Quotes about evening
page 76

“Americanization having its roots in political ideals cannot be achieved so long as these ideals, as interpreted by the sources of authority in America, mean one thing for the native-born and another thing for the foreign-born; one thing for men and another for women; one thing for employers and another for employees; one thing for the rich and another for the poor; one thing in one State and another thing in an adjoining State. No American who hopes for national unity can spend too much time insisting upon the most painstaking interpretation of the guarantees of American law, even though it takes him into such technical matters as interpreter service, cost of appeals, discriminatory laws, and race prejudices. Every support of a sound Americanism is strong or weak according as justice is done or not done.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Women, Men, Justice, Law

“There is no other Úa than the one who has always lived with me and never gone from me for a single moment. She is closer to me than the flower of the field and the light of the glacier, because she is fused with my own breath. The one thing that remains is what lives deepest within yourself, even though you glide from one galaxy to another. Nothing can change that. And now let us have more shark meat.
- Pastor Jón talking with EmBi”

Halldór Laxness book Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

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

Flowers, Light, Change

“Philosophy complains that Custom has hoodwinked us, from the first; that we do everything by Custom, even Believe by it; that our very Axioms, let us boast of Free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such Beliefs as we have never heard questioned. Nay, what is Philosophy throughout but a continual battle against Custom; an ever-renewed effort to transcend the sphere of blind Custom, and so become Transcendental?”

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

Bk. III, ch. 8.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

Question, Thinking, Effort

“To all the politicians, donors and special interests, hear these words from me today: there is only one core issue in the immigration debate and it is this: the well-being of the American people. Nothing even comes a close second.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Immigration speech (31 August 2016)
Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-immigration-address-transcript-227614

People

“By your faith in people, you will someday be betrayed.
I thought it was the same as being rejected.
At the time I didn't have that kind of strength.
Certainly, I knew too much.
It was said that I was a strong child.
I was praised, saying "you must have strength not to cry"
The more things like that were said,
the more even laughing was painful.”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

A Song for XX
Lyrics, A Song for XX

Pain, People, Faith, Strong

“These days a very melancholic mood has taken hold of me. There is nothing else but my work. My dear ones, I have been well and I have been working and my way of working is changing. For this reason I always feel extremely anxious. I am not content and perhaps I will not (ever) be satisfied with my work, not even for one day. I want to attain works which are more personal and clean.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: 1930 - 1941, from 'Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 125: Gorky's quote, in a letter to his sister Vartush Mooradian, 28 February 1938

Way, Feeling, Mood, Change

“The worship of money is the lowest of all human emotions, but it is shared not only by the bourgeoisie, but also by the great majority of us… Little people, humble people, even those who are practically penniless. And I, with all my indignation, all my passion for destruction, I, too, am not free of it. I who am oppressed by wealth, who realise it to be the source of all misery, all my vices and hatred, all the bitterest humiliations that I have to suffer, all my impossible dreams and all the endless torment of my existence, still, all the time, as soon as I find myself in the presence of a rich person, I cannot help looking up to him, as some exceptional and splendid being, a kind of marvelous divinity, and in spite of myself, stronger than either my will of my reason, I feel rising from the very depths of my being, a sort of incense of admiration for this wealthy creature, who is all too often as stupid as he is pitiless. Isn’t it crazy? And why… why?”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Diary ot a Chambermaid

Money, People, Stupidity, Dreams

“In the Church which was founded at Corinth, St. Paul had special difficulties of the kind I have mentioned. In that flourishing commercial city, which through its shipping and situation, maintained a vital connexion between East and West, numerous crowds of people flocked together from all quarters, different in speech and in culture. As they mingled with the inhabitants, they produced, by contacts and contrasts, new and ever new differences. Even in the Church this differentiation endeavoured to make itself felt in sects and parties; and a kind of pagan wisdom made a special attempt to force itself forward as a teacher of truth. In his first letter to this church, from which the text I read is taken, St. Paul strongly combats this tendency.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, Sermon Preached at Trinitatis Kirke, 1844, P. 162

Wisdom, People, Truth, Teachers

“A diverse community is a resilient community, capable of adapting to changing situations. However, diversity is a strategic advantage only if there is a truly vibrant community, sustained by a web of relationships. If the community is fragmented into isolated groups and individuals, diversity can easily become a source of prejudice and friction. But if the community is aware of the interdependence of all its members, diversity will enrich all the relationships and thus enrich the community as a whole, as well as each individual member. In such a community information and ideas flow freely through the entire network, and the diversity of interpretations and learning styles-even the diversity of mistakes-will enrich the entire community.”

