Quotes about container

A collection of quotes on the topic of container, use, other, time.

Quotes about container

“We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture, which despises the content.”

Eduardo Galeano (1940–2015) Uruguayan writer

Love, World, Wedding, Dead

“Every human life contains a potential, if that potential is not fulfilled, then that life was wasted…”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Life

“Few mortals know that the kingdom of God includes the kingdom of mundane fulfillments. … The divine realm extends to the earthly; but the later, illusory in nature, does not contain the essence of Reality.”

Mahavatar Babaji Hindu Yogi

Source: Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), Ch. 34 : Materializing a Palace in the Himalayas

God, Nature, Reality

“The greatest artist does not have any concept
Which a single piece of marble does not itself contain
Within its excess, though only
A hand that obeys the intellect can discover it.”

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet

Source: I Sonetti Di Michelangelo: The 78 Sonnets of Michelangelo with Verse Translation

“You are water
I’m water
we’re all water in different containers
that’s why it’s so easy to meet
someday we’ll evaporate together.”

Yoko Ono (1933) Japanese artist, author, and peace activist

Variant: We're all water from different rivers,
That's why it's so easy to meet,
We're all water in this vast, vast ocean,
Someday we'll evaporate together.

Water

“Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Daughters

“Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

Life

“The heart that
breaks open can
contain the
whole universe.”

Joanna Macy (1929) American activist

Peaceful, Universe, Heart

“Place is the greatest thing, as it contains all things.”

Thales (-624–-547 BC) ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician

As quoted in Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, I, 35

“Welcome to the citadel of eternal wisdom. Behold, this crystal contains the sum of all human knowledge -- Except Rap And Country”

Dril Twitter user

[ Link to tweet https://twitter.com/dril/status/26334898832] Tweets by year, 2010

Wisdom, Knowledge, Country

“Now, as there is an infinity of possible universes in the Ideas of God, and as only one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for God's choice, which determines him toward one rather than another. And this reason can be found only in the fitness, or the degrees of perfection, that these worlds contain, since each possible thing has the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection it involves.”

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German mathematician and philosopher

Or, comme il y a une infinité d'univers possibles dans les idées de Dieu, et qu'il n'en peut exister qu'un seul, il faut qu'il y ait une raison suffisante du choix de Dieu qui le détermine à l'un plutôt qu'à l'autre. Et cette raison ne peut se trouver que dans la convenance, dans les degrés de perfection que ces mondes contiennent, chaque possible ayant droit de prétendre à l'existence à mesure de la perfection qu'il enveloppe.
La monadologie (53 & 54).
The Monadology (1714)

God, World, Idea, Universe

“The dimple that thy chin contains has beauty in its round,
That never has been fathomed yet by myriad thoughts profound.”

Hafez (1326–1389) Persian poet

Source: Odes, CXLIII, in Hafiz of Shiraz: Selections from his Poems, translated from the Persian, by Herman Bicknell (1875), p. 197; quoted in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 59

Beauty

“If we arrive at an equation containing on each side the same term but with different coefficients, we must take equals from equals until we get one term equal to another term. But, if there are on one or on both sides negative terms, the deficiencies must be added on both bides until all the terms on both sides are positive. Then we must take equals from equals until one term is left on each side.”

Diophantus Arithmetica

As quoted by Thomas Little Heath, Diophantos of Alexandria: https://books.google.com/books?id=ABkPAAAAIAAJ A Study in the History of Greek Algebra (1885) Arithmetica (c. 250 AD)

“When a man sought knowledge, it would not be long before it could be seen in his humbleness, his sight, upon his tongue and his hands, in his prayer, in his speech and in his disinterest (zuhd) in worldly allurements. And a man would acquire a portion of knowledge and put it into practice, and it would be better for him than the world and all it contains – if he owned it he would give it in exchange for the hereafter.”

