“If Van Eyck’s patrons had all been Buddhists he would neither have painted the Adoration of the Lamb nor, for that matter, the Hunting of the Otter, but though the fact that he did is therefore trivially connected with the civilization in which he worked, there is no need to place these works on the periphery of the Hegelian wheel and look for the governing cause that explains both otter hunting and piety in the particular form they took in the early decades of the fifteenth century, and which is also expressed in Van Eyck’s new technique.”

— Ernst Gombrich

In Search of Cultural History (1969)

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Ernst Gombrich 16

art historian 1909–2001

Ted Dekker (1962) American writer

Source: Black: The Birth of Evil

“Nothing looks funnier than an otter having a good time, unless it’s a sea otter, which looks even more cherubic.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

"Home Schooling and Indian Lore"
An Autobiographical Novel (1991)
Context: I remember the first time I ever saw otter play and slide down a slippery bank into the water. Old Billy knew where they were and took me to them. We sat down silently behind some bushes on the bank of an Indiana stream and pretty soon out came a family of otter and climbed up on the bank and slid down the mud slide over and over again like little children. Nothing looks funnier than an otter having a good time, unless it’s a sea otter, which looks even more cherubic.

“Though this reverent-dread and love be not parted asunder, yet they are not both one, but they are two in property and in working, and neither of them may be had without other. Therefore I am sure, he that loveth, he dreadeth, though that he feel it but a little.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 74

“The more 'otter it is, the more 'otter otters likes it”

Brian Jacques (1939–2011) British fiction writer known for Redwall animal fantasy novels

“All those movements which took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and which had the Reformation as their main expression and result should be analyzed as a great crisis of the Western experience of subjectivity and a revolt against the kind of religious and moral power which gave form, during the Middle Ages, to this subjectivity. The need to take a direct part in spiritual life, in the work of salvation, in the truth which lies in the Book—all that was a struggle for a new subjectivity.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Source: "The Subject and Power" (1982), p. 782

“…He was averse from shedding human blood, though he destroyed many idolatrous temples, and erected mosques in their stead. He held conversation neither with Nazarenes nor with bramins; nor would he permit them to hold civil offices under his government.”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

Sultãn ‘Alãu’d-Dîn Ahmad Shãh II Bahmanî (AD 1436-1458)
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

“I cannot find in Chatterton's works any thing so extraordinary as the age at which they were written. They have a facility, vigour, and knowledge, which were prodigious in a boy of sixteen, but which would not have been so in a boy of twenty. He did not show extraordinary powers of genius, but extraordinary precocity. Nor do I believe he would have written better, had he lived. He knew this himself, or he would have lived. Great geniuses, like great kings, have too much to think of to kill themselves.”

Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770) English poet, forger

William Hazlitt Lectures on the English Poets (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1818) p. 243.
Criticism

“Plato… introduces two infinities, because both in increase and diminution there appears to be transcendency, and a progression to infinity. Though… he did not use them: for neither is there infinity in numbers by diminution or division; since unity is a minimum: nor by increase; for he extends number as far as to the decad.”

Aristotle book Physics

Book III, Ch. VIII, p. 167.
Physics

“Then I heard someone who had a book of Anaxagoras, as he said, out of which he read that the mind was the disposer and cause of all… and I said to myself: If mind is the disposer, mind will dispose all for the best, and put each particular in the best place; and I argued that if anyone desired to find out the cause of the generation or destruction of anything, he must find out what state of being or suffering or doing was best for that thing, and therefore a man had only consider the best for himself and others, and then he would also know the worse, for that the same science comprised both.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

“As a general rule, all that has been hitherto advanced respecting the nature of this deity, must be understood to refer to his properties: for the nature of the god is not one thing, and his influence another: and truly, besides these two, his energy a third thing: seeing that all things which he wills, these he is, he can, and he works. For neither doth he will that which he is not; nor is he without strength to do that which he wills; nor doth he will that which he cannot effect.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Now this is very different in the case of men, for theirs is a double nature mixed up in one, that of soul and body; the former divine, the latter full of darkness and obscurity: hence naturally arise warfare and discord between the two.
Upon the Sovereign Sun (362)

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Ernst Gombrich 16

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