Quotes about closing
page 11

“I want to take you as close as you can get, I want to feel your ecstasy as you feel mine, I want to bridge the final gap between us, I want us to come together in a place where each can know the other does not lie.”

Norman Spinrad book The Void Captain's Tale

Source: The Void Captain's Tale (1983), Chapter 15 (p. 201)

Lie, Feeling

“Most people won’t have opportunity to do full-time service, but those lucky enough to have monetary wealth or some spare time really can make an enormous difference. As someone who’s now in the public sector, and is seeing up-close-and-personal the real impact of what we do and what we give, I can tell you: every dollar and every volunteer help, in more ways than you can count.”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://mikebloomberg.com/en/issues/education/mayor_michael_bloomberg_delivers_slate_60_dinner_keynote_address_at_william_j_clinton_presidential_library
Philanthropy

People, Way, Time, Help

“The greatest danger to the British Empire and to the British people is not to be found among the enormous fleets and armies of the European Continent, nor in the solemn problems of Hindustan; it is not in the 'Yellow Peril' nor the 'Black Peril' nor any danger in the wide circuit of colonial and foreign affairs. No, it is here in our midst, close at home, close at hand in the vast growing cities of England and Scotland, and in the dwindling and cramped villages of our denuded countryside. It is there you will find the seeds of Imperial ruin and national decay—the unnatural gap between rich and poor, the divorce of the people from the land, the want of proper discipline and training in our youth, the exploitation of boy labour, the physical degeneration which seems to follow so swiftly on civilized poverty, the awful jumbles of an obsolete Poor Law, the horrid havoc of the liquor traffic, the constant insecurity in the means of subsistence and employment which breaks the heart of many a sober, hard-working man, the absence of any established minimum standard of life and comfort among the workers, and, at the other end, the swift increase of vulgar, joyless luxury—here are the enemies of Britain. Beware lest they shatter the foundations of her power.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 139-140
Early career years (1898–1929)

Life, People, Youth, Law

“A common issue with SF settings is that causally disconnected civilizations nevertheless are close enough in technological development that conflict is possible, rather than it being a matter of laser cannons against a thin film of single celled organisms.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

[loquls$32v$1@reader1.panix.com, 2014]
2010s

“As Christ's ministry drew to its close, its severity and its gentleness both increased; its severity to the class from whom it never turned away. Side by side through all His manifestations of Himself, there were the two aspects: "He showed Himself froward " (if I may quote the word) to the self-righteous and the Pharisee; and He bent with more than a woman's tenderness of 'yearning love over the darkness and sinfulness, which in its great darkness dimly knew itself blind, and in its sinfulness stretched out a lame hand of faith, and groped after a Divine deliverer.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 68.

Love, Faith, Quotes, Christ

“There was a smell in the air now. The hot, close, frightening small of mob; mob excited, hungry, dreaming blood and death. The primitive in Stark knew that sweaty acridity all too well.”

Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: The Ginger Star (1974), Chapter 7 (p. 45)

Death, Dreams

“Wodeyar's musical output numbers close to 100 kritis [Compositions]. The nature of this output, whether it is in the choice of ragas like Bhanu Chandrika, Hamsanatini and Bhoopala Panchama, or in the lyrics which carry deep meanings drawn form the Upanishads and Srividya worship, show a keen and intelligent mind at work. Fascinating as the life was of this multi-faceted personality, it also had a poignancy for the trials and tribulations he faced.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

In Jayachamaraja Wodeyar http://www.radioweb.in/programs/jayachamaraja-wodeyar

Life, Music, Intelligence, Nature

“My attitude was always to keep open, to keep scanning. I think that's how things work in nature. Many people are close-minded, rigid, and that's not my inclination.”

Jonas Salk (1914–1995) Inventor of polio vaccine

Academy of Achievement interview (1991)

People, Nature, Thinking

“Don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amide nature, extrapolate art from it and concentrate on what you will create as a result.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1870s - 1880s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), pp. 5 & 22: Gauguin is advising a fellow painter, 1885

Dreams, Art, Nature

“In Somalia, we know exactly what they had to gain because they told us. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell, described this as the best public relations operation of the Pentagon that he could imagine. His picture, which I think is plausible, is that there was a problem about raising the Pentagon budget, and they needed something that would be, look like a kind of a cakewalk, which would give a lot of prestige to the Pentagon. Somalia looked easy. Let's look back at the background. For years, the United States had supported a really brutal dictator, who had just devastated the country, and was finally kicked out. After he's kicked out, it was 1990, the country sank into total chaos and disaster, with starvation and warfare and all kind of horrible misery. The United States refused to, certainly to pay reparations, but even to look. By the middle of 1992, it was beginning to ease. The fighting was dying down, food supplies were beginning to get in, the Red Cross was getting in, roughly 80% of their supplies they said. There was a harvest on the way. It looked like it was finally sort of settling down. At that point, all of a sudden, George Bush announced that he had been watching these heartbreaking pictures on television, on Thanksgiving, and we had to do something, we had to send in humanitarian aid. The Marines landed, in a landing which was so comical, that even the media couldn't keep a straight face. Take a look at the reports of the landing of the Marines, it must've been the first week of December 1992. They had planned a night, there was nothing that was going on, but they planned a night landing, so you could show off all the fancy new night vision equipment and so on. Of course they had called the television stations, because what's the point of a PR operation for the Pentagon if there's no one to look for it. So the television stations were all there, with their bright lights and that sort of thing, and as the Marines were coming ashore they were blinded by the television light. So they had to send people out to get the cameramen to turn off the lights, so they could land with their fancy new equipment. As I say, even the media could not keep a straight face on this one, and they reported it pretty accurately. Also reported the PR aspect. Well the idea was, you could get some nice shots of Marine colonels handing out peanut butter sandwiches to starving refugees, and that'd all look great. And so it looked for a couple of weeks, until things started to get unpleasant. As things started to get unpleasant, the United States responded with what's called the Powell Doctrine. The United States has an unusual military doctrine, it's one of the reasons why the U. S. is generally disqualified from peace keeping operations that involve civilians, again, this has to do with sovereignty. U. S. military doctrine is that U. S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat. That's not true for other countries. So countries like, say, Canada, the Fiji Islands, Pakistan, Norway, their soldiers are coming under threat all the time. The peace keepers in southern Lebanon for example, are being attacked by Israeli soldiers all the time, and have suffered plenty of casualties, and they don't like it. But U. S. soldiers are not permitted to come under any threat, so when Somali teenagers started shaking fists at them, and more, they came back with massive fire power, and that led to a massacre. According to the U. S., I don't know the actual numbers, but according to U. S. government, about 7 to 10 thousand Somali civilians were killed before this was over. There's a close analysis of all of this by Alex de Waal, who's one of the world's leading specialists on African famine and relief, altogether academic specialist. His estimate is that the number of people saved by the intervention and the number killed by the intervention was approximately in the same ballpark. That's Somalia. That's what's given as a stellar example of the humanitarian intervention.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Responding to the question, "what did the United States have to gain by intervening in Somalia?", regarding Operation Provide Relief/Operation Restore Hope/Battle of Mogadishu.
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999, Sovereignty and World Order, 1999

