Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Fragments
Freeman (1948), p. 142
1 Cababe & Ellis' Q. B. D. Rep. 134.
Reg. v. Ramsey (1883)
Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Power of Words (1937), p. 222
Context: There is no area in our minds reserved for superstition, such as the Greeks had in their mythology; and superstition, under cover of an abstract vocabulary, has revenged itself by invading the entire realm of thought. Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought. In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends. To keep to the social level, our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities. This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary: nation, security, capitalism, communism, fascism, order, authority, property, democracy. We never use them in phrases such as: There is democracy to the extent that... or: There is capitalism in so far as... The use of expressions like "to the extent that" is beyond our intellectual capacity. Each of these words seems to represent for us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean, successively or simultaneously, anything whatsoever. Our lives are lived, in actual fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits; and yet we act and strive and sacrifice ourselves and others by reference to fixed and isolated abstractions which cannot possibly be related either to one another or to any concrete facts. In this so-called age of technicians, the only battles we know how to fight are battles against windmills.
“As knowledge advances and scientific disciplines change, so do the disciplines impinging on them.”
Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and the New Biology of Mind (2008)
Marion Edwards Park, 1933, [Marion Edward Park 1922-1942, http://www.brynmawr.edu/president/MarionEdwardsPark1922-1942.html, Bryn Mawr College, 25 April 2013, dead, https://web.archive.org/web/20130416021726/http://www.brynmawr.edu/president/MarionEdwardsPark1922-1942.html, 16 April 2013]
<p>Schon ist mein Blick am Hügel, dem besonnten,
dem Wege, den ich kaum begann, voran.
So fasst uns das, was wir nicht fassen konnten,
voller Erscheinung, aus der Ferne an—</p><p>und wandelt uns, auch wenn wirs nicht erreichen,
in jenes, das wir, kaum es ahnend, sind;
ein Zeichen weht, erwidernd unserm Zeichen...
Wir aber spüren nur den Gegenwind.</p>
Spaziergang (A Walk) (March 1924)
Alternate translation:
My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance—<p>and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave . . .
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke as translated by Robert Bly (1981)
As quoted in Futurism, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 64.
1910, Manifesto of Futurist Painters,' April 1910
The Art of Persuasion