Francisco Varela (1946–2001) Chilean biologist

Maturana and Varela (1987) The Tree of Knowledge as cited in: Fritjof Capra (1996) The Web of Life. p. 330

Communication, Idea, Learning, Change

“Consider with due attention, for the path is very strait, even while it is more spacious than the heavens and the earth and what is between them.”

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

IX, 3
The Persian Bayán

“The League of Nations is the greatest humbug in history. They cannot even protect a little nation like Armenia. They do nothing but pass useless resolutions.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Prime Minister
Source: Quoted in Lord Riddell's diary entry (18 December 1920), J. M. McEwen (ed.), The Riddell Diaries 1908-1923 (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), p. 330

History

“That feeling of terrible emptiness when I touched him was like going into a house that you thought would be full of people you loved, only to find it empty, and even the furniture taken. You walk from room to room, hearing your footsteps echo on the naked floors. Your voice bounces back from the empty walls, where the lines of beloved photos still show like the line around a body at a crime scene. He was gone.”

Laurell K. Hamilton (1963) Novelist

memories of Princess Meredith about encountering the body of her father, Essus; p. 40
Merry Gentry series, A Stroke of Midnight (2005)

Love, People, Feeling, Photo

“Human society is born in the shadow of religious fear, and in that stage the suppression of heresy is a sacred social duty. Then comes the rise of a priesthood, and the independent thinker is met with punishment in this world and the threat of eternal damnation hereafter. Even today it is from the religious side that the greatest danger to freedom of thought comes. Religion is the last thing that man will civilise.”

Chapman Cohen (1868–1954) British atheist and secularist writer and lecturer

Quoted in The Freethinker, Vol. 84 (G.W. Foote, 1964), p. 215.

World, Fear, Religion, Freedom

“I ask you not to expect all answers to all problems from me, even though you expect me to lead the way. I ask you not to expect me to solve all your problems, even though you voted for me to do that. I only ask you to join hands with me to be the best we can be, and together lay foundation for a future that is more secure and certain for our children and generations to come.”

Bukola Saraki (1962) Nigerian politician

Inaugural Address (2003)

Children, Way, Problem, Future

“It is clear that international law must evolve, even if it will be difficult to find the new and appropriate notions that will allow it to … However, it is unlikely that we will ever be capable of building a world that is qualitatively better than we ourselves are.”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

Democracy Against Itself: The Future of the Democratic Impulse (1993), Revel, Free Press (1993), p. 264 ISBN 0029263875, 9780029263877
1990s, Democracy Against Itself: The Future of the Democratic Impulse (1993)

World, Law

“She watches Marvy's face as he pays Monika, watches him in this primal American act, paying, more deeply himself than when coming, or asleep, or maybe even dying.”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

“It is difficult to say when algebra as a science began in China. Problems which we should solve by equations appear in works as early as the Nine Sections (K'iu-ch'ang Suan-shu) and so may have been known by the year 1000 B. C. In Liu Hui's commentary on this work (c. 250) there are problems of pursuit, the Rule of False Position… and an arrangement of terms in a kind of determinant notation. The rules given by Liu Hui form a kind of rhetorical algebra.
The work of Sun-tzï contains various problems which would today be considered algebraic. These include questions involving indeterminate equations. …Sun-tzï solved such problems by analysis and was content with a single result…
The Chinese certainly knew how to solve quadratics as early as the 1st century B. C., and rules given even as early as the K'iu-ch'ang Suan-shu… involve the solution of such equations.
Liu Hui (c. 250) gave various rules which would now be stated as algebraic formulas and seems to have deduced these from other rules in much the same way as we should…
By the 7th century the cubic equation had begun to attract attention, as is evident from the Ch'i-ku Suan-king of Wang Hs'iao-t'ung (c. 625).
The culmination of Chinese is found in the 13th century. …numerical higher equations attracted the special attention of scholars like Ch'in Kiu-shao (c.1250), Li Yeh (c. 1250), and Chu-Shï-kié (c. 1300), the result being the perfecting of an ancient method which resembles the one later developed by W. G. Horner”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