People, World, Peace, Food

“It is often said that in prosperity we have many friends, but that we are usually neglected when things go badly. I disagree. Not only do malicious people flock about us in order to witness our ruin, but other unfortunates as well, who have been kept away by our happiness, and now feel close to us on account of our troubles. When Shelley was poor and unknown, he had more friends than the triumphant Lord Byron. It takes great nobility of soul to be able, without any taint of self-interest, to be friends with fortunate people.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship

People, Feeling, Soul, Happiness

“Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland
plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke
Into pale sea — look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet:
this dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close;
this is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

"The Eye"

War, Mountain, Water, Sea

“One man saluted him, another bowed,
Some kissed his hand, still others kissed his foot;
Whoever touched him, joyful was and proud,
For supernatural he seemed, if not
Divine; jostling around him in a crowd,
As close as possible the Bulgars got,
And clamoured for him raucously and cried
To be their king, their captain and their guide.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Uno il saluta, un altro se gl'inchina,
Altri la mano, altri gli bacia il piede:
Ognun, quanto più può, se gli avvicina,
E beato si tien chi appresso il vede,
E più chi 'l tocca; che toccar divina
E sopranatural cosa si crede.
Lo pregan tutti, e vanno al ciel le grida,
Che sia lor re, lor capitan, lor guida.
Canto XLIV, stanza 97 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Kiss

“I can't come; express office was closed.”

Dutch Schultz (1902–1935) American mobster

From police transcripts of incoherent deathbed confession

“At the close of the day when the hamlet is still,
And mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove,
When naught but the torrent is heard on the hill,
And naught but the nightingale’s song in the grove.”

James Beattie (1735–1803) Scottish poet, moralist and philosopher

The Hermit

Forgetting

“Marx, although a man of broad knowledge, had one blind spot: he was ignorant of the true character of economics. He did not realize that economics can only be understood in close relationship to the other humanities (and certain sciences), and therefore should not be studied in vacuo. Ironically, this very weakness was largely instrumental in making Marxism successful. Marxist economics—yet another instance of a false but clear idea—can be explained to the merest child in a matter of minutes. (Conversely, to explain the workings of the free market economy to an adult would take weeks of hard work.) Because it was easily grasped, Marxism flooded the world within a few decades, as had other simplistic ideologies and religions, such as Islam and the Enlightenment; this same sort of simplicity gave rise to the French Revolution and national socialism. Christianity, on the other hand, took three centuries to triumph.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Source: Leftism Revisited (1990), p. 337

World, Religion, Idea, Knowledge

“Now one may ask, How could a Christian philosophy have something over a non-Christian philosophy, if it does not reach to a higher level of solutions, if it cannot get handy answers, if the problems and questions are still there? Well, perhaps a greater truth could be present in its ability to see the world in its truly mysterious character, in its inexhaustablity. It could even be the case that here, in the very experience of being as a mystery, that it is not to be grasped in the hand as a "well-rounded truth" — herein is reality more deeply and truly grasped than in any transparent system that may charm the mind of the student with its clarity and simplicity. And this is the claim of Christian philosophy: to be truer, precisely because of its recognition of the mysterious character of the world.
In no way, then, does philosophy become easier. Plato appears to have discovered and felt that too — if a certain interpretation of Plato is correct, maintaining that Plato understood philosophy to be something tragic for this reason, that it must constantly have recourse to mythos, since the teaching of philosophy can never close itself into a system.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, pp. 127–128
The "interpretation of Plato" referred to is that of Gerhard Krüger, Einsicht und Leidenschaft (Frankfurt, 1939), p. 301.

Truth, World, Way, Question

“Khouri did not need to be told that Hades was a neutron star, any more than she needed to be told that there was no such thing as a safe close encounter with one. You either kept away or you died; those were the rules, and there was no force in the universe capable of negating them. Gravity ruled, and gravity did not take into account circumstances, or the unfairness of things, or listen to eleventh-hour petitions before reluctantly repealing its laws. Gravity crushed, and near the surface of a neutron star gravity crushed absolutely, until diamond flowed like water; until a mountain collapsed into a millionth of its height.”

Alastair Reynolds book Revelation Space

Source: Revelation Space (2000), Chapter 37 (p. 554).

Law, Mountain, Star, Universe

“When a customer asks what no one else has ever asked, pay close attention.”

Ron Kaufman (1956) American author and consultant

Lift Me UP! Service With A Smile (2005)

“I would never even think about skating with somebody else. The whole reason I wanted to come back to skating was to be close to Tessa again, and to share those moments.”

Scott Moir (1987) Canadian figure skater

Scott Moir, quoted in "Tessa Virtue, Scott Moir Will Leave Huge Hole In Our Hearts, Canadian Figure Skating" https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/02/20/tessa-virtue-scott-moir-retirement-figure-skating-legacy_a_23366266/ (20 February 2018) Partnership with Tessa Virtue, Scott Moir about Virtue

Thinking

“The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the beautiful exists for the gratification of an observer, it is independent of him. In this sense music, too, has no aim (object), and the mere fact that this particular art is so closely bound up with our feelings by no means justifies the assumption that its aesthetic principles depend on this union.”

Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) austrian musician and musicologist

The Beautiful in Music (1854)

Beauty, Art, Music, Feeling

“I Am the Artist when I am Open. When I am closed I am Brion Gysin.”