Hasan al-Basri (642–728) Iranian Sufi Saint

Quoted in Ibn Al-Mubârak, Al-Zuhd wa Al-Raqâ`iq Vol.1 p. 156.

World, Knowledge

“Perhaps not one religion contains all of the truth of the world. Perhaps every religion contains fragments of the truth, and it is our responsibility to identify those fragments and piece them together.”

Christopher Paolini book Brisingr

Source: Brisingr

Truth, World, Religion

“Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Source: The Quiet American

World, Feeling, Suffering

“I distrust any advice that contains the words 'ought' or 'should'.”

Tamora Pierce (1954) American writer of fantasy novels for children

“Human beings are drawn to cats because they are all we are not — self-contained, elegant in everything they do, relaxed, assured, glad of company, yet still possessing secret lives.”

Pam Brown (1948) Australian poet

Secret, Cats

“The end was contained in the beginning.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“Now let me be clear: I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power.… The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors…and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks Against Going to War with Iraq (2 October 2002).
2000-03

People, World, Way, History

“The idea that an advanced civilization need not rest on slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance; it is a good deal younger than the Christian religion. But even if Chesterton's dictum were true, it would only be true in the sense that a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts constantly. It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx's theory is contained in the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate him so much.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

As I Please (25 February 1944) http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/eaip_01 "As I Please" (1943–1947)

Life, Hate, Religion, Law

“While I am not a believer in the orthodox sense, I commend religion, first, because every individual should have some ideal — religious, artistic, scientific, or humanitarian — to give significance to his life. Second, because all the great religions contain wise prescriptions relating to the conduct of life, which hold good now as they did when they were promulgated.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Machine to End War (1937)

Life, Religion, Sense

“The Russians are primitive folk. Besides, Bolshevism is something that stifles individualism and which is against my inner nature. Bolshevism is worse than National Socialism — in fact, it can't be compared to it. Bolshevism is against private property, and I am all in favor of private property. Bolshevism is barbaric and crude, and I am fully convinced that that atrocities committed by the Nazis, which incidentally I knew nothing about, were not nearly as great or as cruel as those committed by the Communists. I hate the Communists bitterly because I hate the system. The delusion that all men are equal is ridiculous. I feel that I am superior to most Russians, not only because I am a German but because my cultural and family background are superior. How ironic it is that crude Russian peasants who wear the uniforms of generals now sit in judgment on me. No matter how educated a Russian might be, he is still a barbaric Asiatic. Secondly, the Russian generals and the Russian government planned a war against Germany because we represented a threat to them ideologically. In the German state, I was the chief opponent of Communism. I admit freely and proudly that it was I who created the first concentration camps in order to put Communists in them. Did I ever tell you that funny story about how I sent to Spain a ship containing mainly bricks and stones, under which I put a single layer of ammunition which had been ordered by the Red government in Spain? The purpose of that ship was to supply the waning Red government with munitions. That was a good practical joke and I am proud of it because I wanted with all my heart to see Russian Communism in Spain defeated finally.”

Hermann Göring (1893–1946) German politician and military leader

To Leon Goldensohn (28 May 1946)
The Nuremberg Interviews (2004)

Men, Hate, War, Education

“Reality contains not only evidence, but also the means (such as our minds, and our artefacts) of understanding it. There are mathematical symbols in physical reality. The fact that it is we who put them there does not make them any less physical.”

David Deutsch book The Fabric of Reality

Source: The Fabric of Reality (1997), Ch.3

Mathematics, Understanding, Reality

“This work contains many things which are new and interesting. Unfortunately, everything that is new is not interesting, and everything which is interesting, is not new.”

Lev Landau (1908–1968) Soviet physicist

http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-02-01-04.htm

“Charisms are not distributed at random but are dispensed by God to supply what is needful and lacking in his Church at each historical moment. If they are from God, they usually do not flow with the latest fashionable trend but much more likely contain an antidote and remedy for the perils of the time.”

Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905–1988) Swedish Catholic theologian

First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr (1968)

God, Fashion, Time

“The striving for significance, this sense of yearning, always points out to us that all psychological phenomena contain a movement that starts from a feeling of inferiority and reach upward. The theory of Individual Psychology of psychological compensation states that the stronger the feeling of inferiority, the higher the goal for personal power.”

Alfred Adler (1870–1937) Medical Doctor, Psychologist, Psychiatrist, Psychotherapist, Personality Theorist

From a new translation of "Progress in Individual Psychology" ("Fortschritte der Individualpsychologie", 1923), a journal article by Alfred Adler, in the AAISF/ATP Archives.

Feeling, Sense, Personality

“I concluded that women are flawed. There is something mentally wrong with the way their brains are wired, as if they haven’t evolved from animal-like thinking. They are incapable of reason or thinking rationally. They are like animals, completely controlled by their primal, depraved emotions and impulses. That is why they are attracted to barbaric, wild, beast-like men. They are beasts themselves. Beasts should not be able to have any rights in a civilized society. If their wickedness is not contained, the whole of humanity will be held back from advancement to a more civilized state. Women should not have the right to choose who to mate with. That choice should be made for them by civilized men of intelligence. If women had the freedom to choose which men to mate with, like they do today, they would breed with stupid, degenerate men, which would only produce stupid, degenerate offspring. This in turn would hinder the advancement of humanity. Not only hinder it, but devolve humanity completely. Women are like a plague that must be quarantined. When I came to this brilliant, pefect revelation, I felt like everything was now clear to me, in a bitter, twisted way. I am one of the few people on this world who has the intelligence to see this. I am like a god, and my purpose is to exact ultimate Retribution on all of the impurities I see in the world.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), 19-22, UC Santa Barbara, Building to Violence

God, Freedom, Intelligence, People

“God only knows what she thought. My environment contained nothing more alien than writing or the desire to express one’s self in writing. But I never forgot the look of astonishment and bewilderment on the young woman’s face when I had finished reading and glanced at her. Her inability to grasp what I had done or was trying to do somehow gratified me. Afterwards whenever I thought of her reaction I smiled happily for some unaccountable reason.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

Self-confidence, God, Smile, Reading

“Ideals contain the spirit of an ever-living human.”

Zafar Mirzo (1972)

“Life may contain the "essence" (what else could?); recollection, the repetition in imagination, may decipher the essence and deliver to you the "elixir"; and eventually you may even be privileged to "make" something out of it, "to compound the story." But life itself is neither essence nor elixir, and if you treat as such it will only play its tricks on you.”

Hannah Arendt book Men in Dark Times

Source: Men in Dark Times

Life, Imagination

“God has fallen out of containment in religion and into human hearts—God is incarnating. Our whole unconscious is in an uproar from the God Who wants to know and to be known.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

God, Religion, Heart

“She walked quickly through the darkness with the frank stride of someone who was at least certain that the forest, on this damp and windy night, contained strange and terrible things and she was it.”

Terry Pratchett book Wyrd Sisters

Source: Wyrd Sisters

Night

“A life of short duration… could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting eighty years.”

Viktor E. Frankl (1905–1997) Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor

Love, Life, Joy

“From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain and nourish all the world.”

William Shakespeare Love's Labour's Lost

Source: Love's Labour's Lost

Women, Books, World, Art

“The Highest Thought is always that thought which contains joy. The Clearest Words are those words which contain truth. The Grandest Feeling is that feeling which you call love.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

Love, Truth, Feeling, Joy

“Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Accept - then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Sad

“In the particular is contained the universal.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

Universe

“I don't regret it, you know. I would do it all again. Children are our hope for the future."
THERE IS NO HOPE FOR THE FUTURE, said Death.
"What does it contain, then?"
ME.”

