Quotes about space
page 22

“To see and feel one’s beloved naked for the first time is one of life’s pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 18 (pp. 348-349)

Love, Life, Pain, Truth

“Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

As quoted in "V.S. Pritchett Himself" http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/06/18/specials/theroux-pritchett.html?_r=1&oref=slogin by Paul Theroux in The New York Times (22 May 1977)

People

“Giving it away helps defuse complex intellectual property issues of ownership and control that can distract the universities from their missions to disseminate knowledge." - commmenting on MIT's Open Courseware program”

Hal Abelson (1947) computer scientist

Source: MIT's maverick view of intellectual property worth considering http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA18.01C.hendricks0318.768fcaac.html

Knowledge, Help

“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise or, at least, neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Section III, Chap. II.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part I

Time, Personality

“Everywhere the need exists for maternal sympathy and help, and thus we are able to recapitulate in the one word motherliness that which we have developed as the characteristic value of woman. Only, the motherliness must be that which does not remain within the narrow circle of blood relations or of personal friends; but in accordance with the model of the Mother of Mercy, it must have its root in universal divine love for all who are there, belabored and burdened.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), The Significance of Woman's Intrinsic Value in National Life (1928)

Love, Help, Maternity, Personality

“1. The human mind is so constructed that it must see every perception in a time-relation—in an order—and every perception of an object in a space-relation—as outside or beside our perceiving selves.
2. These necessary time-relations are reducible to Number, and they are studied in the theory of number, arithmetic and algebra.
3. These necessary space-relations are reducible to Position and Form, and they are studied in geometry.
Mathematics, therefore, studies an aspect of all knowing, and reveals to us the universe as it presents itself, in one form, to mind. To apprehend this and to be conversant with the higher developments of mathematical reasoning, are to have at hand the means of vitalizing all teaching of elementary mathematics.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Editor's Introduction, The Teaching of Elementary Mathematics https://books.google.com/books?id=NKoAAAAAMAAJ (1906) by David Eugene Smith

Mathematics, Study, Time

“We detect light and particles that have traveled billions of light years on their way across the universe to us. During the billions of years of travel, very small effects due to quantum gravity can be amplified to the point that we can detect them.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

"Loop Quantum Gravity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Way, Travel, Light

“He [Marcus Aurelius] constantly recurs to his fundamental principle that the universe is wisely ordered, that every man is a part of it and must conform to that order which he cannot change, that whatever the Deity has done is good, that all mankind are a man's brethren, that he must love and cherish them and try to make them better, even those who would do him harm.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

The Philosophy of Antoninus

Love, Change, Parting

“Know that the difficulties which lead to confusion in the question what is the purpose of the Universe or of any of its parts, arise from two causes: first, man has an erroneous idea of himself, and believes that the whole world exists only for his sake; secondly, he is ignorant both about the nature of the sublunary world, and about the Creator's intention to give existence to all beings whose existence is possible, because existence is undoubtedly good.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.25

World, Idea, Question, Nature

“There are so many elements flying in so many different directions that you really have to go with what feels like instinctively. The nature of the universe is fairly whimsical and nonsensical. In the most somber, beatific peacefulness there's complete chaos and maniacal laughter. I think music that doesn't reflect that is boring.”

Beck (1970) American Musician (b.1970)

Guitar magazine, January 1999

Peace, Music, Feeling, Nature

“At any rate we may be sure that the political instinct of our bourgeois opponents, as soon as their class interests come into play, will lead them to take a position hostile to us. A classical example is furnished by Belgium, where, as already remarked, a compromise was concluded under the most favorable circumstances conceivable, between the socialists and the liberals. Our party was in undisputed possession of the leadership and was therefore in no danger of being cheated out of the fruits of the common victory. The end sought was universal, equal and direct suffrage. But the clerical party knows its boys, knows its Pappenheimers. It knows that the bourgeoisie has no class interest in giving the laborers, who, in modern industrial states, constitute a majority of the population, the universal suffrage and thereby the prospect of winning a majority and getting political supremacy. It made a counter demand for proportional representation with plural voting, that is, giving more votes to the rich, and thereby granting to the radical bourgeoisie a share in the government, if it would assist in defeating universal and direct suffrage. And behold, without a minute’s hesitation the gentlemen of the radical bourgeoisie broke their agreement with the socialists and joined the clericals in their fight against universal suffrage and the social democracy. Whoever is not convinced by this example that the emancipation struggle of the proletariat is a class struggle is one on whom further arguments would be wasted.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Hostility, Democracy, Boy, Victory

“the axis of the universe
—love”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

73
73 poems (1963)

Love

“Barack the boy was raised by his white maternal grandparents; his Kenyan father abandoned him. The qualities Americans appeared to find universally appealing in the ambitious, affable Obama—his confidence and calm, and his commitment to community and kin, education and excellence—these came from Kansas, not Kenya.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"The Big Lie About Obama and Race," http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=482 WorldNetDaily.com, January 23, 2009. 2000s, 2009

Education, Confidence, Boy, Communication

“We call the mind that wants to make the way of the Universe clear and to put it into practice the mind that seeks truth. However clever a dog or a monkey may be, they cannot realize the universal mind. Only human beings have the privilege and capacity to realize it. If you have a mind that seeks truth, you are happy because this is the proof that you are a real human being.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

18 : The mind that seeks truth
Ki Sayings (2003)

Truth, Dogs, Way, Happiness

“Annihilation means, with the Buddhistical philosophy, only a dispersion of matter, in whatever form or semblance of form it may be; for everything that bears a shape was created, and thus must sooner or later perish, i. e., change that shape; therefore, as something temporary, though seeming to be permanent, it is but an illusion, Maya; for, as eternity has neither beginning nor end, the more or less prolonged duration of some particular form passes, as it were, like an instantaneous flash of lightning. Before we have the time to realize that we have seen it, it is gone and passed away for ever; hence, even our astral bodies, pure ether, are but illusions of matter, so long as they retain their terrestrial outline. The latter changes, says the Buddhist, according to the merits or demerits of the person during his lifetime, and this is metempsychosis. When the spiritual entity breaks loose for ever from every particle of matter, then only it enters upon the eternal and unchangeable Nirvana. He exists in spirit, in nothing; as a form, a shape, a semblance, he is completely annihilated, and thus will die no more, for spirit alone is no Maya, but the only REALITY in an illusionary universe of ever-passing forms.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled, Volume I, Chapter VII

Reality, Change, Time, Personality

“The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when the scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called “final causes.” The final cause of a thing or event meant the purpose which it was supposed to serve in the universe, its cosmic purpose.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p.5.

