Quotes about connection (1592 quotes, page 15)

“A sense of belonging, a sense of being part of a real and important story, a sense of being connected to other people, to people who are not here any more, to those who have gone before us. And a sense of being connected to the universe itself.
All those things were promised and summed up in the phrase, 'The Kingdom of Heaven.”

Philip Pullman (1946) English author

But if the Kingdom is dead, we still need those things. We can't live without those things because it's too bleak, it's too bare and we don't need to. We can find a way of creating them for ourselves if we think in terms of a Republic of Heaven.
This is not a Kingdom but a Republic, in which we are all free and equal citizens, with — and this is the important thing — responsibilities. With the responsibility to make this place into a Republic of Heaven for everyone. Not to live in it in a state of perpetual self-indulgence, but to work hard to make this place as good as we possibly can.
Surefish interview (2002)

People , Sense , Universe , Parting

“A connecting principle
Linked to the invisible
Almost imperceptible
Something inexpressible”

Sting (1951) English musician

"Synchronicity I"
Synchronicity (1983)
Context: With one breath, with one flow
You will know
Synchronicity
A sleep trance, a dream dance,
A shared romance
Synchronicity A connecting principle
Linked to the invisible
Almost imperceptible
Something inexpressible

“Once you start seeing injustice in one place, it's like taking off blinders- you start to see injustice everywhere, and how it is all connected.”

Mark Ames (1965) American writer and journalist

Part II: The Banality of Slavery, page 65.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
Context: Just as the American colonials' consciousness expanded from rebelling against unfair taxation in the 1760s to wide noble revolutionary goals touching on the inherent rights of mankind, so the Whiskey Rebellion guerrillas took on broader themes as injustice increasingly framed their consciousness. Once you start seeing injustice in one place, it's like taking off blinders- you start to see injustice everywhere, and how it is all connected.

“I don't see myself, for example, writing about cultural dichotomies, but about human connections. All of us go through angst and identity crises. And even when you write in a specific context, you still tap into that subtext of emotions that we all feel about love and hope, and mothers and obligations and responsibilities.”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

SALON Interview (1995)
Context: Other Asian-American writers just shudder when they are compared to me; it really denigrates the uniqueness of their own work. I find it happening less here partly because people are more aware now of the flaws of political correctness — that literature has to do something to educate people. I don't see myself, for example, writing about cultural dichotomies, but about human connections. All of us go through angst and identity crises. And even when you write in a specific context, you still tap into that subtext of emotions that we all feel about love and hope, and mothers and obligations and responsibilities.

Love , Hope , Feeling

“I think the trick for any songwriter is authenticity. For the young songwriter coming up who is connected to his generation, as I was connected to mine, write honestly about what's going on in the center of your life.”

Paul Williams (songwriter) (1940) American composer, singer, songwriter and actor

Songfacts interview (2007)
Context: I think the trick for any songwriter is authenticity. For the young songwriter coming up who is connected to his generation, as I was connected to mine, write honestly about what's going on in the center of your life. You know, when "We've Only Just Begun" was a Number 1 record, I think the Number 1 album in the country was "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." So it was as far away from what was happening in the music scene as you can get. And yet it was a hit. I think it was a hit because of, obviously, Karen's amazing vocal, but I think that any time we write authentically and honestly about what's going on in the center of our chest, because people are so much alike, there's a big a chance that it's going on in the center of your chest, too.

Life , Thinking

“Such a connection can be terrifying.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-impossible-2012 of The Impossible (19 December 2012)
Reviews, Four star reviews
Context: Seated in a dark theater, I reached out my hand for that of my wife’s. She and I had visited the same beach and discussed visiting it with our children and grandchildren. An icy finger ran slowly down our spines. Such a connection can be terrifying. What does it mean? We are the playthings of the gods.

“Slowly he lifted his hands in the darkness and held them in mid-air, the fingers spread weakly open. If he reached out with his hands, and if his hands were electric wires, and if his heart were a battery giving life and fire to those hands, and if he reached out with his hands and touched other people, reached out through these stone walls and felt other hands connected with other hearts -- if he did that, would there be a reply, a shock?”

Richard Wright (1908–1960) African-American writer

Native Son (1940)

Life , People , Heart

“I believed then, that man was sick — not exceptional man, but average man. I believed that the condition of man was to be a morally diseased creation and that the best job I could do at the time was to trace the connection between his diseased nature and the international mess he gets himself into. To many of you, this will seem trite, obvious, and familiar in theological terms. Man is a fallen being. He is gripped by original sin. His nature is sinful and his state is perilous.”

William Golding (1911–1993) British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate

On his motivations to write Lord of the Flies, from his essay "Fable", p. 85
The Hot Gates (1965)
Context: The overall intention may be stated simply enough. Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society..... but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another... I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head... I am thinking of the vileness beyond all words that went on, year after year, in the totalitarian states. It is bad enough to say that so many Jews were exterminated in this way and that, so many people liquidated — lovely, elegant word — but there were things done during that period from which I still have to avert my mind less I should be physically sick. They were not done by the headhunters of New Guinea or by some primitive tribe in the Amazon. They were done, skillfully, coldly, by educated men, doctors, lawyers, by men with a tradition of civilization behind them, to beings of their own kind.
My own conviction grew that what had happened was that men were putting the cart before the horse. They were looking at the system rather than the people. It seemed to me that man’s capacity for greed, his innate cruelty and selfishness, was being hidden behind a kind of pair of political pants. I believed then, that man was sick — not exceptional man, but average man. I believed that the condition of man was to be a morally diseased creation and that the best job I could do at the time was to trace the connection between his diseased nature and the international mess he gets himself into. To many of you, this will seem trite, obvious, and familiar in theological terms. Man is a fallen being. He is gripped by original sin. His nature is sinful and his state is perilous. I accept the theology and admit the triteness; but what is trite is true; and a truism can become more than a truism when it is a belief passionately held....
I can say in America what I should not like to say at home; which is that I condemn and detest my country's faults precisely because I am so proud of her many virtues. One of our faults is to believe that evil is somewhere else and inherent in another nation. My book was to say you think that now the war is over and an evil thing destroyed, you are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could it could happen in any country. It could happen here.

Disease , Nature , Time

“Does some mysterious circularity in time connect consciousness and the very existence of the universe?
Most Neo-Pantheists like to think so.”

Peter J. Carroll (1953) British occultist

Source: The Apophenion (2008), p. 62
Context: Does the universe as a whole exhibit any kind of consciousness that we can interact with? Does the universe seek to evolve greater complexity and more sophisticated consciousness? Could it use some help from us in this? Do all species seem worth preserving regardless of their economic value to us? Does some mysterious circularity in time connect consciousness and the very existence of the universe?
Most Neo-Pantheists like to think so.

