Quotes about being
page 56

Dag Hammarskjöld photo

“The longest journey
Is the journey inwards.
Of him who has chosen his destiny,
Who has started upon his quest
For the source of his being.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

Variant translation: The longest journey is the journey inward, for he who has chosen his destiny has started upon his quest for the source of his being.
Markings (1964)

Douglas Coupland photo

“I have nowhere to go.
The swift satellites show
The clock of my whole being is slow.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"Here"
Tares (1961)

Jean Paul Sartre photo
Báb photo
Báb photo
Meher Baba photo

“If God can be found through the medium of any drug, God is not worthy of being God.”

God in a Pill? : Meher Baba on L.S.D. and The High Roads (1966)
General sources

Charles Darwin photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Paul Theroux photo
Mark Satin photo
Ron White photo
Francis S. Collins photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
Jacques-Yves Cousteau photo
Arnold Bennett photo
David Brin photo

“It was better to imagine a sacrifice being for something.”

Source: Startide Rising (1983), Chapter 51 (p. 269)

Gordon B. Hinckley photo
John Stuart Mill photo

“A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.”

Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985) American speculative fiction writer

As quoted in The Issue at Hand: Studies in Contemporary Magazine Science Fiction (1964) by James Blish, p. 14

Al Gore photo
John Leguizamo photo
Erick Avari photo

“I have learned so much from every director and actor I have ever worked with. I have been fortunate to have worked with some of the greats of our era and I was always cognizant of the fact that I was getting a free education every time at bat. I think you learn so much from just observing and being privy to the conversations that move the creative process forward.”

Erick Avari (1952) Indian actor

Playing Elrktra's Father and Encountering The Mummy: A Chat with Actor Erick Avari https://podcastingthemsoftly.com/2015/11/17/playing-elektras-father-and-encountering-the-mummy-a-chat-with-actor-erick-avari/ (November 17, 2015)

Sinclair Lewis photo
Jordan Peterson photo

“The importance of imitation for the development of higher cognition in human beings: We embody ideas before we abstract them out and then represent them in an articulated way. What is the child doing when they play house? They are watching their parent over multiple instantiations, and then abstracting out the spirit called Mother, and that is whatever is mother-like across all those multiple manifestations, and then laying out that pattern internally and manifesting it in an abstract world. It's that you're smart enough to pull out the abstraction, and then embody it. And certainly the child is striving toward an ideal. If children don't engage in that kind of dramatic and pretend play to some tremendous degree, then they don't get properly socialized. It's really a critical element of developing self understanding and of also developing the capability of being with others, because what you do when you're a child, especially around the age of four is: you jointly construct a shared fictional world, and then you act out your joint roles within that shared fictional world. Embodied imitation and dramatic abstraction constituted the ground out of which higher abstract cognition emerged. How else could it be? Clearly we were mostly bodies before we were minds. Clearly. And so we were acting out things way before we understood them.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_GPAl_q2QQ "Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority"

Alain de Botton photo
Fiona Apple photo

“I don't have a big thing about leaving my mark or being historic.”

Fiona Apple (1977) singer-songwriter, musician

Dr Drew interview http://www.neverisapromise.com/interviews/DrDrew1199.html (November 1999)

Chris Cornell photo
Martin Buber photo
Alain de Botton photo
Ray Kurzweil photo

“Creating an avatar of this sort is one way of embodying that information in a way that human beings can interact with. It is inherently human to transcend limitations.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

Futurist Ray Kurweil Bring Dead Father Back to Life http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/futurist-ray-kurzweil-bring-dead-father-back-life/story?id=14267712 (August 9, 2011)
Futurist Ray Kurweil Bring Dead Father Back to Life http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/futurist-ray-kurzweil-bring-dead-father-back-life/story?id14267712 (2011)

“When I look back, I’ve had an incredibly lucky life. Being tall with unusual looks helped, although I did build a barrier around myself early on because of shyness. I know I could have enjoyed my life a lot more then if I’d been the person I am today.”

Valerie Leon (1943) English actress

Whatever happened to Bond Girl Valerie Leon? http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/life/614933/Bond-Girl-Valerie-Leon-career-life (November 2, 2015)

“[Chapman] is a strong candidate for being the fool’s gold of the current free-agent market.”

