Quotes about searching
page 8

“Let me remain a traveler
Searching my meaning ever.
Let me remain a poet
Singing my reason simple.”

From the poem Let me remain a poet
Song of a Bard and Other Poems (2005)

“One would think that agents charged with protecting us from "dirty nukes" would enjoy the same discretionary search authority as partrolmen who make traffic stops. In fact, they have less. If a patrolman pulls you over for weaving between lanes, and smells bourbon on your breath, he does not need a warrant to give you a breath test. But if an FBI agent learns that you are a member of a known terrorist group, and that you behaved suspiciously at a flight school, he must jump through bureaucratic hoops of fire to search your laptop computer.”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Uncuff the FBI: Congress Must Undo the Church Committe's Damage (2002)

School, Thinking, Learning

“... published today as a United Nations Special Report. The alleged rise of intelligence in so-called backward countries is ascribed by the scientists who conducted the three-year investigation to improved diet and sanitation, while the as-yet unconfirmed decline in advanced nations is attributed to intensified pollution. Asked to comment on the report just prior to leaving for Hollywood, where he is tonight slated to open his annual retrospective, Prexy said, quote, Well, if they’re so smart why aren’t they clever? End quote. At a press conference in Tegucigalpa the disappearance of Leonard Ross, field agent for Globe Relief, and Dr. Isaiah Williams, the British medico who’s also unaccounted for, was officially ascribed today to terrorism. Troops are searching the area intensively, but so far have reported no success. Following the shock resignation of the former president of the “Save the Med” fund, Dottore Giovanni Crespinolo, the Italian government has flatly denied his charge that the vast sums donated by corporations and individuals in forty-eight countries in the hope of saving the doomed landlocked sea have been embezzled. Reports from Rome, however...”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

January “NO BIGGER THAN A MAN’S HAND”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Hope, Quotes, Intelligence, Success

“Sleepless,
Twenty-four hours of searching
Searching for my life”

Kate Havnevik (1975) Norwegian singer-songwriter

Sleepless
Song lyrics

Life

“The Macedonians are a newly emergent people in search of a past to help legitimize their precarious present as they attempt to establish their singular identity in a Slavic world dominated historically by Serbs and Bulgarians. One need understand only a single geopolitical fact: As one measures conflicting Serb and Bulgarian claims over the past nine centuries, they intersect in Macedonia. Macedonia is where the historical Serb thrust to the south and the historical thrust to the west meet. This is not to say that present Serb and Bulgarian ambitions, where the past has precedence over the present and future.”

Eugene N. Borza (1935) American historian

The Eye Expanded By Frances B. Titchener, Richard F. Moorton

People, World, Understanding, Past

“Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.”

Sylvia Plath book Crossing the Water

"Mirror" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/mirror.html Crossing the Water (1971)

Girl, Fish, Tear

“We seek—we find—
And find the charm has with the search declined.
Affections—pleasures—all in which we trust, —
What do they end in?—Nothing, or disgust.”

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

(1st July 1826) Moralising
The London Literary Gazette, 1826

Pleasure

“Ideology critique raises a claim that it shares with hermeneutics, namely, the claim to understand an “author” better than he understands himself. What at first sounds arrogant about this claim can be methodologically justified. Others often really do perceive things about me that escape my attention—and conversely. They possess the advantage of distance, which I can profit from only retrospectively through dialogic mirroring. This, of course, would presuppose a functioning dialogue, which is precisely what does not take place in the process of ideology critique.
An ideology critique that does not clearly accept its identity as satire can, however, easily be transformed from an instrument in the search for truth into one of dogmatism. All too often, it interferes with the capacity for dialogue instead of opening up new paths for it.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 19

Truth, Understanding

“I get up, go out, and everything is changed. The blood drains from my head, the noise of things bursting, merging, avoiding one another, assails me on all sides, my eyes search in vain for two things alike, each pinpoint of skin screams a different message, I drown in the spray of phenomena.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

Change

“Though the churches, in general, abstained from interfering officially, the scientific activities of the physicists have always been influenced by their private religious views. The latter, of course, were not necessarily identical with the ecclesiastical doctrines, but the philosophical attitudes of the scientists were affected, at least to some extent, by the prevailing religious thought. Kepler, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton freely acknowledged this influence; it played a part in the principle of least action in the eighteenth century. After this period, in which Kant's philosophy proclaimed the complete independence of scientific understanding and religious belief, not much more about it is found in physical writings. However, this by no means signifies that the investigational urge of later scientists was not intimately connected with their religiosity. The tenet that the scientific experience of truth in any sense is "theoria," i. e., a view of God, might be said sincerely about the best of them. The search for knowledge without regard to its applicability for use has been "an essential trait of man through the centuries, a sign of his higher origin."”

Max von Laue (1879–1960) German physicist

[Max von Laue, History of physics, Academic Press Inc, 1950, http://www.archive.org/details/historyofphysics030356mbp, 3-5]

God, Truth, Understanding, Knowledge

“The judicial process, as was said at the outset of these lectures, is a process of search and comparison, and little else.”

Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870–1938) United States federal judge

Page 163
Other writings, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921)

“It seems obvious, then, that the search for solutions to the problems generated by a predominantly privately owned market-oriented society has been and will continue to be a major element in the political agenda of every democratic country.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

After the Revolution? (1970; 1990), Ch. 3 : Democracy and Markets

Problem, Country

“[American exceptionalism] is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński (1928–2017) Polish-American political scientist

Spokespersons of US Right 'In Most Cases Stunningly Ignorant, Interview in Der Spiegel http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,733079,00.html (December 6, 2010).

People, Understanding, Dependency

“Such as may make thee search the coffers round.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

At a Vacation Exercise. Line 31, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I will never be satisfied. Life is one constant search for betterment for me.”

Jayne Mansfield (1933–1967) American actress, singer, model

Here They Are Jayne Mansfield (1992)

Life

“Mary Follett devoted a lifetime to searching for the true principles of organization which would ensure a stable foundation for the steady, ordered progress of human well-being. That her search was not in vain will be evident to all who read the lectures. Her teaching is not theoretical, but is based on a close study of the practice of a large number of business undertakings. She chose this field of enquiry to supplement her work on local and national government because she realized that the principles which should determine organization are identical, no matter what the purpose which that organization is designed to serve.”

Seebohm Rowntree (1871–1954) British philanthropist industrialist and sociologist writer

Seebohm Rowntree, "Preface" to Mary Parker Follett with Henry C. Metcalf, and Lyndall Urwick (eds.). Dynamic administration: the collected papers of Mary Parker Follett. Harper & Brother Publishing, 1942

Business, Study, Reading

“Where you have the will you have the skill; study, search, practice application; healthy irreverence; look for the kink in the thing, be curious.”

Verghese Kurien (1921–2012) Indian founder of dairy-cooperative Amul

His views on his multi-skills in p. 168.
Quote, Thought Leaders

Study

“Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom. Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders. We believe that all men are created equal. Yet many are denied equal treatment. We believe that all men have certain unalienable rights. Yet many Americans do not enjoy those rights. We believe that all men are entitled to the blessings of liberty. Yet millions are being deprived of those blessings — not because of their own failures, but because of the color of their skin. The reasons are deeply imbedded in history and tradition and the nature of man. We can understand — without rancor or hatred — how this all happened. But it cannot continue. Our Constitution, the foundation of our Republic, forbids it. The principles of our freedom forbid it. Morality forbids it. And the law I will sign tonight forbids it.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Civil Rights Bill signing speech (1964)

Men, Justice, Law, Color

“Once some engineers from the veneer trust laboratory came to me for consultation with a quite skilful presentation of their problems. Diﬀerent productivity is obtained for veneer-cutting machines for diﬀerent types of materials; linked to this the output of production of this group of machines depended, it would seem, on the chance factor of which group of raw materials to which machine was assigned. How could this fact be used rationally?
This question interested me, but nevertheless appeared to be quite particular and elementary, so I did not begin to study it by giving up everything else. I put this question for discussion at a meeting of the mathematics department, where there were such great specialists as Gyunter, Smirnov himself, Kuz’min, and Tartakovskii. Everyone listened but no one proposed a solution; they had already turned to someone earlier in individual order, apparently to Kuz’min. However, this question nevertheless kept me in suspense. This was the year of my marriage, so I was also distracted by this. In the summer or after the vacation concrete, to some extent similar, economic, engineering, and managerial situations started to come into my head, that also required the solving of a maximization problem in the presence of a series of linear constraints.
In the simplest case of one or two variables such problems are easily solved—by going through all the possible extreme points and choosing the best. But, let us say in the veneer trust problem for ﬁve machines and eight types of materials such a search would already have required solving about a billion systems of linear equations and it was evident that this was not a realistic method. I constructed particular devices and was probably the ﬁrst to report on this problem in 1938 at the October scientiﬁc session of the Herzen Institute, where in the main a number of problems were posed with some ideas for their solution.
The universality of this class of problems, in conjunction with their difficulty, made me study them seriously and bring in my mathematical knowledge, in particular, some ideas from functional analysis.
What became clear was both the solubility of these problems and the fact that they were widespread, so representatives of industry were invited to a discussion of my report at the university.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

L.V. Kantorovich (1996) Descriptive Theory of Sets and Functions. p. 39; As cited in: K. Aardal, ‎George L. Nemhauser, ‎R. Weismantel (2005) Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science, p. 15-26

Marriage, Mathematics, Idea, Question

“In light of knowledge obtained, the happy achievement seems almost a matter of course, and any intelligent student can grasp it without too much trouble. But the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion, and final emergence into light—only those who have experienced it can understand that.”

Albert Einstein book The World as I See It

"Notes on the Origin of the General Theory of Relativity" (1934) Mein Weltbild, in Ideas and Opinions (1954) ed., Carl Seelig.
1930s

Confidence, Intelligence, Understanding, Knowledge

“We don’t need to be in dire straits to need to feel hope. On a perfectly beautiful, sunny, clear day when everything is going just right, you can still use hope. That we are able to be content within is the most hopeful message there is. That we can find that one thing the heart has searched for, for so long, is a very hopeful message. That’s the message I bring. And that brings people hope. That is what is important for all of us: that hope, that idea of self-fulfillment, that idea of being able to have contentment in one’s life.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Undated
Source: Conversation with Prem Rawat The Prem Rawat Foundation

Life, People, Beauty, Hope

“Underlying even the so-called problem of knowledge there is simply this human feeling, just as underlying the inquiry into the "why," the cause, there is simply the search for the "wherefore," the end. All the rest is either to deceive oneself or to wish to deceive others; and to wish to deceive others in order to deceive oneself.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), II : The Starting-Point

Feeling, Knowledge, Problem

“It is like a wide embrace gathering all those who have long searched for words of hope… Saddened by the continual strife amongst believers of many confessions and wearied of their intolerance towards each other, I discovered in the Bahá'í teaching the real spirit of Christ so often denied and misunderstood.”