Terry Pratchett book Sourcery

Source: Sourcery

Death, Children, Hope, Future

“Everything that ever happened to you, you experienced right within you. Light and darkness, pain and pleasure, agony and ecstasy—all of it happened within you. If someone touches your hand right now, you may think you are experiencing their hand, but the fact of the matter is you are only experiencing the sensations in your own hand. The whole experience is contained within. All human experience is one hundred percent self-created.”

Sadhguru book Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Source: Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

Pain, Pleasure, Thinking, Light

“In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.”

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) Austrian writer

Source: The Post-Office Girl

Soul

“Thinking. This book contains some. Whether you try it at home is up to you.”

Terry Pratchett book Nation

Source: Nation

Books, Home, Thinking

“Only someone who (like the Intuitionist) denies that the concepts and axioms of classical set theory have any meaning could be satisfied with such a solution, not someone who believes them to describe some well-determined reality. For in reality Cantor's conjecture must be either true or false, and its undecidability from the axioms as known today can only mean that these axioms do not contain a complete description of reality.”

Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) logician, mathematician, and philosopher of mathematics

Reality, Falseness

“Accept — then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

Sad, Life

“I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

World, Universe

“People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness.”

Javier Marías (1951) Spanish writer

La gente sólo se casa cuando no tiene más remedio, por pánico o porque anda desesperada o para no perder a alguien a quien no soporta perder. Siempre hay mucha chaladura en lo que parece más convencional.
Source: Corazón tan blanco [A Heart So White] (1992), p. 121

People, Madness

“Every weakness contains within itself a strength.”

Shūsaku Endō (1923–1996) author from Japan

“Joy is to fun what the deep sea is to a puddle. It’s a feeling inside that can hardly be contained.”

Terry Pratchett book A Hat Full of Sky

Source: A Hat Full of Sky

Feeling, Joy, Sea

“Success is determined not by whether or not you face obstacles, but by your reaction to them. And if you look at these obstacles as a containing fence, they become your excuse for failure. If you look at them as a hurdle, each one strengthens you for the next.”

Ben Carson book Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

Source: Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story

Failure, Success

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Source: Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

Summer

“Rivers, ponds, lakes and streams — they all have different names, but they all contain water. Just as religions do — they all contain truths”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

Source: Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times

Truth, Religion, Water

“And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

Passion

“It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Revenge, Suffering

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”

Loren Eiseley (1907–1977) US philosopher (1907-1977)

Water

“There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance next time.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Heartbreaking, Powerful, Loss, Time

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Wise, Wisdom, Books, Way

“Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Sad

“Human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores.”

William C. Roberts (1932) American physician

Quoted in Will Tuttle, The World Peace Diet, [//books.google.it/books?id=H_clxwd27CgC&pg=PT107 ch. 5]

Nature, Animals

“When you look at a tree, you are aware of the tree. When you have a thought or feeling, you are aware of that thought or feeling. When you have a pleasurable or painful experience, you are aware of that experience. These seem to be true and obvious statements. Yet if you look at them very closely, you will find that in a subtle way their very structure contains a fundamental illusion, an illusion which is unavoidable when you use language. Thought and language create an apparent duality and a separate person where there is none.
The truth is you are not somebody who is aware of the tree, the thought, feeling or experience. You are the awareness or consciousness in and by which those things appear. As you go about your life, can you be aware of yourself as the awareness in which the entire content of your life unfolds?”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Stillness Speaks (2003)

Life, Pain, Pleasure, Truth

“One included all, and all were contained in one.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Old Path White Clouds : Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha (1991) Parallax Press ISBN 81-216-0675-6

“After he had gone over the mansion, his entertainer asked him what he thought of the splendours it contained; and he in reply did full justice to the riches of its owner and the skill of its decorators, but he added, "Lions would have fared better, had lions been the artists."”

