Quotes about anything (6859 quotes, page 30)

“We don’t know anything about silent sages, buried knowledge, the eye of the mute poet, serene seers, yet how many talkative destroyers, prophets and ideologues, teachers and beautifiers there are on the other side.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

"Hush," p. 61
The Shape (2000), Sequence: “Big Chamber”

Knowledge , Teachers

“Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.”

Charles Caleb Colton (1777–1832) British priest and writer

Vol. I; XXV
Lacon (1820)
Variant: Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.

Men , Religion , Fight

“Passion looks like anger to people who aren’t passionate about anything.”

Marcus Orelias (1993) American actor, rapper, songwriter, author and entrepreneur

People , Passion , Anger

“And you think they’ll let you,” said Machine. It was a flat, sad statement.
“No,” she said, “but nobody ever let me do anything in my life before and I never let that stop me.”

Joanna Russ (1937–2011) American author

Source: Fiction, Picnic on Paradise (1968), p. 119

Life , Sadness , Thinking

“Without even saying anything, just his eyes… It’s not like he forces you to do it, but the power that he has, it’s something in his spirit. It’s almost like intangible and kind of magical. He has an energy that kind of lifts you. Any doubt that you had is just gone. You just do it – it’s really simple. It was so easy to work with him.”

Alison Lohman (1979) American actress

Of Ridley Scott.
Interview with Rebecca Murray

“My specific… object has been to contain, within the prescribed limits, the whole of the student's course, from the confines of elementary algebra and trigonometry, to the entrance of the highest works on mathematical physics. A learner who has a good knowledge of the subjects just named, and who can master the present treatise, taking up elementary works on conic sections, application of algebra to geometry, and the theory of equations, as he wants them, will, I am perfectly sure, find himself able to conquer the difficulties of anything he may meet with; and need not close any book of Laplace, Lagrange, Legendre, Poisson, Fourier, Cauchy, Gauss, Abel, Hindenburgh and his followers. or of any one of our English mathematicians, under the idea that it is too hard for him.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Preface, p. iii
The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Books , Mathematics , Idea , Knowledge

“One reason nature pleases us is its endless use of a few simple principles: the cube-square law; fractals; spirals; the way that waves, wheels, trig functions, and harmonic oscillators are alike; the importance of ratios between small primes; bilateral symmetry; Fibonacci series, golden sections, quantization, strange attractors, path-dependency, all the things that show up in places where you don’t expect them…these rules work with and against each other ceaselessly at all levels, so that out of their intrinsic simplicity comes the rich complexity of the world around us. That tension—between the simple rules that describe the world and the complex world we see—is itself both simple in execution and immensely complex in effect. Thus exactly the levels, mixtures, and relations of complexity that seem to be hardwired into the pleasure centers of the human brain—or are they, perhaps, intrinsic to intelligence and perception, pleasant to anything that can see, think, create?—are the ones found in the world around us.”

John Barnes book Mother of Storms

Source: Mother of Storms (1994), pp. 470-471

Pleasure , World , Law , Way

“One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people's motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans-- anything except reason.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Random Thoughts http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2007/09/03/random_thoughts?page=full&comments=true, Sep 03, 2007
2000s

Pain , People , Education , Motivation

“If you do anything useful it will haunt you forever after, and if you have a major success you get decades of hard manual labor - meaning you have to work on the manual.”

Bjarne Stroustrup (1950) Danish computer scientist, creator of C++

C QA Community Event with Bjarne Stroustrup, 2014-08-27 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDqQudbtuqo,

Success

“It does not matter what you know about anything if you cannot communicate to your people. In that event you are not even a failure. You're just not there.”

Saul D. Alinsky (1909–1972) American community organizer and writer

Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. 81

People , Communication , Failure

“One time, my wife said to me, [imitating his wife] "Honey, the dryer is broken." [as himself] Did you check the lint trap? [imitating his wife with a clueless face] Sit down, honey, I'll check it. [as his wife] "Was there anything in there?" [as himself] There's a quilt in there. Look! You made a sofa cushion.”

Ron White (1956) American comedian

They Call Me Tater Salad

Time

““Hasn’t all this taught you anything?” Annette asked Gabriel Baines as they waited for the simulacrum’s return and report.
“Like what?”
“That there is no perfect defense. There is no protection. Being alive means being exposed; it’s the nature of life to be hazardous—it’s the stuff of living.”