Thinking , Universe , Time

“After these matters we ought perhaps next to discuss pleasure. For it is thought to be most intimately connected with our human nature, which is the reason why in educating the young we steer them by the rudders of pleasure and pain; it is thought, too, that to enjoy the things we ought and to hate the things we ought has the greatest bearing on virtue of character. For these things extend right through life, with a weight and power of their own in respect both to virtue and to the happy life, since men choose what is pleasant and avoid what is painful; and such things, it will be thought, we should least of all omit to discuss, especially since they admit of much dispute.”

Aristotle book Nicomachean Ethics

Book X, 1172a.17
Nicomachean Ethics

Life , Men , Pain , Hate

“An unjust composition never fails to contain error and falsehood. Therefore an unjust connection of ideas is not derived from nature, but from the imperfect composition of man.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. XIII Section II - Of The Importance of the Exercise of Reason, and Practice of Morality, in order to the Happiness of Mankind
Context: An unjust composition never fails to contain error and falsehood. Therefore an unjust connection of ideas is not derived from nature, but from the imperfect composition of man. Misconnection of ideas is the same as misjudging, and has no positive existence, being merely a creature of the imagination; but nature and truth are real and uniform; and the rational mind by reasoning, discerns the uniformity, and is thereby enabled to make a just composition of ideas, which will stand the test of truth. But the fantastical illuminations of the credulous and superstitious part of mankind, proceed from weakness, and as far as they take place in the world subvert the religion of REASON, NATURE and TRUTH.

Error , Idea , Nature

“There is no discredit, though there is at times much discomfort, in this everlasting perhaps with which we have to preface so much connected with the practice of our art. It is, as I said, inherent in the subject.”

William Osler (1849–1919) Canadian pathologist, physician, educator, bibliophile, historian, author, cofounder of Johns Hopkins Hospi…

On the Educational Value of the Medical Society (1903)
Context: Surrounded by people who demand certainty, — and not philosopher enough to agree with Locke that "Probability supplies the defect of our knowledge and guides us when that fails, and is always conversant about things of which we have no certainty," the practitioner too often gets into a habit of mind which resents the thought that opinion, not full knowledge, must be his stay and prop. There is no discredit, though there is at times much discomfort, in this everlasting perhaps with which we have to preface so much connected with the practice of our art. It is, as I said, inherent in the subject.

Art , Time

“She might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man.”

E.M. Forster book Howards End

Source: Howards End (1910), Ch. 22
Context: She might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy-going.

Passion , Help

“Diane felt the thread of connection between her and Danny drawn out infinitely thin, until it broke with a hurt to her heart she'd known she'd have to feel, but worse than she thought it would be.”

John Crowley book Four Freedoms

Part Four, Chapter 2
Four Freedoms (2009)
Context: She couldn't see that, though, because the haze out at sea erased the ship long before it could beyond the horizon, drawing after it the other ships. Diane felt the thread of connection between her and Danny drawn out infinitely thin, until it broke with a hurt to her heart she'd known she'd have to feel, but worse than she thought it would be.

Feeling , Heart , Hurt

“Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree. To manifest individuality, every branch must have a sensitive connection with the tree, just as our independently moving and differentiated fingers must have a sensitive connection with the whole body. The point, which can hardly be repeated too often, is that differentiation is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but not separate, and though man is not connected to the universe by exactly the same physical relation as branch to tree or feet to head, he is nonetheless connected—and by physical relations of fascinating complexity. The death of the individual is not disconnection but simply withdrawal. The corpse is like a footprint or an echo—the dissolving trace of something which the Self has ceased to do.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 60

Death , Tree , Universe

“All the monads except as serve as intermediaries for the connections have distinctive designations.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

Source: Mathematical Monads (1889), p. 268
Context: As the mathematics are now understood, each branch — or, if you please, each problem, — is but the study of the relations of a collection of connected objects, without parts, without any distinctive characters, except their names or designating letters. These objects are commonly called points; but to remove all notion of space relations, it may be better to name them monads. The relations between these points are mere complications of two different kinds of elementary relations, which may be termed immediate connection and immediate non-connection. All the monads except as serve as intermediaries for the connections have distinctive designations.

“The Platonic doctrine of Ideas has been, in all ages, the derision of the vulgar, and the admiration of the wife. Indeed, if we consider that ideas are the most sublime objects of speculation, and that their nature is no less bright in itself, than difficult to investigate, this opposition in the conduct of mankind will be natural and necessary; for, from our connection with a material nature, our intellectual eye, previous to the irradiations of science, is as ill adapted to objects the most splendid of all, "as the eyes of bats to the light of day."”

Proclus (412–485) Greek philosopher

"A Dissertation on the Doctrine of Ideas, &c." Footnote: see second book of Aristotle's Metaphysics.
The Philosophical and Mathematical Commentaries of Proclus on the First Book of Euclid's Elements Vol. 1 (1788)

Age , Idea , Nature , Light

“I hope it will take less than five years to have a fundamental change if our movement is successful and I believe it has every potential to be successful. But as I said and I hate to be repetitive, the time is really now. Because as much as the Iranian people can be empowered, and therefore heartened and therefore optimistic toward their future -- and I'm specifically speaking about today's generation -- these are tomorrow's leaders in Iran. These are the kids, the daughters, the sons of a previous generation who are left there to fight and fend for themselves with no possible help so far available to them and yes, they are resilient in their struggle. This could turn quickly to cynicism and deception if they think the world has abandoned them. Remember what the slogans were on the streets of Tehran one year ago. There were signs in different languages -- in English, in French -- and this was not for some Iranians practicing their language skills among themselves. They were clearly aimed at the West. And among those slogans were “Obama, Obama, are you with us or with them?” That warrants a response. We have yet to hear that response. That means Iranians could turn more radical as a result of their deception; as a result of their cynicism; and that doesn't bode well, not only for Iran but for the world. And it will be a testimony to the fact that no real help is ever given to nations that want to struggle for liberty because perhaps there are some other interests that no one really wants to talk about. If that is not true, then we need to see a genuine attempt to help the society. We are not asking the world to determine our fate—that is the business of the Iranian people alone. All we are asking is that today it is time to engage with the people of Iran; with the freedom movements; with those who are struggling for their rights for self-determination and liberty. We are fighting against those who have denied us these rights and it's about time that we are heard and have our “day in court,” as the saying goes. This is an opportunity that we are facing right now as I speak to you. It's right in front of us. It's right under our noses literally, and I have yet to see a concrete policy -- whether it's the U. S. government or some of its other allies in the region or in Europe -- that will indicate that beyond attempting a few diplomatic negotiating tactics and besides posturing for the possibility of conflict, there is any real effort made to go beyond the regime and its representatives and try to connect and try to see how they can be of help to the Iranian people without having to attack our country and bomb our homeland.”

Reza Pahlavi (1960) Last crown prince of the former Imperial State of Iran

As quoted by Felice Friedson, Iranian Crown Prince: Ahmadinejad's regime is "delicate and fragile" http://www.rezapahlavi.org/details_article.php?article=459&page=2, August 12, 2010.
Interviews, 2010

Hate , Fate , People , World

“Cinema is a truly valuable means of connecting people. ”

Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998) Japanese film maker

People

“Nothing means more to a writer than to get a letter from a reader who has deeply connected to one of your books.”