John Henry Newman (1801–1890) English cleric and cardinal

Lecture I, Section 1.
Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851)

Justice

“When it comes to the insightful reading of such passages that comes via the elevated sense, we shall not beg to differ at all about its name—whether one wishes to call it tropologia, allegoria, or anything else—but only about whether it contains meanings that are beneficial.”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

Commentary on the Song of Songs, As translated by Margaret M. Mitchell in Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics (2010)

Sense, Reading

“Out of the nowhere of the dimensionless state comes the differentiation of the sound of the trumpet in the dimensional state, in the now here of the dimensional state. That sound is generated first in the mouthpiece of the trumpet, and the vibration is taken up by the air contained in the whole trumpet and by the trumpet itself. This portrayal indicates a oneness, first of all between the trumpeter and the trumpet; and then the oneness between the air (the substance in the trumpet), the trumpet itself, and the sound that is being propagated.”

Martin Cecil, 7th Marquess of Exeter (1909–1988) Marquess of Exeter

The Third Sacred School, Volume 2, Chapter 73
As of a Trumpet, On Eagle's Wings, The Third Sacred School

“[We are now] in a position to judge of the validity of the objection which has been made, that the principle of Natural Selection depends on a succession of favourable chances. The objection is more in the nature of an innuendo than of a criticism, for it depends for its force upon the ambiguity of the word chance, in its popular uses. The income derived from a Casino by its proprietor may, in one sense, be said to depend upon a succession of favourable chances, although the phrase contains a suggestion of improbability more appropriate to the hopes of the patrons of his establishment. It is easy without any very profound logical analysis to perceive the difference between a succession of favourable deviations from the laws of chance, and on the other hand, the continuous and cumulative action of these laws. It is on the latter that the principle of Natural Selection relies.”

Ronald Fisher book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection

On the objection (still often made by creationists) that the theory of evolution predicts evolution occurs "only by chance", Ch. 2, p. 37.
The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930)

Law, Hope, Nature, Sense

“Let us look for our light in our feelings. There is a warmth in them that contains many clarities.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Feeling, Light

“If one leaves a wooden or cardboard box containing a small glass ampulla with several centigrams of a radium salt in one’s pocket for a few hours, one will feel absolutely nothing. But 15 days afterwards a redness will appear on the epidermis, and then a sore which will be very difficult to heal. A more prolonged action could lead to paralysis and death. Radium must be transported in a thick box of lead.
It can even be thought that radium could become very dangerous in criminal hands, and here the question can be raised whether mankind benefits from knowing the secrets of Nature, whether it is ready to profit from it or whether this knowledge will not be harmful for it. The example of the discoveries of Nobel is characteristic, as powerful explosives have enabled man to do wonderful work. They are also a terrible means of destruction in the hands of great criminals who are leading the peoples towards war. I am one of those who believe with Nobel that mankind will derive more good than harm from the new discoveries.”

Pierre Curie (1859–1906) French physicist

Nobel lecture (1905)

Death, War, People, Secret

“It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete--opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.”

Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) Russian composer, pianist and conductor

Source: 1970s and later, Themes and Conclusions (1982), p. 188.

Art, Music, Nature, Reality

“Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood -- one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Mark Twain book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Ch. 13 http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-13.html A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

Death, Hunger, People, Hell

“Being a loner has its advantages, a self-containment necessary for keeping body and 'soul' alive and progressing. Dying in prison is not such a great problem as living in prison.”

Dennis Nilsen (1945–2018) British serial killer

As quoted in Exclusive: Dennis Nilsen: My Prison Life of Drink and Drugs http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/exclusive-dennis-nilsen-prison-life-555104, Mirror.co.uk (27 August, 2005)

Soul, Problem

“The subject of this book is the structure of space-time on length-scales from 10-13cm, the radius of an elementary particle, up to 1028cm, the radius of the universe. …we base our treatment on Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. This theory leads to two remarkable predictions about the universe: first, that the final fate of massive stars is to collapse behind an event horizon to form a 'black hole' which will contain a singularity; and secondly, that there is a singularity in our past which constitutes, in some sense, a beginning to the universe.”