Philip K. Dick book Clans of the Alphane Moon

Source: Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), Chapter 13 (p. 226)

Life , Nature , Waiting , Perfection

“So she drank to the point of suicide, because a life which not only lacked love, but couldn't even catch a little indifference, like a net to contain air, was intolerable; because she hadn't a single god, or goddamn thing to do, or anything she could look back on as done—completed or accomplished—only one pleasureless screw which produced an ingrate and a monster upon whom she nevertheless pinned her hopes with exactly the same chance for success as anyone would who tried to drive a nail into a passing cloud—a son to whom she threw her soul at considerable peril, like a stone in a paper boat.”

William H. Gass book The Tunnel

pgs 136-137
The Tunnel (1995)

Love , Life , God , Hope

“We’re operating a huge sleep experiment, worldwide, unlike anything anyone has ever done. We have 250 million nights of sleep in our database, and we’re using all the latest technologies to make sense of it.”

Philippe Kahn (1952) Entrepreneur, camera phone creator

Fortune, June 29th, 2015, regarding the focus that Fullpower Technologies has on gathering and understanding sleep data https://fortune.com/2015/06/29/sleep-data/.

Sense , Sleep , Night

“Much time was wasted and ink spilled in the late 1960s and early 1970s trying to interpret the lagged effect of prices on wages as reflecting adaptive lags in the formation of expectations. But if we have learned anything from the new Keynesian economics of Fischer, Taylor, Blanchard, and their younger followers, it is that price and wage inertia is compatible with rational expectations.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

Robert J. Gordon, The Phillips Curve Now and Then. (1990).

Learning , Time

“I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Third term as Prime Minister

Life , Women , Men , Children

“My own home, we do it in our on home. I know about that. Anybody that has a VCR, talk to them, and I ask you to use your own commonsense… If you had the power to sit on a playback of a recording and you could wipe out the commercials or not wipe out the commercials, what would you do? … We all do it.
But when you do it, you strip away the reason for free television. … As far as I am concerned, I am going to continue taping because the plaintiffs have said they aren't going to do anything to me. I am not committing any crime. They know that.”

Jack Valenti (1921–2007) President of the MPAA

Testimony to the US House of Representatives (1982)

Home

“Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 7

Understanding

“Mentally speaking, it sucks, man. Who wants to prepare their whole life and have it all taken away by some guy who just made a bad pass? But that's the beauty of the sport as well. Anything can happen.”

Apolo Anton Ohno (1982) American short track speed skating competitor

On speedskating
Gordon, Devin (2006-01-23), "APOLO ANTON OHNO: SPEED SKATING". Newsweek. 147 (4):48

Life , Beauty , Guy , Sport

“When I paint an abstract picture (the problem is very much the same in other cases), I neither know in advance what it is meant to look like nor, during the painting process, what I am aiming at and what to do about getting there. Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings – like that of a person who possesses a given set of tools, materials and abilities and has the urgent desire to build something useful which is not allowed to be a house or a chair or anything else that has a name; who therefore hacks away in the vague hope that by working in a proper, professional way he will ultimately turn out something proper and meaningful.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Notes, 1985; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Abstract paintings' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/subjects-2/abstract-paintings-7
1980's

Hope , Way , Problem , Effort

“I think faith in each other is much harder than faith in God or faith in crystals. I very rarely have faith in God; I occasionally have little spasms of it, but they go away, if I think hard enough about it. I am incandescent with rage at the idea of horoscopes and of crystals and of the nonsense of 'New Age', or indeed even more pseudo-scientific things: self-help, and the whole culture of 'searching for answers', when for me, as someone brought up in the unashamed Western tradition of music and poetry and philosophy, all the answers are there in the work that has been done by humanity before us, in literature, in art, in science, in all the marvels that have created this moment now, instead of people looking away. The image to me... is gold does exist, and for 'gold' say 'truth', say 'the answer', say 'love', say 'justice', say anything: it does exist. But the only way in this world you can achieve gold is to be incredibly intelligent about geology, to learn what mankind has learnt, to learn where it might lie, and then break your fingers and blister your skin in digging for it, and then sweat and sweat in a forge, and smelt it. And you will have gold, but you will never have it by closing your eyes and wishing for it. No angel will lean out of the bar of heaven and drop down sheets of gold for you. And we live in a society in which people believe they will. But the real answer, that there is gold, and that all you have to do is try and understand the world enough to get down into the muck of it, and you will have it, you will have truth, you will have justice, you will have understanding, but not by wishing for it.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

From Radio 4's Bookclub http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00f8l3b
2000s

Love , God , People , Truth

“I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em by calling 'em the masses and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

Saturn Over the Water (1961) ch. 2.

