Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher
The Art of Persuasion
Preface Introductory to the Following Treatise
The Sceptical Chymist (1661)
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher
The Art of Persuasion
Mohammad Hidayatullah (1905–1992) 11th Chief Justice of India
Source: Law in the Scientific Era, P.vii.
Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature
Nobel Lecture (8 December 1990)
Context: Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry. Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun.
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher
The Art of Persuasion
“Anything worth knowing cannot be understood by the human mind.”
Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician
Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher
Entry (1960)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
Context: Total innovation is a flight from comparison and also from imitation. Those who discover things for themselves and express them in their own way are not overly bothered by the fact that others have already discovered these things — have even discovered them over and over again — and have expressed what they found in all manner of ways.
Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet
Letter Ten (26 December 1908)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)