Letter to Hessey (1823).
“The Earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.”
Source: Popular Political Economy: Four lectures delivered at the London Mechanics Institution (1827), p. 30
Source: Pfeffer, Jeffrey, and Christina T. Fong. "The business school ‘business’: Some lessons from the US experience." Journal of management studies 41.8 (2004): 1501-1520. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christina_Fong2/publication/46540485_The_Business_School_%27Business%27_Some_Lessons_from_the_US_Experience/links/0c96052a604fa4e317000000/The-Business-School-Business-Some-Lessons-from-the-US-Experience.pdf
Quote of Ad Reinhardt (1963); as cited in: Joseph Kosuth, (1969), " Art after Philosophy http://www.ubu.com/papers/kosuth_philosophy.html"
1956 - 1967
Variant: The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else. Art as art is nothing but art. Art is not what is not art.
“Whatever is praised everywhere else yields to Spain alone. It is she that spawns the toughest soldiers, the most experienced generals, the most eloquent orators, the most famous poets; she is the mother of judges—and the mother of Emperors. She gave the Empire the great Trajan, and then Hadrian; to her the Empire is indebted for you [Theodosius I].”
Dum Hispaniae uni quidquid ubique laudatur adsurgat. Haec durissimos milites, haec experientissimos duces, haec facundissimos oratores, haec clarissimos uates parit, haec iudicum mater haec principum est. Haec Traianum illum, haec deinceps Hadrianum misit imperio; huic te debet imperium.
"Panegyric of Theodosius" (389), as recorded in the Panegyrici Latini. Translation from C. E. V. Nixon and Barbara Saylor Rodgers, In Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The Panegyrici Latini (1994), p. 452 https://books.google.com/books?id=0WlC_UtU8M4C&pg=PA452&dq=%22It+is+she+that+spawns+the+toughest+soldiers%22&hl=en&sa=X#v=onepage&q=%22It%20is%20she%20that%20spawns%20the%20toughest%20soldiers%22&f=false, original Latin at p. 649 https://books.google.com/books?id=0WlC_UtU8M4C&pg=PA649&dq=%22It+is+she+that+spawns+the+toughest+soldiers%22&hl=en&sa=X#v=onepage&q=%22Haec%20durissimos%20milites%22&f=false.
“they possess most gold and silver, by which war, like everything else, flourishes.”
Book VI, 6.34; "they have abundance of gold and silver, and these make war, like other things, go smoothly" ( trans. http://www.classicpersuasion.org/pw/thucydides/jthucbk6rv2.htm Benjamin Jowett)
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book VI
Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 167
Context: We are, each one of us, ordained to live out our lives in the context of ultimate questions, such as:
Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?
Where did the laws of physics come from?
Why does the universe seem so strange?
My response to such questions has been to articulate a covenant with Mystery. Others, of course, prefer to respond with answers, answers that often include a concept of god. These answers are by definition beliefs since they can neither be proven nor refuted. They may be gleaned from existing faith traditions or from personal search. God may be apprehended as a remote Author without present-day agency, or as an interested Presence with whom one can form a relationship, or as pantheistic — Inherent in All Things.
The opportunity to develop personal beliefs in response to questions of ultimacy, including the active decision to hold no Beliefs at all, is central to the human experience. The important part, I believe, is that the questions be openly encountered. To take the universe on — to ask Why Are Things As They Are? — is to generate the foundation for everything else.
