Quotes about creature
page 9

“Hume describes (E, 235) as a “fancied monster” a man who has “no manner of concern to his fellow-creatures but to regard the happiness and misery of all sensible beings with greater indifference than even two contiguous shades of the same color” (ibid.). To limit one's concern to those sensible beings who are of one's own species is to be part-monster, but such monsters, alas, are not merely fancied ones.”

Annette Baier (1929–2012) New Zealand philosopher

Source: Knowing Our Place in the Animal World, p. 75

Happiness, Color, Parting, Indifference

“We women have before us the noblest end to which a finite creature may attain; and our duty is nothing else than the fulfilment of the whole moral law, the attainment of every human virtue.”

Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) Irish writer, social reformer, anti-vivisection activist and leading suffragette

Lecture I, p. 23
The Duties of Women (1881)

Women, Law

“Then the handsome Kunti was united (in intercourse) with the god of justice in his spiritual form and obtained from him a son devoted to the good of all creatures. And she brought his excellent child…. an incorporeal voice (from the skies) said,…And this first child of Pandu shall be known by the name of w:YudhishtiraYudhishthira. Possessed of prowess and honesty of disposition, he shall be a famous king, known throughout the three worlds.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

The Mahabharata/Book 1: Adi Parva/Section CXXIII

God, World, Justice

“Ah! Five hundred years I have toiled to entice this creature, despairing, doubting, brooding by night, yet never abandoning hope that my calculations were accurate and my great talisman cogent. Then, when finally it appears, you fall upon it for no other reason than to sate your repulsive gluttony!”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

Source: Dying Earth (1950-1984), The Eyes of the Overworld (1966), Chapter 4, "The Sorcerer Pharesm"

Hope, Appearance, Despair, Night

“The skein of human continuity must often become this tenuous across the centuries (hanging by a thread, in the old cliché), but the circle remains unbroken if I can touch the ink of Lavoisier's own name, written by his own hand. A candle of light, nurtured by the oxygen of his greatest discovery, never burns out if we cherish the intellectual heritage of such unfractured filiation across the ages. We may also wish to contemplate the genuine physical thread of nucleic acid that ties each of us to the common bacterial ancestor of all living creatures, born on Lavoisier's ancienne terre more than 3.5 billion years ago—and never since disrupted, not for one moment, not for one generation. Such a legacy must be worth preserving from all the guillotines of our folly.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Lying Stones of Marrakech

"The Proof of Lavoisier's Plates", p. 114
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

Age, Light

“In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), H. G. Wells pointed out that ever since the beginning of life, most creatures have been 'up against it'. Their lives are a drama of struggle against the forces of nature. Yet nowadays you can say to a man: Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but -- what do you do? His real interest may be in something else -- art, science, literature, philosophy. The bird is a creature of the air, the fish is a creature of the water, and man is a creature of the mind.”

Colin Wilson book From Atlantis to the Sphinx

Source: From Atlantis to the Sphinx (1996), p. 346-347

Love, Life, Hate, Family

“When it came to the tiger, I found that animating the movements of a large feline animal posed some difficulties, as it required precise and miniscule advancements in movement throughout its body. As well as tigers, I also studied domestic cats, and by so doing managed to achieve a combination of mannerisms represented by both. The overall impression is of latent ferocity and a lust for blood, but at the same time there are also slow, graceful movements that mask the creature's power.”

Ray Harryhausen (1920–2013) American animator

Source: An Animated Life (2003), p. 252

Cats, Study, Time, Animals

“translation: Ethics of the Cosmos, ie. its conscious creatures means that there shouldn't be any suffering anywhere: neither for perfected nor for other immature ones or ones that are starting their development. It is an expression of pure selfishness (egoism). If there will be no ordeals or nuisances in the Universe, not even one atom will be a part of an imperfect, suffering or criminal organism.”

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) Russian and Soviet rocket scientist and pioneer of the astronautic theory

Этика космоса, т.е. ее сознательных существ состоит в том, чтобы не было нигде никаких страданий: ни для совершенных, ни для других недозрелых или начинающих своё развитие животных. Это есть выражение чистейшего себялюбия (эгоизма). Ведь если во вселенной не будет мук и неприятностей, то ни один ее атом не попадёт в несовершенный страдальческий или преступный организм. from Научная этика http://tsiolkovsky.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Nauchnaya-etika.pdf

Suffering, Universe, Parting, Perfection

“The promise of a future life is held to have such prominence in Christ's teaching as to lead Paul to say that the Master "brought life and immortality to light." How did he do this? By filling the life of to-day with the consciousness of eternal things, of truths and principles which would not change if the whole visible universe were to pass away.
No one to-day, I think, will maintain that Christ created the hope which he aroused to an activity before undreamed of. The majority of the Jews believed in a life after death, as is shown by the segregation of the Sadducees from the orthodox of the synagogue. The new teaching vindicated the spiritual rights and interests of man. From the depths of his own heart was evolved the consciousness of a good that could not die. Man, the creature of a day, has a vested interest in things eternal.”

Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) American abolitionist, social activist, and poet

Beyond the Veil

Life, Death, Truth, Hope

“Wasn’t all their effort worthless? Wouldn’t it be better to accept the impossibility of their mission? He began to think Krane was mad. If there were a threat, then inevitably they would die. Death was the future of all people, all planets, all universes. Their struggle was symbolic of the futility of living creatures who fought against their own inevitable extinction. What were a few more years of existence compared to the longevity of a cosmos? In those terms, the whole history of their species lasted for less than a fraction of a second. And then, sheltering beside him under the protection of the energy equalizer, she looked up for a second, and, obscurely, he understood that the effort always would be worth it. Always had been worth it.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Source: Short fiction, The Lost Canal (2013), p. 371

Death, People, History, Thinking

“It seems unfortunate that strong people are usually so disagreeable and overbearing that no one cares for them. In fact, to be different from your fellow creatures is always a misfortune. The Growleywogs knew that they were disliked and avoided by every one, so they had become surly and unsociable even among themselves.”

L. Frank Baum book The Emerald City of Oz

The Emerald City of Oz
Later Oz novels

People, Strong

“Man is not the most majestic of the creatures; long before the mammals even, the dinosaurs were far more splendid. But he has what no other animal possesses: a jigsaw of faculties, which alone, over three thousand million years of life, made him creative. Every animal leaves traces of what he was. Man alone leaves traces of what he created.”

Jacob Bronowski The Ascent of Man

The Ascent of Man (1973)

Life, Animals

“I think the best thing about the picture is that we do feel for the Creature. We feel for him and his predicament and where he is and so on. I think that’s a very positive thing really. I like that we feel sympathy for the Creature.”