Joe Kehoskie (1973) American baseball agent

On $30 million Cuban pitcher Aroldis Chapman's readiness for Major League Baseball, from the New York Times article "Risks Seen in Signing Cuban Defector" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/sports/baseball/04chapman.html by Jack Curry (3 December 2009)

James Hamilton photo
Jacob Bronowski photo

“The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science, or outside of it, we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses. First, in the engineering sense: Science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But second, I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge – all information between human beings – can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma. It's a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance – and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair. The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930's, it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it – the ascent of man against the throwback to the despots' belief that they have absolute certainty.”

Episode 11: "Knowledge or Certainty"
The Ascent of Man (1973)

“The Lord, O Arjuna, dwells in the heart of every being, and by his delusive power spins round all beings set on the machine.”

W. Douglas P. Hill (1884–1962) British Indologist

Source: The Bhagavadgītā (1973), p. 211. (61.)

Miss Shangay Lily photo
Colin Wilson photo
William Bradford photo
Alfred North Whitehead photo

“Every human being is the natural guardian of his own importance.”

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

Source: 1920s, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. 9: "Science and Philosophy"

George Holmes Howison photo
Nigel Cumberland photo

“The business author Stephen Covey explains it well using logging as an analogy – when you are trying to saw a tree down you must take breaks to sharpen your saw. Being a workaholic and failing to do so will leave you blunt and useless.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

François de La Rochefoucauld photo

“There are few people who are more often wrong than those who cannot suffer being wrong.”

Il n'y a point de gens qui aient plus souvent tort que ceux qui ne peuvent souffrir d'en avoir.
Maxim 386.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Robert S. Mendelsohn photo
William Lane Craig photo

“And therefore, even though animals are in pain, they aren't aware of it. They don't have this third order pain awareness. They are not aware of pain, and therefore they do not suffer as human beings do. Now, this is a tremendous comfort to those of us who are animal lovers, like myself, or to pet owners. Even though your dog or your cat may be in pain, it isn't really aware of being in pain, and therefore it doesn't suffer as you would when you are in pain.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

"Does God Exist?" debate vs Stephen Law, Westminster Central Hall, London, , quoted in * 2012-10-04
William Lane Craig argues that animals can’t feel pain
Jerry
Coyne
Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is True
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/william-lane-craig-argues-that-animals-cant-feel-pain/
2013-03-07

Nicomachus photo

“Scientific number, being set over such things as these, should be harmoniously constituted, in accordance with itself; not by any other but by itself.”

Nicomachus (60–120) Ancient Greek mathematician

Book I, Chapter VI
Nicomachus of Gerasa: Introduction to Arithmetic (1926)

Kabir photo
Samuel Butler photo
Amir Taheri photo

“The Shah's vision of the ideal form of government was not so far removed from that of Mossadeq. In that ideal model one man, the king, prime minister or Pishva [Führer] would act as the guardian of the nation's highest interests. The Pishva, because he loves his people, could never do anything that might not be good for the people and the country. He might sacrifice the interests of the few for the benefit of the many. But he would never harm 'the people' or 'the nation' as a whole. Mossadeq's version of the same model envisaged a role for crowds, political groups - though not for political parties - and religious associations whose task was to support the Pishva by fighting his opponents and making him feel loved and cherished. In the Shah's model, the Pishva's decisions were to be carried out exclusively through the bureaucracy with the armed forces always ready to crush any opposition. All that was left for 'the nation' to do was applaud the Pishva and make him feel good. Mossadeq and the Shah advanced exactly the same argument in defence of their respective models: Iran, being constantly prey to the devilish appetite of the rapacious foreign powers, the influence of the ajnabi (foreigners), multiplying the centres of political power would allow the ajnabi to infiltrate the nation's structures. Neither man could invisage a situation in which different sections of the Iranian society might, for reasons of their own, oppose the Leader. They could conceive of no circumstances in which an opposition movement could emerge without foreign backing and intrigue.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

The Unknown Life of the Shah (1991)