Age, Unfaithfulness, Faith

“The president just seems to be living in some sort of alternative universe populated by the failed gods of his narcissism and vainglory.”

Josh Marshall Talking Points Memo

Talking Points Memo (2007-09-14) http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/053207.php

God

“The system of scholastic disputations encouraged in the Universities of the middle ages had unfortunately trained men to habits of indefinite argumentation, and they often preferred absurd and extravagant propositions, because greater skill was required to maintain them; the end and object of such intellectual combats being victory and not truth.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 28
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Men, Truth, Age, Victory

“Inflation is really like drugging the baby universe with speed. The supercool union of the hitherto unfriendly gods was blessed by amphetamine, and this made the universe inflate rather than just expand. The early orgy of expansion in the universe comes to an abrupt end as soon as the supercooled particle stuff finally freezes.”

João Magueijo (1967) Portuguese scientist

pg. 115
Faster than the Speed of Light

God, Baby, Speed

“We must have a new commitment to excellence and transparency at MU. The leadership of the school failed the students who expected more from the great university they chose to attend. Professor Click, on the grounds of an institution that is supposed to carry the banner of free thought and expression, on a campus with one of the world’s leading journalism schools -- trampled on the First Amendment, the very sacred defender of individual thought. The actions of a rogue professor and rudderless leaders have embarrassed the university and our state. To begin moving forward, it is long past time for the University to remove Professor Click. We must renew our commitment to Mizzou, which really is a commitment to the students, who are the future of our great state.”

Eric Schmitt (1975) American politician, lawyer

Reforming Mizzou: Earning back the taxpayers’ trust http://www.columbiatribune.com/bf4d55bb-fee4-5a97-8341-2824a3baba05.html (January 10, 2016)

World, School, Time, Past

“The man who reacts to the universe with a cry of impotent anguish is acceptable as an artist only if he can persuade us that he has sanely considered the other possible reactions and found them inadequate.”

Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) English theatre critic and writer

"Anatomy of the Absurd" (1962), p. 104
Tynan Right and Left (1967)

Cry

“We should judge university philosophy … by its true and proper aim: … that the junior barristers, solicitors, doctors, probationers, and pedagogues of the future should maintain, even in their innermost conviction, the same line of thought in keeping with the aims and intentions that the State and its government have in common with them. I have no objection to this and so in this respect have nothing to say. For I do not consider myself competent to judge of the necessity or needlessness of such a State expedient, but rather leave it to those who have the difficult task of governing men, that is to say, of maintain law and order, … and of protecting the few who have acquired property from the immense number of those who have nothing but their physical strength. … I certainly do not presume to argue with them over the means to be employed in this case; for my motto has always been: “Thank God, each morning, therefore, that you have not the Roman realm to care for!” [Goethe, Faust] But it was these constitutional aims of university philosophy which procured for Hegelry such an unprecedented ministerial favor. For it the State was “the absolute perfect ethical organism,” and it represented as originating in the State the whole aim of human existence. Could there be for future junior barristers and thus for state officials a better preparation than this, in consequence whereof their whole substance and being, their body and soul, were entirely forfeited to the State, like bees in a beehive, and they had nothing else to work for … except to become efficient wheels, cooperating for the purpose of keeping in motion the great State machine, that ultimus finis bonorum [ultimate good]? The junior barrister and the man were accordingly one and the same. It was a real apotheosis of philistinism.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Inzwischen verlangt die Billigkeit, daß man die Universitätsphilosophie nicht bloß, wie hier gescheht!, aus dem Standpunkte des angeblichen, sondern auch aus dem des wahren und eigentlichen Zweckes derselben beurtheile. Dieser nämlich läuft darauf hinaus, daß die künftigen Referendarien, Advokaten, Aerzte, Kandidaten und Schulmänner auch im Innersten ihrer Ueberzeugungen diejenige Richtung erhalten, welche den Absichten, die der Staat und seine Regierung mit ihnen haben, angemessen ist. Dagegen habe ich nichts einzuwenden, bescheide mich also in dieser Hinsicht. Denn über die Nothwendigkeit, oder Entbehrlichkeit eines solchen Staatsmittels zu urtheilen, halte ich mich nicht für kompetent; sondern stelle es denen anheim, welche die schwere Aufgabe haben, Menschen zu regieren, d. h. unter vielen Millionen eines, der großen Mehrzahl nach, gränzenlos egoistischen, ungerechten, unbilligen, unredlichen, neidischen, boshaften und dabei sehr beschränkten und querköpfigen Geschlechtes, Gesetz, Ordnung, Ruhe und Friede aufrecht zu erhalten und die Wenigen, denen irgend ein Besitz zu Theil geworden, zu schützen gegen die Unzahl Derer, welche nichts, als ihre Körperkräfte haben. Die Aufgabe ist so schwer, daß ich mich wahrlich nicht vermesse, über die dabei anzuwendenden Mittel mit ihnen zu rechten. Denn „ich danke Gott an jedem Morgen, daß ich nicht brauch’ für’s Röm’sche Reich zu sorgen,”—ist stets mein Wahlspruch gewesen. Diese Staatszwecke der Universitätsphilosophie waren es aber, welche der Hegelei eine so beispiellose Ministergunft verschafften. Denn ihr war der Staat „der absolut vollendete ethische Organismus,” und sie ließ den ganzen Zweck des menschlichen Daseyns im Staat aufgehn. Konnte es eine bessere Zurichtung für künftige Referendarien und demnächst Staatsbeamte geben, als diese, in Folge welcher ihr ganzes Wesen und Seyn, mit Leib und Seele, völlig dem Staat verfiel, wie das der Biene dem Bienenstock, und sie auf nichts Anderes, weder in dieser, noch in einer andern Welt hinzuarbeiten hatten, als daß sie taugliche Räder würden, mitzuwirken, um die große Staatsmaschine, diesen ultimus finis bonorum, im Gange zu erhalten? Der Referendar und der Mensch war danach Eins und das Selbe. Es war eine rechte Apotheose der Philisterei.
Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 5, p. 159, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 146-147
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), On Philosophy in the Universities

Men, God, Law, Soul

“At the very heart, that is. Other things, like humanity, and mercy, and charity, that most good men hold more precious than all else, they do not come first for the Light. Oh, sometimes they are there; often, indeed. But in the very long run the concern of you people is with the absolute good, ahead of all else. You are like fanatics. Your masters, at any rate. Like the old Crusaders—oh, like certain groups in every belief, though this is not a matter of religion, of course. At the centre of the Light there is a cold white flame, just as at the centre of the Dark there is a great black pit bottomless as the Universe.”

Susan Cooper (1935) English fantasy writer

Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), The Grey King (1975), Chapter 10 “The Pleasant Lake” (p. 115)

Men, People, Religion, Light

“The supreme Being is everywhere; but He is not equally visible everywhere. Let us seek Him in the simplest things, in the most fundamental laws of Nature, in the universal rules by which movement is conserved, distributed or destroyed; and let us not seek Him in phenomena that are merely complex consequences of these laws.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Les Loix du Mouvement et du Repos, déduites d'un Principe Métaphysique (1746)

Law, Nature

“What is the body? That shadow of a shadow
of your love, that somehow contains
the entire universe.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

"Where are we?" in Ch. 2 : Bewilderment
Disputed, The Essential Rumi (1995)

Love

“The universe comprises all being in a totality; for nothing that exists is outside or beyond infinite being, as the latter has no outside or beyond.”

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer

Cause, Principle, and Unity (1584)

“The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these institutions must be wholly free – which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state.”

Alan Barth (1906–1979) American journalist

The Rights of Free Men: An Essential Guide to Civil Liberties (1984).

“The reckoning with idealism as a view of life is universal, but it also touches on something central in art-its life's substance. One must understand that it is impossible to distinguish between a picture’s form and its substance. As the flower's structure is governed by the intentional tension (when it loses the sap the form is lost), so also with art the substance creates the tension. Form and substance are one and the same. Form is the life expression and substance the living painting.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

1940 - 1948, Intimate Banalities' (1941)

Life, Art, Flowers, Understanding

“We are the ancestors of those gardening the universe.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Space: What love's got to do with it - The Space Review (2004)

“Who are we? We are the life force power of the universe.”

Jill Bolte Taylor (1959) American neuroscientist

Ted Talks http://www.byronkatie.com/newsletter_april_08.html

Life

“It's possible, you can never know, that the universe exists only for me. If so, it's sure going well for me, I must admit.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

TIME magazine Vol. 149, No. 2 (13 January 1997) http://web.archive.org/web/20000619011644/http://www.time.com/time/gates/gates2.html 1990s

“I understand where Bill Maher is coming from when he says, basically, the world is destroying itself over a bunch of fairy tales about talking snakes and men who are alive inside fishes. I'm very sympathetic to it, but at the same time, given the cosmos that we're living in, it's very persuasive, the idea that there is some kind of first cause that's running things. It might not be the god of Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, it might not be the god of al-Qaida, and it might not be the god of Abraham, but something very well could be running things. The order of the universe as we see it, the interlocking nature, and the way things work together, are persuasive of the idea that there may be some overarching first cause.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

[John, Marks, http://www.salon.com/books/int/2008/10/23/stephen_king/print.html, Stephen King's God trip, Salon.com, 2008-10-23, 2008-10-23]

Men, God, World, Way

“I have travelled across the universe through the years to find her. Sometimes going all the way is just a start…”

Jim Steinman (1947) American musician

Opening caption to the video for "I'd Do Anything for Love (but I Won't Do That)" (1993)

Way, Travel

“The single idea that resounds on every page of this book is the idea of the infinity of the human spirit, in the individual as well as in humanity. It is a view of the wonderful and terrible disproportion of that spirit to everything that would contain and diminish it, of its awakening to its own nature through its confrontation with the reality of constraint and the prospect of death, of its terror before the indifference and vastness of the nature around it, of its discovery that what it most shares with the whole of the universe is its ruination by time, of its subsequent recognition that time is the core of reality if anything is, of its enslavement to orders of society and culture that belittle it, of its need to create a world, a human world, in which it can be and become itself even if to do so it must nevertheless rebel against every dogma, every custom, and every empire, and of its power to realize this seemingly impossible and paradoxical program by identifying, in each intellectual and political situation, the next steps.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 26-7

Death, Books, World, Idea

“His military triumphs awakened no pride nor vain glory, as they would have done had they been effected for selfish purposes. In the time of his greatest power he maintained the same simplicity of manners and appearance as in the days of his adversity. So far from affecting a regal state, he was displeased if, on entering a room, any unusual testimonials of respect were shown to him. If he aimed at a universal dominion, it was the dominion of faith; as to the temporal rule which grew up in his hands, as he used it without ostentation, so he took no step to perpetuate it in his family”

Washington Irving (1783–1859) writer, historian and diplomat from the United States

Mahomet and his successors, George P. Putnam, 1850, p. 339.
Mahomet and his successors (1849)

Family, Faith, Appearance, Time

“The inner ego always identifies with its source-identity as a beloved, individualized portion of the universe. It is aware of the universal love that is its heritage. It is also aware of the infinite power and strength that composes the very fabric of its being. Through being made aware of these facts, the exterior ego can begin to feel a quicker sense of support and nourishment. The knowledge can let it relax, let go, so that it feels its life couched and safe, and knows itself to be indeed a beloved child of the universe, both ancient and young at once, with an identity far beyond the annals of time. It is of great value, then, that each person remember this universal affiliation.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Way Toward Health (1997), p. 148

Love, Life, Feeling, Support

“Conformity may give you a quiet life; it may even bring you to a University Chair. But all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.”