Brion Gysin (1916–1986) Canadian artist

Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, back cover

“To a gentleman, who, at the close of a fierce dispute with Porson, exclaimed, "My opinion of you is most contemptible, Sir"; he retorted, "I never knew an opinion of yours that was not contemptible."”

Richard Porson (1759–1808) British classical scholar

John Selby Watson, The Life of Richard Porson, M.A. (1861), p. 385.

“Behind the shower curtain, Zooey closed his eyes for a few seconds, as though his own small craft were listing precariously in the wake. Then he pulled back the shower curtain and stared over at the closed door. It was a weighty stare, and relief was not really a great part of it. As much as anything else, it was the stare, not so paradoxically, of a privacy-lover who, once his privacy has been invaded, doesn't quite approve when the invader just gets up and leaves, one-two-three, like that.”

Jerome David Salinger book Franny and Zooey

Franny and Zooey (1961), Zooey (1957)

Lovers, Parting

“Now you play the loving woman;
I'll play the faithful man.
But just don't look too close into the palm of my hand.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Brilliant Disguise"
Song lyrics, Tunnel Of Love (1987)

Love, Faith

“…but he distinctly remembered standing at the house door one summer morning in a passionate outburst of rebellion against going to school. Naturally his mother was the immediate victim of his rage; that is what mothers are for, and boys also; but in this case the boy had his mother at unfair disadvantage, for she was a guest, and had no means of enforcing obedience. Henry showed a certain tactical ability by refusing to start, and he met all efforts at compulsion by successful, though too vehement protest. He was in fair way to win, and was holding his own, with sufficient energy, at the bottom of the long staircase which led up to the door of the President's library, when the door opened, and the old man slowly came down. Putting on his hat, he took the boy's hand without a word, and walked with him, paralyzed by awe, up the road to the town. After the first moments of consternation at this interference in a domestic dispute, the boy reflected that an old gentleman close on eighty would never trouble himself to walk near a mile on a hot summer morning over a shadeless road to take a boy to school, and that it would be strange if a lad imbued with the passion of freedom could not find a corner to dodge around, somewhere before reaching the school door. Then and always, the boy insisted that this reasoning justified his apparent submission; but the old man did not stop, and the boy saw all his strategical points turned, one after another, until he found himself seated inside the school, and obviously the centre of curious if not malevolent criticism. Not till then did the President release his hand and depart.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

School, Way, Boy, Nature

“Every historian loves the past or should do. If not, he has mistaken his vocation; but it is a short step from loving the past to regretting that it has ever changed. Conservatism is our greatest trade-risk; and we run psychoanalysts close in the belief that the only "normal" people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anybody else.”

A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990) Historian

"The Radical Tradition: Fox, Paine, and Cobbett", p. 14
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)

Love, People, Change, Past

“Some young men could not afford to marry or were statutorily forbidden to do so, and then their visits to Japanese brothels engendered guilt as well as VD. The official attitude to taking brown mistresses was always ambivalent. It let the side down, but a sleeping dictionary was the only way to learn the language. Mr Butcher is good on all this, and he gives such tables as one headed ‘Ethnicity of Women from whom European Men Treated at the Sultan Street Clinic Contracted Venereal Disease, 1927-1931.’ The girls of Siam were the great infectresses, but the Malays came a close second. The Japanese, who had regular medical inspections and lived in brothels cleaner than hotels, were down with the Eurasians to 0.4% in 1931. This damnable sex, by no means to be tamed by quinine or cricket. Guilt guilt guilt….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

Women, Men, Disease, Sex

“How old are you, Brian? You ought to know by now that something always breaks up love affairs unless both parties are willing to compromise themselves. And that compromising is harder to do the older and less flexible and more independent you are. It just isn’t in you, Brian. You could no more get married now than you could become a priest, or a sculptor, or a greengrocer.”
Duffy opened his mouth to voice angry denials, then one corner turned up and he closed it. “Damn you,” he said wryly. “Then why do I want to, half the time?”
Aurelianus shrugged. “It’s the nature of the species. There’s a part of a man’s mind that can only relax and go to sleep when he’s with a woman, and that part gets tired of always being tensely awake. It gives orders in so loud a voice that it often drowns out the other components. But when the loud one is asleep at last, the others regain control and chart a new course.” He grinned. “No equilibrium is possible. If you don’t want to put up with the constant seesawing, you must either starve the logical components or bind, gag and lock away in a cellar that one insistent one.”
Duffy grimaced and drank some more brandy. “I’m used to the rocking, and I was never one to get motion-sick,” he said. “I’ll stay on the seesaw.”

Tim Powers book The Drawing of the Dark

Aurelianus bowed. “You have that option, sir.”
Source: The Drawing of the Dark (1979), Chapter 18 (p. 247)

Love, Nature, Sleep, Time

“I’d very much like to wake up one morning with a cow of the Friesian variety and walk her down to Soho to the Coach and Horses, stopping on the way to buy twenty Players, ply her with vodkas until closing time, whip her off to an Indian restaurant, take her up to the Colony Room till 5.30 and then to the Yorkminster, Swiss Tavern, Three Greyhounds, get beaten up by Chinese waiters at midnight, have a row with the taxi driver, set the bed on fire, put it out with tears and then wake up on the floor. Could you then milk said cow? I doubt it.”

Jeffrey Bernard (1932–1997) British journalist

Ibid. [when?]

Way, Tear, Time, Horse

“I had scarcely entered the room when I saw on my table an open book I had not put there. It was the works of Cardano. I did not intend to read it, but my gaze fell as though compelled on a story told by that philosopher. He writes that he was studying one night by candlelight when he saw two tall old men come in through the closed doors of his room. He asked them many questions, and they finally told him they were from the Moon; whereupon they disappeared.
I was so surprised, both by the book that had put itself on my table and by the page it was open to, that I took this chain of events for an inspiration from God, who was urging me to tell people that the Moon is a world.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)

Men, God, People, Books

“We want to build up a new state! That is why the others hate us so much today…. They are, after all, plutocracies in which a tiny clique of capitalists dominate the masses, and this, naturally, in close cooperation with international Jews and Freemasons.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Speech at the Berlin Sportpalast on the opening of the Kriegswinterhilfswerk, September 4, 1940, Adolf Hitler collection of speeches 1922-1945, part 2, p. 735 https://issuu.com/grupodeestudosfernandodeogum/docs/adolf_hitler_-_collection_of_speech 1940s

Hate, Nature

“I want to govern provincially no more. I want national independence. [… ] I took time for this decision because I know all the perils of this mission. I want to ask you to struggle also in order that our country can be born in a close future.”