Julie Adams (1926–2019) American actress

Exclusive Interview With Julie Adams http://www.horrorsociety.com/2013/09/23/exclusive-interview-with-julie-adams-star-of-creature-from-the-black-lagoon/ (September 23, 2013)

Feeling, Thinking

“O dawn, you washed them away
in a woman who was clean.
O form of woman, sister of Wisdom,
how great is your glory!
For in you there rose a life unquenchable
that death shall never stifle.
Wisdom exalted you to make
all creatures fairer in your beauty
than they were when the world was born.”

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) Medieval saint, prophetise, mystic and Doctor of Church

Ad Vitam S. Ruperti Epilogus 6, Pitra 364.

Life, Death, Wisdom, World

“The Extras were as clean as they'd ever been in their lives, and their hair - and beards in the case of the older ones - had been laboriously trimmed, in styles that amusingly parodied the latest fashions. Gray had almost gone so far as to have them clothed - but after much experimentation he'd decided against it; even the slightest scrap of clothing made them look too human, and he was acutely aware of the boundary between impressing his guests with his daring, and causing them real discomfort. Of course, naked, the Extras looked exactly like naked humans, but in Gray's cultural milieu, stark naked humans en masse were not a common sight, and so the paradoxical effect of revealing the creatures' totally human appearance was to make it easier to think of them as less than human.”

Greg Egan (1961) Australian science fiction writer and former computer programmer

The Extra http://eidolon.net/?story=The%20Extra, published in Eidolon (Winter 1990) Fiction

Fashion, Thinking, Appearance, Clothes

“The light of the people of the world is their knowledge and utterance; while the splendours shed from the glorious acts of Him Whom God shall make manifest are His Words, through whose potency He rolleth up the whole world of existence, sets it under His Own authority by relating it unto Himself, then as the Mouthpiece of God, the Source of His divine light — exalted and glorified be He — proclaimeth: ‘Verily, verily, I am God, no God is there but Me; in truth all others except Me are My creatures. Say, O My creatures! Me alone, therefore, should ye fear’.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

VIII, 1
The Persian Bayán

God, People, Truth, World

“Vegan is a term that refers to people who have chosen a way of living guided by ahimsa (nonharming) and reverence for life. … Vegans recognize the value of life to all living creatures and extend to them the compassion, kindness, and justice in The Golden Rule. Vegans see animals as free entities in nature, not slaves or vassals, nor as chattel, pieces of goods to be bought and sold. An animal has feelings, an animal has sensitivity, an animal has a place in life, and the vegan respects this life that is manifest in the animal. Vegans do not wish to harm the animal any more than they would want the animal to harm them. This is an example of The Golden Rule precisely as it should be applied.”

H. Jay Dinshah (1933–2000) American proponent of veganism and Jain ethics

"Go Vegan for the Animals" (adapted from "Let’s Talk about Veganism" in Powerful Vegan Messages, 2014), in the American Vegan Society website http://www.americanvegan.org/animals.html.

Life, People, Justice, Way

“The mathematician may be compared to a designer of garments, who is utterly oblivious of the creatures whom his garments may fit. To be sure, his art originated in the necessity for clothing such creatures, but this was long ago; to this day a shape will occasionally appear which will fit into the garment as if the garment had been made for it. Then there is no end of surprise and delight.”

George Dantzig (1914–2005) American mathematician

This quote is by his father Tobias Dantzig (1884-1956) Number: The Language of Science (1930) p. 240
Misattributed

Art, Appearance, Clothes

“He had picked up his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way that gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of what I was doing. To do it in ANY way was an act of violence, for what did it consist of but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse? Wasn't it base to create for a being so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into our situation a clearness it couldn't have had at the time, for I seem to see our poor eyes already lighted with some spark of a prevision of the anguish that was to come.”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

Source: The Turn of the Screw (1898), Ch. XXIII.

Beauty, Way, Idea, Light

“When a man becomes steadfast in his abstention from harming others, then all living creatures will cease to feel enmity in his presence”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

The Mahābhāṣya

Feeling

“I’ve been a vegan now since 1995, that would be more than 14 years, and as a result I’ve had tremendous health… great energy, clarity — I’ve had the ability to connect my dietary choices with my health. I had Crohn’s growing up and I had a pretty serious bout with it throughout my thirties and forties. When I changed my diet, the symptoms began to disappear. And I started to understand also how the choice of diet affects the environment, resources, energy — it’s a spiritual choice, as well. And so if I had one day to make an imprint on the nation, I’d look at the choices that we make as respect to food. Also, the matters of compassion towards living creatures who become food. We need to be more thoughtful as a nation about the choices that we make and the food that we consume.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Interview on Reddit, quoted in "Dennis Kucinich Wants To Give Vegan Chocolate Chip Brownies To The World", Ecorazzi (21 December 2009) http://www.ecorazzi.com/2009/12/21/dennis-kucinich-wants-to-give-a-vegan-chocolate-chip-brownie-to-the-world/

Health, Food, Understanding, Change

“Trees have their sap from water. Water fecundates all things made that are called "creature". We see by means of water. Water gives many souls a splendour not to be outshone by the Angels.”

Wolfram von Eschenbach book Parzival

Von wazzer boume sint gesaft.
wazzer früht al die geschaft,
der man für crêatiure giht.
mit dem wazzere man gesiht.
wazzer gît maneger sêle schîn,
daz die engl niht liehter dorften sîn.
Bk. 16, section 817, line 25; p. 406.
Parzival

Angels, Soul, Tree, Water

“But the young people of today are benighted creatures born with telephone numbers imprinted on their brains, and where passion is concerned they have about as much grace as a pig in a cornfield.”

Giovannino Guareschi (1908–1968) Italian journalist, cartoonist and humorist

Thunder on the Right
Don Camillo and the Prodigal Sun (1952)

People, Passion

“When Boswell confessed to Johnson that he feared some things he was entering in his journal were too small, the latter advised him that nothing is too small for so small a creature as man. This is good evidence that Johnson had achieved what I referred to as perspective, which carries with it a necessary humility. And while some may be startled to hear Mencken called a modest man, I can infer nothing but a real condor and humility from those bombastic and ironical allusions to himself which comprise much of the humor of his writings. The tone he adopted was a rhetorical instrument; he had faced his limitations.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Life without prejudice,” p. 11.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Fear

“A cat is the ideal literary companion. A wife, I am sure, cannot compare except to her disadvantage. A dog is out of the question. It may do at a butcher's – it would be out of place in a bookseller's. A cat for a bookseller is a different creature temperamentally from the same animal at a fishmonger's or a baker's. In these shops the cat is a useful animal – I suppose it is employed to eat fish entrails or to keep down rats and mice – but in my shop its function is that of a familiar. It is at once decorative – contemplative – philosophical, and it begets in me great calm and contentment.”