A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990) Historian

"The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p. 14
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)

Life, History, Change

“There is … only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Der kategorische Imperativ, der überhaupt nur aussagt, was Verbindlichkeit sei, ist: handle nach einer Maxime, welche zugleich als ein allgemeines Gesetz gelten kann.
Source: Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Ch. 11

Law, Time

“The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Jitterbug Perfume (1984)

Personality

“The conventional Big Bang theory does not say anything about what caused the expansion. It really is only a theory about the aftermath of a bang. In the scientific version of the Big Bang, the universe starts with everything already expanding, with no explanation of how that expansion started… So the Scientific version of the Big Bang theory is not really a theory of a bang, it's really a theory of the aftermath of a bang.”

Alan Guth (1947) American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Lecture 1: Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse? Part I.
The Early Universe (2012)

“Contemporary liberals think of rights as universal human attributes that can be respected anywhere, but here they show a characteristic disregard of history. Current understandings of human rights developed along with the modern nation-state. It was the nation-state that emancipated individuals from the communal ties of medieval times and created freedom as it has come to be known in the modern world. This was not done without enormous conflict and severe costs. Large-scale violence was an integral feature of the process. If the US became a modern nation only after a civil war, France did so only after the Napoleonic wars and Germany after two world wars and the Cold War. In Africa and the Balkans the struggle for nationhood has run in parallel with ethnic cleansing, while the welding of China into a nation that is underway today involves the suppression of Muslim minorities and something not far from genocide in Tibet.”

John Gray book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

Armed Missionaries: Missionary Liberalism, Liberal Imperialism (pp. 238-9)
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007)

War, World, History, Communication

“People ask me, "Do you have optimism about the world, about how terrible it is?" And I say, "Yes, it's great the way it is" … I had the wonderful privilege of sitting face to face with [a Hindu guru] and the first thing he said to me was "Do you have a question?", cause the teacher always answers questions… I said, "Yes, I have a question." I said, " Since in Hindu thinking all the universe is divine, a manifestation of divinity itself, how can we say no to anything in the world? How can we say no to brutality to stupidity to vulgarity to thoughtlessness?" And he said, "For you and me, you must say yes." Well, I learned from my friends who were students of his that that happened to be the first question he asked his guru, and we had a wonderful conversation for an hour there.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Episode 2, Chapter 12
The Power of Myth (1988)

People, Stupidity, World, Way

“Nehru’s daughter, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, carried her father’s game much farther. In her fight for a monopoly of power, she split the Congress Party, and made a common cause with the Communists. Well-known Communists and fellow-travellers were given positions of power in the ruling Congress Party, in the Government at the Centre as well in the States, and in prestigious institutions all over the country. The Muslim-Marxist combine of “historians” had already captured the Indian History Congress during the days of Pandit Nehru, and many honest historians had been hounded out of it. Now this combine was placed in control of the Indian Council of Historical Research and entrusted with extensive patronage. The combine took over the National Council of Educational Research and Training also, and laid down the guidelines for producing school textbooks on various subjects. The Jawaharlal Nehru University was created and financed on a fabulous scale in order to collect Communist professors from all over the country, and form them into a frontline brigade for launching all sorts of anti-Hindu campaigns. The smokescreen for this Stalinist operation was provided by the slogan of Secularism which nobody was supposed to question, or examine as to what it had come to mean. Its meaning had to be accepted ex-cathedra, and as laid down by the Muslim-Marxist combine. In the new political parlance that emerged, Hinduism and the nationalism it inspired, became blackned as “Communalism.””

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Small wonder that the word “Hindu” started becoming a dirty word in the academia as well as the media.
Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

Education, School, Travel, History

“Mohammed Ghori had the Hindu temples of Ajmer demolished and ordered the construction of mosques and Quran schools on their ruins. … He plundered Kanauj and Kashi and destroyed their temples…. [His generals] destroyed in passing the remaining Buddhist communities of Bihar and destroyed the universities of Nalanda.”

Muhammad of Ghor (1160–1206) Ghurid Sultan

Louis Frédéric, L'Inde de l'Islam, quoted in Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind, Rupa (2001)

School, Communication

“You poor suckers [mammals]: you've got all this horrible stuff to get through somehow so obviously there's got to be an incentive, or at least some kind of fix for you to get addicted to. That's love: possibly the sneakiest trick ever played on any variety of life form by a notoriously conniving Universe. You do all these dismal, soul-destroying things because you get attached to each other.”

Tom Holt (1961) British writer

the spokesclone, p. 322
Falling Sideways (2002)

Love, Life, Soul

“From that point, my universe went on crumbling; new cracks appeared all the time. I could see that the pleasant securities of childhood, all of those warm little human emotions, all of those trivial aims and purposes that we allow to rule our lives, were an illusion. We were like sheep munching grass, unaware that the butcher's lorry is already on its way. I got used to living with a deep, underlying feeling of uncertainty that no one around me seemed to share. It was rather like living on death row.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Alien Dawn (1998), pp. 12-13

Death, Way, Feeling, Grass

“Confronted, when the weather is fine and I am in propitious emotional circumstances, with certain landscapes, certain works of art, certain human beings, I know, for the time being, that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world. On other occasions, skies and destiny being inclement, I am no less immediately certain of the malignant impersonality of an uncaring universe. Every human being has had similar experiences. This being so, the sensible thing to do would be to accept the facts and frame a metaphysic to fit them. But with that talent for doing the wrong thing, that genius for perversity, so characteristically human, men have preferred, especially in recent times, to take another course. They have either denied the existence of these psychological facts; or if they have admitted them, have done so only to condemn as evil all such experiences as cannot be reconciled in a logical system with whatever particular class of experiences they have chosen, arbitrarily, to regard as "true" and morally valuable. Every man tries to pretend that he is consistently one kind of person and does his best consistently to worship one kind of God. And this despite the fact that he experiences diversity and actually feels himself in contact with a variety of divinities.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

“One and Many,” pp. 3–4
Do What You Will (1928)

Men, God, World, Art

“First we notice an investigation which Prof. Planck of Berlin published in 1899. His aim was that it should fit the observed facts of radiation, and show why the energy of bodies was not wholly transformed into radiation. …his investigation seemed to show that continuity had to be given up, suggesting that in the last resort changes in the universe do not consist of continuous motions in space and time, but in some way are discontinuous.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Way, Change, Time

“The specialist serves as a striking concrete example of the species, making clear to us the radical nature of the novelty. For, previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his speciality; but neither is he ignorant, because he is "a scientist," and "knows" very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with an the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XII: The Barbarism Of "Specialisation"

Men, Fashion, Nature, Learning

“When we study the habits of animals in a truly sympathetic way and become thoroughly acquainted with them and with the work that each one is performing, we shall see that each one has its place in the economy of God's world, that each has its part to play, and that even so far as the animal world is concerned we are all related and inter-related. If we destroy or permit to be destroyed that marvellous balance which the Divine Power has instituted in the Universe, we do it at our own peril. Instead, then, of being the enemies of the animal world, instead of being its persecutors and its destroyers, we should be its friends and helpers.”