Katherine Paterson (1932) American children's writer born and mainly raised in China

Books

“My admittedly limited experience on the internet and with computer “information”, has revealed that this is a rather shallow sort of knowledge and impersonal sort of human connection. I think great books and real live human beings do a better job of making us wise, compassionate people.”

Katherine Paterson (1932) American children's writer born and mainly raised in China

People , Books , Knowledge , Thinking

“When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. You are connected to your child and to all those who touch your lives. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.”

Sophia Loren (1934) Italian actress

Thinking

“After a year being off the road it got pretty hard, I started to get pretty low as I wanted that drug back, I wanted that connection back.”

Billie Joe Armstrong (1972) American singer and guitarist

“Whenever you write a record you run the risk of your ideas not appealing to certain sections of society, but there’s something about the energy we have that people get into and that’s never changed. There’s a lot more to punk rock than just a catchy song, it’s a deeper thing about community and connection - and I think we’re still part of that.”

Billie Joe Armstrong (1972) American singer and guitarist

People , Communication , Thinking , Idea

“Physical attractions are common. A mental connection is rare.”

Ralph Smart

“It’s not the number of people you connect with, it’s the quality of interactions.”

Ralph Smart

People

“Generations come and pass. The learned of our Church and the laity know what fundamental relations we now have, and had, with the Egyptian Church. It is religion that binds us with our brethren in Egypt. When We say religion, it is not restricted to the professed faith. In this connection no one should question the faith of others, for no human can judge the ways of God.”

Haile Selassie (1892–1975) Emperor of Ethiopia

"Investiture of New Patriarch" (11 May 1971), in Important Utterances of H. I. M. Emperor Haile Selassie I, 1963-1972 (1972) edited by the Imperial Ethiopian Ministry of Information, p. 268

God , Faith , Religion , Question

“Today's reality
Fancy phone…. but afraid to connect
Big house…. small family
Expensive watch.…no time
Lot of friends on facebook…. no best friends
Great knowledge…. no wisdom
Lots of humans.…no humanity
Love animals…. eat animals
High IQ…. less emotions
Touched the moon…. neighbours unknown
Advanced medicine…. poor health
More degrees…. less common sense
Love sex…. fear intimacy”

Ralph Smart

facebook

Family , Time , Housing , Health

“Connection is the single biggest need for a physical human.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

instagram

“In the production under common ownership the bookkeeping is a public matter; it lies open to all. The workers have always a complete view of the course of the whole process. Only in this way they are able to discuss matters in the sectional assemblies and in the shop-committees, and to decide on what has to be done. The numerical results are made visible, moreover, by statistical tables, by graphs and pictures that display the situation at a glance. This information is not restricted to the personnel of the shop; it is a public matter, open to all outsiders. Every shop is only a member in the social production, and also the connection of its doings with the work outside is expressed in the book-keeping. Thus insight in the production going on in every enterprise is a piece of common knowledge for all the producers.”

Antonie Pannekoek (1873–1960) Dutch astronomer and Marxist theorist

Section 1.3, "Shop Organization"
Workers Councils (1947)

Knowledge , Books , Way

“Labor is a social process. Each enterprise is part of the productive body of society. The total social production is formed by their connection and collaboration. Like the cells that constitute a living organism, they cannot exist isolated and cut off from the body. So the organization of the work inside the shop is only one-half of the task of the workers. Over it, a still more important task, stands the joining of the separate enterprises, their combination into a social organization.”

Antonie Pannekoek (1873–1960) Dutch astronomer and Marxist theorist

Section 1.1
Workers Councils (1947)

Parting

“Owners are the shareholders, living outside the process of production, idling in distant countryhouse and maybe gambling at the exchange. A shareholder has no direct connection with the work. His property does not consist in tools of him to work; with his property consists simply in pieces of paper, in shares of enterprises of which he does not even know the hereabouts. His function in society is that of a parasite. His ownership does not mean that he commands and directs the machines; this is the sole right of the director. It means only that he may claim a certain amount of money without having to work for it. The property in hand, his shares, are certificates showing his right - guaranteed by law and government, by courts and police - to participate in the profits; titles of companionship in that large Society for Exploitation of the World, that is capitalism.”

Antonie Pannekoek (1873–1960) Dutch astronomer and Marxist theorist

Source: Workers Councils (1947), Chapter One, The Task, Section 1.2

Money , Distant , Law , World

“As the imperialist countries attained a high degree of wealth and affluence— the result both of scientific and technical progress and of their plunder of the nations of Asia and Africa— these individuals lost all self-confidence and imagined that the only way to achieve technical progress was to abandon their own laws and beliefs. When the moon landings took place, for instance, they concluded that Muslims should jettison their laws! But what is the connection between going to the moon and the laws of Islam? Do they not see that countries having opposing laws and social systems compete with each other in technical and scientific progress and the conquest of space? Let them go all the way to Mars or beyond the Milky Way; they will still be deprived of true happiness, moral virtue, and spiritual advancement and be unable to solve their own social problems. For the solution of social problems and the relief of human misery require foundations in faith and morals; merely acquiring material power and wealth, conquering nature and space, have no effect in this regard. They must be supplemented by, and balanced with, the faith, the conviction, and the morality of Islam in order truly to serve humanity instead of endangering it. This conviction, this morality, these laws that are needed, we already possess. So as soon as someone goes somewhere or invents something, we should not hurry to abandon our religion and its laws, which regulate the life of man and provide for his well-being in this world and the hereafter.”

Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989) Religious leader, politician

Islam and Revolution, Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, Translated and Annotated by Hamid Algar, Mizan Press, Berkley, pp 36.
Islam and civilization

Faith , Religion , Confidence , Law

“The great majority of crimes committed in bourgeois society are either direct infringements of property rights or are indirectly connected with property.”

Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938) Soviet politician

74
ABC's of Communism

“Our habits of thinking so fondly connect the order of the universe with the fate of man, that this gloomy period of history has been decorated with inundations, earthquakes, uncommon meteors, preternatural darkness, and a crowd of prodigies fictitious or exaggerated.”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

Vol. 1, Chap. 10.
The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire: Volume 1 (1776)

Universe , Thinking , History , Fate

“Anansi is the god of stories - I’m telling Anansi my story. I remember my aunt telling me some Anansi stories when I was 9 or 10, but I didn’t take them in. In my 20s, I bought loads of Anansi books. History, folklore, and culture gives you pride and happiness through a sense of connection.”