William Darling (politician) (1885–1962) Scottish politician

Source: The Bankrupt Bookseller (1947), p. 48

Dogs, Cats, Question, Fish

“God is a kind Father. He sets us all in the place where He wishes us to be employed; and that employment is truly "our Father's business." He chooses work for every creature which will be delightful to them, if they do it simply and humbly. He gives us always strength enough, and sense enough, for what He wants us to do; if we either tire ourselves, or puzzle ourselves, it is our own fault. And we may always be sure, whatever we are doing, that we cannot be pleasing Him, if we are not happy ourselves.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 123.

God, Happiness, Business, Sense

“The slave is a man, "the image of God," but "a little lower than the angels;" possessing a soul, eternal and indestructible; capable of endless happiness, or immeasurable woe; a creature of hopes and fears, of affections and passions, of joys and sorrows, and he is endowed with those mysterious powers by which man soars above the things of time and sense, and grasps, with undying tenacity, the elevating and sublimely glorious idea of a God. It is such a being that is smitten and blasted. The first work of slavery is to mar and deface those characteristics of its victims which distinguish men from things, and persons from property. Its first aim is to destroy all sense of high moral and religious responsibility. It reduces man to a mere machine. It cuts him off from his Maker, it hides from him the laws of God, and leaves him to grope his way from time to eternity in the dark, under the arbitrary and despotic control of a frail, depraved, and sinful fellow-man. As the serpent-charmer of India is compelled to extract the deadly teeth of his venomous prey before he is able to handle him with impunity, so the slaveholder must strike down the conscience of the slave before he can obtain the entire mastery over his victim.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

The Nature of Slavery. Extract from a Lecture on Slavery, at Rochester, December 1, 1850
1850s, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

Men, God, Happiness, Fear

“Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume I, chapter VIII: "Religion", page 312 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=330&itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=image The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)

World, Soul, Distant, Appearance

“Most striking, perhaps, in their general appearance was the disproportion between the legs of these creatures and the length of their bodies; and yet — so relative is our idea of grace — my eye became habituated to their forms, and at last I even fell in with their persuasion that my own long thighs were ungainly.”

H. G. Wells book The Island of Doctor Moreau

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 15: Concerning the Beast Folk

Idea, Appearance

“Heaven says nothing, and the whole earth grows rich beneath its silent rule. Men, too, are touched by heaven's virtue; yet, in their greater part, they are creatures of deceit. They are born, it seems, with an emptiness of soul, and must take their qualities wholly from things without. To be born thus empty into this modern age, this mixture of good and ill, and yet steer through life on an honest course to the splendors of success — this is a feat reserved for paragons of our kind, a task beyond the nature of the normal man.”

Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) Japanese writer

Book I, ch. 1.
The Japanese Family Storehouse (1688)

Life, Men, Age, Soul

“If I were an academician.... or a believer in a higher reality outside me, as most people are (lucky creatures!), I would have no need for any justification for painting landscapes, or portraits, or social realism. I would rely on my so-called common sense, on which I see and feel, and I would enjoy it. Or I would fix one point in the distant haze of that unknown reality, would try to approach it as nearly as I could, and would find solace in the fanatical belief that I am the only one who is portraying that reality which is the only truth.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

Quote of Naum Gabo (1950), cited in: Eidos: a journal of painting, sculpture and design. Nr.1, p. 32 cited in: Herbert E. Read, Sir Herbert Edward Read (1971) The philosophy of modern art: collected essays. p. 94
1936 - 1977

People, Truth, Feeling, Reality

“The duties of kingship among the anthropoids are not many or arduous. … But Tarzan tired of it, as he found that kingship meant the curtailment of his liberty. He longed for the little cabin and the sun-kissed sea — for the cool interior of the well-built house, and for the never-ending wonders of the many books.
As he had grown older, he found that he had grown away from his people. Their interests and his were far removed. They had not kept pace with him, nor could they understand aught of the many strange and wonderful dreams that passed through the active brain of their human king. So limited was their vocabulary that Tarzan could not even talk with them of the many new truths, and the great fields of thought that his reading had opened up before his longing eyes, or make known ambitions which stirred his soul.
Among the tribe he no longer had friends as of old. A little child may find companionship in many strange and simple creatures, but to a grown man there must be some semblance of equality in intellect as the basis for agreeable association.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 12 : Man's Reason

People, Truth, Books, Dreams

“Formerly I felt repulsion for these creatures, and it was a harrowing thought for me to reflect that so many of our profession, Troyon, Marchal, Meryon, Jundt, M. Maris, Monticelli [all painter-artists], and heaps more had ended like this.”

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

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, 25 May 1889; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 592), p 25 1880s, 1889

“OOPS! You naughty creature! You didn't run Configure with sh! I will attempt to remedy the situation by running sh for you…”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

Source code, <code>Configure</code>

“Why is it so hard to keep the mind concentrated, and to live up to our good resolutions? The problem is the basically mechanical nature of our left-brain consciousness. We have a kind of robot servant who does things for us: we learn to type or drive a car, painfully and consciously, then our robot takes over, and does it far more quickly and efficiently. Because man is the most complex creature on Earth, he is forced to rely on his robot far more than other animals. The result is that, whenever he gets tired, the robot takes over. For the modern city dweller, most of his everyday living is done by the robot. This is why it takes an emergency to concentrate the mind 'wonderfully', and why we forget so quickly.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Alien Dawn (1998), p. 344

Cars, Nature, Problem, Learning

“The child who has been taught to realise the claims that God's lower creatures have upon him, whose heart has been touched by lessons of kindness and mercy, under their sweet influence will grow to be a large-hearted, tender-hearted, manly man. Then let the children be trained, their hands, their intellects, and above all their hearts. Let them be taught to have pity for the animals that are at our mercy, that cannot protect themselves, that cannot explain their weakness, their pain, or their suffering, and soon this will bring to their recognition that higher law, the moral obligation of man as a superior being to protect and care for the weak and defenceless. Nor will it stop here, for this in turn will lead them to that highest law—man's duty to man.”

Ralph Waldo Trine (1866–1958) American author

Source: Every Living Creature (1899), p. 8

God, Pain, Children, Law

“Many people fail to grasp this point, apparently because they think of "scientific" evidence as only that produced in laboratories by controlled experiments. This leads them to treat field studies, however careful, thorough and well-documented, as "anecdotal"--mere preparation for the real thing, therefore properly ignored till it bears fruit entitled to be considered by learned persons. This attitude was much like that of cavalry generals in the First World War, waiting patiently for the infantry to clear the ground so that they could make the dashing charges that alone they thought entitled the name of warfare. Because these creatures are complex, only a tiny fraction of important truths about them can ever be seen in laboratories of expressed in control experiments. The same, of course, is true of the human race.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 224.