Ralph Waldo Trine (1866–1958) American author

Source: Every Living Creature (1899), p. 64

God, World, Way, Study

“Is it not plain that the law of good will has a universal application? There is no event, no act, no word, no supreme crisis of life in which man may let the good will go, and turn on the forces of ill will, egotism, and selfishness. Letting the good will go out of him, he lapses straightway into the child or the savage. Keeping the flow of the serene good will in his soul, he walks the earth, fearless, erect, with God’s sunshine on his face. To live thus is the essence of civilization; the individual and the social welfare are thus secured and harmonized. To live thus is practical religion; the more thoroughly we try, test, and experience it, the more completely it will be found to grow out of, and to illustrate, a Theology, that is, a divine plan of the universe. This Theology matches the needs of civilized men in a civilized world.”

Charles Fletcher Dole (1845–1927) Unitarian minister, speaker, and writer

The Theology of Civilization (May 1899)

Life, Men, God, World

“To imagine that Caesar aspired to do something in the way Alexander did it — and this is what almost all historians have believed — is definitely to give up trying to understand him. Caesar is very nearly the opposite of Alexander. …[I]t is not merely a universal kingdom that Caesar has in view. His purpose is a deeper one. He wants a Roman empire which does not live on Rome, but on the periphery, on the provinces, and this implies the complete supersession of the City-State. It implies a State in which the most diverse peoples collaborate, in regard to which all feel solidarity.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?

People, Way, Feeling, Imagination

“Above all I feel that you must resign yourself to taking me as I am, that is, with the congenital quality (or weakness) which ever since my childhood has caused my spiritual life to be completely dominated by a sort of profound 'feeling' for the organic realness of the World. At first it was an ill-defined feeling in my mind and heart, but as the years have gone by it has gradually become a precise, compelling sense of the Universe's general convergence upon itself; a convergence which coincides with, and culminates at its zenith in, him in quo omina constant, and whom the Society has taught me to love.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

Letter from Cape Town to Father General, Jean-Baptiste Janssens (12 October 1951)

Love, Life, World, Feeling

“This is the only sure way I know to counter the anti-Copernican idea that the universe is accelerating in our epoch - to get rid of the problem entirely!”

John Moffat book Reinventing Gravity

Source: Reinventing Gravity (2008), Chapter 15, Dark Energy And The Accelerating Universe, p. 207

Way, Idea, Problem

“And finally we have this, this discovery that Earth's magnetic field can be ripped open and our atmosphere laid bare to the solar wind, much like Mars. Magnetism is underrated in the grand scheme of things, in my opinion. We'd do well to pay more attention to magnetic trends in our corner of the universe and what effects it has on Earthly climate.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

Earth's Magnetic Field Has Massive Breach – scientists baffled http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/16/earths-magnetic-field-has-massive-breach-scientists-baffled/, wattsupwiththat.com, December 16, 2008. 2008

“My own experience of mescalin is described in the appendix of Beyond the Outsider. My 'trip' was pleasant enough, although I experienced none of the visual effects described by Huxley; I was plunged into an agreeable but sluggish dreaminess. In this torpid state, I became aware of the problem mentioned by Huxley: 'How was this cleansed perception to be reconciled with a proper concern with human relations…?' -- in my case, with my concern for my wife and three-year-old daughter? Although I personally felt nothing but a sense of relaxation and trustfulness, I was aware that, in practice, the world is full of dangers, and in this state, I was incapable of the necessary vigilance; it made me feel guilty. I was neglecting my job of looking after them. Moreover, my ability to think was impaired. Huxley remarks that he found his own ability to remember and 'think straight' to be little, if at all, reduced. I could 'think straight', but I could not think to any purpose. Even the feeling of universal love was not particularly pleasant; I compared it to having a large alsation dog who puts his paws on your shoulder and licks your face.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Frankenstein's Castle (1980), p. 59-60

Love, World, Dogs, Feeling

“One of the most profound and universal realizations of later childhood, a realization that probably is never totally integrated, is the discovery that one's parents are not necessarily representative of the human species, that one has grown up in an idiosyncratically structured family with its own peculiarities and dramas.”

Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000) American psychologist

Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 275

Family, Parent, Childhood

“Money, having freed itself from the physical universe, has become number itself, and finance a strange form of mathematical alchemy.”

David Orrell (1962) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Other Side Of The Coin (2008), Chapter 3, One Versus Plurality, p. 89

Money, Mathematics

“Colin did not laugh. Instead he thought, Tampons have strings? Why? Of all the major human mysteries—God, the nature of the universe, etc.—he knew the least about tampons. To Colin, tampons were a little bit like grizzly bears: he was aware of their existence, but he'd never seen one in the wild, and didn't really care to.”