Stephen Hawking book The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time

with G.F.R. Ellis, "The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time" (1973) Preface

Fate, Books, Star, Sense

“Underlying the concept of positivity is the conviction that the positive is intrinsically positive in itself, without anyone pausing to ask what is to be regarded as positive. … It is significant and really quite interesting that the term 'positive' actually contains this ambivalence. On the one hand, 'positive' means what is given, is postulated, is there—as when we speak of positivism as the philosophy that sticks to the facts. But, equally, 'positive' also refers to the good, the approvable, in a certain sense, the ideal. And I imagine that this semantic constellation expresses with precision what countless people actually feel to be the case.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 18

People, Feeling, Imagination, Sense

“I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully worked out scheme. There is no intelligent design theory that’s comparable. Working out a positive theory is the job of the scientific people that we have affiliated with the movement. Some of them are quite convinced that it’s doable, but that’s for them to prove…No product is ready for competition in the educational world.”

Phillip E. Johnson (1940–2019) American Law clerk

Berkley Science Review (Spring 2006), 2008-11-23 http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/articles.php?issue=10&article=evolution, 2000s

People, World, Education, Error

“Currently there's five machines permanently networked here. They all contain the serious core stuff. A couple of the machines are pensioned off 486s, with little other value now. Plus there's two Jaz drives in the building and the portable also carries a fair amount of stuff. Plus every Friday a man comes around and carves all the new stuff onto stone slabs and buries them in the garden… I think I'm okay.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Usenet

Thinking

“I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien book On Fairy-Stories

On Fairy-Stories (1939)

World, Fear, Peace, Beauty

“The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2008, A More Perfect Union (March 2008)

Love, Men, Children, People

“Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

"Can a Scientific Community Be Stable?," Lecture, Royal Society of Medicine, London (29 November 1949)
1940s

“The energy to manufacture Art doesn't come merely from the superficial darshan (philosophy) of objects; nor from mere intellect and knowledge; but it comes from those subtle conscience, which finds emotional caressing from divine experience climbing above bestial eyes. The beast merely looks and remains satisfied, but man tries to touch the heart of everything. The superficial understandings do not satisfy him, in the world containing form-relation and conscience he cannot remain satisfied though philosophy. He tries to connect the things seen and experienced in his mind and outer nature with eternal and true and tries to touch them with the help of relation and support of chief reason.”

Laxmi Prasad Devkota (1909–1959) Nepali poet

कला र जीवन (Art and Life)
Art and Life

World, Art, Understanding, Support

“I don’t think they’re gaining strength, what is true is that from the start, our goal has been first to contain and we have contained them. They have not gained ground in Iraq, and in Syria, they’ll come in, they’ll leave. But you don’t see this systematic march by ISIL across the terrain.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

ABC News, when George Stephanopoulos suggested ISIL is gaining strength, hours before Paris attacks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS3jady8bIc (13 November 2015) 2015

Thinking

“The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed suddenly into magnificent sense.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Je weiter ich lebe, desto nötiger scheint es mir, auszuhalten, das ganze Diktat des Daseins bis zum Schluss nachzuschreiben; denn es möchte sein, dass erst der letzte Satz jenes kleine, vielleicht unscheinbare Wort enthält, durch welches alles mühsam Erlernte und Unbegriffene sich gegen einen herrlichen Sinn hinüberkehrt.
Letter to Ilse Erdmann, 21 December 1913, in Letters on Life, U. Baer, trans. (2007)
Rilke's Letters

Understanding, Sense, Learning

“The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.”
Talis...mihi uidetur, rex, vita hominum praesens in terris, ad conparationem eius, quod nobis incertum est, temporis, quale cum te residente ad caenam cum ducibus ac ministris tuis tempore brumali, accenso quidem foco in medio, et calido effecto caenaculo, furentibus autem foris per omnia turbinibus hiemalium pluviarum vel nivium, adveniens unus passeium domum citissime pervolaverit; qui cum per unum ostium ingrediens, mox per aliud exierit. Ipso quidem tempore, quo intus est, hiemis tempestate non tangitur, sed tamen parvissimo spatio serenitatis ad momentum excurso, mox de hieme in hiemem regrediens, tuis oculis elabitur. Ita haec vita hominum ad modicum apparet; quid autem sequatur, quidue praecesserit, prorsus ignoramus. Unde si haec nova doctrina certius aliquid attulit, merito esse sequenda videtur.