War, People, Truth, World

“I had been taught that while the Sun indeed affects the upper and outer atmosphere of the Earth, purported connections with the troposphere and weather and climate were uniformly wacky and to be distrusted. I still believe that to some extent, for there is a hypnotism about cycles that seems to attract people. It draws all kinds of creatures out of the woodwork. The claims that were made for associations between weather events and the Sun I thought were pretty preposterous. One of those that turned up was this notion that Gene told me about. About the work of Walter Maunder 100 years before, when he had thought that there was a prolonged period of time in the 1600s when the Sun wasn’t so active.”

John A. Eddy (1931–2009) American astronomer

People, Time, Sun, Drawing

“There could have been no more complete answer than that silence, and Lydgate, forgetting everything else, completely mastered by the outrush of tenderness at the sudden belief that this sweet young creature depended on him for her joy, actually put his arms round her, folding her gently and protectingly— he was used to being gentle with the weak and suffering—and kissed each of the two large tears. This was a strange way of arriving at an understanding, but it was a short way.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

Way, Understanding, Kiss, Tear

“If evolution was worth its salt, it should've evolved something better than "survival of the fittest." I think a better idea would be "survival of the wittiest." At least, that way, creatures that didn't survive could've died laughing.”

Lily Tomlin (1939) American actress, comedian, writer, and producer

As "Trudy"
Contributions of Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1985)

Way, Idea, Thinking

“Well, you know, people always ask me what makes Creature from the Black Lagoon hold up after all these years. I always say that if you look at the movie, the storyline starts with the Big Bang. Then it goes to the creation of man, and you see evolution with man coming out of the sea. The theory today is that man DID come out of the sea. These are issues that men today are STILL dwelling on. Was man created? Or, was man evolved? So, that's why if you watch Creature, you're not bored because it still makes sense.”

Ben Chapman (actor)

Ben Champman Interview https://www.the-reelgillman.com/interviews/10_1_02.html (November 1, 2002)

Men, People, Sense, Sea

“I cannot but look upon the strange Instinct of this noisome and troublesome Creature a Louse, of searching out foul and nasty Clothes to harbor and breed in, as an Effect of divine Providence, design'd to deter Men and Women from Sluttishness and Sordidness.”

John Ray (1627–1705) British botanist

The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation http://books.google.com/books?id=rRI5AAAAcAAJ&pg=PA309 (1691). p. 309

Women, Men, Search, Clothes

“The sea, unmated creature, tired and lone,
Makes on its desolate sands eternal moan.”

Frederick William Faber (1814–1863) British hymn writer and theologian

The Sorrowful World.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Sea

“By anguish which made pale the sun,
I hear Him charge his saints that none
Among his creatures anywhere
Blaspheme against Him with despair,
However darkly days go on.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) English poet, author

St. 19.
De Profundis (1862)

Sun, Despair

“One should receive pleasures that bring contentment to the Creator. This means that the creature will want to bestow upon the Creator, and will have fear of the Creator, of receiving for oneself, since reception of pleasure - when one receives for one's own benefit - removes him from cleaving to the Creator.”

Baruch Ashlag (1907–1991) Polish rabbi

Selected Articles

Pleasure, Fear

“Evolution doesn’t greatly care about what happens to creatures once they’ve passed on their genetic heritage.”

Alastair Reynolds book Chasm City

Source: Chasm City (2001), Chapter 20 (p. 332).

“When I was in my teens, I invented a term to describe them. I call it 'holiday consciousness'... because I often experienced this sense of optimism and wide-awakeness when setting out on a journey or a holiday. It was always the feeling that the world is self-evidently complex and beautiful, and that life is so obviously good that man's boredom and defeat is an absurdity... And then I used to ask: Why do men forget this so easily? And the answer seemed obvious: because the human will is so flabby and weak. Instead of being self-controlled, self-driven creatures, most men are little more than leaves on a stream, they drift along hoping for the best. I once wrote that men are like grandfather clocks driven by watchsprings.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Black Room (1975), p. 75

Life, Men, World, Beauty

“The Angel that presided o'er my birth
Said, "Little creature, formed of joy and mirth,
Go love without the help of any thing on earth."”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

The Angel That Presided
1800s, Poems from Blake's Notebook (c. 1807-1809)

Love, Angels, Birth, Help

“Toronto is already in the toils of Christmas, and from several windows the hollow Ho Ho! of a mechanical Santa Claus may be heard. Children watch these creatures with hard, calculating eyes, wondering if the old man is really crazy, or only pretending to be, like Hamlet…”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

Children, Christmas

“If we measured success by longevity, then dinosaurs must rank as the number one success story in the history of land life. Not only did dinosaurs exercise an airtight monopoly as large land animals, they kept their commanding position for an extraordinary span of time - 130 million years. Our own human species is no more than a hundred thousand years old. And our own zoological class, the Mammalia, the clan of of warm-blooded furry creatures, has ruled the land ecosystem for only seventy million years. True, the dinosaurs are extinct, but we ought to be careful in judging them inferior to our own kind. Who can say that the human system will last another thousand years, let alone a hundred million? Who can predict that our Class Mammalia will rule for another hundred thousand millennia?”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 16
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life, Exercises, History, Time

“Ram and Kirshan whom Hindus worship are insignificant creatures, and have been begotten by their parents… Ram could not protect his wife whom Ravan took away by force. How can he (Ram) help others?… It is thousands of times shameful that some people should think of Ram and Kirshan as rulers of all the worlds… To think that Ram and Rahman are the same, is extremely foolish. The creator and the creature can never be one… The controller of the Cosmos was never called Ram and Kirshan before the latter were born. What has happened after their birth that they have come to be equated with Allah, and the worship of Ram and Kirshan is described as the worship of Allah? May Allah save us!
Our prophets who number one lakh and twenty-four thousand have encouraged the created ones to worship the Creator… The gods of the Hindus (on the other hand) have encouraged the people to worship them (the gods) instead… They are themselves misguided, and are leading others astray… See, how the (two) ways are different!”

Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624) Indian philosopher

Maktubat-i-Imam Rabbani translated into Urdu by Maulana Muhammad Sa’id Ahmad Naqshbandi, Deoband, 1988, Volume I, 396 Letter was written to Hirday Ram Hindu who had “expressed affinity” with Sirhindi’s school of thought.
From his letters

God, People, World, Way

“The point cannot be just survival, nor even survival in numbers. Survival is just as well achieved by much less ambitions creatures which go in for sheer number. (In fact a cost-benefit-conscious gene that really understood its business would, no doubt, have remained on board something like the amoeba; it will probably be amoung the last to go.) Nor is it survival-as-society, since many animals achieve this despite a lot of bickering.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 148.

Business, Animals

“According to Lewis, the dehumanization threatened by the mastery of nature has, at its deepest cause, less the emerging biotechnologies that might directly denature bodies and flatten souls, and more the underlying value-neutral, soulless, and heartless accounts that science proffers of living nature and of man. By expunging from its account of life any notion of soul, aspiration, and purpose, and by setting itself against the evidence of our lived experience, modern biology ultimately undermines our self-understanding as creatures of freedom and dignity, as well as our inherited teachings regarding how to live — teachings linked to philosophical anthropologies that science has now seemingly dethroned.”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

Looking for an Honest Man (2009)

Life, Soul, Understanding, Nature

“Rewarding is a large giving-of-truth that the Lord doeth to him that hath travailed; and giving is a courteous working which He doeth freely of Grace, fulfilling and overpassing all that is deserved of creatures.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 58

Truth

“IV. Thesis. Freedom is very well compatible with sound lawfulness of the course of nature. But the concept of a timeless God is then untenable. But the restriction which omnipotence and omniscience suffer through freedom of the creature in the sense above determined, must be eliminated by the assumption of a temporally acting God, of a ruler of the hearts and destinies of men; the concept of Providence must be supplemented and in part replaced by the notion of government of the world.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

No Antithesis indicated.
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Men, God, World, Law

“You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for Allah the Almighty to create His creation, grant them power over all the creatures and land, grant them all the amenities of life, and then deny them that which they are most in need of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives?”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

2000s, 2002, Letter to the American people (2002)

Life, Religion, Law, Question

“When the disciples asked Jesus who was greatest in the kingdom of heaven, he set a little child in the midst of them. … By the "poor in spirit," therefore, I understand our Lord to mean those who retain the spirit of little children, for little children are they of whom he said, "of such is the kingdom," in which they who are most childlike are greatest.Childlike men are the antipodes of the crawling creatures we call "poor spirited;" the men of expediencies and policies, who are sharp-eyed along the low horizons of earth.”

William Burnet Wright (1836–1924) American clergyman

Source: Master and Men (1894), p. 41

Men, Children, Understanding

“You are that rarest of creatures: a man with the wisdom to see beyond his own time.”

Alastair Reynolds book The Prefect

Source: The Prefect (2007), Chapter 10 (p. 125)

Wisdom, Time

“Examine the man who lives in misery because he does not shine above other men; who goes about producing himself, pruriently anxious about his gifts and claims; struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybody for God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over the heads of men! Such a creature is among the wretchedest sights seen under this sun. A great man? A poor morbid prurient empty man; fitter for the ward of a hospital, than for a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk on quiet paths; unless you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the emptiness of the man, not his greatness. Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would find something in him. In good truth, I believe no great man, not so much as a genuine man who had health and real substance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented in this way.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero As King

Men, Hunger, God, Health

“It’s time to rethink the whole system of HMOs and managed care. This entire unnecessary level of corporatism rakes off profits and worsens the quality of care. But HMOs did not arise in the free market; they are creatures of government interference in health care dating to the 1970s. These non-market institutions have gained control over medical care through collusion between organized medicine, politicians, and drug companies, in an effort to move America toward “free” universal health care.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Diagnosing our Health Care Woes, September 25, 2006 http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2006/tst092506.htm 2000s, 2006-2009

Health, Effort, Universe, Time

“[T]he truth is that coyotes have never been solely wilderness creatures. …for the 15,000 years since we humans have been in North America, coyotes have always been capable of living among us. …A coyote's primary prey happens to be… the mice and rats that flourish around and among us… By the time Europeans got to America, coyotes had long since sought out the major Indian cities of Mesoamerica.”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016)

Truth, Time

“No sooner does a divine gift reveal itself in youth or maid than its market value becomes the decisive consideration, and the poor young creatures are offered for sale, as we might sell angels who had strayed among us.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 21

Youth, Angels, Decision

“The duty of relieving his fellow creature in distress is imposed on the Christian irrespective of religious doctrines and tenets, and notwithstanding that the object of charity may worship God in an erroneous manner, but in that which he believes to be most acceptable to his Creator.”

John Romilly, 1st Baron Romilly (1802–1874) English Whig politician and judge

Att.-Gen. v. Calvert (1857), 23 Beav. 258.

God

“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume I; lecture 1, "Atoms in Motion"; section 1-2, "Matter is made of atoms"; p. 1-2
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

World, Imagination, Knowledge, Thinking

“Have you noticed anything strange about him?
Strange? We humans insist on inhabiting a charnel ground - isn't that strange enough for spiritual creatures without splitting hairs?
He seems to be two different men. His personality switches from moment to moment.
Only two? Perhaps there is something wrong with your eyes. Look more closely and you will see he changes with every exhalation. So do I. So do you.”

John Burdett book Bangkok Haunts

Bangkok Haunts, Ch. 22.

Men, Change, Personality

“Love is an affection which carries the attention of the mind beyond itself, and is the sense of a relation to some fellow creature as to its object.”

Adam Ferguson book An Essay on the History of Civil Society

PART I, SECTION II.
An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)

Love, Sense

“What right has a man to ask Jesus to forgive him, when his heart is still burning with hatred or festering with grudges against a fellow-creature? Confession, to be of any avail, must let go of its hold on the sin confessed.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 155.