Feeling , Help

“I have attempted to develop my thinking in such a way that the work I've done is not me – not to confuse my feelings with what I produced. I didn't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings. Abstract Expressionism was so lively – personal identity and painting were more or less the same, and I tried to operate the same way. But I found I couldn't do anything that would be identical with my feelings. So I worked in such a way that I could say that it's not me. That accounts for the separation.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Jasper Johns: 'I have attempted to develop my thinking', Vivien Raynor, Artnews 72 no. 3, March 1973, p. 20-22
1970s

Way , Feeling , Thinking , Painting

“I think the subject of race has been so difficult and so polluted by malign ideas that most people have just left it alone, including geneticists. … Most genetic variation is neutral – it doesn't do anything for or against the phenotype, and evolution ignores it – so most previous attempts to look at race have concluded that there's little difference between races. I think this position is the one on which the social scientists are basing their position. … If you look at the genes that do make a difference, selected genes, which are a tiny handful of the whole, you do find a number of differences, not very many, but a number of interesting differences between races as to which genes have been selected. This, of course, makes a lot of sense, because once the human family dispersed from its homeland in Africa, people faced different environments on each continent, different climates, different evolutionary challenges, and each group adapted to its environment in its own way.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

"An interview with Nicholas Wade" http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/nicholas-wade, American Scientist (April 2006).

People , Family , Way , Idea

“Heavens, no! It could get subpoenaed. I can't write anything.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Jim Lehrer News Hour, when asked if she keeps a diary, hours before a jury in Little Rock, Arkansas, returned guilty verdicts against Clintons' business partners; May 29, 1996 http://www.stophillary.com/things2no.htm http://www.trettel.com/ccrc/quotes/Quotes1996/quotes060296.html
White House years (1993–2000)

“Some claim that telepathy and clairvoyance and pre-vision of the future are high-level powers characteristic of the upper reaches. I am not in a position to judge whether such powers exist or not, though on the whole I incline with much hesitation to believe that in some form or other they do. But I cannot see anything particularly lofty about them. They may be consequences of high development, but in themselves they are merely strange modes of perceiving events of commonplace order.”

Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) British novelist and philosopher

Source: Philosophy and Living (1939), Chapter VIII: Personality

Future

“After returning to Berkeley, I was called by the New York Times. They had heard about the paper and the response to it and wanted to send a reporter to Berkeley to talk to me about the issues surrounding it. Ralph Blumenthal came to Berkeley, spent a few days talking with me, left and wrote a sober and intelligent account, sketchy and somewhat popular, but basically correct. I was completely unprepared for the storm it was to provoke within psychoanalytic circles. To this day I am not entirely certain what it was in the article that so infuriated the analytic community. But there can be no doubt about the severity of the anger, even rage, directed at me. The two-part article was published in the "Science" section of the Times on two successive Tuesdays, August 14, and August 21,1981. I happened to be in England when the first part came out. Anna Freud had seen it and called me. "I am surprised at all the phone calls I have been receiving. I can't see anything so terrible in this article."”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

I was relieved.
Source: Final Analysis (1990), p. 193

Intelligence , Communication , Rage , Science

“I sold electric light bulbs to janitors, candy to drug stores, and Stoddard's Lectures from door to door. I had decided I was a total failure, when I saw an advertisement which indicated that somebody wanted an expert accountant. Not knowing anything about its I applied for the job and got it.
I am convinced that what are commonly known as "the breaks," good or bad, have fully as much to do with one's success or failure as ability. The break I got in this instance lay in the fact that my employer knew even less about the duties of an expert accountant than I did.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) American writer

How I Wrote the Tarzan Books (1929)

Failure , Light , Success

“.. the thing was to choose one [a ready-made object] that you were not attracted by.... and that was difficult because anything becomes beautiful if you look at it long enough... [My intention was to] completely eliminate the existence of taste, bad or good or indifferent.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote from The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties, Irving Sandler, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978, p. 164
posthumous

Beauty , Indifference

“If I have accomplished anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed on me by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 1: Childhood and Early Education

Training

“Uncertainty is he root of all progress and all growth. As the old adage goes, the man who believes he knows everything learns nothing. We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something.”