Bernard Landry (1937–2018) Canadian politician

August 2004 National Council speech announcing his intention to remain leader

Decision, Time, Future, Country

“In thinking about the costs of this war, and thinking about renewing it, we have to reconsider what it has done to America. It has turned the U. S. military into a force at ease with abuse of captives and civilians, occupying a Muslim nation. Some of this is surely due to the sheer hell of fighting an enemy you cannot see, surrounded by people you do not understand or trust, and being killed randomly in urban or desert insurgency conditions where friend and foe are close to indistinguishable, and where your buddies are killed on a regular basis by faceless cowards. You can certainly understand how soldiers grow completely numb in the face of abuse in those circumstances. Every "hajji" can seem like the enemy after a while. It requires men and women of almost saintly capabilities to keep their moral bearings among terrorists who massacre scores of innocents as a religious duty, among people whose differences are impossible for young troops to figure out in split-seconds. In such conditions, and as a consequences of grotesque under-manning, the breakdown in ethical discipline is no big surprise. But that doesn't make it any the less of a big deal.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

"Re-Thinking The War II" http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/05/rethinking_the__5.html, The Daily Dish (8 May 2007)

Women, Men, War, People

“Bad luck is usually transmitted by close proximity to habitual sufferers.”

Irvine Welsh book The Acid House

The narrator talking about Ange after they are released from prison.
"Stoke Newington Blues".
The Acid House (1994)

Bad luck, Suffering

“It is as if thinking itself had been reduced to the level of industrial processes, subjected to a close schedule—in short, made part and parcel of production.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 21.

Thinking, Parting

“In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln accomplished something almost miraculous. That is to say, what he had to do was to fight off the challenge of Douglas from the Republican side and at the same time drive a wedge between Douglas and the Southern Democrats. I compared his achievement in that to Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign, where Jackson fought two federal armies, beat them both and kept them close to Washington while he joined Lee before Richmond for the final battle of the seven days. It was a case of technical and strategic cleverness and profundity that is, I think, perhaps almost unrivaled in world history.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

World, History, Thinking, Time

“On the trip to Russia with the Harlem Globetrotters, we were in Lenin Stadium, and they assigned a dressing room to the team. The players were getting dressed for one of their games. They were in rather close quarters. Remember, these were young kids-Wilt was 23. The others were his age. They were like kittens. You bump me, i'll bump you back. And before you know it, two of the guys set on Wilt. They started playfully pushing and shoving him. And finally one of his teammates hit Wilt a little too hard. He took these two guys, twisted each of their shirts, and lifted both of them off the ground. Each of these guys weighed over 200 pounds. It looked like he had two little crackers in his hands. I thought he was going to hit their heads together. It was an amazing demonstration of strength.”

Wilt Chamberlain (1936–1999) basketball player

Dr. Stan Lorber, team doctor on the Globetrotters' Russian trip
Strength

Age, Guy, Game

“Does knowledge rest on construction in the sense that it only functions because the knowing system is operatively closed, therefore: because it can maintain no operative contact with the outside world; and because it therefore remains dependent, for everything that it constructs, on its own distinction between self-reference and allo-reference?”

Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) German sociologist, administration expert, and social systems theorist

Luhmann (1991) “Wie lassen sich latente Strukturen beobachten?,” in Paul Watzlawick, Peter Krieg (eds.), Das Auge des Betrachters: Beiträge zum Konstruktivismus. Festschrift für Heinz von Foerster, Piper, München-Zürich, p. 71; cited in: Heinz von Foerster (1993) " For Niklas Luhmann: “How Recursive is Communication?” http://e1020.pbworks.com/f/fulltext-2.pdf". Translated by Richard Howe.

World, Knowledge, Sense, Dependency

“Everything is literally entangled, it can all be communicated with and affected 'at a distance' because there is no distance, only a simulation of apparent separation which our limited consciousness feeds us second by second at 11 bits. The 'telepathy' which brings people together is no more or less supernatural or unlikely than the 'telepathy' which brings two of your fingers together when you think about it. Patience, participation and constant close observation of what's going on, on the inside and on the outside will soon make you a fine sorcerer, if that's what you want to be.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2004
https://web.archive.org/web/20040807071522/http://www.popimage.com/content/grant20048.html Popimage interview
On magic

People, Communication, Thinking, Patience

“When I woke up, it was daylight. That is when I remembered that I had a father. During the alert, I had followed the mob, not taking care of him. I knew he was running out of strength, close to death, and yet had abandoned him.
I went to look for him.
Yet at the same time a thought crept into my mind: If only I didn't find him! If only I were relieved of this responsibility, I could use all my strength to fight for my own survival, to take care of myself…Instantly, I felt ashamed, ashamed of myself forever.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Death, Time, Fight

“I looked down at the poor calf. Its hide was spotted black and white and it had the most delicate ankles. From the slightly open mouth there appeared a pink tongue. I closed my eyes and ran out of Hellfrick's room and threw myself on the floor in my room. I lay there and shuddered, thinking of the old cow alone in the field in the moonlight, old cow mooing for her calf. Murder!”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939), Chapter Thirteen

Thinking, Appearance

“In this case, the United States had particular reason to consult most closely with those Caribbean countries which had called on it to help resolve the crisis. Nevertheless, their lack of consultation was regrettably less than we would have wished.”

Geoffrey Howe (1926–2015) British Conservative politician

"Foreign Secretary regrets lack of consultation by US", The Times, 27 October 1983; p. 4.
Remarks in the House of Commons, 26 October 1983, on the United States' decision to invade Grenada (a Commonwealth country) without consultation with the United Kingdom.

Help, Country

“I have already mentioned that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto. I, and the others who started the organization, did so for two reasons. Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalize and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the Government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence…”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

1960s, I am Prepared to Die (1964)

Hostility, War, People, Law

“I had the benefit of background and infrastructure, success would have come rather easily and my independent contribution would not have been easily measurable. Here there was so much to be done - how could I not try? I had a trained butler. Mumbai was close. The Mathais were there but I would stay at the Taj for Rs 50 per night. I could afford it because in Anand I had no expenses at all. **When asked why with aristocratic background how reconciled to stay in a garage.”