Marie of Edinburgh, Queen of Romania (1875–1938) last Queen consort of Romania as the wife of King Ferdinand I

qtd. in Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By (1944)

Hope, Christ

“Whence first arose among unhappy mortals throughout the world that sickly craving for the future? Sent by heaven, wouldst thou call it? Or is it we ourselves, a race insatiable, never content to abide on knowledge gained, that search out the day of our birth and the scene of our life's ending, what the kindly Father of the gods is thinking, or iron-hearted Clotho? Hence comes it that entrails occupy us, and the airy speech of birds, and the moon's numbered seeds, and Thessalia's horrid rites. But that earlier golden age of our forefathers, and the races born of rock or oak were not thus minded; their only passion was to gain the mastery of the woods and the soil by might of hand; it was forbidden to man to know what to-morrow's day would bring. We, a depraved and pitiable crowd, probe deep the counsels of the gods.”
Unde iste per orbem primus venturi miseris animantibus aeger crevit amor? divumne feras hoc munus, an ipsi, gens avida et parto non umquam stare quieti, eruimus quae prima dies, ubi terminus aevi, quid bonus ille deum genitor, quid ferrea Clotho cogitet? hinc fibrae et volucrum per nubila sermo astrorumque vices numerataque semita lunae Thessalicumque nefas. at non prior aureus ille sanguis avum scopulisque satae vel robore gentes mentibus his usae; silvas amor unus humumque edomuisse manu; quid crastina volveret aetas scire nefas homini. nos, pravum et flebile vulgus, scrutati penitus superos.

Statius book Thebaid

Source: Thebaid, Book III, Line 551 (tr. J. H. Mozley)

Life, God, Age, World

“But absolutely nothing remains of that one and only medicament of which Hippocrates makes mention (darkly and mystically, I admit) in several places, and still less are its operations understood, inasmuch as no one now searches with lynx-like eyes into the profound depths of true natural philosophy, to gain an accurate knowledge of its composition and its virtues.”

Robert Fludd (1574–1637) British mathematician and astrologer

Robert Fludd, cited in: Waite (1887, p. 290)
According to Waite: "In Medicine he laments the loss of that universal panacea referred to by Hippocrates."

Nature, Knowledge

“A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Pt. 1
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Love, Life, Men, Sleep

“While I was going through it, although I must admit that I broke down many times as the indignities of repeated handcuffing, stripping and cavity searches, swabbing, hold up with common criminals and drug addicts were all being imposed upon me despite my incessant assertions of immunity, I got the strength to regain composure and remain dignified thinking that I must represent all of my colleagues and my country with confidence and pride.”

Devyani Khobragade (1974) Indian diplomat

Devyani Khobragade letter to her colleagues: The full text http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/devyani-khobrogade-letter-to-her-colleagues-the-full-text/2013/12/18/aaad7018-6804-11e3-ae56-22de072140a2_story.html, The Washington Post, 18 December 2014

Confidence, Thinking, Time, Country

“De Lubac discusses an atheism which means to suppress this searching, he says, “even including the problem as to what is responsible for the birth of God in human consciousness.””

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) French phenomenological philosopher

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 45

God, Birth, Problem

“All political progress has been the removal of forced and artificial relations among men, and the establishment of natural relations. Democracy is a search for natural leaders and the rights and privileges that belong to man by virtue of his manhood.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. II: From the Artificial to the Natural

Men, Democracy, Nature

“Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) French phenomenological philosopher

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 44

World, Motivation

“A sketch of the progress of Geology is the history of a constant and violent struggle between new opinions and ancient doctrines sanctioned by the implicit faith of many generations and supposed to rest on scriptural authority. The inquiry, therefore, although highly interesting to one who studies the philosophy of the human mind, is singularly barren of instruction to him who searches for truths in physical science.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 34
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Truth, Faith, History, Study

“Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.”

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

On Democracy (6 October 1884)

Truth, Lie, Imagination, Waiting

“The schools, having found the object of their long, blind searching, shall teach directness, simplicity, naturalness: they shall protect the young against palpable illusion. They shall teach that, while man once invented a process called composition, Nature has forever brought forth organisms. They shall encourage the love of Nature that wells up in every childish heart, and shall not suppress, shall not stifle, the teeming imagination of the young.
They shall teach, as the result of their own bitter experience, that conscious mental effort, that conscious emotionality, are poor mates to breed from, and that true parturition comes of a deep, instinctive, subconscious desire. That true art, springing fresh from Nature, must have in it, to live, much of the glance of an eye, much of the sound of a voice, much of the life of a life.
That Nature is strong, generous, comprehensive, fecund, subtile: that in growth and decadence she continually sets forth the drama of man's life.
That, thro' the rotating seasons, thro' the procession of the years, thro' the march of the centuries, permeating all, sustaining all, there murmurs the still, small voice of a power that holds us in the hollow of its hand.”

Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) American architect

Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual (1894)

Love, Life, School, Art

“Meditation … puts into question more or less everything you tend to do in your search for happiness. But if you lose sight of this, it can become just another strategy for seeking happiness—a more refined version of the problem you already have.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, Taming the Mind http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/taming-the-mind (April 12, 2014) 2010s

Question, Problem, Happiness

“Everyone, including I, is certain
that "that thing" they're searching for
is in the future.
But how many people have realized
that "that" is actually in the past?
I can't even guess.”

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

Duty
Lyrics, Duty

People, Past, Future

“Body pleasure is very different from promiscuity, which reflects a basic inability to experience pleasure. If a sexual relationship is not pleasurable, the individual looks for another partner. …Affectionately shared physical pleasure… tends to stabalize a relationship and eliminate the search.”

James W. Prescott (1930) American psychologist

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

Pleasure

“You cannot do anything without rousing the masses to action. A plenary meeting of the Soviet must be called to decide on mass searches in Petrograd and the goods stations. To carry out these searches, each factory and company must form contingents, not on a voluntary basis: it must be the duty of everyone to take part in these searches under the threat of being deprived of his bread card. We can't expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism: speculators must be shot on the spot. Moreover, bandits must be dealt with just as resolutely: they must be shot on the spot.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

“Meeting of the Presidium of the Petrograd Soviet With Delegates From the Food Supply Organisations" (27 January 1918) http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/MPPS18.html Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 501. 1910s

Parting

“Each worldview was a cultural product, but evolution is true and separate creation is not. […] Worldviews are social constructions, and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully. Fact and theory are intertwined, and all great scientists understand the interaction.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Shields of Expectation—and Actuality", p. 425
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Understanding, Knowledge

“Natural historians tend to avoid tendentious preaching in this philosophical mode (although I often fall victim to such temptations in these essays). Our favored style of doubting is empirical: if I wish to question your proposed generality, I will search for a counterexample in flesh and blood. Such counterexamples exist in abundance, for they form a staple in a standard genre of writing in natural history — the “wonderment of oddity” or “strange ways of the beaver” tradition.”

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

"Reversing Established Orders", p. 394
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Way, History, Question, Nature

“It is a strange and dismal thing that in a world of such need, such opportunity and such variety as ours, the search for an illusory peace of mind should go so zealously pursued and defended, while truth goes languishing.”

Karl Menninger (1893–1990) American psychiatrist

The Week (October 16, 1958)

Truth, World, Peace

“I kept stumbling and falling and stumbling and falling as I searched for the good. 'Why?' I asked myself. Now I believe that I was on the right path all along, particularly with the Green Belt Movement, but then others told me that I shouldn't have a career, that I shouldn't raise my voice, that women are supposed to have a master. That I needed to be someone else. Finally I was able to see that if I had a contribution I wanted to make, I must do it, despite what others said. That I was OK the way I was. That it was all right to be strong.”

Wangari Maathai (1940–2011) Kenyan environmental and political activist

As quoted in the article Wangari Maathai:"You Strike The Woman ..." by Priscilla Sears in the quarterly In Context #28 (Spring 1991)

Women, Way, Strong

“It is instinctive to search for something. Abstract art is inherently about the search - and about not finding anything. My gray monochromes have the same illusionistic implications as my landscapes. I want them to be seen as narratives - even if they are narratives of nothingness. Nothing is something. You might say they are like photographs of nothing.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

Art

“In the search for character and commitment, we must rid ourselves of our inherited, even cherished biases and prejudices. Character, ability and intelligence are not concentrated in one sex over the other, nor in persons with certain accents or in certain races or in persons holding degrees from some universities over others. When we indulge ourselves in such irrational prejudices, we damage ourselves most of all and ultimately assure ourselves of failure in competition with those more open and less biased.”

J. Irwin Miller (1909–2004) American businessman

Cummins website http://www.cummins.com/cmi/content.jsp?menuIndex=8&siteId=1&overviewId=684&menuId=1&langId=1033&

Sex, Intelligence, Failure, Universe

“The search for freedom through sex is doomed to failure.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 4

Sex, Failure, Freedom

“Back in the mid-1700s, Samuel Johnson observed that there were two kinds of knowledge: that which you know, and that which you know where to get. It was a moment when cheap and abundant print coupled with reliable postal networks triggered an information explosion that dramatically changed the way people thought. […] Now the Internet is changing how we think again. Just as print took over the once-human task of knowing, cyberspace is assuming the task of knowing where to get what we seek. […] Now we revel in search, but most of what we search for isn't worth seeking, as the top search lists on Google, Yahoo and Bing make clear. […] The Internet has changed our thinking, but if it is to be a change for the better, we must add a third kind of knowledge to Johnson's list — the knowledge of what matters.”

Paul Saffo (1954) American writer

"A Third Kind of Knowledge" http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_7.html#saffo, in The Edge Annual Question—2010: How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_index.html, January 2010

People, Way, Knowledge, Thinking

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

The Brook Kerith http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12821/12821-h/12821-h.htm, ch. 11 (1916).

Family, For Men, World, Travel

“The dialogue is laughably cheesy throughout, but perhaps that's part of Basic Instinct's appeal. In fact, there are times when the film comes close to achieving a status where it's so bad it becomes entertaining. … If you're looking for an intelligent thriller with real characters, Basic Instinct will seem like a fraud. If, on the other hand, you don't care whether the story makes sense and all you're in search of are cheap thrills and naked bodies, the movie delivers. Then again, so does a lot of Cinemax's late night programming.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=199 of Basic Instinct (1992). Two star reviews

Intelligence, Fraud, Sense, Time

“He [ Jan Toorop, an older and famous Dutch religious painter] sees the Catholic faith as A. Besant, [a British Theosophiste and women's right activiste, then] views it in its primeval period: the Catholic religion as it was originally, is the same as Theosophy, is it not? I remained broadly in agreement with Toorop, and I could tell that he goes to the depths, and that he is searching for the spiritual.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in Mondrian's letter to Cornelis Spoor, Domburg October 1910; Van Ginneken and Joosten, op. cit. (note 26), pp. 263; as cited in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 47
1910's

Women, Faith, Religion

“The search for original cases and the "superior" rules that would emerge from them spread far outside legal practice. Wallace Donham, dean of the Harvard Business School from 1919 to 1942, was trained at the law school in the heady days of the case system's early and enthusiastic reception. Where law and business parted ways was in the contingent matter of the availability of ready- made cases — law faculty simply reached for their shelves, while professors of business needed to create a new literary species — the business case book.”

Peter Galison (1955) American physicist

Source: Image and Logic, 1997, p. 57

Books, School, Law, Way

“It looked like lively abstract art. Symbols in search of context.”

Jeff VanderMeer book Finch

Source: Finch (2009), p. 74

Art

“Donald Trump: Meredith, he spent two million dollars in legal fees trying to get away from this issue. And if he weren't lying, why wouldn't he just solve it? And I wish he would, because if he doesn't, it's one of the greatest scams in the history of politics, and in the history period. You are not allowed to be a president if you're not born in this country. He may not be born in this country. And I'll tell you what, three weeks ago I thought he was born in this country. Right now, I have some real doubts. I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they're finding.
Meredith Vieira: You have people now, down there searching—
Trump: Absolutely.
Vieira: I mean, in Hawaii?
Trump: Absolutely. And they cannot believe what they're finding. I would like to have him show his birth certificate, and can I be honest with you, I hope he can. Because if he can't, if he can't, if he wasn't born in this country, which is a real possibility, I'm not saying it hap— I'm saying it's a real possibility, much greater than I thought two or three weeks ago, then he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics. And beyond politics.”

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

Today 2011-04-07 NBC Television regarding Barack Obama Two million dollars is the sum of all the Obama presidential campaign's post-election legal expenses. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/apr/12/donald-trump/donald-trump-claims-obama-has-spent-2-million-lega/ 2010s, 2011

People, Hope, History, Lying

“Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral looking an object?”

Max Perutz (1914–2002) Austrian-born British molecular biologist

The Hemoglobin Molecule, Scientific American, 211, 65-76, November 1964. This comment refers to the appeareace of the low resolution structure of hemoglobin, which Perutz was instrumental in elucidating in a heroic effort that spanned 1937 to 1959. In the course of this work, Perutz and his co-workers developed many of the techniques that are used to this day to determine the three-dimensional structures of macromolecules.

Truth

“The romantic [Dutch] movement under the leadership of the geniuses Nuyen [c. 1830] also attracted me to follow. And in spite of the fact that in this way people lost their color and embellishment and often degenerating into chic, later on, a more sensible search arose for enlivening of coloration, heightening effect and strengthening the relief.”

Johannes Bosboom (1817–1891) Dutch painter

version in original Dutch (citaat van Johannes Bosboom, in Nederlands): De romantische beweging onder aanvoering van den genialen nl:Wijnand Nuijen trok ook mij aan tot volgen. En al verviel men langs dien weg in gekleurdheid en opgesmuktheid, vaak ontaardend in chic; er ontsproot daaruit later een meer verstandig zoeken naar verlevendiging van coloriet, verhooging van effect, vermeerdering van reliëf. Quote from Bosboom's small autobiography, 1891; as cited in De Hollandsche Schilderkunst in de Negentiende Eeuw, G. H. Marius; https://ia800204.us.archive.org/31/items/dehollandschesch00mariuoft/dehollandschesch00mariuoft.pdf Martinus Nijhoff, s-'Gravenhage / The Hague, tweede druk, 1920, pp. 74-75 (translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek) 1890's

People, Color, Way

“He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

“Socrates,” p. 67
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999), Sequence: “A Stone and a Word”

History, Time

“I believe that the nature of man is a contradiction rooted in the conditions of human existence that requires a search for solutions, which in their turn create new contradictions and now the need for answers.
I believe that every answer to these contradictions can really satisfy the condition of helping man to overcome the sense of separation and to achieve a sense of agreement, of unity, and of belonging.
I believe that in every answer to these contradictions, man has the possibility of choosing only between going forward or going back; these choices, which are translated into specific actions, are means toward the regressing or toward the progressing of the humanity that is in us.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Credo (1965)

Nature, Sense, Help

“What is God? The telescope by which we hold converse with the stars, the microscope which unveils the secrets of nature, the crucible of the chemist, the knife of the anatomist, the reflective faculties of the philosopher, all the common instruments of science, avail not here. On the threshold of that impenetrable mystery, a voice arrests our steps. From out the clouds and darkness that are round about God's throne, the question comes, "Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?"”