Mark Manson (1984) American writer and blogger

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 6, “You’re Wrong About Everything (But So Am I)” (p. 135)

Learning

“em>The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident (though there is a great deal of it) to have contributed anything of permanent value to the storehouse of human thought.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

1960s, Review of Teilhard de Chardin's "The Phenomenon of Man", 1961

“I'll take it! If anything gets in my way, we'll shoot first and argue afterwards.”

William Frederick Halsey, Jr. (1882–1959) United States admiral

On taking responsibility for the war, as quoted in Joseph Bryan, Admiral Halsey's story (1947), p. 76.

Way

“I always figured that once I wrapped a film, then anything beyond that is none of my business. If I can avoid seeing the final product, then all I have in my head is feeling good about the experience.”

Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician

Quoted in Ron Dicker, "Going deep with rebel Johnny Depp," http://www.johnnydeppfan.com/interviews/sunpotcarticle.htm Baltimore Sun (2003-07-08)

Feeling , Business

“Nor should anything said after dinner be taken for counsel.”

Philippe de Commines book Mémoires

Car on ne doit point tenir pour conseil ce qui se fait après disner.
Bk. II, ch. 2.
Mémoires

“Yes, well I noticed that in your last issues' interviews with those Eastern teachers ["From light to Light," Jan. 1995], emptiness was mentioned a lot. I find that a wrong word. Because in God realisation and being one with God the Most High, the unspeakable one, there's no sense whatsoever of ever having done anything yourself. It is all done for you. It's by grace. And so it's not being empty, it's being emptied. There's a different emphasis or a different connotation to that.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Response to the question "You write, "Enlightenment is to be emptied (not empty) of feelings and thus at one with the purest sensation of divine being." What's the distinction here between being "emptied" and being "empty" of feelings?"
Love is not a feeling ~ The Interview (1995)

God , Sense , Light , Teachers

“I'm out there on my own this season as a ball player. Right now, I don't think the fans care anything about me being a vice-president of the club or what I would do as a manager. That's all out this season. It's the old Babe on the old job—a ball player. It has been the only job I ever knew. It was the only job that put me where I happen to be right now. I'd rather make good as a ball player this season than anything I ever did. I'm not kidding myself. I'm not going to be any Tris Speaker in that outfield. The old dogs are going to do a lot of barking. But they've barked before. And you know—a barking dog seldom bites.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

As quoted in "'Never Happier in My Life' Ruth Tells Grantland Rice..."

Dogs , Thinking , Season

“The dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Oxford and Cambridge
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy

Men , Education , Business

“Anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

Source: Translations, The Tale of Genji (1925–1933), Ch. 25: 'The Glow-Worm'

Life

“The way you get a better world is, you don’t put up with substandard anything.”

Joe Strummer (1952–2002) British musician, singer, actor and songwriter

My Dinner with Strummer (March 1999)
Variant: The way you get a better world is, you don’t put up with substandard anything.

World , Way

“All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.”

Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer

Generation X (1991)

“All this, all of this love we're talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I'm wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don't know anything, and I'm the first one to admit it.”

Raymond Carver book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

Love , Way , Thinking , Memory

“Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing. They all assume we know what WE are doing. We don't … Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore and wishes he could go home.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis (1991)

Home , Understanding

“The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word.”

Stanisław Lem book Solaris

Source: Solaris (1961), Ch. 8 "The Monsters", p. 120

Men , Fate , History , Sense

“He reached his hand toward me. “You don’t mind my asking, do you?” “Of course not,” I say calmly as I reverse the lit end of the cigarette so that the flame is cupped in the palm. I reach for his handshake. He screams like a woman in distress with her skirt held high. I puff my meanness as he licks at the burn and whimpers, “You sonofagun. You’ve burned the dickens out of my hand.” “I know.” “But why? I didn’t do anything. I don’t even know you.” “I guess it’s my Samoan blood.” Sal rushes to my defense. He points his finger at the fag. “Out!” “But I didn’t do anything.” “Out, out!””