Verghese Kurien (1921–2012) Indian founder of dairy-cooperative Amul

In p. 143.
Quote, Thought Leaders

Success, Training, Night

“No enjoyment on this sad old earth has come even close to the unending pleasures that God has prepared 'for those that love Him.' This is the teaching of the Bible. And you are going to miss out, simply because you refuse to change your mind, repent, and trust the Saviour.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)

Love, God, Pleasure, Sadness

“I hate polite conversation. I hate it when people stand around and go, 'Hi, how are you?' I hate words that don't have any reason or meaning. Also I hate it when people smoke in elevators and closed in places. It's just so rude.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/madonna_2.htm.

Hate, People

“The parallels that form the core of this book fit into a historical framework in the wake of the Armana Age during the closing centuries of the second millenium. Prior to the Armana Age (i. e., before 1400 B. C.) Egyptian, Canaanite, Mesopotamian, Anatolian, Aegean and other influences met around the East Mediterranean to form an international order, by which each was in turn affected.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Introduction
The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962])

Books, Age

“Listen, monsieur Vollard, I worked a lot out of doors at L'Estaque. Except for that there was no other event of importance in my life during the years 1870-71. I divided my time between the field and the studio... Zola closed his letter by urging me to come back to Paris too [in 1872 Cézanne went back to Paris].... but all the same, something told me to go back to Paris. It was too long since I had seen the Louvre. But understand, Monsieur Vollard, I was working at that time on a landscape which was not going well. So I stayed at Aix a little while longer to study on my canvas.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote in: Cezanne, by Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 32-33
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, 1860s - 1870s

Life, Understanding, Study, Time

“That democratization has never closely approached its theoretical limits, either in the government of the state or in the government of other institutions, is revealed in the three great historical movement toward democratizing the state.”

Robert A. Dahl (1915–2014) American political scientist

After the Revolution? (1970; 1990), Ch. 1 : Three Criteria for Authority

“For as long as possible, the learned collegium has tried to defend its integrity against the close combat of ideologico-critical exposures. Do not unmask, lest you yourself be unmasked could be the unspoken rule. It is no accident that the great representatives of critique—the French moralists, the Encyclopedists, the socialists, and especially Heine, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—remain outsiders to the scholarly domain. In all of them there is a satirical, polemical component that can scarcely be hidden under the mask of scholarly respectability. These signals of a holy nonseriousness, which remains one of the sure indexes of truth, can be employed as signposts to the critique of cynical reason.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 18

Truth, Learning

“Side by side with the production of metals, the Egyptians and the inhabitants of Mesopotamia perfected the arts of making glazed pottery… and the production of glass. …vessels were baked in tall closed furnaces. "Egyptian blue" was made in Egypt by heating silica with malachite and lime… applied with soda as a blue glaze on faience, and the blue glass is also colored with copper. Some early… Egyptian and Babylonian blue glass are coloured with cobalt.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

A Short History of Chemistry (1937)

Art, Color, Perfection

“The Sabbath bids us behold in His created works the glory of the Creator. And it was because He desired us to do this that Jesus bound up His precious lessons with the beauty of natural things. On the holy rest day, above all other days, we should study the messages that God has written for us in nature. We should study the Saviour's parables where He spoke them, in the fields and groves, under the open sky, among the grass and flowers. As we come close to the heart of nature, Christ makes His presence real to us, and speaks to our hearts of His peace and love.”

Ellen G. White book Christ's Object Lessons

Source: Christ's Object Lessons (1900), Ch. 1, p. 25 - 26

Love, God, Peace, Beauty

“Very shortly the temple was once again a wonder of the world, and the Ephesian Church settled down to a long reign marked only by the usual bitter quarrels, heresies, and internal dissent through which all major faiths struggle.
Any religion begins in a moment of transforming truth. That moment quickly shatters into falsehood and shame and stagecraft, bitter comedy, sometimes murder. Thieves catch hold of any chance for power. The early years of a faith are best not too closely examined by its faithful.”

Kage Baker book The Life of the World to Come

Source: The Life of the World to Come (2004), Chapter 12, “Alec Solves a Mystery” (p. 201)

Truth, World, Faith, Religion

“Okay, I get it. You people destroy billions of brain cells on a daily basis with your excess consumption of alcoholic beverages, over-the-counter as well as prescription medication—the latter of which, chances are, aren't even yours—and a veritable laundry list of substances that you shove into your soft little bodies day after day. The reason I bring up your chemically-induced mind is because I think the lot of you have forgotten my accomplishments, so please allow me to jog your ailing memory: I am the only three-time straight-edge World Heavyweight Champion in WWE history, I am the only Superstar in WWE history to win back-to-back Money in the Bank Ladder Matches at WrestleMania, and don't forget I am the man that did you, the WWE Universe, a favor that you didn't even deserve when I got rid of the Charismatic Enabler Jeff Hardy from this company…forever. But that runs a close #2 to my crowning achievement of using my Anaconda Vice and, for the first time, making the Undertaker [makes the motion on his chest] tap out—I did that. Me. I did that, and I did it all without drugs, I did it all without alcohol, and above all else, I did it all without any help from any of you. So I want somebody, anybody in a position of power to come out here right now and treat me with the respect I have earned, not only as the face of SmackDown, but the poster boy of the entire company, and as the choice of a new generation, I deserve to know who my next opponent is now that I have defeated the all-powerful Undertaker. [Waits amidst the boos of the crowd] Oh, that's right. There isn't anybody left!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

September 25, 2009
Friday Night SmackDown

Money, People, Alcohol, World

“The Empty Quarter offered me the chance to win distinction as a traveller; but I believed that it could give me more than this, that in those empty wastes I could find the peace that comes with solitude, and, among the Bedu, comradeship in a hostile world. Many who venture into dangerous places have found this comradeship among members of their own race; a few find it more easily among people from other lands, the very differences which separate them binding them ever more closely. I found it among the Bedu. Without it these journeys would have been a meaningless penance.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 4.