Derek Owusu

On giving his book That Reminds Me folkloric elements in “Derek Owusu: ‘Mental health issues that people find scary aren’t being talked about’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/02/derek-owusu-that-reminds-me-stormzy-mens-mental-health in The Guardian (2019 Nov 2)

Sense , God , Books , History

“The impact of these extra millions of people has spread even beyond the space they physically occupy. Their industries have changed the chemical constituency of the atmosphere. The oceans that cover most of the surface of the planet have been polluted and increasingly acidified. We now realise that the disasters that continue increasingly to afflict the natural world have one element that connects them all - the unprecedented increase in the number of human beings on the planet.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

Affliction , People , Nature , World

“To secure order, freedom, and safety, for the minority as well as for the majority of the Irish people, and to do so as far as possible, by the administration of equal laws, should be the first object of any Ministry responsible for the government of that country. But I shall resist to the uttermost any attempt to loosen the connection, which has subsisted so long between Ireland and Great Britain, under whatever disguises that attempt may be made.”

Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) British Conservative politician and statesman

Election address for the 1885 general election, quoted in Blanche E. C. Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour, First Earl of Balfour, K.G., O.M., F.R.S., Etc. 1848–1905 (London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 1936), p. 72
President of the Local Government Board

Freedom , People , Law , Country

“We are bound also to consider what are those taxes, the removal of which will give more scope to commercial enterprise, and occasion an increased demand for labour. ... let the House remember that the principle on which we have gone, and gone advisedly, is the absolute repeal of taxation in many cases. ... We do hope that the direct and instant effect will be increased consumption of many articles now subject to duty, invigorating the industry and extending the commercial enterprise of the country through other channels, and supplying the void we cannot hope to fill up by direct taxation. ... We have taken this course after careful consideration, and we recommend this plan from a deliberate conviction that if sanctioned by Parliament it will conduce to the extension of industry, to the encouragement of enterprise, and that the result of that extension of industry and encouragement of enterprise will be the benefit of all classes of the community, whether they are directly or indirectly connected with commerce, manufactures, or agriculture.”

Robert Peel (1788–1850) British Conservative statesman

Budget speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1845/feb/14/financial-statement-the-budget in the House of Commons (14 February 1845)
Prime Minister

Communication , Hope , Housing , Country

“Other qualities of bodies are connected with simple energy of motion and energy of position. Such is heat, which we find by experiment can be turned into work. Finding it convertible with energy, we call it a form of energy. ...But as to heat, it is further established by experiment that in this case the energy of motion does really persist as such. Thus a gas consists of molecules flying about with velocity, rotating and vibrating, and so having energy motion. All this energy of motion is what we call heat, and thus heat is a repetition of a known meaning of energy. Again, heat exists between a radiating body and the thing it warms; now the intermediate space is filled by the luminiferous ether, which, being elastic, has in its ultimate parts both energy of motion energy of position. In these forms the heat exists in the space in question.”

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

"Energy and Force" (Mar 28, 1873)

Question , Parting , Flying

“The great danger... not content with our real knowledge of the relation of the finite to the infinite, they slur over our vast ignorance by the help of the imagination. Myth supplies the place of true knowledge where we are ignorant of the connection between finite and infinite. Hence... most concrete systems of religion present us with a certain amount of knowledge but a great deal of myth.”

Karl Pearson (1857–1936) English mathematician and biometrician

The Ethic of Freethought (Mar 6, 1883)

Imagination , Religion , Help , Knowledge

“In connection with the matter of command in the field, there is perhaps a popular misconception that the Army and the Navy were intermingled in a standard form of joint operational organization in every theater throughout the world. Actually, the situation was never the same in any two areas. For example, after General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower had completed his landing in Normandy, his operation became purely a land campaign. The Navy was responsible for maintaining the line of communications across the ocean and for certain supply operations in the ports of Europe, and small naval groups became part of the land army for certain special purposes, such as the boat groups which helped in the crossing of the Rhine. But the strategy and tactics of the great battles leading up to the surrender of Germany were primarily army affairs and no naval officer had anything directly to do with the command of this land campaign. A different situation existed in the Pacific, where, in the process of capturing small atolls, the fighting was almost entirely within range of naval gunfire; that is to say, the whole operation of capturing an atoll was amphibious in nature, with artillery and air-support primarily naval. This situation called for a mixed Army-Navy organization which was entrusted to the command of Fleet Admiral Nimitz. A still different situation existed in the early days of the war during the Solomon Islands campaign where Army and Navy became, of necessity, so thoroughly intermingled that they were, to all practical purposes, a single service directed by Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr. Under General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Army, Army Aviation, and the naval components of his command were separate entities tied together only at the top in the person of General MacArthur himself. In the Mediterranean the scheme of command differed somewhat from all the others.”

Ernest King (1878–1956) United States Navy admiral, Chief of Naval Operations

Third Report, p. 172
U.S. Navy at War, 1941-1945: Official Reports to the Secretary of the Navy (1946)

War , Support , Personality , Help

“Consider the fact that, in a few years, I shall be dead. This fact can seem depressing. But the reality is only this. After a certain time, none of the thoughts and experiences that occur will be directly causally related to this brain, or be connected in certain ways to these present experiences. That is all this fact involves. And, in that description, my death seems to disappear.”

Derek Parfit book Reasons and Persons

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 45

Time , Dead , Reality , Relation ships

“And when all things were created as has been described by Moses — both heaven and earth, and the things therein — the twelve angels of the Mother were divided into four principles, and each fourth part of them is called a river — Phison, and Gehon, and Tigris, and Euphrates, as, he says, Moses states. These twelve angels being mutually connected, go about into four parts, and manage the world, holding from Edem a sort of viceregal authority over the world. But they do not always continue in the same places, but move around as if in a circular dance, changing place after place, and at set times and intervals retiring to the localities subject to themselves. And when Phison holds sway over places, famine, distress, and affliction prevail in that part of the earth, for the battalion of these angels is niggardly.”

Hippolytus of Rome Refutation of all Heresies

Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Volume 6: Hippolytus, Bishop Of Rome, Volume 1 p. 187
Refutation of All Heresies

Time , Affliction , Angels , Dance

“The end of Kali Yuga is significant, for many cosmic events are connected with this period... Armageddon was predicted ages ago, and the abnormalities at the end of Kali Yuga were described in the Puranas, but even keen thinkers underestimated those clear indications. However, the unusualness of the events does not impress humanity, whose mental confusion was also predicted ages ago.”

Helena Roerich (1879–1955) Russian philosopher

106
Armageddon

Age

“The approaching great epoch is closely connected with the ascendancy of woman. As in the best days of humanity, the future epoch will again offer woman her rightful place alongside her eternal fellow traveler and co-worker, man. You must remember that the grandeur of the Cosmos is built by the dual Origin. Is it possible, therefore, to belittle one Element of It?”