Forgiveness, Heart

“Nietzsche proposes the following brilliant hypothesis: The bad conscience is the deep-seated morbid condition that declared itself in man under the stress of the most radical change he has ever experienced when he found himself imprisoned in perpetuity within a society which was in- violable. All the strong and savage instincts such as adventurousness, rashness, cunning, rapacity, lust of power, which till then had not only been honoured, but actually encouraged, were suddenly put down as dangerous, and by degrees branded as immoral and criminal. Creatures adapted to a roving life of war and adventure suddenly saw all their instincts classed as worthless, nay, as forbidden. An immense despondency, a dejection without parallel, then took possession of them. And all these instincts that were not allowed an outward vent, turned inwards on the man himself feelings of enmity, cruelty, … violence, persecution, destruction and thus the bad conscience originated.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 39

Life, War, Feeling, Strong

“Question: …you believe the Fed shouldn't exist… make the case.
Ron Paul: First reason is, it's not authorized in the Constitution, it's an illegal institution. The second reason, it's an immoral institution, because we have delivered to a secretive body the privilege of creating money out of thin air; if you or I did it, we'd be called counterfeiters, so why have we legalized counterfeiting? But the economic reasons are overwhelming: the Federal Reserve is the creature that destroys value. This station talks about free market capitalism, and you can't have free market capitalism if you have a secret bank creating money and credit out of thin air. They become the central planners, they decide what interest rates should be, what the supply of money should be…
Question: How does the gold standard solves that?
Ron Paul: It maintains a stable currency and a stable value. If the Fed concentrated more on stable money rather than stable prices… They push up new money in stocks and in commodities and in houses, and then they have to come in to rescue the situation. They create the bubbles, then they come in and rescue it, and they do nothing more than try to do price fixing. Capitalism depends, and capital comes from savings, but there's no savings in this country, so this is all artificial. It creates the misdirection and the malinvestment and all the excessive debt, and it always has to have a correction. Since the Fed has been in existence, the dollar has lost about 97% of its value. You're supposed to encourage savings, but if something loses its value, why save dollars? There's no encouragement whatsoever. […] Gold is 6000 years old, and it still maintains its purchasing power. Oil prices really are very stable in terms of Gold. […] Both conservatives and liberals want to enhance big government, and this is a seductive way to tax the middle class.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

CNBC debate with Faiz Shakir, March 20, 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k94VWPjUQSM 2000s, 2006-2009

Money, Secret, Way, Question

“Imagine you are God. You’re all-powerful, nothing is beyond you. You’re all-loving. So it is really, really important to you that humans are left in no doubt about your existence and your loving nature, and exactly what they need to do in order to get to heaven and avoid eternity in the fires of hell. It’s really important to you to get that across. So what do you do? Well, if you’re Jehovah, apparently this is what you do. You talk in riddles. You tell stories which on the surface have a different message from the one you apparently want us to understand. You expect us to hear X, and instinctively understand that it needs to be interpreted in the light of Y, which you happen to have said in the course of a completely different story 500-1,000 years earlier. Instead of speaking directly into our heads - which God has presumed the capability of doing so - simply, clearly and straightforwardly in terms which the particular individual being addressed will immediately understand and respond to positively - you steep your messages in symbols, in metaphors. In fact, you choose to convey the most important message in the history of creation in code, as if you aspired to be Umberto Eco or Dan Brown. Anyone would think your top priority was to keep generation after generation after generation of theologians in meaningless employment, rather than communicate an urgent life-or-death message to the creatures you love more than any other.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

FFRF 2012 National Convention, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJTQiChzTNI?t=43m19s

Love, Life, Death, God

“In my vision, space-age objects, in the form of small computers, will cross these cultural barriers to enter the private worlds of children everywhere. They will do so not as mere physical objects. This book is about how computers can be carriers of powerful ideas and of the seeds of cultural change, how they can help people form new relationships with knowledge that cut across the traditional lines separating humanities from sciences and knowledge of the self from both of these. It is about using computers to challenge current beliefs about who can understand what and at what age. It is about using computers to question standard assumptions in developmental psychology and in the psychology of aptitudes and attitudes. It is about whether personal computers and the cultures in which they are used will continue to be the creatures of "engineers" alone or whether we can construct intellectual environments in which people who today think of themselves as "humanists" will feel part of, not alienated from, the process of constructing computational cultures.”

Seymour Papert book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

Introduction
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980)

Children, People, Books, Age

“She was a great woman with the heart of a little child. Her works praise her; the millions of God's creatures whom she has saved from suffering sing her praise. Where she has gone the recognition of this world counts for little. She has gone where the merciful are blessed, where the pure in heart see God.”

Florence Earle Coates (1850–1927) American writer and poet

Mrs. Coates on her Aunt (ca. September 1916), Mrs. Caroline Earle White—President and founder of The Women's Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the American Anti-Vivisection Society. Caroline Earle White biography on the American Anti-Vivisection Society website http://www.aavs.org/cew.html Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, Volume 33 (1922) http://books.google.com/books?id=c1o8AAAAIAAJ&dq=%22florence%20earle%20coates%22%20%22pure%20in%20heart%20see%20god%22&pg=PA52#v=onepage&q=%22she%20was%20a%20great%20woman%22&f=false

God, World, Suffering, Singing

“Man, considered as a creature, must necessarily be subject to the laws of his creator, for he is entirely a dependent being…This law of nature, being co-eval with mankind and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original.”

William Blackstone book Commentaries on the Laws of England

Introduction, Section II: Of the Nature of Laws in General
Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769)

God, Law, Nature, Time

“And is there care in Heaven? And is there love
In heavenly spirits to these Creatures bace?”

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene

Canto 8, stanza 1
The Faerie Queene (1589–1596), Book II

Love

“The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures.”

Frans de Waal (1948) Dutch primatologist and ethologist

"Do Humans Alone 'Feel Your Pain'?", in The Chronicle (26 October 2001) http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i09/09b00701.htm

Parting

“I do not see that it is possible, nor can I discover that it would be right, for me now to withdraw from the cause in which I have so long taken so deep an interest. The work is great, and vast are the results depending upon it, and unhappily our laborers are not abundant…But conscious of the increasing hazard we run owing to the long continuance of monopolies, and beholding the appalling sufferings of multitudes of my fellow-creatures, and satisfied that all benevolence and charity and the teaching of religion and of schools fall short of much of their full effect owing to the degraded and impoverished condition of the people—I should feel myself guilty, as possessing abundance and leaving others to hunger, nakedness and immorality and deepest ignorance and crime, if I were to retire into domestic quiet and leave the struggle to be carried on entirely by others.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to his mother-in-law Mrs. Priestman (November 1842), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 102-103.
1840s

Hunger, People, School, Religion

“No mind of a creature can attain Him.”