Hostility, People, World, Peace

“Sir, there was once a time when close relations of amity were established between the Governments of England and France. It was in the reign of the later Stuarts; and it marks a dark spot in our annals, because it was an union formed in a spirit of domineering ambition on the one side, and of base and vile subserviency on the other. But that, Sir, was not an union of the nations; it was an union of the Governments. This is not be an union of the Governments; it is to be an union of the nations.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1860/feb/10/customs-acts-committee-the-financial in the House of Commons (10 February 1860) on the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty 1860s

Time

“Jonathan Dimbleby: Understandably, when your marriage collapsed, you form close friendships, you re-establish close friendships, of whatever character that friendship is. Were you, did you try to be, faithful and honourable to your wife when you took on the vow of marriage?
Charles, Prince of Wales: Yes, absolutely.
Dimbleby: And you were?
Charles: Yes, until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.”

Charles, Prince of Wales (1948) son of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom

Alan Hamilton, "Intimate portrait of a private man in the public eye", The Times, 30 June 1994.
Interview with Jonathan Dimbleby for the television programme "Charles: The private man, the public role", transmitted 29 June 1994.
1990s

Friendship, Marriage, Faith, Understanding

“The room is like a cave, and has books I love in it. The main door was closed up and a smaller opening was made under the stairs. (I went away while all this was happening.) The furniture is locked in, and part of me is locked in too, or I hope it is, although I often made a bid to escape. I have left instructions that I would like to be buried here when I die or a bit before, the cave bricked up.”

Colm Tóibín (1955) Irish novelist and writer

Writers' rooms: Colm Tóibín http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jul/13/writers.rooms.colm.toibin#, The Guardian (13 July 2007)

Love, Books, Hope, Parting

“More than a decade after the Shah's death it is no longer necessary to be for or against him on all matters. How could one be for or against everything that happened during a reign of nearly thirty-eight years? How could Iranians not be for him when he fought over Azerbaijan or when he gave the royal assent to the bill that nationalised Iran's oil? How could one be against the principle of land reform or the enhancement of women's status? And did he not deserve support when he fought for a more just system of production and pricing for oil, which he called 'a noble substance'? But how could anyone be for him when he closed all doors on discussion and debate and effectively drove many intelligent and patriotic Iranians into the arms of reactionary mullahs? And how could one approve of the unchecked intervention of the SAVAK secret police in virtually all aspects of life, especially in the 1970s? Last but not least, it would be difficult to understand, much less to justify, his almost pathological belief that only the major powers were capable of either protecting or destabilising his regime.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

The Unknown Life of the Shah (1991)

Life, Death, Women, Secret

“[T]he constitution controls any legislative act repugnant to it.... It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.... So if a law be in opposition to the constitution; if both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case, so that the court must either decide that case conformably to the law, disregarding the constitution; or conformably to the constitution disregarding the law; the court must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case. This is the very essence of judicial duty.... Those then who controvert the principle that the constitution is to be considered, in court, as a paramount law, are reduced to the necessity of maintaining that courts must close their eyes on the constitution, and see only the law. This doctrine would subvert the very foundation of all written constitutions... It would be giving the legislature a practical and real omnipotence... The judicial power of the United States is extended to all cases arising under the constitution.”

John Marshall (1755–1835) fourth Chief Justice of the United States

5. U.S. (1 Cranch) 137
Marbury v. Madison (1803)

Law

“He replaced the gray of the walls with a darker shade by closing his eyes. It felt good to shut out some of the light. Not all, but just some. Just enough so there was a gray without images or threatening corners. Not the blackness that gives birth to those sudden flashes of stinging light that slashes your eyes, or the velvety darkness that thickens and become animated and flows and somehow moves around and over you. Just a soothing gray. Nothing to see.”

Hubert Selby Jr. book The Room

The Room (1971)

Birth, Light, Animals

“Because a cause was taken to be sufficient for its effect, nothing was required to explain the effect other than the cause. Consequently, the quest for causes was environment-free. It employed what we now call 'closed-system' thinking. Laws. —like that of freely falling bodies—-were formulated so as to exclude environmental effects.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1970s, Redesigning the future, 1974, p. 10.

Law, Thinking

“The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Homily during the Holy Mass at the Capital Mall in Washington, D.C., on 7 October 1979, during the pope's first apostolic journey to the United States Source: Libreria Editrice Vaticana http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/homilies/1979/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_19791007_usa-washington_en.html

Life, People, Pleasure, Family

“Man goes far away or near but God never goes far-off; he is always standing close at hand, and even if he cannot stay within he goes no further than the door.”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

All Will be Well (2004)

God

“If, in spite of the fact that all these attributes have been faithfully handed down unaltered for hundreds of generations, we are to believe that, in the course of time, they have all diverged from one common stock, how shall we resist the arguments of the transmutationist, who contends that all closely allied species of animals and plants have in like manner sprung from a common parentage, albeit that for the last three or four thousand years they may have been persistent in character?”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.20, p. 387-388

Time, Animals

“If I had stopped to listen once or twice
If I had closed my mouth and opened my eyes
If I had cooled my head and warmed my heart
I'd not be on this road tonight.”

James Taylor (1948) American singer-songwriter and guitarist

"That Lonesome Road", written with Don Grolnick
Song lyrics, Dad Love His Work (1981)

Heart

“This one thing remains: faith; one feels instinctively that many things are changing and that everything will change. We are living in the last quarter of a century which will end again in an enormous revolution.... we shall certainly not live to see the better times of pure air and the refreshing of the old society after those big storms. We are still in the closeness but the following generations will be able to breathe in freely.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Antwerp Belgium, Winter 1886; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 451), p. 38 1880s, 1886

Faith, Feeling, Change, Time

“Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips,
Think but one thought of me up in the stars.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

"Summer Dawn".

Star, Thinking

“One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things. Run just about everything.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'. "Publisher's Statement", in the first issue of National Review (19 November 1955) http://www.nationalreview.com/flashback/buckley200406290949.asp.

Age, World, Imagination, Idea

“We will learn that computers, amazing as they are, still cannot come close to being as effective as human beings. A computer isn't creative on its own because it is programmed to behave in a predictable way. Creativity comes from looking for the unexpected and stepping outside your own experience. Computers simply cannot do that.”