David Foster Wallace photo
George Holmes Howison photo

“Before it can be said, then, that human freedom and the absolute definiteness of God as Supreme Reason are really reconciled, we must have found some way of harmonising the eternity of the human spirit with the creative and regenerative offices of God. The sense of their antagonism is nothing new. Confronted with the race-wide fact of human sin, the elder theology proclaimed this antagonism, and solved it by denying to man any but a temporal being; quite as the common-sense of the everyday Philistine, absorbed in the limitations of the sensory life, proclaims the mere finitude of man, and is stolid to the ideal considerations that suggest immortality and moral freedom, rating them as day-dreams beneath sober notice, because the price of their being real is the attributing to man nothing short of infinity. "We are finite! merely finite!" is the steadfast cry of the old theology and of the plodding common realist alike; and, sad to say, of most of historic philosophy too. And the old theology, with more penetrating consistency than the realistic ordinary man or the ordinary philosophy, went on to complete its vindication of the Divine Sovereignty from all human encroachment by denying the freedom of man altogether.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.330-1

Benjamin J. Davis Jr. photo
Plutarch photo

“Lampis, the sea commander, being asked how he got his wealth, answered, "My greatest estate I gained easily enough, but the smaller slowly and with much labour."”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Whether an Aged Man ought to meddle in State Affairs
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Ursula K. Le Guin photo

“Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.”

Section 5
Hainish Cycle, The Word for World Is Forest (1972)

Isaac Barrow photo
Stendhal photo

“A novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.”

Un roman est un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route. Tantôt il reflète à vos yeux l’azur des cieux, tantôt la fange des bourbiers de la route. Et l’homme qui porte le miroir dans sa hotte sera par vous accusé‚ d’être immoral ! Son miroir montre la fange, et vous accusez le miroir! Accusez bien plutôt le grand chemin où est le bourbier, et plus encore l’inspecteur des routes qui laisse l’eau croupir et le bourbier se former.
Vol. II, ch. XIX
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

Henry Moore photo

“And for me Michelangelo's greatest work is one that was in his studio partly finished, partly unfinished when he died 'The Rondanini Pietà'. I don't know of any other single work of art by anyone that is more poignant, more moving. It isn't the most powerful of Michelangelo's works – it's a mixture, in fact, of two styles…. the changing became so drastic that I think he knocked the head off the sculpture… So the figure must originally have been a good deal taller. And if we see also the proportion of the length of the body of Christ compared with the length of the legs, there's no doubt that the whole top of the original sculpture has been cut away. Now this to me is a great question. Why should I and other sculptors I know, my contemporaries – I think that Giacometti feels this, I know Marino Marini feels it – find this work one of the most moving and greatest works we know of when it's a work which has such disunity in it?… But that's so moving, so touching: the position of the heads, the whole tenderness of the top part of the sculpture, is in my opinion more what it is by being in contrast with the rather finished, tough, leathery, typical Michelangelo legs. The top part is Gothic and the lower part is sort of Renaissance.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote of Henri Moore in his interview with David Silvester, in 'The Sunday Times Magazine', 16 Febr. 1964, pp. 18, 20-22
1955 - 1970

Lewis Pugh photo

“I always feel nostalgic when I disembark (off a ship). It's not that I don't like land. I just love being at sea.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

6 November 2014, Twitter
Speaking & Features

Šantidéva photo

“As long as diseases afflict living beings
May I be the doctor, the medicine
And also the nurse
Who restores them to health.”

Šantidéva (685–763) 8th-century Indian Buddhist monk and scholar

Bodhicaryavatara

Bode Miller photo
Agatha Christie photo
Franklin D. Roosevelt photo

“Nazi forces are not seeking mere modifications in colonial maps or in minor European boundaries. They openly seek the destruction of all elective systems of government on every continent-including our own; they seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers who have seized power by force. These men and their hypnotized followers call this a new order. It is not new. It is not order.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

Address to the Annual Dinner for White House Correspondents' Association, Washington, D.C. (15 March 1941). A similar (but misleading 'quote') is inscribed on the FDR memorial, in Washington D. C., which says "They (who) seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers... Call this a New Order. It is not new and it is not order".
1940s

Grover Cleveland photo

“What is the use of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?”

Grover Cleveland (1837–1908) 22nd and 24th president of the United States

As quoted in An Honest President (2000) by H. Paul Jeffers, p. 200.