Yehuda Ashlag (1886–1954) Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Kabbalist

Assorted Themes, On Above Reason

“Most impediments to scientific understanding are conceptual locks, not factual lacks. Most difficult to dislodge are those biases that escape our scrutiny because they seem so obviously, even ineluctably, just. We know ourselves best and tend to view other creatures as mirrors of our own constitution and social arrangements. (Aristotle, and nearly two millennia of successors, designated the large bee that leads the swarm as a king.)”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"Glow, Big Glowworm", p. 256
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

Understanding, Bee

“… the idea of Gaia is anticipated most clearly in a line from the Tao Te Ching, the oldest Taoist scripture. In ancient Chinese rituals, straw dogs were used as offerings to the gods. During the ritual they were treated with the utmost reverence. When it was over and they were no longer needed they were trampled on and tossed aside: 'Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs.' If humans disturb the balance of the Earth they will be trampled on and tossed aside. Critics of the Gaia theory say they reject it because it is unscientific. The truth is that they fear and hate it because it means that humans can never be other than straw dogs.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Straw Dogs (p. 33-4)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

God, Hate, Truth, Fear

“If every earthly pleasure were melted An intelligence in repose without images, an intuition in the light of God, and a spirit elevated in Purity to the Face of God, these three qualities united constitute the true contemplative life into a single experience and bestowed upon one man,
it would be as nothing when measured by the joy of which I write for here it is God who passes into the depths of us in all His purity,
and the soul is not only filled but overflowing.
This experience is that light that makes manifest to the soul the terrible desolation of such as live divorced from love;
it melts the man utterly; he is no longer master of his joy.
Such possession produces intoxication, the state of the spirit in which its bliss transcends the uttermost bounds of anticipation or desire.
Sometimes the ecstasy pours forth in song, sometimes in tears:
at one moment it finds expression in movement, at others in the intense stillness of burning, voiceless feeling.
Some men knowing this bliss wonder if others feel God as they do; some are assured that no living creature has ever had such experiences as theirs;
there are those who wonder that the world is not set aflame by this joy; and there are others who marvel at its nature, asking whence it comes, and what it is.
The body itself can know no greater pleasure upon earth than to participate in it;
and there are moments when the soul feels that it must shiver to fragments in the poignancy of this experience.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

An Anthology of Mysticism and Philosophy

Love, Life, Men, God

“The fault is all ours. We have become overwhelming. About one in twenty of all the people who have ever existed is alive today, compared to just one in a thousand of other species. As a result we are depleting the earth.
But even now the question is still asked: Does it really matter? So we lose a few cute mammals, and a lot of bugs nobody ever heard of. So what? We’re still here.
Yes, we are. But the ecosystem is like a vast life-support machine. It is built on the interaction of species on all scales of life, from the humblest fungi filaments that sustain the roots of plants to the tremendous global cycles of water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Darwin’s entangled bank, indeed. How does the machine stay stable? We don’t know. Which are its most important components? We don’t know. How much of it can we take out safely? We don’t know that either. Even if we could identify and save the species that are critical for our survival, we wouldn’t know which species they depend on in turn. But if we keep on our present course, we will soon find out the limits of robustness.
I may be biased, but I believe it will matter a great deal if we were to die by our own foolishness. Because we bring to the world something that no other creature in all its long history has had, and that is conscious purpose. We can think our way out of this.
So my question is—consciously, purposefully, what are we going to do?”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section I (pp. 509-510)

Life, People, World, Way

“The universe is cold. Fun is the fire that melts the blocks of hardship and creates a bubbling celebration of life. It is the birth right of every creature, a right no less sacred for having been trampled on since the beginning of time.”

Nick Bostrom (1973) Swedish philosopher

Letter From Utopia https://nickbostrom.com/utopia.html (2008)

Life, Birth, Universe, Time

“Suso has even left a diagrammatic picture of the relations subsisting between Godhead, triune God and creatures. In this very curious and interesting drawing a chain of manifestation connects the mysterious symbol of the Divine Ground with the three Persons of the Trinity, and the Trinity in turn is connected in a descending scale with angels and human beings. These last, as the drawing vividly shows, may make one of two choices. They can either live the life of the outer man, the life of the separative selfhood; in which case they are lost (for, in the words of the Theologia Germanica, “nothing burns in hell but the self”). Or else they can identify themselves with the inner man, in which case it becomes possible for them, as Suso shows, to ascend again, through unitive knowledge, to the Trinity and even, beyond the Trinity, to the ultimate Unity of the Divine Ground.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (1944)

Life, God, Angels, Hell

“I get the biggest thrill once in awhile when someone does notice me. I just beam from ear to ear. I went to see my picture, The Creature Walks Among Us it's a science- fiction thriller-and took my children, Cathy and Bobby, along. After the show I stood in front of a very large picture of myself in the lobby -and, you know, not one person knew who I was or said a word.”

Leigh Snowden (1929–1982) American actress

How Leigh Snowden Broke into Movies http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1956/06/03/page/328/article/how-leigh-snowden-broke-into-movies#text (June 3, 1956)

Children, Science, Personality

“He was a man, which, as Plato saith, is a very inconstant creature.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

On the Tranquillity of the Mind
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“When the morning breezes blow toward the town at sunrise, if they bring with them mists from marshes and, mingled with the mist, the poisonous breath of the creatures of the marshes to be wafted into the bodies of the inhabitants, they will make the site unhealthy.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter IV "The Site of a City" Sec. 1

“Dinosaurs first existed around 6,000 years ago. Because dinosaurs were land animals, and God made all the land animals on day six of the creation week, dinosaurs were created on day six. Dinosaurs could not have died out before this time because death, bloodshed, disease and suffering is a result of Adam's sin. Adam and Eve were also made on day six alongside the dinosaurs - so dinosaurs lived with people. Representatives of all the KINDS of land animals, including the dinosaur kinds went on board Noah's ark. All those that were left behind drowned in the cataclysmic circumstances of the Flood - many of their remains became fossils. After the Flood (around 4,500 years ago), the land animals (including dinosaurs) came off the ark and lived in the present world, beside people. Because of sin, the judgement of the curse and the effects of the Flood have greatly changed the earth. Since the Flood, many animals have died out from diseases, a lack of food, etc. The dinosaurs, like many other creatures, seem to have also died out. According to this view, there is no mystery about dinosaurs!”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved! (2000)

Death, God, People, World

“You', the ego, live in your left brain. When we say that man is the only creature who spends 99 per cent of his time inside his own head, we mean, in fact, inside his left cerebral hemisphere. And in the basement of the left hemisphere is the library full of filing cabinets -- the stuffy room that we mistake for reality.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Access to Inner Worlds (1990), p. 9

Reality, Time

“Of all the creatures that man kills for his amusement there is only one that he kills out of hatred—other men. Man hates nothing as much as himself. That is why war is called the leprosy of the human soul.”