1819
Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, Ch. 6: Algebra

Way, Question, Problem, Appearance

“I began to reconcile myself to my forlorn condition, but still I was not what I wished to be: the worst of all was, I had no friend; not a human being that understood me. I wrote daily to my friend Leisewitz; he resided in Hanover, and was just as unhappy as myself, except that he had some friends, and plenty of money. In this respect I was differently situated, and although in want of money to buy books, I was determined not to be any expense to my father. Some watches, snuff-boxes, and rings, presents I had received in Gottingen, soon found their way to the hands of Jews at half price. I was even, against my will, driven to the necessity of accepting small fees from mechanics and peasants. This cut me to the heart; but I could not help myself. The following circumstance, however, overcame me more than all: My father was a man of great knowledge and experience, but, like all old men, he remained faithful to the old method of practice. I visited many of his patients, and without telling me exactly what mode of treatment I was to pursue, he only observed, "You will act so and sohowever, I saw the patients had confidence in my father only, and not in me; they wished me to be his tool, and I therefore followed his mode of practice, and thus lost several of his patients, who could have been saved had I followed my own method.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

Men, Money, Books, Faith

“If the mind is to emerge unscathed from this relentless struggle with the unforeseen, two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

On War (1832), Book 1

Truth, Courage, Light

“Let us not just bear witness to cases of involuntary and forced disappearances. These have caused our country big black eyes and have placed us under tight watch of both local and international rights groups and even foreign governments. We need to put this measure in place.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

The Official Website of the Senate of the Philippines http://www.senate.gov.ph/press_release/2011/0518_escudero1.asp 2011

Country

“History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side.”

John Betjeman (1906–1984) English poet, writer and broadcaster

First and Last Loves (1952).

History

“Striking a balance in favor of individual rights has always been the right decision for us and that it remains so even when technology gives us new ways to exercise those rights. Individual liberty has never weakened us; freedom of speech, enhanced by the Net, will only make us stronger.”

Mike Godwin book Cyber Rights

Cyber Rights — cited in [Kim, June, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age, Law Library Journal, American Association of Law Libraries, 96, 3, 542–544, Summer 2004]
Cyber Rights

Way, Exercises, Decision, Freedom

“Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation.”

Whittaker Chambers Witness

Source: Witness (1952), pp. 4-5

Life, Death, Men, Pain

“The Muslim whose legs are being reduced to pulp by his American tormentor doesn't care if he's being murdered because he is despised by Christians or because he is an impediment to economic rationality. … For all the inevitability that surrounds the Christian/Enlightenment divide, it should not be so difficult for us to find a third option in our intellectual traditions, even if this tradition seems mostly defeated and lost. It is a tradition that is spiritual and yet hostile to the orthodoxies of institutional Christianity. It is the creation of the Enlightenment and yet it is suspicious of the claims of Reason, especially that form of Reason, economic rationalism, that defines capitalism. This tradition began in Europe with Romanticism and in America with the Concord Transcendentalists.”

Curtis White (1951) American academic

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

Hostility

“There are eleven Commandments just in Exodus 20, and that list continues into the next three chapters, with many being ethnospecific and limited to the regional currency of sheep and shekels. It wasn't even relevant then and it has no parallel in the American legal system now, especially since we've freed the slaves, allowed women their own agency, and defied the Commandments by rejecting theocracy, permitting freedom of religion and prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, creed or national heritage.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, The Damn Commandments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u3z69YpLx0 (January 7, 2015)

Women, Religion, Freedom

“I thought fit to… explain in detail in the same book the peculiarity of a certain method, by which it will be possible… to investigate some of the problems in mathematics by means of mechanics. This procedure is… no less useful even for the proof of the theorems themselves; for certain things first became clear to me by a mechanical method, although they had to be demonstrated by geometry afterwards… But it is of course easier, when we have previously acquired, by the method, some knowledge of the questions, to supply the proof than it is to find it without any previous knowledge.”

Archimedes book The Method of Mechanical Theorems

The Method of Mechanical Theorems

Books, Mathematics, Question, Knowledge

“As dogs, cats, horses, and probably all the higher animals, even birds, as is stated on good authority, have vivid dreams, and this is shewn by their movements and voice, we must admit that they possess some power of imagination. … Few persons any longer dispute that animals possess some power of reasoning. Animals may constantly be seen to pause, deliberate, and resolve. It is a significant fact, that the more the habits of any particular animal are studied by a naturalist, the more he attributes to reason and the less to unlearnt instincts.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter II: "Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals", page 46 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=59&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Dogs, Dreams, Imagination, Cats

“May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.”

Jorge Luis Borges book The Library of Babel

Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno.
"The Library of Babel" (1941)
Variants:
I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man — even a single man, tens of centuries ago — has perused and read this book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place may be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.
May Heaven exist, even if our place is Hell.
"Deutsches Requiem". (Emece edition, 1974)

Hell

“When we come to a comparison of heaven and earth, then we may indeed not only forget all about the present life, but even despise and scorn it.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Page 74.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

Life, Forgetting

“Today we preach that science is not science unless it is quantitative. We substitute correlations for causal studies, and physical equations for organic reasoning. Measurements and equations are supposed to sharpen thinking, but, in my observation, they more often tend to make the thinking noncausal and fuzzy. They tend to become the object of scientific manipulation instead of auxiliary tests of crucial inferences.
Many - perhaps most - of the great issues of science are qualitative, not quantitative, even in physics and chemistry. Equations and measurements are useful when and only when they are related to proof; but proof or disproof comes first and is in fact strongest when it is absolutely convincing without any quantitative measurement.
Or to say it another way, you can catch phenomena in a logical box or in a mathematical box. The logical box is coarse but strong. The mathematical box is fine-grained but flimsy. The mathematical box is a beautiful way of wrapping up a problem, but it will not hold the phenomena unless they have been caught in a logical box to begin with.”

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

John R. Platt (1964) " Science, Strong Inference -- Proper Scientific Method (The New Baconians) http://256.com/gray/docs/strong_inference.html. In: Science Magazine 16 October 1964, Volume 146, Number 3642. Cited in: Gerald Weinberg (1975) Introduction to General Systems Thinking. p. 1, and in multiple other sources.

Beauty, Way, Mathematics, Problem

“One of the biggest box-office successes in movie history — probably because for young audiences it's like getting a box of Cracker Jack that is all prizes. Written and directed by George Lucas, the film is enjoyable in its own terms, but it's exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. There's no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the image of a double sunset. The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea out of your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension — a sense of wonder, perhaps. It's an epic without a dream.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"Star Wars," p. 714.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Beauty, Dreams, Feeling, History

“They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don't want any other point of view. They don't even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.”

Roger Ailes (1940–2017) Television executive

Howard
Kurtz
Fox News Chief Blasts NPR 'Nazis'
The Daily Beast
2010-11-17
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-17/fox-news-chief-roger-ailes-blasts-national-public-radio-brass-as-nazis/
2011-02-10
on NPR firing Juan Williams for remarks he made on Fox News about fearing airplane passengers in Muslim garb

Guy, Feeling

“The course of history does not include eternal problems, problems of essences or of dialectics; it only offers valorizations that differ from one culture to another and even from one individual to another. … What is opposed to time as well as eternity is our own valorization of the present. What does it matter that time passes and that its frontier wipes out our valorizations? No warrior has been shaken in his patriotism by the idea that, had he been born on the other side of the border, his heart would have beaten for the other side.”

Paul Veyne (1930) French historian

"The Final Foucault and His Ethics," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Autumn, 1993)

History, Idea, Problem, Time

“I was so tired of seeing these stupid, cheerful books about ageing. One of them even has this whole thing in it about how you are going to have the greatest sex of your life in your sixties and seventies. Which is just garbage.I thought about it and realised that there was one circumstance that you could have the best sex of your life in your sixties and seventies. That would be if you had never had sex until you were 60 or 70.”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

Quoted in Christopher Goodwin, "Get real – ageing’s not all Helen Mirren" http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article1466183.ece, Times Online (UK) (4 March 2007)

Life, Books, Age, Stupidity

“The correct understanding of life, let me tell you, is love despite everything. Love despite everything, that is the aim and object of life. Love, you see, is the only thing that pays in the long run, even though it might seem a dead loss in the short run.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Pétur Þríhross
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Love, Life, Understanding, Loss

“Some intellectuals’ downplaying of objective reality and enduring criteria extends beyond social, scientific, or economic phenomena into art, music, and philosophy. The one over-riding consistency across all these disparate venues is the self-exaltation of the intellectuals. Unlike great cultural achievements of the past, such as magnificent cathedrals, which were intended to inspire kings and peasants alike, the hallmark of self-consciously “modern” art and music is its inaccessibility to the masses and often even its deliberate offensiveness to, or mockery of, the masses.
Just as a physical body can continue to live, despite containing a certain amount of microorganisms whose prevalence would destroy it, so a society can survive a certain amount of forces of disintegration within it. But that is very different from saying that there is no limit to the amount, audacity and ferocity of those disintegrative forces which a society can survive, without at least the will to resist.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Source: 2010s, Intellectuals and Society (2010), Ch. 22 : The Influence of Intellectuals

Art, Music, Reality, Past

“Forget the 18th century, the 19th century, even at the birth of the 20th century. Here's my favorite example, here: 1928, my hero, Walt Disney, created this extraordinary work, the birth of Mickey Mouse in the form of Steamboat Willie. But what you probably don't recognize about Steamboat Willie and his emergence into Mickey Mouse is that in 1928, Walt Disney, to use the language of the Disney Corporation today, "stole" Willie from Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill."
It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928 — no 14 years — just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did to produce the Disney empire.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

OSCON 2002

Birth, Forgetting

“In the countries of the ancient world, even before the formation of the empire, slavery was the basis of society. In each was a capitalist class and a slave class. The capitalists, however, were constantly in fear of slave insurrection. The dread clouded their sunshine by day, and nightmared their sleep; for they saw, piling up against them, a discontent hell-deep and heaven-high.”

Bouck White (1874–1951) American author and novelist

Source: The Call of the Carpenter (1914), p. 8

World, Fear, Hell, Sleep

“Today, for the mass of humanity, science and technology embody 'miracle, mystery, and authority'. Science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will at last be realized. Sickness and ageing will be abolished; scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal. Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of miracles. But to think that science can transform the human lot is to believe in magic. Time retorts to the illusions of humanism with the reality: frail, deranged, undelivered humanity. Even as it enables poverty to be diminished and sickness to be alleviated, science will be used to refine tyranny and perfect the art of war.”

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

The unsaved: The Grand Inquisitor and Flying Fish (p. 123)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

War, Age, Hope, Art

“And I got some other producers I’m working with right now. I got YK 808, I got Deedotwill, I got other up-and-coming artists. I stay working with different people. I like overlapping and vibing with different producers, and that’s just how I’ve always been, man. Even when I was with Three 6 Mafia. I used to always just search for new talent and work with new talented people. I just think that’s what it is. I love making music. I don’t like to stay in the same place -- I’m not that type of person. But I still keep my roots. I still keep my sound.”