Bede book Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Book II, chapter 13
This, Bede tells us, was the advice given to Edwin, King of Northumbria by one of his chief men, at a meeting where the king proposed that he and his followers should convert to Christianity. It followed a speech by the chief priest Coifi, who also spoke in favor of conversion.
Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People)

Life, Appearance, Winter, Time

“I arrived at length at Cairo, mother of cities and seat of Pharaoh the tyrant, mistress of broad regions and fruitful lands, boundless in multitude of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendour, the meeting-place of comer and goer, the halting-place of feeble and mighty, whose throngs surge as the waves of the sea, and can scarce be contained in her for all her size and capacity.”

Ibn Battuta (1304–1377) Moroccan explorer

Travels in Asia and Africa (Rehalã of Ibn Battûta)

Beauty, Sea

“I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say "for the triad"; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality.”

Alban Berg (1885–1935) Austrian composer

Quoted in Reich, Willi (1971). Schoenberg: A Critical Biography, p. 34. Translated by Leo Black.

Law, Music, Way, Thinking

“The essence of striving to the far-off worlds is contained in the assimilation of a consciousness of our life in them. The possibility of life on them becomes for our consciousness, as it were, a channel of approach. Indeed, this consciousness must be dug through as a channel. People are able to swim, yet a considerable portion of them do not swim. Such an obvious fact as the far-off worlds completely fails to attract humanity. It is time to cast this seed into the human brain.”

Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, enlightener, philosopher

§ 44
New Era Community (1926)

Life, People, World, Time

“We always feel younger than we are. I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains its rings. The sum of them is me. The mirror sees only my latest face, while I know all my previous ones.”

Tomas Tranströmer (1931–2015) Swedish poet, psychologist and translator

40.
För levande och döda (For the Living and the Dead) 1996

Feeling, Tree

“The way that we behave contains way more information than we know. And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge has been extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave, and telling stories about it over thousands and thousands and thousands of years, extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity, and trying to represent them party through imitations but also through drama, mythology, and literature, and art, and all of that – to represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like. That process of understanding is what we see unfolding at least in part in the Biblical stories. It's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes it so complex, but I see in it the struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears and to become conscious of what it means to be human, and that's a very difficult thing.”

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

Other

Dreams, Art, Way, Behavior

“I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes. If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe but in a mangled form which contains the information about what you were like but in a state where it can not be easily recognized. It is like burning an encyclopedia. Information is not lost, if one keeps the smoke and the ashes. But it is difficult to read. In practice, it would be too difficult to re-build a macroscopic object like an encyclopedia that fell inside a black hole from information in the radiation, but the information preserving result is important for microscopic processes involving virtual black holes.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

"Information Loss in Black Holes" http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0507171 (July 2005)

Disappointment, Travel, Universe, Science

“These eight rules [above] contain all the precepts for solid and immutable proofs.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

The Art of Persuasion

“The most temperate of persons is the one who controls hismself, and in doubtful events is self-contained.”