Masaru Ibuka (1908–1997) Japanese businessman

Masaru Ibuka in: The Corporate Board, (1992), Vol. 13, p. 30

Way, Learning

“I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Secularism in its present Indian form is no more than an embodiment of anti-Hindu animus, and is supported by all those who want to destroy Hindu society and culture. Secularism is essentially a political concept which originated and took shape in nineteenth century Europe. …. It was in this atmosphere of revolt against Christianity and its closed culture that the concept of Secularism was evolved and employed in country after country in Europe. The secular power of the State was no longer to be the secular arm of the Church. It was to become secular on its own, that is, a power which secured equal rights to all its citizens without bothering about their beliefs. The Church was separated from the State which was no longer supposed to interfere with the religious life of the citizens, or to discriminate against any citizen on the basis of his on her religion or absence of it. Religion was now to be treated as a purely private matter in which the state was not supposed to pry, and which was not to be projected in public affairs.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Defence of Hindu Society (1983)

Life, Religion, Support, Country

“Imagine you are sucking the little fingers of a lady… or… no, you wouldn't understand that -- since you'd never get that close to a lady -- who'd want to get that close to you for God's sake?”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

God, Imagination, Understanding

“That passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of nonsense.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

9 May 1830
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“At this season of the year we draw close to Good Friday. All the eyes of the world will turn back to "a green hill far away, without a city wall," where the founder of Christianity was crucified by those forces of selfishness, greed, and lust for gain that are still at work in the world. It seems to me that unless we do something in Canada about the question of the export of war materials there will be another crucifixion - the crucifixion of a generation of young men, crucified upon a cross of nickel.”

Tommy Douglas (1904–1986) Scottish-born Canadian politician

Debate, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario, April 3, 1939.

Men, War, World, Question

“Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

An unpublished paper of 1907, as quoted in The Rising American Empire (1960) by Richard Warner Van Alstyne, p. 201; also quoted in On Power and Ideology (1987) by Noam Chomsky; accounts of this as being from a lecture of 15 April 1907 seem to be incorrect.
1900s

World

“Of Captain Elliot, already so well known to the government, it would be almost superfluous to speak; in this action, he evinced his characteristic bravery and judgment; and, since the close of the action, has given me the most able and essential assistance.”

Oliver Hazard Perry (1785–1819) United States Naval Officer

Report on the Battle of Lake Erie (13 September 1813); Years later Perry would declare he had sought to minimize what he perceived to be a lack of valor on the part of Elliot, and requested a court-martial against him, for this and other matters.

“Upon Clifford's death the labour of revision and completion was entrusted to Mr. R. C. Rowe, then Professor of Pure Mathematics at University College, London. …On the sad death of Professor Rowe, in October 1884, I was requested… to take up the task of editing… For the latter half of Chapter III. and for the whole of Chapter IV. …I am alone responsible. Yet whatever there is in them of value I owe to Clifford; whatever is feeble or obscure is my own. …With Chapter V. my task has been by no means light. …Without any notice of mass or force it seemed impossible to close a discussion on motion; something I felt must be added. I have accordingly introduced a few pages on the laws of motion. I have since found that Clifford intended to write a concluding chapter on mass. How to express the laws of motion in a form of which Clifford would have approved was indeed an insoluble riddle to me, because I was unaware of his having written anything on the subject. I have accordingly expressed, although with great hesitation, my own views on the subject; these may be concisely described as a strong desire to see the terms matter and force, together with the ideas associated with them, entirely removed from scientific terminology—to reduce, in fact, all dynamic to kinematic. I should hardly have ventured to put forward these views had I not recently discovered that they have (allowing for certain minor differences) the weighty authority of Professor Mach, of Prag. But since writing these pages I have also been referred to a discourse delivered by Clifford at the Royal Institution in 1873, some account of which appeared in Nature, June 10, 1880. Therein it is stated that 'no mathematician can give any meaning to the language about matter, force, inertia used in current text-books of mechanics.”

William Kingdon Clifford (1845–1879) English mathematician and philosopher

This fragmentary account of the discourse undoubtedly proves that Clifford held on the categories of matter and force as clear and original ideas as on all subjects of which he has treated; only, alas! they have not been preserved.
Preface by Karl Pearson
The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885)

Death, Books, Sadness, Law

“[My family] suffer so much. My mother was much older when I came out [of detention]. She had problems with her hearing and high blood pressure. But they still support me. When you make somebody disappear and you don’t announce it to the family, what is this? You make people desperate and bring them close to death. If our cat or dog is lost, it makes us desperately want to know where it is—so for humans disappearing, you can barely imagine the pain. What kind of society is this? If a society cannot even support somebody like me, then people ask: Who is under protection, then? That’s why there is such support for me. It is not because I am so beautiful or so charming. People feel, This guy is fighting for us.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

“ Ai Weiwei: Artistic Licence http://www.economist.com/node/21554178.” Economist, May 5, 2012. 2010-, 2012

Death, Pain, People, Family

“In our sun-down perambulations, of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing "base", a certain game of ball … Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms … the game of ball is glorious.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Comments on baseball in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (23 July 1846), as quoted in Walt Whitman Looks at the Schools (1950) by Florence Bernstein Freedman, p. 126-127 http://books.google.com/books?id=M34nK8SaiMcC&dq=Walt+Whitman+schools&lr=&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0

Game, Sun, Parting

“France has always more or less influenced manners in England; and when your fountain is choked up and polluted, the stream will not run long, or not run clear, with us, or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe, in my opinion, but too close and connected a concern in what is done in France. Excuse me, therefore, if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle of the 6th of October, 1789, or have given too much scope to the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion of the most important of all revolutions, which may be dated from that day, I mean a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“[W]e prefer not to countenance the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so good at one particular thing.... We prefer not to consider the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews, or to imagine what impoverishments in one's mental life would allow people actually to think in the simplistic way great athletes seem to think. Note the way "up-close and personal profiles" of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of rounded human life—outside interests and activities, charities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what's obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It's farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one pursuit. An almost ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to their one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to life in a world that, like a child's world, is very serious and very small.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness
Essays

Life, People, World, Way

“He would start a business, lose money, close it and start another. That would make money for a while, and then the cycle would repeat.”

Robert Kuok (1923) Malaysian businessman

Cap 1 "Moulded by Mother"

Money, Business

“Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Kafka on the Shore (2002)

World, Change, Time

“It is within the power of the majority to close down the closed session. They can do it by majority vote to return to the legislative calendar. We're serving notice on them at this moment: Be prepared for this motion every day until you face the reality. The Senate Intelligence Committee has a responsibility.”

