
Terry Gifford, LLO, page 685
For more excerpts from Muir's account of the dog Stickeen in Alaska, see Stickeen.
1900s, Stickeen (1909)
1940s, Science and Religion (1941)
Context: If it is one of the goals of religion to liberate mankind as far as possible from the bondage of egocentric cravings, desires, and fears, scientific reasoning can aid religion in yet another sense. Although it is true that it is the goal of science to discover rules which permit the association and foretelling of facts, this is not its only aim. It also seeks to reduce the connections discovered to the smallest possible number of mutually independent conceptual elements.
It is in this striving after the rational unification of the manifold that it encounters its greatest successes, even though it is precisely this attempt which causes it to run the greatest risk of falling a prey to illusions. But whoever has undergone the intense experience of successful advances made in this domain is moved by profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence. By way of the understanding he achieves a far-reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man.
This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious, in the highest sense of the word. And so it seems to me that science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life.
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge. E = mc²
Terry Gifford, LLO, page 685
For more excerpts from Muir's account of the dog Stickeen in Alaska, see Stickeen.
1900s, Stickeen (1909)
“Until language has made sense of an experience, that experience is meaningless.”
Word Play (1974)
Context: Thinking is language spoken to oneself. Until language has made sense of an experience, that experience is meaningless.
Variant: Each system has a specific structure made up of certain maintained relationships among its parts, and manifests irreducible characteristics of its own.
Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 12.
“Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.”
Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
1951; as cited in 'Robert Motherwell, American Painter and Printmaker' https://www.theartstory.org/artist-motherwell-robert-life-and-legacy.htm#writings_and_ideas_header, on 'Artstory'
1950s
“Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest.”
Source: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Source: Time Tunnel (1964), Chapter 2 (p. 19).
“By several proofs experience art has made,
Example being guide.”
Per varios usus artem experientia fecit,
Exemplo monstrante viam.
Book I, line 61. Quoted by Michel de Montaigne in Essays, Vol. III, Ch. 13 (tr. Charles Cotton).
Variant translation: Experience, after many trials, perfected the art, example showing the way.
Astronomica
“God will not have his work made manifest by cowards”
Source: 1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance