Quotes about atmosphere
page 2

Neal Stephenson photo

“For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

Wired 2.02: In the Kindom of Mao Bell http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.02/mao.bell.html?pg=2&topic=&topic_set=

Everett Dean Martin photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Jack Herer photo

“Humor could not flourish in a wholly serious and rational atmosphere.”

Raymond Smullyan (1919–2017) American mathematician

Planet Without Laughter (1980)

Carl Sagan photo
Emily Brontë photo
Marvin Bower photo
Umberto Veronesi photo
John Dalton photo
Anton Mauve photo

“. never in my life I have seen such a truly sad thing [an atmosphere at Wolfheze ]. A mother heartbroken about the loss of her only child is nothing compared to this. A broad streak or strip in front of you, which becomes blacker and blacker towards the horizon. a mysterious ticking and hissing of rain drops which keep hanging halfway the heather plant on each twig and sprout..”

Anton Mauve (1838–1888) Dutch painter (1838–1888)

translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Anton Mauve, uit zijn brief:) ..zoo iets waar droevigs [een atmosfeer bij nl:Wolfheze ] heb ik nimmer gezien. Een diepbedroefde moeder over het verlies van haar eenige kind is er niets bij. Een breede streep of strook vóór u, welke naar de horizon toe langer hoe zwarter wordt. een geheimzinnig getik en gesis van regendroppels welke halverwege de hei plant aan elk takje en uitspreitseltje blijft hangen..
In a letter of Anton Mauve to Willem Maris, 1860's; as cited in Anton Mauve, (exhibition catalog of Teylers Museum, Haarlem / Laren, Singer), ed. De Bodt en Plomp, 2009, p. 33
1860's

Hermann Hesse photo
Bill Nye photo

“It is this fragile nature of the earth's atmosphere that I want everybody to appreciate. It's what I call your place in space.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NewsBank, Meagan Engle, ‘Science Guy' Nye tells Miami students to ‘change the world', Oxford Press, Ohio, January 31, 2011]

Yusuf Qaradawi photo
Peter Greenaway photo
Daniel Dennett photo

“Remember Marxism? It used to be a sour sort of fun to tease Marxists about the contradictions in some of their pet ideas. The revolution of the proletariat was inevitable, good Marxists believed, but if so, why were they so eager to enlist us in their cause? If it was going to happen anyway, it was going to happen with or without our help. But of course the inevitability that Marxists believe in is one that depends on the growth of the movement and all its political action. There were Marxists working very hard to bring about the revolution, and it was comforting to them to believe that their success was guaranteed in the long run. And some of them, the only ones that were really dangerous, believed so firmly in the rightness of their cause that they believed it was permissible to lie and deceive in order to further it. They even taught this to their children, from infancy. These are the "red-diaper babies," children of hardline members of the Communist Party of America, and some of them can still be found infecting the atmosphere of political action in left-wing circles, to the extreme frustration and annoyance of honest socialists and others on the left.Today we have a similar phenomenon brewing on the religious right: the inevitability of the End Days, or the Rapture, the coming Armageddon that will separate the blessed from the damned in the final day of Judgment. Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world have been with us for several millennia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off. But, just as with the Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to "hasten the inevitable," not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion. And these people are not funny at all. They are dangerous, for the same reason that red-diaper babies are dangerous: they put their allegiance to their creed ahead of their commitment to democracy, to peace, to (earthly) justice — and to truth. If push comes to shove, some of the are prepared to lie and even to kill…”

Breaking the Spell (2006)

Rick Santorum photo
Dorothy Parker photo

“They exude an atmosphere of The New Republic—a sort of Crolier-than-thou air. p. 36”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25758762M/Dorothy_Parker_Complete_Broadway_1918-1923, Chapter 1: 1918

Anthony Watts photo
D. V. Gundappa photo
Mohammad-Ali Taskhiri photo
Luther Burbank photo
George C. Lorimer photo
Gideon Mantell photo
Rukmini Devi Arundale photo

“To recreate the temple atmosphere on the urban stage, and thus to facilitate a new kind of seeing that would enable the spiritual revival of the dance.”

Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904–1986) Indian Bharatnatyam dancer

On the revival of 'sadir' dance form (which till then was the forte of the devadasis) she said on the settings of the theater for her performances quoted in "Rukmini Devi Arundale, 1904-1986: A Visionary Architect of Indian Culture and the Performing Arts", page 12

Akira Ifukube photo
Max Horkheimer photo
Edward Bouverie Pusey photo
Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
Theodore Dalrymple photo
Alfred Horsley Hinton photo
John F. Kennedy photo

“A country cannot be defeated politically unless it is defeated culturally. Our alien rulers knew that they could not conquer India without conquering Hinduism - cultural India's name at its deepest and highest, and the principle of its identity, continuity and reawakening. Therefore Hinduism became an object of their special attack. Physical attack was supplemented by ideological attack. They began to interpret for us our history, our religion, our culture and ourselves. We learnt to look at us through their eyes…. The long period created an atmosphere of mental slavery and imitation. It created a class of people Hindu in their names and by birth but anti-Hindu in orientation, sympathy and loyalty. They knew all the bad things and nothing good about Hinduism. Hindu dharma is now being subverted from within. Anti-Hindu Hindus are very important today; they rule the roost; they write our histories, they define our nation; they control the media, the academia, the politics, the higher administration and higher courts. They are now working as clients of those forces who are planning to revive their old Imperialism… During this period our minds became soft. We became escapists; we wanted to avoid conflict at any cost, even conflict and controversy of ideas, even when this controversy was necessary. We developed an escape-route. We called it "synthesis". We said all religions, all scriptures, all prophets preach the same things. It was intellectual surrender, and our enemies saw it that way; they concluded that we are amenable to anything, that we would clutch at any false hope or idea to avoid a struggle, and that we would do nothing to defend ourselves. Therefore, they have become even more aggressive. It also shows that we have lost spiritual discrimination (viveka), and would entertain any falsehood; this is prajñâ-dosha, drishti-dosha, and it cannot be good for our survival in the long run. People first fall into delusion before they fall into misfortune.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

On Hinduism (2000)

Murray Walker photo

“I miss it enormously. I miss the buzz. I miss the adrenalin and I miss shouting into the microphone. I miss the atmosphere, I miss the camaraderie. But I don't miss it as much as I might have done, because I haven't had a total withdrawal.”

Murray Walker (1923) Motorsport commentator and journalist

Oliver Owen (July 1, 2007) "The Observer: Silverstone British Grand Prix 2007: Murray Walker Interview: Mint Condition", The Observer.
Interviews

Auguste Rodin photo

“Then I gathered the éléments of what people call my symbolism. I do not understand anything about long words and theories. But I am willing to be a symbolist, if that defines the ideas that Michael Angelo gave me, namely that the essence of sculpture is the modelling, the general scheme which alone enables us to render the intensity, the supple variety of movement and character. If we can imagine the thought of God in creating the world, He thought first of the construction, which is the sole principle of nature, of living things and perhaps of the planets. Michael Angelo seems to me rather to derive from Donatello than from the ancients; Raphaël proceeds from them. He understood that an architecture can be built up with the human body, and that, in order to possess volume and harmony, a statue or a group ought to be contained in a cube, a pyramid or some simple figure. Let us look at a Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the present day. The latter no longer touches us, because it docs not possess the qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van der Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact volume of the objects; the place of these objects has been respected, the modem painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen did not touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that separated them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say that cubic truth, not appearance, is the mistress of things, if I add that the sight of the plains and woods and country views gives me the principle of the plans that I employ on my statues, that I feel cubic truth everywhere, and that plan and volume appear to me as laws of all life and ail beauty, will it be said that I am a symbolist, that I generalise, that I am a metaphysician? It seems to me that I have remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses and haunts me.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 65-67

Paul Cézanne photo
Jack Kirby photo
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot photo
Frances Farmer photo
Woody Allen photo
Masiela Lusha photo
Vyacheslav Molotov photo
Wassily Kandinsky photo
Jacques Chirac photo
C. N. R. Rao photo
Kent Hovind photo