Hasan al-Askari (846–874) Eleventh of the Twelve Imams

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 373
General

Personality

“!-- Your kind letter of the 25th ult., and the express package containing the bronze medal of -->Mr. Clay, during my whole political life, I have loved and revered as a teacher and leader.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Letter to Daniel Ullmann (1 February 1861); quoted in "Why Abraham Lincoln Was a Whig" by Daniel Walker Howe, The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Volume 16, Issue 1 (Winter 1995) http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/2629860.0016.105?view=text;rgn=main; also in We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861 (2013) by William J. Cooper, p. 72 http://books.google.com/books?id=meYLTCRlHaQC&pg=PA72&lpg=PA72&dq=Lincoln+%22I+have+loved+and+revered%22&source=bl&ots=A-QLTNlkSN&sig=F0MdGo6rkAVKc3tIQSs0Xp4AdSY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=fmpQUv22LpCi4APhj4HoDQ&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Lincoln%20%22I%20have%20loved%20and%20revered%22&f=false 1860s

Love, Life, Teachers

“You can’t contain an organization that is running roughshod through that much territory, causing that much havoc, displacing that many people, killing that many innocents, enslaving that many women. The goal has to be to dismantle them.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

When Obama was asked what's needed to really destroy ISIL, not just push back - NATO Summit Press Conference https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/05/remarks-president-obama-nato-summit-press-conference (9 September 2014) 2014

Women, People

“I was thinking of 'duh?' in the sense of 'a sentence containing several words more than three letters long, and possibly requiring general knowledge or a sense of history that extends past last Tuesday, has been used in my presence.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Usenet

History, Knowledge, Thinking, Sense

“And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy moving backward and forward with the rolling pin over the dough, her bosom leaning over the great mound of flour and eggs, […] and we thought of the space the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flour, and the fields to raise the wheat, and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields; […] of the space it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed, at the same time that Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0 was uttering those words: "… ah, what noodles, boys!" the point that contained her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light-years and light-centuries and billions of light-millennia, and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe, […] and she, dissolved into I don't know what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0, she who in the midst of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, "Boys, the noodles I would make for you!," a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0s, scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss.”

Italo Calvino book Cosmicomics

Pages 46-47, "All at One Point".
Cosmicomics (1965)

Love, World, Mountain, Star

“At about midnight he arrived, accompanied by six armed SS officers, and was received by my aide-de-camp, Walter Luedde-Neurath. I offered Himmler a chair and sat down at my desk, on which lay, hidden by some papers, a pistol with the safety catch off. I had never done anything of this sort in my life before, but I did not know what the outcome of this meeting might be. I handed Himmler the telegram containing my appointment. "Please read this," I said. I watched him closely. As he read, an expression of astonishment, indeed of consternation, spread over his face. All hope seemed to collapse within him. He went very pale. Finally he stood up and bowed. "Allow me," he said, "to become the second man in your state." I replied that was out of the question and that there was no way I could make any use of his services. Thus advised, he left me at about one o'clock in the morning. The showdown had taken place without force, and I felt relieved.”

Karl Dönitz (1891–1980) President of Germany; admiral in command of German submarine forces during World War II

As quoted in The Decline and Fall of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (1997) by Hans Dollinger, p. 242

Life, Hope, Way, Question

“I am surprised that the trouble has been contained to the degree it has. Until two years ago, New York City used wiser methods than any other city to deal with racial problems. Now it is a case of outright scare tactics. This won’t work, because the Negro is not afraid. If the tactics are not changed, this could escalate into something very, very serious.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

"Malcolm X Lays Harlem Riot To ‘Scare Tactics’ of Police" https://www.nytimes.com/1964/07/21/malcolm-x-lays-harlem-riot-to-scare-tactics-of-police.html, The New York Times, July 21, 1964

Problem, Change

“But here's an object more of dread
Than ought the grave contains —
A human form with reason fled,
While wretched life remains.

Poor Matthew! Once of genius bright,
A fortune-favored child —
Now locked for aye, in mental night,
A haggard mad-man wild.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Canto II
1840s, My Childhood's Home I See Again (1844 - 1846)

Life, Madness, Night

“The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.”

David Deutsch book The Fabric of Reality

The Fabric of Reality (1997)