Thomas Guthrie (1803–1873) British divine

Source: The Gospel in Ezekiel Illustrated in a Series of Discourses (1856), PP. 63-64 (Man Suffering).

God, Secret, Star, Question

“A man and a woman who, in their young days, agree to have done with sentimental life thereby renounce the search for adventure, the intoxication of new encounters, and the amazing refreshment produced by falling in love again. Their most vital source of energy is cut off; they are doomed to premature insensibility. Their life, scarcely begun, is finished. Nothing can break the monotony of an existence made up of burdens and duties. No further hope, no surprises, no conquests. Their one love will soon be tainted by the cares of housekeeping and the children's education. They will reach old age without ever having known the joys of youth. Marriage destroys romantic love which alone could justify it.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Marriage

Love, Life, Marriage, Children

“It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment, or the courage, to pay the price…. One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover, and yet demand no easy return of love. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963)

Love, Pain, World, Lovers

““Global warming” refers to the global-average temperature increase that has been observed over the last one hundred years or more. But to many politicians and the public, the term carries the implication that mankind is responsible for that warming. This website describes evidence from my group’s government-funded research that suggests global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution. Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming…it has simply been assumed that global warming is manmade. This assumption is rather easy for scientists since we do not have enough accurate global data for a long enough period of time to see whether there are natural warming mechanisms at work.”

Roy Spencer (1955) American meteorologist

Global Warming: Natural or Manmade? http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-natural-or-manmade/

Nature, Time

“Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals.
Anything such a man asks shall be granted. He is wanted in every city, town and village — in every office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such: he is needed and needed badly — the man who can "Carry a Message to Garcia."”

Elbert Hubbard book A Message to Garcia

A Message to Garcia (1899)

World

“While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral considerations, those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge. If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one and if those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by Spinoza's Amor Dei Intellectualis, they would hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements.”

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

1940s, Religion and Science: Irreconcilable? (1948)

Knowledge, Universe, Science, Perfection

“Whatever pretended pessimists in search of notoriety may say, most people are naturally kind, at heart.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 14 : Peculiar Conduct of a Personage

People, Nature, Heart

“A fanciful and flowery and heated imagination beware of; because the things of God are of deep import; and time, and experience, and careful and ponderous and solemn thoughts can only find them out. Thy mind, O man! if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity—thou must commune with God.”

Joseph Smith, Jr. book Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith

Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 137 (25 March 1839)
1830s

God, Soul, Imagination, Communication

“The world could burn around her, the cities turn to dust, the cries of a hundred thousand fill the air, and she would get up after the fire died and walk barefoot and burned over the charred soil in search of clean water, a weapon, a purpose. She would rebuild.”

Kameron Hurley (1980) American writer

Source: God’s War (2011), Chapter 31 (p. 231).

World, Water

“The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

Biophilia (1984)

Life, Sense, Time

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! Late have I loved you! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you.”
Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! et ecce intus eras et ego foris, et ibi te quaerebam.

Aurelius Augustinus book Confessions

X, 27, as translated in Theology and Discovery: Essays in honor of Karl Rahner, S.J. (1980) edited by William J. Kelly
Variant translations:
So late I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! So late I loved you!
The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett‎ (2007), by Lee Oser, p. 29
Too late I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! Too late I loved you! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you.
Introduction to a Philosophy of Religion (1970) by Alice Von Hildebrand
Confessions (c. 397)

Love, Beauty

“It is a false doctrine that labor must assume all management. Those best suited for management must manage, whatever may lie their source. Every industry is searching eagerly for brains. My observation convinces me that most business firms pledged to welfare work are interested in their employed; they often remain open in order to protect those who serve them, even though it might be more profitable for them to close down. People need to stop to think, when the laborer clamors against the unorganized labor market, whether the menace is from the immigrant or from some other source. For no business enterprise wishes its help to leave that it may employ others; the turnover is one of the most expensive things industry has to face. The expense of breaking in new help is appalling.”

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

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

People, Lie, Business, Thinking

“I felt that on a basis of a "search for the miraculous" it would be possible to unite together a very large number of people who were no longer able to swallow the customary forms of lying and living in lying.”

P. D. Ouspensky book In Search of the Miraculous

In Search of the Miraculous (1949)

People, Lying

“As I looked round the clearing at the ranks of squatting warriors and the small isolated group of my own men, I knew that this moonlight meeting in unknown Africa with a savage potentate who hated Europeans was the realization of my boyhood dreams. I had come here in search of adventure: the mapping, the collecting of animals and birds were all incidental. The knowledge that somewhere in this neighbourhood three previous expeditions had been exterminated, that we were far beyond any hope of assistance, that even our whereabouts were unknown, I found wholly satisfying.”

Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003) British explorer

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 146.

Men, Hate, Dreams, Hope

“The tidings I received concerning Hungary were horrifying. The looting, rape and violence that had followed upon the entry of the Red Army into Budapest surpassed the horrors with which we had grown familiar in reports from Vienna and Berlin. Neither small girls nor old women were spared. Cases were known of women in Russian uniforms knocking down men who would not do their bidding. Commando troops with special equipment searched for gold and other precious metals. In the banks, safes were broken open, and the contents, whether they belonged to Hungarians, foreigners or even allies, were looted. The pillage went on for weeks, and banks, business firms and private houses were searched time and time again. The Jews were treated no better than the rest of the population, who were picked off the streets and set to work.”