“Eight simple steps of what I think caused the Flood and explain all these strange phenomena on the planet. Then we'll go into a little bit more detail and then we'll close this down.
1. Noah and the animals got safely in the ark.
2. A 300 degree below zero ice meteor came flying toward the earth and broke up in space. As it was breaking up, some of the fragments got caught and became the rings around the planets. They made the craters on the Moon, the craters on some of the planets, and what was left over came down and splattered on top of the North and South pole.
3. This super cold snow fell on the poles mostly, burying the mammoths, standing up.
4. The dump of ice on the North and South pole cracked the crust of the earth releasing the fountains of the deep. The spreading ice caused the Ice Age effects. The glacier effects that we see. It buried the mammoths. It made the earth wobble around for a few thousand years. And it made the canopy collapse, which used to protect the earth. And it broke open the fountains of the deep.
5. During the first few months of the flood, the dead animals would settle out, and dead plants, and all get buried. They would become coal, if they were plants, and oil if they're animals. And those are still found today in huge graveyards. Fossils found in graveyards. Oil found in big pockets under the ground.
6. During the last few months of the flood, the unstable plates of the earth would shift around. Some places lifted up; other places sank down. That's going to form ocean basins and mountain ranges. And the runoff would cause incredible erosion like the Grand Canyon in a couple of weeks.
7. Over the next few hundred years, the ice caps would slowly melt back retreating to their current size. The added water from the ice melt would raise the ocean level creating what's called a continental shelf. It would also absorb carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere which allows for radiation to get in which is going to shorten people's life spans. And in the days of Peleg, it finally took affect.
8. The earth still today shows the effects of this devastating flood.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Hovind theory

Gino Severini photo

“.. displacement of bodies in [the] atmosphere [where] two persons form but one plastic unity, rhythmically balanced.”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

Quote from Severini's catalog entry for his exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery in London in April 1913, reproduced in Archivi del Futurismo, Volume 1., eds. Maria Drudi Gambillo and Teresa Fiori (Rome: De Luca, 1958-68. 2d 1986), p. 116
Severini explains in short the conception behind his painting 'The Bear Dance at the Moulin Rouge', 1913

José Rizal photo

“I think it is a sad reflection on our civilisation that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what goes on inside our souffles.”

Nicholas Kurti (1908–1998) Hungarian physicist

as quoted by George Porter in the preface of [But the Crackling is Superb, An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society, Institute of Physics Publishing, London, UK, 1988, 0-750-30488-X, xvii]

Paula Modersohn-Becker photo
Burkard Schliessmann photo
Nathaniel Hawthorne photo

“The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

Twice-Told Tales, Preface http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/tttpf.html (1851)

Anatoliy Tymoshchuk photo

“In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the aether reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted.
For the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. Americans had indeed contributed amply to human thought. They had helped to emancipate philosophy from ancient fetters. They had served science by lavish and rigorous research. In astronomy, favoured by their costly instruments and clear atmosphere, they had done much to reveal the dispositions of the stars and galaxies. In literature, though often they behaved as barbarians, they had also conceived new modes of expression, and moods of thought not easily appreciated in Europe. They had also created a new and brilliant architecture. And their genius for organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely conceivable, let alone practicable, to other peoples. In fact their best minds faced old problems of theory and of valuation with a fresh innocence and courage, so that fogs of superstition were cleared away wherever these choice Americans were present. But these best were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.”

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter II: Europe’s Downfall; Section 1, “Europe and America” (p. 33)

Anthony Burgess photo
Mickey Spillane photo
Bill Downs photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
S. H. Raza photo
Koenraad Elst photo
Anton Mauve photo

“Dear friend! I am still staying in Oosterbeek as you can see but I will now leave in 2 days. The last days I spent on two small paintings ordered by Mr. de Visser. I painted them in a happy atmosphere... I send them to you because they were still wet when I sent them away and I could hardly do that to Mr. de Visser. Please, do you want to give them a layer of egg-varnish and when you discover here or there a badly seen dash, or you see a chance to make a witty thing in the paintings, oh chap, I pray you do so, because if he doesn't like them, I'll get no bread and have nasty problems, because I need the money so badly..”