Helena Roerich (1879–1955) Russian philosopher

Travel , Future

“All of these types of abuses, whether they’re human rights abuses, or environmental crimes, stem from a core problem, which is a lack of governance at sea, especially on the high seas. Specifically, there are three ways in which misbehavior happens offshore routinely and with impunity: too few rules, a lack of enforcement, and insufficient awareness of what is happening there. All of these problems are also connected in the sense that they occur with a certain tacit complicity from all of us who live on land…”

Ian Urbina (1972) American journalist

On his book The Outlaw Ocean in “The Outlaw Ocean project – interview with Ian Urbina” https://hopeforjustice.org/news/2019/07/the-outlaw-ocean-project-interview-with-ian-urbina/ (Hope for Justice; Jul 2019)

Sense , Problem , Sea , Way

“Intimacy—real honest intimacy—is one of the most radical things you can do right now. It’s like an endangered species to connect to your feelings and actually be present…”

Liz Phair (1967) American musician

On being open and vulnerable emotionally in music in “A Candid Conversation Between Liz Phair and Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan” https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/a-candid-conversation-between-liz-phair-and-snail-mails-lindsey-jordan/ in Pitchfork (2018 May 9)

Feeling

“Faith healers have gotten one thing right: the human body can detect and defeat all types of diseases including cancer—the second leading cause of death in America. Our mind and body are closely connected. But faith healers have neglected one important point: the complex human brain—created in the image of God—is meant to invent new technologies including medical treatments for our mind and body.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

The Transhumanism Handbook, 2019

God , Faith , Death , Disease

“After coming back to America, it was really a no-brainer. When we saw the Tea Party come from out of nowhere...we had the Russian perspective coming into it...It was very obvious. When we started connecting all the dots, it went right to Charles and David Koch.”

Yasha Levine journalist

Yasha Levine: using the web to fight 'journalistic malpractice', June 14, 2012 https://www.theverge.com/2012/6/14/3076664/yasha-levine-the-exiled-journalism-interview

Tea

“It is indeed a great interest, the conservation of your colonies, but even that interest is connected with your constitution; and the supreme interest of the nation and of the colonies themselves is that you conserve your liberty and do not overturn the foundations of that liberty with your own hands. Faugh! Perish your colonies, if you are keeping them at that price. Yes, if you had either to lose your colonies, or to lose your happiness, your glory, your liberty, I would repeat: perish your colonies.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

"On the Condition of Free Men of Colour" (31 May 1791)

Happiness

“I call myself a citizen artist, because one of the things I do is try to get my playwrights — especially my graduate playwrights — interested in the world. It’s about how you connect art to culture and community here and now, and how we are vital to the expression of our community...”

Luis Alfaro (1963) Chicano performance artist, writer, theater director, and social activist

On calling himself a “citizen artist” in “The Artist as Leader: Luis Alfaro” https://www.uncsa.edu/kenan/artist-as-leader/luis-alfaro.aspx (Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts)

World , Communication , Art

“During all those years of experimentation and research, I never once made a discovery. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention, pure and simple. I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. Then it would be discarded at once and another theory evolved. This was the only possible way for me to work out the problem. … I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament.... Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

On his years of research in developing the electric light bulb, as quoted in "Talks with Edison" by George Parsons Lathrop in Harper's magazine, Vol. 80 (February 1890), p. 425.
Variant:
Through all the years of experimenting and research, I never once made a discovery. I start where the last man left off. … All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention pure and simple.
As quoted in Makers of the Modern World : The Lives of Ninety-two Writers, Artists, Scientists, Statesmen, Inventors, Philosophers, Composers, and Other Creators who Formed the Pattern of Our Century (1955) by Louis Untermeyer, p. 227.
1800s

Light , Truth , Problem , Way

“It was very dispiriting because a lot of things needed to be done. One of the things that happened was, if you had a good rank-and-file activist in a trade union situation, they would make them an offer to become part of the staff—at which point the person was totally lost to the campaign where they were a catalyst and became part of an apparatus that was basically going nowhere. The odd thing is, despite The Permanent Revolution being on the bookshelves, they would explain everything by going back and finding a quote from Trotsky or from Lenin in order to explain things, as opposed to explaining how things were in the real world.... They were basically just living in their own universe as opposed to making real life connections.”

Henry Spira (1927–1998) American activist

Ethics Into Action: Henry Spira and The Animal Rights Movement by Peter Singer (1998).

Personality , Universe , Parting , World

“If you can give someone the pleasure of not liking you, maybe that’s as valid as the pleasure of liking you, some people want to assert themselves by showing the things they don’t like. It’s a form of positioning yourself. We all do that. I get it. But I’m more focused on the people who do like what we do, and there’s a few of them. I like hanging out with those people. If you ever liked Coldplay, then we’re going to really deliver on our promise over the next year or so. It’s not guarded music. It’s about very open things and that might not resonate with some people. But I don’t want to obscure our music behind coolness or cynicism just to avoid criticisms. Because for some people it really connects, and I need it, too.”

Chris Martin (1977) musician, co-founder of Coldplay

On interview with Wall Street Journal, 2015. source http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/coldplay-and-chris-martin-open-up-for-new-album-1447868383

Pleasure , Music , People

“Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.”

Tim Berners-Lee (1955) British computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web

developerWorks Interviews: Tim Berners-Lee (podcast/audio plus transcript) http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int082206txt.html

Thinking , People

“Smashing things together. Because, culturally, that’s America at its most interesting. It’s things connected, awkwardly, that produce the brilliance. It’s not absoluteness that produces the brilliance; it’s when things that don’t belong together collide, and in that collision, something springs forth, and that becomes extraordinarily fascinating to me.”

George C. Wolfe (1954) American playwright

On how he explores the revue as a playwriting form in “GEORGE C. WOLFE” https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/george-c-wolfe in Interview Magazine (2016 May 9)

Spring

“All pedagogy, when it matters, is contextual. Different kids come from different neighborhoods, they come from different experiences, they come from different classes, and they come from different backgrounds. Context always matters in an educational setting and matters of difference have to be addressed if you are going to connect with young people. In order for education to work, you have to make it meaningful, to make it critical, to make it transformative.”

Henry Giroux (1943) American academic

Interview with Media For Us, 2019

Education , Making love , People

“Cultists. They’re like cockroaches. We humans are incredibly fine-tuned by evolution for the task of spotting coincidences and causal connections. It’s a very useful talent that dates back to the bad old days on the savannah (when noticing that there were lion prints by the watering hole and then cousin Ugg went missing, and today there are more lion prints and nobody had gone missing yet, was the kind of thing that could save your skin). But once we developed advanced lion countermeasures like stone axes and language, it turned into our secret curse. Because, you see, when we spot coincidences we assume there’s an intentional actor behind them—and that’s how we create religions. Nature does weird stuff, so it must be governed by supernature. There’s lightning in the clouds: Zeus must be throwing his thunderbolts again. Everyone’s dying of plague except those weird folks with the strange god who wash every day: it must be evil sorcery. And so on.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 8, “Club Zero” (p. 128)

God , Religion , Bad luck , Nature

“There is no doubt that right-hemisphere intuitive thinking may perceive patterns and connections too difficult for the left hemisphere; but it may also detect patterns where none exist. Skeptical and critical thinking is not a hallmark of the right hemisphere. And unalloyed right-hemisphere doctrines, particularly when they are invented during new and trying circumstances, may be erroneous or paranoid.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 7, “Lovers and Madmen” (p. 189)

Thinking

“One thing poetry teaches us, if anything, is that everything is connected…There is so much history that we have not validated.”

Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) American poet

On her worldly view of poetry in “Poet Lucille Clifton: 'Everything Is Connected'” https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124113507 in NPR (2010 Feb 28)

History

“The question of the principle of the form of the intelligible world turns, therefore, upon making apparent in what manner it is possible for several substances to be in mutual commerce, and for this reason to pertain to the same whole, which is called world. We do not here consider the world, let it be understood, as to matter, that is, as to the nature of the substances of which it consists, whether they be material or immaterial, but as to form, that is to say, how among several things taken separately a connection, and among them all, totality can have place.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Kant's Inaugural Dissertation (1770), Section IV On The Principle Of The Form Of The Intelligible World

Question , Intelligence , Nature , World

“During my travels, I find a general belief that to turn a Christian is to turn European; to become self-willed, and give up self-restraint, use only foreign cloth, dress oneself in European style and start taking meat and brandy. But I think the fact is, if a person discards his country, his customs and his old connections and manners when he changes his religion, he becomes all the more unfit to gain a knowledge of God. For, a change of religion means really a conversion of the heart. When there is a real conversion, a man’s heart grows. But in this country one finds that conversion brings about deep disdain for one’s old religion and its followers, i. e., one’s old friends and relatives. The next change that takes place is that of dress and manners and behaviour. All that does great harm to the country.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Mahatma Gandhi in Mahadev Desai, Day-to-Day with Gandhi,Volume 7, Varanasi, 1969, as quoted in Goel, S.R. History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)
Posthumous publications (1950s and later)

God , Clothes , Religion , Country

“I don’t think that I would call it a whirlwind in terms of our relationship. Obviously there have been layers attached to how public it has become after we had a good five, six months almost with just privacy, which was amazing. But no, I think we were able to really have so much time just to connect and we never went longer than two weeks without seeing each other, even though we were obviously doing a long distance relationship. So it’s — we made it work.”

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (1981) American former actress and member by marriage of the British royal family

Engagement interview (November 2017)

Thinking , Time

“Suicide, like any other murder is a sin because it is a sudden disturbance of the harmony of the world… Nature exists for the sake of the soul and for no other reason, it has the design, so to say, of giving the soul experience and self-consciousness. These can only be had by means of a body through which the soul comes in contact with nature, and to violently sever the connection before the natural time defeats the aim of nature, for the present compelling her, by her own slow processes, to restore the task left unfinished. And as those processes must go on through the soul that permitted the murder, more pain and suffering must follow.”

William Quan Judge (1851–1896) American occult writer

Suicide Is Not Death The Lamp, September 1894

Soul , Pain , Time , Suffering

“How man has come to be the complex being that he is and why, are questions that neither Science nor Religion makes conclusive answer to. This immortal thinker having such vast powers and possibilities, all his because of his intimate connection with every secret part of Nature from which he has been built up, stands at the top of an immense and silent evolution. He asks why Nature exists, what the drama of life has for its aim, how that aim may be attained….”

William Quan Judge (1851–1896) American occult writer

The Ocean of Theosophy by William Q. Judge (1893), Chapter 8, Of Reincarnation

Religion , Question , Nature , Secret

“The teachings of Theosophy deal for the present chiefly with our earth, although its purview extends to all the worlds, since no part of the manifested universe is outside the single body of laws which operate upon us. Our globe being one of the solar system is certainly connected with Venus, Jupiter, and other planets, but as the great human family has to remain with its material vehicle — the earth — until all the units of the race which are ready are perfected, the evolution of that family is of greater importance to the members of it. Some particulars respecting the other planets may be given later on. First let us take a general view of the laws governing all.”

William Quan Judge (1851–1896) American occult writer

The Ocean of Theosophy by William Q. Judge (1893), Chapter 2, General Principles

Family , Law , Universe , Perfection

“The Effect of Meditation. Remember also that every one who meditates upon the Master makes a definite connection with him, which shows itself to clairvoyant vision as a kind of line of light. The Master always subconsciously feels the impinging of such a line, and sends out in response a steady stream of magnetism which continues to play long after the meditation is over. The methodical practice of such meditation and concentration is thus of the utmost help to the aspirant, and regularity is one of the most important factors in producing the result. It should be undertaken daily at the same hour, and we should steadily persevere with it, even though no obvious effect may be produced. When no result appears we must be especially careful to avoid depression, because that makes it more difficult for a Master’s influence to act upon us, and it also shows that we are thinking of ourselves more than of him.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: The Masters and the Path (1925), Ch.4

Light , Help , Thinking , Appearance

“Connectivity just can’t be a privilege for people in the richest countries. We believe that connecting everyone in the world is one of the great challenges of our generation. And that’s why we are happy to play whatever small part in that that we can.”

Mark Zuckerberg (1984) American internet entrepreneur

Mark Zuckerberg. 120 Mark Zuckerberg Famous Entrepreneurship & Inspirational Quotes https://verwayathens.com/2019/02/28/120-mark-zuckerberg-famous-entrepreneurship-inspirational-quotes/

World , People , Parting , Country

“We are co-partners in a long and rich religious history -- the Judeo-Christian traditions. Many blacks and Jews have a shared passion for social justice at home and peace abroad. We must seek a revival of the spirit, inspired by a new vision and new possibilities. We must return to higher ground. We are bound by Moses and Jesus, but also connected with Islam and Mohammed. These three great religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, were all born in the revered and holy city of Jerusalem.”

Jesse Jackson (1941) African-American civil rights activist and politician

Address to the Democratic National Convention, 1984

Home , Peace , Religion , Justice

“The younger cadets of Nambutiri families live with Nayar women merely reproduces in English the Malayali mode of describing the married life of these people and of the Nayars. It is part of the theory that the women they live with are not wives, that they may part at will, and that they may form now connections. This part of tho Malabar law has, in the hands of unenquiring commentators, brought much undeserved obloquy on the morality of tho people.”

William Logan (author) book Malabar Manual

Malabar Manual, Page 136 https://archive.org/details/MalabarLogan/page/n148
Malabar Manual (1887)

Family , Law , People , Parting

“The most characteristic custom of tho Nayars is connected with their marriages. Every Nayar girl is married in one sense at a very early age. The tali is tied round her neck before she attains puberty, and it is considered to be disgraceful in her relations not to have this ceremony performed before that event takes place. The tying of tho tali is a great event in each household, and frequently several girls go through this ceremony simultaneously. When this can be managed it enables the family to make a greater display than they would probably be able to afford if there was a separate ceremony for each girl.”

