea , Madness

“As I leave, I feel the value of shared ritual, community, common unity, and a forum in which to express energy and sensations that don’t have any safe context in secular society. We are paying a price for that. Where do we see this sense of abandon? Where do we participate in mass rituals of unity and transcendence? Where is it safe to put aside ego and self-consciousness?”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Self-confidence , Feeling , Communication

“What I have created here in Italy is neither very big nor profound (in the old sense of the word), but formidable. This summer I painted paintings that are the most profound that exist in the absolute. Let me explain these things somewhat.... profoundness as I understand it, and as Nietzsche intended it, is elsewhere than where it has been searched for until now.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

My paintings are small (the biggest is 50 x 70 cm), but each of them is an enigma, each contains a poem, an atmosphere (Stimmung) and a promise that you can not find in other paintings. It brings me immense joy to have painted them – when I exhibit them, possibly in Munich this spring, it will be a revelation for the whole world
Quote from De Chirico's letter to Mr. Fritz Gartz, Florence, 26 Jan. 1910; from LETTERS BY GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, GEMMA DE CHIRICO AND ALBERTO DE CHIRICO TO FRITZ GARTZ, MILAN-FLORENCE, 1908-1911 http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/559-567Metafisica7_8.pdf, p. 562
1908 - 1920

Painting , Understanding , Search , Summer

“The thing that distinguishes social systems from physical or even biological systems is their incomparable (and embarrassing) richness in special cases. Generalizations in the social sciences are mere pathways which lead through a riotous forest of individual trees, each a species unto itself. The social scientist who loses this sense of the essential individuality and uniqueness of each case is all too likely to make a solemn scientific ass of himself, especially if he thinks that his faceless generalizations are the equivalents of the rich variety of the world.”

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

Boulding (1958) "Evidences for an Administrative Science: A review of the Administrative Science Quarterly, volumes 1 and 2". In Administrative Science Quarterly. vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 14
1950s

Tree , Thinking , World , Science

“Ernest Bevin had many of the strongest characteristics of the English race. His manliness, his common sense, his rough simplicity, sturdiness and kind heart, easy geniality and generosity, all are qualities which we who live in the southern part of this famous island regard with admiration.”

Ernest Bevin (1881–1951) British labour leader, politician, and statesman

"Sir W. Churchill on 'a great Englishman'", The Times, 5 November 1953, p. 5
Winston Churchill's remarks on unveiling a bust of Bevin in the Foreign Office.

Parting , Heart

“It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

Life , Reading , Nature

“Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. But I could not conquer my sense of guilt, my feeling that the white men around me knew that I was changing, that I had begun to regard them differently.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

Reading , Change , Feeling , Mood

“But full emotional and intellectual belief never came. Perhaps if I had caught my first sense of life from the church I would have been moved to complete acceptance, but the hymns and sermons of God came into my heart only long after my personality had been shaped and formed by uncharted conditions of life. I felt that I had in me a sense of living as deep as that which the church was trying to give me, and in the end I remained basically unaffected.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

God , Personality , Heart , Life

“He left in his Optics, the earliest surviving table of angles of refraction from air to water. …This table, quoted and requoted until modern times, has been admired… A closer glance at it, however, suggests that there was less experimentation involved in it than originally was thought, for the values of the angles of refraction form an arithmetic progression of second order… As in other portions of Greek Science, confidence in mathematics was here greater than that in the evidence of the senses, although the value corresponding to 60° agrees remarkably well with experience.”

Ptolemy (100–170) Greco-Egyptian writer and astronomer of Alexandria

Carl B. Boyer, in The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (1959)

Confidence , Time , Self-confidence , Water

“I have been deeply shocked by this crime. President McKinley was not a ruler of exclusive or aristocratic tendencies. He was a good friend of the people, a genuine democrat in the best sense of the word. With regard to Mexico, President McKinley had ever evidenced such friendly sentiments that his death will be mourned in this country hardly less keenly than in the United States.”