Anton Mauve (1838–1888) Dutch painter (1838–1888)

translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Anton Mauve's brief, in het Nederlands:) Waarde Vriend! Ik zit zoo als gij ziet nog altijd te Oosterbeek doch zal nu over 2 dagen vertrekken de laatste tijd heb ik aan twee kleine schilderijtjes besteed voor den Heer de Visser, ik heb ze onder een gelukkige atmosfeer geschilderd.. ..ik zend ze jou omdat ze nat waren toen ik ze afzond en ik dat moeyelijk aan den Heer de Visser kon doen, wilt gij ze s.v.p. met een eivernisje bestrijken en vindt gij ze hier of daar eene slecht geziene greep, of ziet gij gemakkelijk kans er nog eene geestige zet in te doen, och kerel ik bid je doe het, want als ze hem niet bevielen en ik krijg geen duiten dan zit ik er leelijk mee in, ik heb ze hoog noodig..
In a letter of Mauve from Oosterbeek 4 Nov. 1867, to Willem Maris in The Hague; from the original letter https://rkd.nl/explore/excerpts/109, RKD Archive, The Hague
1860's

Anthony Watts photo

“And finally we have this, this discovery that Earth's magnetic field can be ripped open and our atmosphere laid bare to the solar wind, much like Mars. Magnetism is underrated in the grand scheme of things, in my opinion. We'd do well to pay more attention to magnetic trends in our corner of the universe and what effects it has on Earthly climate.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

Earth's Magnetic Field Has Massive Breach – scientists baffled http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/16/earths-magnetic-field-has-massive-breach-scientists-baffled/, wattsupwiththat.com, December 16, 2008.
2008

Burkard Schliessmann photo
Haile Selassie photo
Alexander Maclaren photo
Nelson Mandela photo
Roger Nash Baldwin photo
Wallace Stevens photo
Paula Modersohn-Becker photo
Roy Spencer photo
Marshall McLuhan photo
Serzh Sargsyan photo
Gustave Geffroy photo

“From now on whatever the hour represented on the canvas, a supreme accord will be wrought amongst all the parts of the subject: the water, the sky, the clouds, the foliage, reunified by the atmosphere, will form a whole of an irreproachable homogeneity, a grandiose and charming image of natural harmony.”

Gustave Geffroy (1855–1926) French writer

1898 in: Steven Z. Levine, ‎Claude Monet (1994), Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self. p. 93: presented as "account at the time of the reexhibition of the seven Cathedrals in 1898."

Eugène Boudin photo

“[Venice is] somewhat disguised by the artists who usually paint Venice, who have disfigured it by turning it into a city heated by the brightest and hottest sun. On the contrary, Venice, like all luminous cities, has a grey hue, the atmosphere is mild and misty and the sky arrays itself with clouds, just like the sky of our Norman and Dutch regions.”

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) French painter

Quote of Boudin's letter, from Venice, 1895; to art-dealer Durand-Ruel; as cited in 'Venice, The Grand Canal' 1895, by Anne-Marie Bergeret-Gourbin https://www.museothyssen.org/en/collection/artists/boudin-eugene/venice-grand-canal, Museo Thyssen
1880s - 1890s

Eric Blom photo

“Blues. An American dance stemming from the Foxtrot, the speed of which it reduced and into which it brought a deliberately contrived dismal atmosphere. When Blues are sung their words seem to aim at attaining to the utmost depths of gloom and inanity.”

Eric Blom (1888–1959) Swiss-born British-naturalised music lexicographer, musicologist, music critic, music biographer and transl…

Article, Blues, p. 60
Everyman's Dictionary of Music (London: J. M Dent & Sons; 3rd ed. 1958)

S. I. Hayakawa photo
Rosa Luxemburg photo
Willa Cather photo