William Logan (author) book Malabar Manual

Malabar Manual, Page 135 https://archive.org/details/MalabarLogan/page/n147
Malabar Manual (1887)

Family , Marriage , Girl , Age

“When you understand the basic change taking place in any one major area, it is easier to make sense of the others. This discovery of a new pattern transcends explanation. The shift is qual-itative, sudden, the result of neurological processes too rapid and complex to be tracked by the conscious mind. Although logical explanations can be laid out up to a point, the seeing of a pattern is not sequential but all-at-once. If a new concept does not click into place for you on first encounter, read on. As you move through the book you will come upon many related ideas, connections, examples, metaphors, analogies, and illustrative stories. In time, patterns will emerge, the shifts will occur. From the new perspective, old questions may seem suddenly irrelevant.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter One, The Conspiracy

Time , Reading , Understanding , Question

“But today the fashion is to ascribe the extinction of Buddhism to the persecution of Buddhists by Hindus, to the destruction of their temples by the Hindus. One point is that the Marxist historians who have been perpetrating this falsehood have not been able to produce even an iota of evidence to substantiate the concoction. In one typical instance, Romila Thapar had cited three inscriptions. The indefatigable Sita Ram Goel looked them up. Two of these turned out to have absolutely no connection with Buddhist viharas or their destruction, and the one that did deal with an object being destroyed had been held by authorities to have been a concoction; in any event, it told a story which was as different from what the historian had insinuated as day from night.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Fashion , Night

“A state of thievocracy is promoted because it permits politically connected taskmasters to redirect wealth to those deemed worthier by the state. In this sense, slavery is the socialization of labor and property, imposed to make the populace subservient to an institutionalized authority that often preaches equalitarianism and altruism but practices a slavery-enriched militarism. To the far statist Left and their slavocracy comrades, individuals have no ownership rights—so humans can be beasts of burden or simply be exterminated in cleansing bouts of genocide. Many leaders of the Democratic Party are still tied to this slavocracy-socialist tradition as a means to steal wages and assets from the citizenry as well as corrode free speech, due process and the presumption of innocence.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

p 484
Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the ‘Free Left’ and the ‘Statist Left', (2019)

Sense , Wealth , Making love

“Ernst Roehm was a thug. He was a brutish and zealous believer in National Socialism. If anything, he was more radical than Hitler. He believed in the elimination of anyone connected with the old order, businessmen, office holders of any kind. He became the leader of the SA, the Storm Troopers, whose terror tactics had helped make Hitler the leader of Germany.”

Ernst Röhm (1887–1934) German Nazi and military officer

Vance Stewart, "Three Against One," 2002

Making love , Help

“The river Yavyavati is mentioned once in the RV; it has been identified with the Zhob in E. Afghanistan. At PB 25.7.2, however, nothing points to such a W. localisation. The persons connected with it are known to have stayed in the Vibhinduka country, a part of the Kuru-PañcAla land.”

Michael Witzel (1943) German-American philologist

[....] “A dolphin lying on the sands, dried out by the North wind, could refer to the Gangetic dolphin, as in fact it does at 1.17.6...
India and the Ancient World: History, Trade and Culture Before A.D. 650 edited by Gilbert Pollet (Paper by Michael Witzel), Department Oriëntalistiek Leuven, 1987.

Personality , Parting , Country

“It is the destiny of our race to become united into one great body, thoroughly connected in all its parts, and possessed of similar culture. Nature, and even the passions and vices of Man, have from the beginning tended towards this end. A great part of the way towards it is already passed, and we may surely calculate that it will in time be reached.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book The Vocation of Man

Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 88
The Vocation of Man (1800), Faith

Time , Nature , Passion , Way

“To correct the tribe of our younger poets we shall soon require the aid of a physician, not of a critic. Their history may be told in a few words. A young man educated, or rather mis-educated, without experience, without study, without any definite tendency, without the power of exertion, or of tasting any genuine enjoyment, becomes conscious of his miserable oscillation between existence and non-existence —between not having lived and not being about to live—between a barren past and a barren future. He now takes to novel reading, frequents the theatres, compares himself to heroes or poets, and makes verses. All on a sudden the thought flashes across his mind that his unhappy condition is connected with the unfilled profundity of his feelings—with an unsatisfied yearning of the soul. He rushes headlong into the ocean of melancholy, and indulges in expressions with which the poetic springs of latter years have inundated us; he bathes in these waters, and contemplates his own image reflected from their surface.”

Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben (1806–1849) Austrian psychiatrist, poet and philosopher

Source: The Dietetics of the Soul; Or, True Mental Discipline (1838), pp. 136-137

Soul , Study , Reading , History

“This anthology proves that there is nothing new about the realization of the connection between our treatment of non-humans and of each other. Clear minds down the centuries have seen that the violence man shows to man is inextricably linked to the violence we have inflicted upon other species and our shared environment.”

Jon Wynne-Tyson (1924) British writer

"Preface", in The Extended Circle: A Commonplace Book of Animal Rights (1989)

“For those who take the vegetarian option seriously and adopt it as their own, it may well connect with their spiritual or religious orientation, even their sense of meaning and purpose in life. Some might see these as grandiose claims, but the point is that vegetarianism sheds light upon, and is in turn reflected by, our philosophical outlook on ourselves, our world, and our place in it.”

Michael Allen Fox (1940)

Source: Deep Vegetarianism (1999), p. 181

World , Life , Sense , Light

“My cousin Zygmunt found a distant relative in Italy, Professor Vettolani, who works as an astrophysicist in Bologna. When we contacted him, it turned out that our family traditions are quite compatible. So I think we are really connected by Etruscan blood. Although Zygmunt, who is a tireless researcher of family history, has several other theories about our origins. It turns out that in Italy there were two, no longer existing, settlements called Vetulani: one in Lazio, and the other in Tuscany, near Pisa.”

Zygmunt Vetulani (1950) Polish mathematician

Jerzy Vetulani, Mózg i błazen, Wydawnictwo Czarne, Wołowiec 2015, ISBN 978-83-8049-092-5, p. 7.

Distant , Family , Thinking , History

“Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them—drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes—that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001)

Imagination , History , Dependency , Mountain

“Kant has rightly observed that by the resolution of the concept of a thing we can find neither that it exists nor that it is the cause of something else, and accordingly that the concepts of being and causality are not analytical but can be derived only from experience. When however he later feels himself obliged to assume that the notion of causality originates in a pre-experiential property of the cognising subject and therefore stamps it a mere rule of time-series, by which, in experience, with each observation as cause any other could be connected as effect, then is the child thrown out with the bath.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Indeed, we must derive the relations of causality from experience; but we must not fail to correct and to complete our conception of these facts of experience by reflection.
Causality
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Time , Feeling

“What you have written after analyzing everything connected with my achievements and fame is altogether correct.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

Tagore in "Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis in Vigyanprasar".

“Khan saheb’s music has found its way, penetrating barriers of religion, caste and class, to the hearts of millions of our people, uniting them in a shared ecstasy…. He has never accepted that there is any contradiction between music and his religious faith, rather he sees perfect unity, a connection between the two….”

