Entry (1954)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
Context: In products of the human mind, simplicity marks the end of a process of refining, while complexity marks a primitive stage. Michelangelo's definition of art as the purgation of superfluities suggests that the creative effort consists largely in the elimination of that which complicates and confuses a pattern
“Psychotherapy may begin with the primitive, but it must end with the divine, for both are integral factors in the human mind.”
Violet M. Firth (Dion Fortune) (1922), The Machinery of the Mind. p. 96
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Dion Fortune 10
British occultist and author 1890–1946Related quotes
“Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.”
Notebooks (1830).
1830s
Quoted in François-Bernard Mâche (1983, 1992). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion (Musique, mythe, nature, ou les Dauphins d'Arion, trans. Susan Delaney). Harwood Academic Publishers. ISBN 3718653214.
“Wine is like the incarnation--it is both divine and human”
Book III, Chapter 3, p. 374
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)
“Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.”
The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)
"The Engineered Century" http://www.nae.edu/Publications/Bridge/TheVertiginousMarchofTechnology/TheEngineeredCentury.aspx remarks delivered during National Engineers Week on behalf of the National Academy of Engineering at the National Press Club (22 February 2000)
Context: A century hence, 2000 may be viewed as quite a primitive period in human history. It’s something to hope for. … I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer — born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow. As an engineer, I take a substantial amount of pride in the accomplishments of my profession.
“[T]he laws of science are products of the human mind rather than factors of the external world.”
Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)