“Side by side with the production of metals, the Egyptians and the inhabitants of Mesopotamia perfected the arts of making glazed pottery… and the production of glass. …vessels were baked in tall closed furnaces. "Egyptian blue" was made in Egypt by heating silica with malachite and lime… applied with soda as a blue glaze on faience, and the blue glass is also colored with copper. Some early… Egyptian and Babylonian blue glass are coloured with cobalt.”

The Spectrum of Consciousness (1993), Prologue, p. 6
Context: An argument can be legitimately sustained only if the participants are speaking about the same level. Argumentation would — for the most part — be replaced with something akin to Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity. Information from and about the different vibratory levels of bands of consciousness — although superficially as different as X-Rays and radio waves — would be integrated and synthesized into one spectrum, one rainbow. … Each band or level, being a particular manifestation of the spectrum, is what it is only by virtue of the other bands. The color blue is no less beautiful because it exists along side the other colors of a rainbow, and "blueness" itself depends upon the existence of the other colors, for if there were no color but blue, we would never be able to see it. In this type of synthesis, no approach, be it Eastern or Western, has anything to lose — rather, they all gain a universal context.

A Zed and Two Noughts

Ballades in Blue China (1880)

A Short History of Chemistry (1937)
Context: In Alexandria two streams of knowledge met and fused together... The ancient Egyptian industrial arts of metallurgy, dyeing and glass-making... and... the philosophical speculations of ancient Greece, now tinged with ancient mysticism, and partly transformed into that curious fruit of the tree of knowledge which we call Gnosticism.... the result was the "divine" or "sacred" art (... also means sulphur) of making gold of silver.... during the first four centuries a considerable body of knowledge came into existence. The treatises written in Greek... in Alexandria, are the earliest known books on chemistry.... The treatises also contain much of an allegorical nature... sometimes described as "obscure mysticism."... the Neoplatonism which was especially studied in Alexandria... is not so negligible as has sometimes been supposed.... The study of astrology was connected with that of chemistry in the form of an association of the metals with the planets on a supposed basis of "sympathy". This goes back to early Chaldean sources but was developed by the Neoplatonists.

As quoted in Zirkle, Conway (1935), The beginnings of plant hybridization p. 105

Source: High Windows

Source: 1850's, Vrolijk Versterven' (from Bilders' diary & letters), p. 19 - quote of Bilder's letter to his maecenas Johannes Kneppelhout, from Savoy, near Geneva, Switzerland, September 1858

an inscription in French title, (translated) – instruction of his artwork, 1918; as quoted from 'Looking at Dada' ed. Sarah Blyth / Edward Powers, MoMa museum, New York 2006, p. 13
1915 - 1925