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

he shouts, his hands stiffly on the bar. The old fag picks himself up and begins to drag himself out.
Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 68.

“Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Linus & the Lunatics, Part II, 2003-11-25, 2006-08-28 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7279,
2000s, 2000-04

People , Way

“That's wild! I'll start off with five stars and work backwards from there. Now there, to me, is the most perfect band in existence, whether you're thinking of it orchestrationally or in terms of Duke's immensely creative writing. I can't think of anybody I admire more than this man; nobody could even be compared with him, except Billy Strayhorn. Duke does something with this old, tired instrumentation of trumpets, trombones and saxophones, and he has a perfect way of utilizing the men's specific sounds. Anything he plays is a work of art. The band is out of tune, for instance, and it doesn't even matter. They almost have their own brand of intonation. Duke can take an exotic-sounding idea and create something – you might call it sophisticated crudity. It gives both the qualities that I look for – an earthy quality and the sophisticated quality.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Reviewing " Agra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6MDDbrAqqg" from Far East Suite, as quoted in "Clare Fischer: Blindfold Test" http://www.mediafire.com/view/fix6ane8h54gx/Clare_Fischer#2nmgk677qzm4cnu

Men , Art , Way , Star

“It is not to be inferred that it would be anything less than courting national disaster to leave our country barren of defense. Human nature is a very constant quality. While there is justification for hoping and believing that we are moving toward perfection, it would be idle and absurd to assume that we have already reached it. We can not disregard history. There have been and will be domestic disorders. There have been and will be tendencies of one nation to encroach on another. I believe in the maintenance of an Army and Navy, not for aggression but for defense. Security and order are our most valuable possessions. They are cheap at any price. But I am opposed to every kind of military aggrandizement and to all forms of competitive armament. The ideal would be for nations to become parties to mutual covenants limiting their military establishments, and making it obvious that they are not maintained to menace each other. This ideal should be made practical as fast as possible.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Freedom and its Obligations (1924)

Hope , History , Nature , Perfection

“I am human, sometimes I feel afraid and sometimes I am worried because even though I am not afraid to spend a few years in jail, I understand that my mother and friends will be worried. I always discuss this in my head. … I'm more scared to live in this country, in this world, and do nothing: to spend life too afraid of everything, too afraid to speak or go to certain places, to just be in a normal work and don't create anything for the next generation. In my understanding, that is much more scary than to go to jail.”

Oksana Shachko (1987–2018) Ukrainian artist and activist with FEMEN

Interview with Luxemburger Wort (2015)

Life , World , Feeling , Understanding

“This is the point where love becomes possible. We see the other with the eye of the heart, an eye not clouded by fear manifesting as need, jealousy, possessiveness, or manipulation. With the unclouded eye of the heart, we can see the other as other. We can rejoice in the other, challenge the other, and embrace the other without losing our own center or taking anything away from the other. We are always other to each other — soul meeting soul, the body awakened with joy. To love unconditionally requires no contracts, bargains, or agreements. Love exists in the moment-to-moment flux of life.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: Dancing in the Flames (1997), p. 221

Love , Life , Fear , Jealousy

“Look who's laughing now that you've wasted
How many years and you've barely even tasted
Anything remotely close to
Everything you've boasted about
Look who's crying now.”

Jack Johnson (musician) (1975) American musician

F-Stop Blues.
Song lyrics, Brushfire Fairytales (2001)

Cry

“Know that the essence of a person, as such, is quite impossible to perceive without his material embodiment (…) This is because our five senses and our imagination do not offer us anything more than the revelation of the actions of the essence, but not the essence itself.”

Yehuda Ashlag (1886–1954) Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Kabbalist

Assorted Themes, On Form, Essence & Matter

Imagination , Sense , Personality

“If I've learned anything in my life, it's that God has the habit of asking you to do the very thing you think you can't do.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 123

Life , God , Thinking , Learning

“He who seeks freedom for anything but freedom's self is made to be a slave.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book The Old Regime and the Revolution

Original text: Qui cherche dans la liberté autre chose qu'elle-même est fait pour servir.
Variant translation: The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.
Old Regime (1856), p. 204 http://books.google.com/books?id=N50aibeL8BAC&pg=PA204&vq=%22He+who+seeks+freedom%22&source=gbs_search_r&cad=1_1
1850s and later

Freedom