John Green book An Abundance of Katherines

Colin Singleton, p. 57
An Abundance of Katherines (2006)

God, Nature

“Even the existence of this corporeal element, low as it in reality is, because it is the source of death and all evils, is likewise good for the permanence of the Universe and the continuation of the order of things, so that one thing departs and the other succeeds.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.10

Death, Reality, Evil

“There is a place with four suns in the sky — red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth — and made of diamond. There are atomic nuclei a few miles across which rotate thirty times a second. There are tiny grains between the stars, with the size and atomic composition of bacteria. There are stars leaving the Milky Way, and immense gas clouds falling into it. There are turbulent plasmas writhing with X- and gamma-rays and mighty stellar explosions. There are, perhaps, places which are outside our universe. The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming a part of it.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Planetary Exploration (University of Oregon Books, Eugene, Oregon, 1970), page 15

World, Way, Star, Time

“The Goldberg Variations are, as explained in my booklet-text, in short, music that observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music that, like Baudelaire’s lovers, “rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.” Gould is referring here to the circular design of the work, a circularity whose development is polarized, inspired, and fed by more and more new energy fields. The result is a universe that in its significance resembles the alpha and omega of music in general, music that evolves out of nothing and disappears back into nothing as if in a state in which time stands still.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Music, Lovers, Time

“Despite the absence of physical equality in nature, political systems engage in grand endeavors to dictate perfection and equality in a universe devoid of both. In their egalitarian and quixotic quest to redistribute wealth, they rob Peter to pay Paul, which only creates a state of dependency, not of equality. Any attempt to impose equality can only bring about more inequality. Rev. William J. H. Boetcker expressed this same insight in 1916, writing, 'You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 72

Nature, Strong, Dependency, Perfection

“The world of their [the bourgeois’] predecessors was a backward, pre-technological world, a world with the good conscience of inequality and toil, in which labor was still a fated misfortune; but a world in which man and nature were not yet organized as things and instrumentalities. With its code of forms and manners. with the style and vocabulary of its literature and philosophy. this past culture expressed the rhythm and content of a universe in which valleys and forests, villages and inns, nobles and villains, salons and courts were a part of the experienced reality. In the verse and prose of this pre-technological culture is the rhythm of those who wander or ride in carriages. who have the time and the pleasure to think, contemplate, feel and narrate. It is an outdated and surpassed culture, and only dreams and childlike regressions can recapture it. But this culture is, in some of its decisive elements. also a post-technological one. Its most advanced images and positions seem to survive their absorption into administered comforts and stimuli; they continue to haunt the consciousness with the possibility of their rebirth in the consummation of technical progress. They are the expression of that free and conscious alienation from the established forms of life with which literature and the arts opposed these forms even where they adorned them. In contrast to the Marxian concept, which denotes man's relation to himself and to his work in capitalist society, the artistic alienation is the conscious transcendence of the alienated existence—a “higher level” or mediated alienation. The conflict with the world of progress, the negation of the order of business, the anti-bourgeois elements in bourgeois literature and art are neither due to the aesthetic lowliness of this order nor to romantic reaction—nostalgic consecration of a disappearing stage of civilization. “Romantic” is a term of condescending defamation which is easily applied to disparaging avant-garde positions, just as the term “decadent” far more often denounces the genuinely progressive traits of a dying culture than the real factors of decay. The traditional images of artistic alienation are indeed romantic in as much as they are in aesthetic incompatibility with the developing society. This incompatibility is the token of their truth. What they recall and preserve in memory pertains to the future: images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 59-60

Life, Fate, Pleasure, Truth

“The music of Marian Anderson and other African-American artists has greatly enriched our quality of life and created one of our Nation's most treasured art forms. As universal and original expressions of the human experience, their body of work, both past and present, entertains, inspires, and thrills countless people around the world.”

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

2000s, 2001, Black Music (June 2001)

Life, People, World, Art

“For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.”

W. H. Auden September 1, 1939

Source: September 1, 1939 (1939), Lines 62–66

Love, Error

“Most religions, and certainly the Abrahamic ones, have three features that are foreign to science. The most important is religion’s linkage to moral codes that define and enforce proper behavior, behavior supposedly reflecting God’s will. The second is the widespread belief in eternal reward and punishment: the notion that after death not just your fate but everyone else’s depends on adherence to conduct mandated by your religion. And the third is the notion of absolute truth: that the nature of your god, and what it wants, is unchanging. While some believers see their ability to fathom God’s nature as limited, and don’t accept the notion of a heaven or hell, the certainty of religious dogma is ar more absolute and far less provisional than the pronouncements of science.
This combination of certainty, morality, and universal punishment is toxic. It is what leads many believers not only to accept unenlightened views, like the disenfranchisement of women and gays, opposition to birth control, and intrusions into people’s private sex lives, but also to force those views on others, including their own children and society at large, and sometimes even to kill those who disagree.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), pp. 219-220

Death, Women, God, Fate

“Jones, Howard (2003). Death of a Generation: How the Assassinations of Diem and JFK Prolonged the Vietnam War. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195052862.”

Madame Nhu (1924–2011) First lady of South Vietnam

Sources

Death, War

“All civilizations go though similar processes of emergence, rise, and decline. The West differs from other civilizations not in the way it has developed but in the distinctive character of its values and institutions. These include most notably its Christianity, pluralism, individualism, and rule of law, which made it possible for the West to invent modernity, expand throughout the world, and become the envy of other societies. In their ensemble these characteristics are peculiar to the West. Europe, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has said, is “the source — the unique source” of the “ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom. . . . These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle Eastern ideas, except by adoption.” They make Western civilization unique, and Western civilization is valuable not because it is universal but because it is unique. The principal responsibility of Western leaders, consequently, is not to attempt to reshape other civilizations in the image of the West, which is beyond their declining power, but to preserve, protect, and renew the unique qualities of Western civilization. Because it is the most powerful Western country, that responsibility falls overwhelmingly on the United States of America.
To preserve Western civilization in the face of declining Western power, it is in the interest of the United States and European countries … to recognize that Western intervention in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multicivilizational world.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 12 : The West, Civilizations, and Civilization, § 2 : The West In The World, p. 311

World, Law, Way, Democracy

“The romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie.
Progressive Universalpoesie (1798); in the German language, particularly in the Romantic schools, "Poesie" means both poetry as genre and faculty and the source of creativity to form poetry.