Bismillah Khan (1916–2006) Indian musician

Faith , Religion , People , Heart

“What made her talent so great was her capacity to live what she sang. Her music was deepened by her connection to the struggles and the triumphs of the African American experience growing up in her father’s church, the community of Detroit, and her awareness of the turmoil of the South. She had a lifelong, unwavering commitment to civil rights and was one of the strongest supporters of the movement. She was our sister and our friend. Whenever I would see her, from time to time, she would always inquire about the well-being of people she met and worked with during the sixties.When she sang, she embodied what we were fighting for, and her music strengthened us. It revived us. When we would be released from jail after a non-violent protest, we might go to a late night club and let the music of Aretha Franklin fill our hearts. She was like a muse whose songs whispered the strength to continue on. Her music gave us a greater sense of determination to never give up or give in, and to keep the faith. She was a wonderful, talented human being. We mourn for Aretha Franklin. We have lost the Queen of Soul.”

Aretha Franklin (1942–2018) American musician, singer, songwriter, and pianist

John Lewis, "Congressman John Lewis on Aretha Franklin: ‘One of God’s precious gifts’" https://www.ajc.com/lifestyles/congressman-john-lewis-aretha-franklin-one-god-precious-gifts/PRXHP5dgRpjhhuIUdjGEsO/, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (August 16, 2018)

Soul , Faith , Time , Night

“Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him … there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime. He was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story which we all believe. We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgement of fourteen men and women that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.”

Roscoe Arbuckle (1887–1933) American silent film actor, comedian, director, and screenwriter

Statement from jury in third trial for manslaughter, April 12 1922.

Success , Hope , People , Way

“I’m a vulgar, fucked-up degenerate comedian who did drugs. And I’m connecting with Christian mothers and fathers. I love that. That means so much to me.”

Louis C.K. (1967) American comedian and actor

http://www.dead-frog.com/blog/entry/interview_louis_ck_creator_of_the_sitcom_lucky_louie/

Love , Making love

“I have throughout introduced the Integral Calculus in connexion with the Differential Calculus. …Is it always proper to learn every branch of a direct subject before anything connected with the inverse relation is considered? If so why are not multiplication and involution in arithmetic made to follow addition and precede subtraction?”

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

The portion of the Integral Calculus, which properly belongs to any given portion of the Differential Calculus increases its power a hundred-fold...
The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Relation ships , Learning

“Sadism is plainly connected with the need for self-assertion. At the same time it cannot be separated from the idea of defeat.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

A sadist is a man, who, in some sense, has his back to the wall. Nothing is further from sadism, for example, than the cheerful, optimistic mentality of a Shaw or Wells.
Source: The Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963), p. 158

Idea , Time , Self-confidence

“Making models was reputed to be hugely enjoyable… But when you got the kit home and opened the box the contents turned out to be of a uniform leaden gray or olive green, consisting of perhaps sixty thousand tiny parts, some no larger than a proton, all attached in some organic, inseparable way to plastic stalks like swizzle sticks. The tubes of glue by contrast were the size of large pastry tubes. No matter how gently you depressed them they would blurp out a pint or so of a clear viscous goo whose one instinct was to attach itself to some foreign object—a human finger, the living-room drapes, the fur of a passing animal—and become an infinitely long string. Any attempt to break the string resulted in the creation of more strings. Within moments you would be attached to hundreds of sagging strands, all connected to something that had nothing to do with model airplanes or World War II. The only thing the glue wouldn’t stick to, interestingly, was a piece of plastic model; then it just became a slippery lubricant that allowed any two pieces of model to glide endlessly over each other, never drying. The upshot was that after about forty minutes of intensive but troubled endeavor you and your immediate surroundings were covered in a glistening spiderweb of glue at the heart of which was a gray fuselage with one wing on upside down and a pilot accidentally but irremediably attached by his flying cap to the cockpit ceiling. Happily by this point you were so high on the glue that you didn’t give a shit about the pilot, the model, or anything else.”

Bill Bryson The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

Source: The Life And Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006), p. 81

Home , War , Box , Heart

“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in firs and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines- real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts The breast is a machine that produces miilk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it.”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

The Desiring Machine
Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1977)

Time

“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines — real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

from Anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia, p. 1

Time

“There are moments of sentimental and mystical experience... that carry an enormous sense of inner authority and illumination with them when they come. But they come seldom, and they do not come to everyone; and the rest of life makes either no connection with them, or tends to contradict them more than it confirms them. Some persons follow more the voice of the moment in these cases, some prefer to be guided by the average results. Hence the sad discordancy of so many of the spiritual judgments of human beings; a discordancy which will be brought home to us acutely enough before these lectures end.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lecture I, "Religion and Neurology"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Home , Personality , Sense , Sadness

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”

E.M. Forster book Howards End

Source: Howards End (1910), Ch. 22

Passion , Love , Life , Making love

“There is nothing very extraordinary in this fact: no youth of the age I then was, can be expected to be more than one thing, and this was the thing I happened to be. Ambition and desire of distinction, I had in abundance; and zeal for what I thought the good of mankind was my strongest sentiment, mixing with and colouring all others. But my zeal was as yet little else, at that period of my life, than zeal for speculative opinions. It had not its root in genuine benevolence, or sympathy with mankind; though these qualities held their due place in my ethical standard. Nor was it connected with any high enthusiasm for ideal nobleness.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)

Life , Youth , Age

“An unjust composition never fails to contain error and falsehood. Therefore an unjust connection of ideas is not derived from nature, but from the imperfect composition of man. Misconnection of ideas is the same as misjudging, and has no positive existence, being merely a creature of the imagination; but nature and truth are real and uniform; and the rational mind by reasoning, discerns the uniformity, and is thereby enabled to make a just composition of ideas, which will stand the test of truth. But the fantastical illuminations of the credulous and superstitious part of mankind, proceed from weakness, and as far as they take place in the world subvert the religion of REASON, NATURE and TRUTH.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. XIII Section II - Of The Importance of the Exercise of Reason, and Practice of Morality, in order to the Happiness of Mankind

Imagination , Religion , Error , Nature

“We all naturally possess the most remarkable tool for connecting to people and attaining social power—empathy. When cultivated and properly used, it can allow us to see into the moods and minds of others, giving us the power to anticipate people’s actions and gently lower their resistance. This instrument, however, is blunted by our habitual self-absorption. We are all narcissists, some deeper on the spectrum than others. Our mission in life is to come to terms with this self-love and learn how to turn our sensitivity outward, toward others, instead of inward. We must recognize at the same time the toxic narcissists among us before getting enmeshed in their dramas and poisoned by their envy.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 2 : Transform Self-love into Empathy
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Time , Envy , People , Learning

“Most of us spend our lives avoiding the thought of death. Instead, the inevitability of death should be continually on our minds. Understanding the shortness of life fills us with a sense of purpose and urgency to realize our goals. Training ourselves to confront and accept this reality makes it easier to manage the inevitable setbacks, separations, and crises in life. It gives us a sense of proportion, of what really matters in this brief existence of ours. Most people continually look for ways to separate themselves from others and feel superior. Instead, we must see the mortality in everyone, how it equalizes and connects us all. By becoming deeply aware of our mortality, we intensify our experience of every aspect of life.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 18 : Meditate on Our Common Mortality
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Understanding , Death , People , Way

Quotes about connection page 15

Quotes about connection
page 15