Miklós Horthy (1868–1957) Hungarian Admiral and Regent 1920-1944

Source: Memoirs, p. 303

Women, Men, Girl, Business

“Of all animals man only is endowed with reason, properly so called, so he only hath a will, and is capable of virtue and vice, rewards and punishments. Yet something bearing a resemblance to each of these, may also be found in brutes, especially such as are more perfect, and more capable of discipline. For there is in them a certain faculty that answers to reason, called by some an inferior degree of reason, whereby they not only consider in a manner what is pleasant and profitable, and search for the means of attaining them; but they likewise acknowledge a certain manner of living suitable to their nature prescribed to them by God, which has some affinity to virtue.”

Johannes Crellius (1590–1633) German theologian

Ethicae Christianae, Book II, Ch. 1; as quoted in Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), London, 1737, Vol. 4, Ch. Rorarius, p. 905 https://books.google.it/books?id=JmtXAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA905.

God, Nature, Animals, Perfection

“We speak of concrete and not 'abstract painting', because we have finished with the period of research and speculative experience. In their search for purity artists were obliged to abstract from 'natural forms' in which the plastic elements were hidden, in order to eliminate natural forms and to replace them with 'artistic forms'. To-day the idea of 'artistic form' is as obsolete as the idea of 'natural form'. We establish the period of pure painting by constructing 'spiritual form.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Creative spirit becomes concrete.
Quote on 'Concrete art', in: 'Comments on the basic of concrete painting', Paris, January 1930; 'Art Concret', April 1930, pp. 2–4
1926 – 1931

Idea, Nature, Painting

“And if we do but watch the hour,
There never yet was human power
Which could evade, if unforgiven,
The patient search and vigil long
Of him who treasures up a wrong.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Mazeppa (1819), stanza 10.

“Net neutrality would require that every search engine produce an equal number of results that satisfy every disagreement about [every] issue… Just think of it as Fairness Doctrine for the Internet. I'm not making this up.”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

On net neutrality, The Rush Limbaugh Show, March 16, 2010 http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_031610/content/01125111.guest.html

Thinking

“It may be that ultimately the search for dark matter will turn out to be the most expensive and largest null result experiment since the Michelson-Morely experiment, which failed to detect the ether.”

John Moffat book Reinventing Gravity

Source: Reinventing Gravity (2008), Chapter 4, Dark Matter, p. 77

“If women ran the world, we'd still be searching for the wheel.”

Maddox (1978) American internet writer

Twenty-six things a perfect guy would do, and other propaganda disseminated by misguided women. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=26_things The Best Page in the Universe

Women, World

“We live so much of our lives in chaos. Human history can be viewed as an endless search for greater order: everything from language to religion to law to science tries to impose a framework on chaotic existence. The existentialists, sometimes wrongly described as disbelieving in an underlying order, saw the risks and the foolishness of the obsession with creating one. Hitler showed the risk, as did any number of populist tyrants before him. I teach my students that law, too, shows the risk, when we try to regulate a phenomenon—human behavior—that we do not even understand. I am not arguing against law…but against the Panglossian assumption that we can ever do law particularly well. The darkness in which we live dooms us to do it badly.”

Stephen L. Carter book The Emperor of Ocean Park

Source: The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), Ch. 18, More News by Phone, III

Religion, Law, Behavior, History

“It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to search for prejudices among the beliefs and values that we hold.”

Peter Singer book Practical Ethics

Source: Practical Ethics, 3rd Edition (2011), Ch. 3: Equality for Animals? (p. 49)

“Toward dawn, he dreamed that he was in hiding, in one of the naves of the Clementine Library. What are you looking for? a librarian wearing dark glasses asked him. I'm looking for God, Hladik replied. God, the librarian said, is in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand volumes in the Clementine. My parents and my parents' parents searched for that letter; I myself have gone blind searching for it.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Ficciones

"The Secret Miracle"
Ficciones (1944)

God, Dreams, Parent

“As I understand the various opinions today: One Justice holds that two-parent notification is unconstitutional (at least in present circumstances) without judicial bypass, but constitutional with bypass […]; four Justices would hold that two-parent notification is constitutional with or without bypass […]; four Justices would hold that two-parent notification is unconstitutional with or without bypass, though the four apply two different standards […]; six Justices hold that one-parent notification with bypass is constitutional, though for two different sets of reasons […]; and three Justices would hold that one-parent notification with bypass is unconstitutional […]. One will search in vain the document we are supposed to be construing for text that provides the basis for the argument over these distinctions and will find in our society’s tradition regarding abortion no hint that the distinctions are constitutionally relevant, much less any indication how a constitutional argument about them ought to be resolved. The random and unpredictable results of our consequently unchanneled individual views make it increasingly evident, Term after Term, that the tools for this job are not to be found in the lawyer’s – and hence not in the judges – workbox. I continue to dissent from this enterprise of devising an Abortion Code, and from the illusion that we have authority to do so.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

On whether a state law may require notification of both parents before a minor can obtain an abortion; Hodgson v. Minnesota (1990, concurring in the judgment and dissenting in part), 497 U.S. 417 http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/497/417.html, No. 88-605 ; decided June 25, 1990 1990s

Justice, Understanding, Parent

“Thought is born of failure. When action satisfies there is no residue to hold the attention; to think is to confess a lack of adjustment which we must stop to consider. Only when the human organism fails to achieve an adequate response to its situation is there material for the process of thought, and the greater the failure the more searching they become.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 1

Failure, Thinking

“Time and experience have forcefully taught that the power to inspect dwelling places, either as a matter of systematic area-by-area search or, as here, to treat a specific problem, is of indispensable importance in the maintenance of community health; a power that would be greatly hobbled by the blanket requirement of the safeguards necessary for a search of evidence of criminal acts.”

Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) American judge

Frank v. Maryland, 359 U.S. 360, 372 (1959); majority opinion in 5-4 ruling that allowed health inspectors to enter a private home without a search warrant (May 4, 1959).
Judicial opinions

Health, Communication, Problem, Time

“When sexuality is operating in the service of intimacy, it is the fact that it is the particular other who is responding to the vulnerability inherent in sustaining desire that generates intensity and meaning. It is precisely the physiological intensity of the sexual response that lends the sexual encounter its dramatic interpersonal significance. This suggests that it is a mistake to regard the role of sexuality in relation to needs for relatedness and attachment as a "sexualization," which implies that sex is carrying something that can and somehow should be attended to in other ways. (Although this is sometimes the case.) The distinction between preoedipal and oedipal developmental levels often implies such an artificial and misleading separation between sexual experience and issues of attachment and connection. There is perhaps nothing better suited for experiencing and deepening the drama of search and discovery than the mutual arousal, sustaining, and quenching of sexual desire.”

Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000) American psychologist

Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 107-108

Sex, Way

“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy; and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is, that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

From The Twilight Zone episode The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street (March 6, 1960).
The Twilight Zone

Men, Children

“His last word had been my name. He had called out to me and I had not answered.
I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!”

Elie Wiesel book Night

About the death of his father
Night (1960)

Pain, Tear

“One thing leads to another, and soon you are searching for answers to basic questions.Another time during lectures on Classical Logic, we were introduced to an “experimentum crucis”. It was illustrated by the deciding experiment of Fizeau on the speed of light in water as compared to its speed in air. Since wave theory predicts that speed in water is less, and corpuscular theory (with point particles) predicts it would be faster, this is supposed to have selected the wave theory is correct. But then how would one accommodate the photoelectric effect? Then it turns out that if the “corpuscle” of light had a finite size, corpuscular theory also predicts lower speed of light in water. But then one can ask how come photoelectric emission being prompt even in feeble light, how could the energy of a photon spread over π(λ/2)2 act as a whole and liberate a single photoelectron! This leads us to question the square of the amplitude being interpreted as the probability of the particle being formed in the immediate vicinity. How do probabilities enter quantum mechanics? Thus the questions (and the quest) go on.”

E. C. George Sudarshan (1931–2018) Indian physicist

in A Glance Back at Five Decades of Scientific Research, published in Particles and Fields: Classical and Quantum, Journal of Physics: Conference Series 87 (2007), IOP Publishing, p. 1-2.

Question, Light, Water, Time

“The search for meaning is not limited to science: it is constant and continuous--all of us engage in it during all our waking hours the search continues even in our dreams. There are many ways of finding meaning, and there are no absolute boundaries separating them.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Evolution: the general theory (1996), p. 3.

Dreams, Way, Science

“… we can afford many mistakes in the search. The main thing is to make as fast as possible.”

John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) American physicist

As quoted by Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, and Wojciech H. Zurek. "John Wheeler, relativity, and quantum information." https://authors.library.caltech.edu/15184/1/Misner2009p1638Phys_Today.pdf Physics Today 62, no. 4 (April 2009): 40–46 (quote from p. 44) [10.1063/1.3120895]

“Be sure of the fact before you lose time in searching for a cause.”

Horace Mann (1796–1859) American politician

James Burgh, in The Dignity of Human Nature (1754)
Misattributed

Time

“Somehow, suddenly, a musical idea occurs to you; either a whole phrase, or three notes, or a series of chords, something that seems pregnant with possibilities for development. Once you have the kinds of ideas that fascinate you, you're no longer in a position to decide the nature of the animal. It's going to take its essence from the musical ideas that occur to you…. Some musical ideas are too short, they don't seem long enough to carry you through ten minutes of music, so you have to start searching about for other ideas; contrasting ones that seem to fit with the original ones.”

Aaron Copland (1900–1990) American composer, composition teacher, writer, and conductor

Aaron Copland: the Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, ISBN 0805049096.

Music, Idea, Nature, Animals

“Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

Life, Peace

“I refer, of course, to the debts our nation has amassed for itself over decades of indulgence. It is the new Red Menace, this time consisting of ink. We can debate its origins endlessly and search for villains on ideological grounds, but the reality is pure arithmetic.”

Mitch Daniels (1949) Governor of Indiana

Reported in Kathryn Jean Lopez, " Mitch Daniels Takes CPAC http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/259623/mitch-daniels-takes-cpac-kathryn-jean-lopez", National Review Online (February 11, 2011).

Reality, Time