Richard Durbin (1944) U.S. senior senator from Illinois

Intelligence, Reality

“One must become
Fanatic – be a wedge – a thunder-bolt
To smite a passage through the close-grained world.”

John Davidson (1857–1909) Scottish poet

Smith (Glasgow: Wilson, 1888) p. 33

World

“6 A wall is called isodomum when all the courses are of equal height; pseudisodomum, when the rows of courses do not match but run unequally. Both kinds are strong: first, because the rubble itself is of close texture and solid, unable to suck the moisture out of the mortar, but keeping it in its moist condition for a very long period; secondly, because the beds of the stones, being laid smooth and level to begin with, keep the mortar from falling, and, as they are bonded throughout the entire thickness of the wall, they hold together for a very long period.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter VIII, Sec. 6

Strong

“Women's desire is a mysterious, feral thing, and if you think you've got it figured out because you've looked at a few Georgia O'Keeffe paintings, you're not even close.”

Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic

Fifty Shades Freed Is a Pleasure. Just Don’t Call It a Guilty One, Time.com, 2018-02-09, 2018-02-09, http://time.com/5139117/fifty-shades-freed-review-movie/, 2018-02-09 http://time.com/5139117/fifty-shades-freed-review-movie/,

Women, Thinking, Painting

“There is one hit of mine which will not stay in the official records, but which I believe to be the longest clout ever made off a major league pitcher. At least some of the veteran sport writers told me they never saw such a wallop. The Yanks were playing an exhibition game with the Brooklyn Nationals at Jacksonville, Fla., in April, 1920. Al Mamaux was pitching for Brooklyn. In the first inning, the first ball he sent me was a nice, fast one, a little lower than my waist, straight across the heart of the plate. It was the kind I murder, and I swung to kill it. The last time we saw the ball it was swinging its way over the 10-foot outfield fence of Southside Park and going like a shot. The ball cleared the fence by at least 75 feet. Let's say the total distance traveled was 500 feet: the fence was 423 feet from the plate. If such a hit had been made at the Polo Grounds, I guess the ball would have come pretty close to the top of the screen in the centerfield bleachers.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

In "Wherein Babe Tells of Some Longish Swats" http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1920/08/15/page/18/article/wherein-babe-tells-of-some-longish-swats by Ruth (as told to Pegler), in The Chicago Tribune (August 15, 1920); reprinted as "The Longest Hit in Baseball" https://books.google.com/books?id=SAAlxi-0EZYC&pg=PA39&dq=%22There+is+one+hit+of+mine%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjngMzRjbnQAhXDYyYKHe-JCCMQ6AEIFDAA#v=onepage&q=%22There%20is%20one%20hit%20of%20mine%22&f=false2 in Playing the Game: My Early Years in Baseball, p. 39

Way, Travel, Game, Sport

“When you're down and troubled
And you need some loving care
And nothing, nothing is going right.
Close your eyes and think of me
And soon I will be there
To brighten up even your darkest nights.”

Carole King (1942) Nasa

You've Got a Friend · performance with James Taylor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4mNDS5rIRU · performance by James Taylor (1971) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7RPCFfudmU · performance with Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan & Shania Twain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJPgxEi2BM8 · Boston Strong performance with James Taylor (30 May 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZI3kLrHK80 Song lyrics, Tapestry (1971)

Love, Thinking, Night

“The pipe-call, mentioned by Burton, is noticed under a different denomination by Chaucer; "Lo," says he, "the birde is begyled with the merry voice of the foulers' whistle, when it is closed in your nette," --alluding to the deceptive art of the bird-catchers in his time.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 39
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Hunting

Art, Bird, Time

“To conclude: there are two well-known minor ways in which language has mattered to philosophy. On the one hand there is a belief that if only we produce good definitions, often marking out different senses of words that are confused in common speech, we will avoid the conceptual traps that ensnared our forefathers. On the other hand is a belief that if only we attend sufficiently closely to our mother tongue and make explicit the distinctions there implicit, we shall avoid the conceptual traps. One or the other of these curiously contrary beliefs may nowadays be most often thought of as an answer to the question Why does language matter to philosophy? Neither seems to me enough.”

Ian Hacking (1936) Canadian philosopher

Ian Hacking (1975), Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, p. 7.

Way, Question, Sense

“Stand close around, ye Stygian set,
with Dirce in the boat conveyed,
Lest Charon, seeing her, forget,
That he is old and she a shade.”

Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) British writer

Epitaph on Dirce - George Orwell called it 'one of the best epitaphs in English - If I were a woman it would be my favourite epitaph-it would be the one I should like to have for myself." - quoted in Orwell:Collected Works, It is What I Think, p. 45.

Forgetting

“Listen to satsang. It is a very good thing. God created day and night. After that He created excellent things to eat, and then he landed us in this world. Isn't this human body beautiful? There is a nose to breathe with. Tell me, could we have survived without it? See what a good job of seeing these eyes do. Look how beautiful are the hands and the feet. If no seva is done, then these hands are of no use. These two ears have been given, if we don’t listen to satsang with them, aren’t they useless? If you do not go to satsang walking with these feet, they are also worthless. God has created all the parts of this body quite well, but if we don't use them properly, it is our fault, not the Creator's. The river flowing over there is the Ganga, but it is not flowing for its own use. It is we who drink its water, wash our clothes in it, and irrigate our fields with it. By bathing in it only the dirt of this body is washed, but by bathing in the Ganga of satsang, all the evils are removed. What I am telling you is also written in the Gita. But Gita cannot make you understand. Only the satguru can make you understand the satnam (true name), so do practice Knowledge. Look at Lord Shiva sitting with eyes closed [pointing towards a fountain with a statue of Shiva]. He always stays in the contemplation of Guru Maharaj. Whenever I see him he doesn’t do any other work. I don’t know whether he doesn’t like doing any other work or what. Therefore, you too should also practice Knowledge like this.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Prem Nagar, Hardwar August 21,1962 (translated from Hindi). Birthday Celebrations, as published in "Hansadesh" magazine, Issue 1, Mahesh Kare, January 1963. (First published address.)
1960s

God, World, Beauty, Drink