“Those humble but indomitable workers, to whom later generations referred by the collective name of Baale Masorah, Masters of Tradition, performed in obscurity their Herculean task of guarding the Biblical Text against loss or variation.”

—  Robert Gordis

"The Biblical Text in the Making", p. 1

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Those humble but indomitable workers, to whom later generations referred by the collective name of Baale Masorah, Maste…" by Robert Gordis?
Robert Gordis photo
Robert Gordis 4
American rabbi and theologian 1908–1992

Related quotes

Dora Russell photo

“To take even this first step towards a happy society is a herculean task. After it has been accomplished, generations to come will see what the creature will do next. We none of us know; and we should be thoroughly on our guard against all those who pretend that they do.”

Dora Russell (1894–1986) author, feminist, socialist campaigner

Preface
The Right to Be Happy (1927)
Context: It has taken us centuries of thought and mockery to shake the medieval system; thought and mockery here and now are required to prevent the mechanists from building another. Without falling into a mystical vitalism that reverences organic nature as sacred, we can at least try rather to serve than to subdue the prancing seas of life. With this in view I have taken as impulses, instincts, or needs certain driving forces in the human species as we know it at present, and argued for such social and economic changes as will give them new, free, and varied expression. To take even this first step towards a happy society is a herculean task. After it has been accomplished, generations to come will see what the creature will do next. We none of us know; and we should be thoroughly on our guard against all those who pretend that they do.

Ansel Adams photo

“The herculean task of a photographer is to capture a momentary frame as beautiful in reality, as it would be in a dream.”

Ansel Adams (1902–1984) American photographer and environmentalist

Radio interview, 1972

Thomas Little Heath photo

“The actual writers of Elements of whom we hear were the following. Leon, a little younger than Eudoxus, was the author of a collection of propositions more numerous and more serviceable than those collected by Hippocrates. Theudius of Magnesia, a contemporary of Menæchmus and Dinostratus, "put together the elements admirably, making many partial or limited propositions more general". Theudius's book was no doubt the geometrical text-book of the Academy and that used by Aristotle.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Achimedes (1920)

“Clearly the secret of happiness… is a variation on the general principle of banging your head against a wall, and then stopping.”

Stef Penney book The Tenderness of Wolves

Source: The Tenderness of Wolves

Michael Halliday photo

“It is part of the task of linguistics to describe texts, and all texts, including those prose or verse, which fall within any definition of literature and are accessible to analysis by the existing methods of linguistics.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Source: 1950s–1960s, The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching, 1964, p. 1.

Anthony de Mello photo

“The Master persistently warned against the attempt to encompass Reality in a concept or a name.”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

Source: One Minute Nonsense (1992), p. 131
Context: The Master persistently warned against the attempt to encompass Reality in a concept or a name. A scholar in mysticism once asked, "When you speak of BEING, sir, is it eternal, transcendent being you speak of, or transient, contingent being?"
The Master closed his eyes in thought. Then he opened them, put on his most disarming expression, and said, "Yes!"

Frederic G. Kenyon photo

“It is indeed a striking proof of the essential soundness of the tradition that with which all these thousands of copies, tracing their ancestry back to so many different parts of the earth and to conditions of such diverse kinds, the variations of text are so entirely questions of detail, not of essential substance.”

Frederic G. Kenyon (1863–1952) British palaeographer and biblical and classical scholar

Source: The Story Of The Bible, Chapter X, The Position Today, p. 136

Jane Addams photo

“The task of youth is not only its own salvation but the salvation of those against whom it rebels, but in that case there must be something vital to rebel against and if the elderly stiffly refuse to put up a vigorous front of their own, it leaves the entire situation in a mist.”

Jane Addams (1860–1935) pioneer settlement social worker

The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930)

Alfred North Whitehead photo

“The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 6.
1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
Context: Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.

“Employers crave the power to fire workers whose performance is judged inferior-not just to get rid of those particular workers, but more importantly to motivate and discipline the rest of the workforce.”

Jim Stanford (1961) Canadian economist

Part 2, Chapter 8, Workers and Bosses, p. 103
Economics For Everyone (2008)

Related topics