Halldór Laxness book Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Saknússemm II
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

Men, Hate, War, Soul

“How would we think and feel about predatory dinosaurs if they were alive today? Humans have long felt antipathy toward carnivores, our competitors for scarce protein. But our feelings are somewhat mollified by the attractive qualities we see in them. For all their size and power, lions remind us of the little creatures that we like to have curl up in our laps and purr as we stroke them. Likewise, noble wolves recall our canine pets. Cats and dogs make good companions because they are intelligent and responsive to our commands, and their supple bodies make them pleasing to touch and play with. And, very importantly, they are house-trainable. Their forward-facing eyes remind us of ourselves. However, even small predaceous dinosaurs would have had no such advantage. None were brainy enough to be companionable or house-trainable; in fact, they would always be a danger to their owners. Their stiff, perhaps feathery bodies were not what one would care to have sleep at the foot of the bed. The reptilian-faced giants that were the big predatory dinosaurs would truly be horrible and terrifying. We might admire their size and power, much as many are fascinated with war and its machines, but we would not like them. Their images in literature and music would be demonic and powerful - monsters to be feared and destroyed, yet emulated at the same time.”

Gregory Scott Paul (1954) U.S. researcher, author, paleontologist, and illustrator

Gregory S. Paul (1988) Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, Simon and Schuster, p. 19
Predatory Dinosaurs of the World

War, Fear, Dogs, Music

“Only the creatures of the earth take from one another, boy. All creatures, but men more than any. Life they take, and liberty, and all that another man may have—sometimes through greed, sometimes through stupidity, but never by any volition but their own. Beware your own race, Bran Davies—they are the only ones who will ever harm you, in the end.”

Susan Cooper (1935) English fantasy writer

Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), The Grey King (1975), Chapter 6 “Bird Rock” (pp. 71-72)

Life, Men, Stupidity, Boy

“It was told that when God long ago created Sipirja he settled it by the river and trampled the path nearby the houses: go wanderer, stay a while but not longer! In the houses of Sipirja people speak their own language so that no stranger can understand what they say; it remains unexplained. They are like mute, armless, eyeless and there is not heart in any one’s chest, only the possessed and lashed flesh. When a stranger comes to the village of Sipirja, they despise him like an animal and they laugh at his speech, and all the old painful things and injustices which everyone has suffered sometimes are exposed. Children and old hags stare after him when he has left, they imitate his speech and the way how he walked and moved his arm, and they say: a creature like that! so ugly! They ask the stranger inside and they fill his cup with delicious coffee and urge to drink, but when he is gone they speak about him with despise: a creature like that!”

Timo K. Mukka (1944–1973) Finnish writer

p. 29

God, Pain, Children, People

“I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most loveable, the appeal of whose helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one's own committed heart. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I - well, I had them.”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

Source: The Turn of the Screw (1898), Ch. II.

World, Heart

“Every creature, every work of God, is admirably well made; but if any one appears imperfect in our eyes, it does not belong to us to criticise it. Perhaps that which we do not find right in its kind, turns to our advantage, without our being able to perceive it. Let us look at the state of the heavens, one while the sun shines, another time it does not appear; now the weather is fine; again it is unpleasant; one day is hot, another is cold; another time it is rainy, snowy or cloudy; every thing is variable and inconstant. Let us look at the surface of the earth: here the ground is flat; there it is hilly and mountainous; in other places it is sandy; in others it is barren; and elsewhere it is productive. Let us, in thought, go into an orchard or forest. What do we see? Trees high or low, large or small, upright or crooked, fruitful or unfruitful. Let us look at the birds of the air, and at the fishes of the sea, nothing resembles another thing. Let us look at the beasts. We see among the same kinds some of different forms, of different dimensions, domestic or wild, harmless or ferocious, useful or useless, pleasing or hideous. Some are bred for men's sakes; some for their own pleasures and amusements; some are of no use to us. There are faults in their organization as well as in that of men. Those who are acquainted with the veterinary art, know this well; but as for us who have not made a study of this science, we seem not to discover or remark these faults. Let us now come to ourselves. Our intellectual faculties as well as our corporeal organization have their imperfections. There are faculties both of the mind and heart, which education improve; there are others which it does not correct. I class in this number, idiotism, imbecility, dulness. But nothing can correct the infirmities of the bodily organization, such as deafness, blindness, lameness, palsy, crookedness, ugliness. The sight of a beautiful person does not make another so likewise, a blind person does not render another blind. Why then should a deaf person make others so also? Why are we Deaf and Dumb? Is it from the difference of our ears? But our ears are like yours; is it that there may be some infirmity? But they are as well organized as yours. Why then are we Deaf and Dumb? I do not know, as you do not know why there are infirmities in your bodies, nor why there are among the human kind, white, black, red and yellow men. The Deaf and Dumb are everywhere, in Asia, in Africa, as well as in Europe and America. They existed before you spoke of them and before you saw them.”

Laurent Clerc (1785–1869) French-American deaf educator

Statement of 1818, quoted in Through Deaf Eyes: A Photographic History of an American Community (2007) by Douglas C. Baynton, Jack R. Gannon, and Jean Lindquist Bergey

Men, God, Pleasure, Education

“The student of culture is concerned with a characteristic which man displays more markedly than any other known creature — the ability to transmit what he has learned. In following the procedure I suggest, the learning of Homo sapiens would be treated as a further specialization of the concept of grades, with the recognition that in some species — possibly even in some orders — the ability to learn may represent not only an improvement, in an evolutionary sense, but also an increase in vulnerability. Man's unique, high ability to learn, coupled as it is with a small amount of built-in behavior, represents such a vulnerability.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1960s, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), p. 30-31

Behavior, Sense, Learning

“At bottom, knowledge of God in faith is always this indirect knowledge of God, knowledge of God in His works, and in these particular works in the determining and using of certain creaturely realities to bear witness to the divine objectivity. What distinguishes faith from unbelief, erroneous faith and superstition is that it is content with this indirect knowledge of God.”

Karl Barth book Church Dogmatics

2:1
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

God, Faith, Knowledge, Reality

“Most people have a problem becoming a vegan or stopping eating meat, but because of how I want to live in this world and how I want to treat other creatures, I have to be a vegan. In order for me to eat meat, I would have to change all of my other beliefs.”

Jim Morris (bodybuilder) (1935–2016) American bodybuilder

"The Story of a 78-Year-Old Vegan Bodybuilder - Jim Morris: Lifelong Fitness" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUtv4slpm-U, documentary-film on YouTube (March 11, 2014).

People, World, Problem, Change

“The Philosopher of this age is not a Socrates, a Plato, a Hooker, or Taylor, who inculcates on men the necessity and infinite worth of moral goodness, the great truth that our happiness depends on the mind which is within us, and not on the circumstances which are without us; but a Smith, a De Lolme, a Bentham, who chiefly inculcates the reverse of this,—that our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances; nay, that the strength and dignity of the mind within us is itself the creature and consequence of these. Were the laws, the government, in good order, all were well with us; the rest would care for itself! Dissentients from this opinion, expressed or implied, are now rarely to be met with; widely and angrily as men differ in its application, the principle is admitted by all.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Men, Happiness, Truth, Age