“When confronted by midnight in the social order we have in the past turned to science for help. And little wonder! On so many occasions science has saved us. When we were in the midnight of physical limitation and material inconvenience, science lifted us to the bright morning of physical and material comfort. When we were in the midnight of crippling ignorance and superstition, science brought us to the daybreak of the free and open mind. When we were in the midnight of dread plagues and diseases, science, through surgery, sanitation, and the wonder drugs, ushered in the bright day of physical health, thereby prolonging our lives and making for greater security and physical well-being. How naturally we turn to science in a day when the problems of the world are so ghastly and ominous. But alas! science cannot now rescue us, for even the scientist is lost in the terrible midnight of our age. Indeed, science gave us the very instruments that threaten to bring universal suicide.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

A Knock on Midnight http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/multimediaentry/doc_a_knock_at_midnight/ 1960s, Strength to Love (1963)

Health, Age, World, Disease

“It is imperative, from the Indian side, that the powers that be in Indian universities must recognize the need for historical Indo-European linguistics in their humanities departments if they are to make significant contributions to the protohistory of their subcontinent. Indo-European studies should, if anything, be an Indian forte, not exclusively a European one; many Indian scholars have a distinct head start due to their advanced knowledge of Sanskrit, which still plays a fundamental and extensive role in this field. In particular, it is simply unacceptable that research into substratum influence in Sanskrit texts has primarily been the preserve of a dozen or so Western scholars, however qualified.”

Edwin Bryant book The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture

The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture

Knowledge, Study

“In some traditionalist universities not long ago, you could not research on authors who were still alive. This was a great incentive to slip a knife between their ribs one foggy evening, or a remarkable test of patience if your chosen novelist was in rude health and only 34.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

2000s, After Theory (2003)

Health, Patience

“We have learned coordination of mind and body and the "ki breathing methods". Therefore we can bring the ki of the universe into our bodies at anytime. When a water pump is dried out, no water can flow from the well up through the pump. To start this flow again we must put some water back into the pump. In the same way, ki does not flow strongly in a person suffering from illness or misfortune. Let us practice "kiatsuho" to put back into these people, stimulate their own flow of ki, and give them a fresh start to happiness.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

16. Kiatsuho - pressing with ki
Ki Sayings (2003)

People, Way, Suffering, Learning

“Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.”

Alfonso X of Castile (1221–1284) King of Castile

Si hubiera estado presente en la Creación, habría dado algunas indicaciones útiles.
After studying Ptolemy's treatise on astronomy.; reported in Thomas Carlyle, History of Frederick the Great, book ii. chap. vii. Carlyle wrote that this saying of Alfonso about Ptolemy's astronomy, "that it seemed a crank machine; that it was pity the Creator had not taken advice," is still remembered by mankind, — this and no other of his many sayings.
If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking on creation thus, I should have recommended something simpler.
Quoted/paraphrased by Adam Riess in his Nobel Prize (in Physics 2011) lecture slides on Supernovae Reveal An Accelerating Universe (A Science Adventure Story).

“I once had a dispute with a group of Swedish professors at the University of Uppsala as to which country, Sweden or Canada, was the dullest in the world. It was a draw; they claimed superiority because of their long history, and I claimed it because of Canada's immense land mass, which gives us space for tremendous expansion, even of such things as dullness.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Opera and Humour (1991)

World, History, Drawing, Country

“We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.”

Lionel Trilling book The Liberal Imagination

Art and Neurosis
The Liberal Imagination (1950)

Health, Idea

“It is mutual fear and distrust that mostly generate world tensions and these can be traced in no small measure, like other root causes of worsening world conditions, to different people's conflicting and often intolerant, value-belief differences … Whereas in the past science did little, if anything, to remedy this situation and in some ways made things worse, our reformed "macro-determinist" science that includes consciousness and subjective values … provides common universal ethical foundations on which all nations could work to build a World Government or at least a World Security System to help control nuclear developments and other global threats that require international collaboration.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

The Human Predicament: A Way Out? (1985), p. 3

People, World, Fear, Way

“For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel - a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance - and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in de facto way for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. This last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or difused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects; for they are themselves, consciously or unconsciously seeking to fit them into or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete at times fanatical, military inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.”

Isaiah Berlin book The Hedgehog and the Fox

The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953). Editor Henry Hardy. Collaborator Michael Ignatieff. Editorial Princeton University Press, 2013. ISBN 1400846633, p. 2.

Way, Feeling, Idea, Understanding

“By virtue of the universal concept, thought attains mastery over the particular cases. However, the most formalized universe of logic still refers to the most general structure of the given, experienced world; the pure form is still that of the content which it formalizes. The idea of formal logic itself is a historical event in the development of the mental and physical instruments for universal control and calculability. In this undertaking man had to create theoretical harmony out of actual discord, to purge thought from contradictions, to hypostatize identifiable and fungible units in the complex process of society and nature. Under the rule of formal logic, the notion of the conflict between essence and appearance is expendable if not meaningless; the material content is neutralized; the principle of identity is separated from the principle of contradiction (contradictions are the fault of incorrect thinking); final causes are removed from the logical order. Well defined in their scope and function, concepts become instruments of prediction and control. Formal logic is thus the first step on the long road to scientific thought”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 137

World, Idea, Nature, Thinking

“Under the old dispensation, before the advent of science, when this little world was all, and the sun, moon, and stars were merely fixtures overhead to give light and warmth, the conception of a being adequate to create and control it all was easier. The storms were expressive of his displeasure, the heavens were his throne, and the earth was his footstool. But in the light of modern astronomy one finds himself looking in vain for the God of his fathers, the magnified man who ruled the ancient world. In his place we have an infinite and eternal Power whose expression is the visible universe, and to whom man is no more and no less than any other creature.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. XI: Points of View

God, World, Star, Light

“but then I remembered how crass it is to talk money or stocks with university types.”

Andy Kessler (1958) American writer

Part VII, The Margin Surplus, Ghana a Goner, p. 281.
Running Money (2004) First Edition

Money

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

Source: The Limits of Atheism: Or, Why Should Sceptics be Outlaws? 1874, p. 15

God, Confidence, Knowledge

“That in which consciousness happens, the universal consciousness or mind, we call the ether of consciousness. All the objects of consciousness form the universe. What is beyond both, supporting both, is the supreme state, a state of utter stillness and silence. Whoever goes there, disappears. It is unreachable by words, or mind. You may call it God, or Parabrahman, or Supreme Reality, but these are names given by the mind. It is the nameless, contentless, effortless and spontaneous state, beyond being and not being.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Reality
Source: "I am That." P.35-6.