Dorothy Parker photo

“Of course, there are many things to be said for the afternoon performance, chief among them being that it cuts in so generously on one’s work. p. 201”

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 4: 1921

George Chakiris photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Mark Rothko photo

“I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

in The Romantics were prompted, essay by Mark Rothko, 1947/48; as quoted in Possibilities, vol 1, no. 1, winter 1947-48, Kate Rothko Prizel and Christophor Rothko.
1940's

Nicholas Wade photo
Britney Spears photo
Antonio Negri photo
El Lissitsky photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Lucille Ball photo

“When human beings banish God from the world, they make Gods of themselves.”

Dennis O'Driscoll (1954–2012) Irish poet, critic

Other Quotes

Thomas Robert Malthus photo
Agatha Christie photo

“You will become more conscious if you use the moment of being rebuked or blamed to observe your reaction. You will observe yourself making an excuse, giving a reason.”

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

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Yan Lianke photo

“Better than big business is clean business.
To an honest man the most satisfactory reflection after he has amassed his dollars is not that they are many but that they are all clean.
What constitutes clean business? The answer is obvious enough, but the obvious needs restating every once in a while.
"A clean profit is one that has also made a profit for the other fellow."
This is fundamental moral axiom in business. Any gain that arises from another's loss is dirty.
Any business whose prosperity depends upon damage to any other business is a menace to the general welfare.
That is why gambling, direct or indirect, is criminal, why lotteries are prohibited by law, and why even gambling slot-machine devices are not tolerated in civilized countries. When a farmer sells a housekeeper a barrel of apples, when a milkman sells her a quart of milk, or the butcher a pound of steak, or the dry-goods man a yard of muslin, the housekeeper is benefited quite as much as those who get her money.
That is the type of honest, clean business, the kind that helps everybody and hurts nobody. Of course as business becomes more complicated it grows more difficult to tell so clearly whether both sides are equally prospered. No principle is automatic. It requires sense, judgment, and conscience to keep clean; but it can be done, nevertheless, if one is determined to maintain his self-respect. A man that makes a habit, every deal he goes into, of asking himself, "What is there in it for the other fellow?" and who refuses to enter into any transaction where his own gain will mean disaster to some one else, cannot go for wrong.
And no matter how many memorial churches he builds, nor how much he gives to charity, or how many monuments he erects in his native town, any man who has made his money by ruining other people is not entitled to be called decent. A factory where many workmen are given employment, paid living wages, and where health and life are conserved, is doing more real good in the world than ten eleemosynary institutions.
The only really charitable dollar is the clean dollar. And the nasty dollar, wrung from wronged workmen or gotten by unfair methods from competitors, is never nastier than when it pretends to serve the Lord by being given to the poor, to education, or to religion. In the long run all such dollars tend to corrupt and disrupt society.
Of all vile money, that which is the most unspeakably vile is the money spent for war; for war is conceived by the blundering ignorance and selfishness of rulers, is fanned to flame by the very lowest passions of humanity, and prostitutes the highest ideal of men; zeal for the common good; to the business of killing human beings and destroying the results of their collective work.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), Clean Business

Peter F. Drucker photo

“Absolute size by itself is no indicator of success and achievement, let alone of managerial competence. Being the right size is.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 3, p. 672

Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Hilaire Belloc photo

“Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This [taking a rosary out of his pocket] is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Speech to voters of South Salford (1906), quoted in Robert Speaight, The Life of Hilaire Belloc (London: Hollis & Carter, 1957), p. 204
Response to his Tory opponent's slogan, "Don't vote for a Frenchman and a Catholic". On polling day, 13 January 1906, Belloc, standing as a Liberal, overturned a Conservative majority to win by 852 votes, winning again four years later, though by an even slimmer margin.

Paul Cézanne photo
African Spir photo
Colin Wilson photo
Brian Wilson photo

“Being called a musical genius was a cross to bear. Genius is a big word. But if you have to live up to something, you might as well live up to that.”

Brian Wilson (1942) American musician, singer, songwriter and record producer

"Brian Wilson: God Only Knows" http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/god-only-knows-19880811 in Rolling Stone (11 August 1988)