William McKinley (1843–1901) American politician, 25th president of the United States (in office from 1897 to 1901)

President of Mexico Porfirio Díaz. The Authentic Life of President McKinley, page 398.

Death , People , Country

“Capitalism subordinates men to machines instead of using machines to liberate men from the burden of mechanical and repetitive work. it subordinates all social activities to the imperatives of an incessant drive for individual enrichment in terms of money, instead of gearing social life to the development of rich individualities and their social relations. The contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, inherent in every commodity, fully unfolds itself in this contradictory nature of capitalist machinery. When capitalism is not overthrown once it has created the material and social preconditions for a classless society of associated producers, this contradiction implies the possibility of a steadily increasing transformation of the forces of production into forces of destruction, in the most literal sense of the word: not only forces of destruction of wealth (crises and wars), of human wealth and human happiness, but also forces of destruction of life tout court.”

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) Belgian economist and Marxist philosopher

Introduction to Capital. Introduction to volume 1 (1976)

Money , War , Wealth , Nature

“The death of John Barrymore made us think again for a minute of F. Scott Fitzgerald. They were very different men: a lot alike. Undoubtedly, they both worked hard, but there was the same sense of a difficult technique easily mastered (too easily perhaps); there was the same legend of great physical magnetism, working incessantly for its own destruction; there was the same need for public confession, either desperate or sardonic; and there was always a good deal of time wasted, usually accompanied by the sweet smell of grapes. We have seen Scott Fitzgerald when everything he said was a childish parody of his own talent, and the last time we saw John Barrymore he was busy with a sick and humiliating parody of his. The similarity probably ends there. Up to the day he died, we believe, Fitzgerald still kept his original and eager devotion to his profession, along, we like to think, with the strict confidence that he might still achieve the strict perfection that was so often almost his. Barrymore, on the other hand, had given up long ago.”

John Barrymore (1882–1942) American actor of stage, screen and radio

Wolcott Gibbs, Season in the Sun (1951)

Confidence , Time , Business , Perfection

“Yes, in the sense that the negative is like the composer’s score. Then, using that musical analogy, the print is the performance.”

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

Paraphrased as "Film is the score and the print is the performance."
Sheff
David
May 1983
Playboy
http://davidsheff.com/article/ansel-adams/
Playboy Interview: Ansel Adams
226

Music

“Film has dream, film has music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames in a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. At the editing table, when I run the trip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind one frame after another, see almost imperceptible changes, wind faster — a movement.”

Ingmar Bergman book Laterna Magica

Laterna Magica (1987); The Magic Lantern : An Autobiography as translated by Joan Tate (1988).
Variant translation: Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.
As quoted in "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" by John Berger, Sight and Sound (June 1991).

Childhood , Soul , Dreams , Art

“Short of coming to their senses and abolishing the whole thing, we might expect that the rules for daylight saving time will remain the same for some time to come, but there is no guarantee.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

We can only be glad there is no daylight loan time, or we would face decades of too much daylight, only to be faced with a few years of total darkness to make up for it.
The Long, Painful History of Time http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html.

Time

“We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true; but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings — many of them not so much.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

" A Wind Storm in the Forests of the Yuba http://books.google.com/books?id=zj2gAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA55", Scribner's Monthly, volume XVII, number 1 (November 1878) pages 55-59 (at page 59); modified slightly and reprinted in The Mountains of California http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_mountains_of_california/ (1894), chapter 10: A Wind-Storm in the Forests
1890s, The Mountains of California (1894)

Tree , Way , Travel , Making love

“After this was done I reached in under my left armpit in approved American gangster fashion and produced my ugly little automatic. Without a further word I placed it on the front desk of my Steinway and proceeded with my concert. Every note was heard and, in a sense, I suppose I opened up the way in Hungary for modern music of a non-Bartó k– Kodá ly variety.”

George Antheil (1900–1959) American avant-garde composer, pianist, author and inventor

Music , Lying , Way , Fashion