God, Support, Reality, Silence

“In a word, CLEANTHES, a man who follows your hypothesis is able perhaps to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: but beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance; and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him. You justly give signs of horror, DEMEA, at these strange suppositions; but these, and a thousand more of the same kind, are CLEANTHES’s suppositions, not mine. From the moment the attributes of the Deity are supposed finite, all these have place. And I cannot, for my part, think that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in any respect, preferable to none at all.”

David Hume book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

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

Death, Age, World, Thinking

“The relational picture of space and time has implications that are as radical as those of natural selection, not only for science but for our perspective on who we are and how we came to exist in this evolving universe of relations.”

Lee Smolin book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity

Three Roads to Quantum Gravity (2000)

Nature, Science, Time

“All men, rich and poor, must aid one another materially and personally. The rules vary in detail, but they all maintain the principle of universal mutual aid in the Muslim fraternity. This fraternity is absolute, and it comprises men of all colours and all races… all are the sons of Adam in the flesh and all carry in them spark of the Divine Light. Everyone should strive his best to see that this spark be not extinguished but rather developed to that full "Companionship-on-High" which was the vision expressed in the last words of the Prophet [Muhammad] on his deathbed, the vision of that blessed state which he saw clearly awaiting him.”

Aga Khan III (1877–1957) 48th Imam of the Nizari Ismaili community

Memoirs of Aga Khan: World Enough & Time (1954)

Men, Light, Personality

“There’s so much goodness there, and such a value placed on education, which is sort of universal among Jews around the world. I appreciate that obviously, to be a part of that.”

Natalie Portman (1981) Israeli-American actress

Interview, Jewish Chronicle, 6 July 2007 http://thejc.com/home.aspx?AId=44797&ATypeId=1&search=true2&srchstr=Natalie%20Portman&srchtxt=1&srchhead=1&srchauthor=1&srchsandp=1&scsrch=0

World, Education, Parting

“It is not wise to think of people as either friends or enemies as if you were the center of the universe; many are not aware of your existence!”

Salman al-Ouda (1956) journalist

My Enemies, I Thank You (كتاب شكرا أيها الأعداء)

People, Thinking

“In some central and important cases, … the existence of specific power relations in the society will produce an appearance of a particular kind. Certain features of the society that are merely local and contingent, and maintained in existence only by the continual exercise of power, will come to seem as if they were universal, necessary, invariant, or natural features of all forms of human social life, or as if they arose spontaneously and uncoercedly by free human action.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 52.

Life, Exercises, Nature, Appearance

“Nothing is more certain than that war promotes science and increases comforts. Utopia may mean no more wars, but universal peace and plenty will never reign until at least one more war raises mankind to a plane of such comfort and ease that nobody on either side of a frontier can even imagine the possibility of resorting to arms. Comfort creates wars and comfort may someday end them.”

Malcolm de Chazal (1902–1981) Mauritian artist

Sens-plastique

War, Peace, Imagination, Science

“He had gone to several universities... and had found only curves and credits. He had become drunk on the idea of God and found only theology. He had risen several times on the subtle and powerful wings of lust, expectant of magnificence, achieving only discharge. A few times he had extended friendship with palpitating hope, only to find that no one quite knew what he had in mind. His solitude now was the result of his metabolism, that constant breathing in of joy and exhalation of sadness.”

Edward Lewis Wallant book The Tenants of Moonbloom

The Tenants of Moonbloom (1962)

God, Friendship, Sadness, Hope

“I truly wish with all my heart that universal salvation were true. But to pretend that people are not sinful and in need of salvation would be as cruel and deceptive as pretending that somebody was healthy even though you knew that he had a fatal disease for which you knew the cure.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

People, Disease, Heart

“The symbolic universe also orders history. It locates all collective events in a cohesive unity that includes past, present and future. With regard to the past, it establishes a 'memory' that is shared by all the individuals socialized within the collectivity. With regard to the future, it establishes a common frame of reference for the projection of individual actions.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 104 (1991, 120)

History, Memory, Past, Future

“Remember what we once were and what we thought we'd be. And now this. And it's all we have, Allan, it's us. Every step we've taken -- every tick of the clock -- making everything worse. If this is all life is, what's the use? Better to die, like carol, before you find it out, before Time gets to work on you. I've felt it before, Allan, but never as I've done tonight. There's a great devil in the universe, and we call it Time.”

J.B. Priestley Time and the Conways

Time and the Conways, p. 59-60.

Life, Time

“Possibilities that fail to get realized are, for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all. There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all that was or is or shall be actual having been from eternity virtually there. The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, to which 'impossibilities' is the only name that rightfully belongs.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

The Dilemma of Determinism in "The Will to Believe" p. 151 http://books.google.com/books?id=Moqh7ktHaJEC&pg=PA151 1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

“We are so bound together that no man can labor for himself alone. Each blow he strikes in his own behalf helps to mold the Universe.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

"On Getting on in the World".
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Help

“Oh thou, who givest sustenance to the universe
From whom all things proceed
To whom all things return
Unveil to us the face of the true spiritual sun
Hidden by a disc of golden light
That we may know the truth
And do our whole duty
As we journey to thy sacred feet”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Recited by "Lily"
Song lyrics, The Red Shoes (1993)

Truth, Light, Sun

“The objects of instruction in purely scientific mechanics and physics are, first, to produce in the student that improvement of the understanding which results from the cultivation of natural knowledge, and that elevation of mind which flows from the contemplation of the order of the universe”

William John Macquorn Rankine (1820–1872) civil engineer

"On the Harmony of Theory and Practice in Mechanics" (Jan. 3, 1856)
Context: The objects of instruction in purely scientific mechanics and physics are, first, to produce in the student that improvement of the understanding which results from the cultivation of natural knowledge, and that elevation of mind which flows from the contemplation of the order of the universe; and secondly, if possible, to qualify him to become a scientific discoverer.<!--p. 176

Understanding, Nature, Knowledge

“Did you know that the biggest—you know, the biggest star in the univer—in the whole galaxy/universe is as big as an atom is small? Did you know that? Isn't that wild? That's more pothead philosophy.”

Krist Novoselic (1965) Croatian-American rock musician

Video interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWU2aljeMqE, 1991

Star

Quotes about space page 22

Quotes about space
page 22