Juicy J (1975) American rapper and record producer from Tennessee; co-founder of Three 6 Mafia

Juicy J Interview Rubba band Business Wiz Khalifa Juicy J https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/8070920/juicy-j-interview-rubba-band-business-wiz-khalifa

Love, People, Music, Search

“O slayer of foes, I have no complaint even if thou beest unpropitious to me. I have, O sinless one, also no complaint that though by birth I am superior to Kunti yet I am inferior to her in station. I do not grieve, O thou of Kuru's race, that Gandhari hath obtained a hundred sons. This, however, is my great grief that while Kunti and I are equal, I should be childless, while it should so chance that thou shouldst have offspring by Kunti alone. If the daughter of Kuntibhoja should so provide that I should have offspring, she would then be really doing me a great favour and benefiting thee likewise. She being my rival, I feel a delicacy in soliciting any favour of her. If thou beest, O king, propitiously disposed to me, then ask her to grant my desire.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Madra addresses Pandu after the birth of Kunti's sons and also of the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra
The Mahabharata/Book 1: Adi Parva/Section CXXIV

Feeling, Birth, Chance, Daughters

“Earlier contentions that the right hemisphere is not even conscious largely gave way by the mid seventies to an intermediate position conceding that the mute hemisphere may be conscious at some lower elemental levels, but claiming that it lacks the higher, reflective, self-conscious kind of inner awareness that is special to the human mind and is needed, so it is said, to qualify the right conscious system as a "self' or "person". Self awareness in particular is reported, on the basis of mirror tests mainly, to be a predominantly human attribute and is rated by developmental as well as by evolutionary standards to be a highly advanced phase of conscious awareness.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

Nobel lecture (1981)

Way, Personality

“A story is told according to which Saint-Pol-Roux, in times gone by, used to have a notice posted on the door of his manor house in Camaret, every evening before he went to sleep, which read: ‘THE POET IS WORKING’.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Sleep, Time, Reading, Housing

“Recently a courageous group of Arab and Muslim intellectuals wrote me a letter. In it, they said this: "The shore of reform is the only one on which any lights appear, even though the journey demands courage and patience and perseverance." The United Nations was created to make that journey possible. Together we must support the dreams of good and decent people who are working to transform a troubled region -- and by doing so, we will advance the high ideals on which this institution was founded.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2006, United Nations General Assembly speech (September 2006)

People, Dreams, Courage, Support

“Oh, that's a good question because what I would consider essential may be different than what my record company and the fans might have in mind. But when you do a retrospective of 20 years like this (album) and realize that you had so many hit singles, it's really an honor. There's a couple of songs that I wrote, one is called "Along Came You" for my daughter Emily; and the other, "Nayib's Song (I Am Here for Your) for my son. Both are in the 'slow disc.' I put them in even if they were not singles or hits because for me my being a mother is an essesntial part of who I am."”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

answer to question "The title of your new album is "The Essential Gloria Estefan. What is the essential Gloria Estefan?"
2006

Question, Parting, Daughters

“In early times of Christianity, even those who used animal food themselves came to think of the vegetarian as one who lived a higher life, and approached more nearly to Christian perfection.”

George Salmon (1819–1904) mathematician and Anglican theologian

A Historical Introduction to the Study of the Books of the New Testament (London: John Murray, 1885; 4th ed. 1889), p. 203 http://archive.org/stream/historicalintrod00salmuoft#page/203/mode/2up.

Life, Food, Thinking, Time

“When I was young and walked along Breiðafjörður I never would have thought that such a wide variety of people inhabited the world. Here were many folk from the numerous city-states and counties of Italy: Milanese, Napolese and Sicilians, Sardinians, Savoyards, Venetians and Tuscans, along with the Romans themselves; here one could see the peoples of the six Spanish kingdoms: the Castilians, Aragonese, Catalans, Valencians, Majorcans, and Navarrans; gathered here were envoys from the different nations of the Empire, even from the nations that had adopted Luther's reforms: Bavarians, Germans and Croatians, Franconians, Westphalians, Rhinelanders, Saxons, Burgundians, Franks, Walloons, Austrians, and Styrians... I saw people from nations I knew nothing about, their countenances, the textures of their clothing, their grimy faces and their eyes filled with passion and tenacity. Most often, however, I found myself thinking about their countless feet, bare or in shoes, mostly certainly tired, yet somehow lively and hopeful; and the old crusade-dance that resounded through their musica: 'Fair are the fields, cloudless God's sky.' And suddenly I realized that Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir was gone. Not a single Icelander remained.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Arnas describing a procession in Rome
Íslandsklukkan (Iceland's Bell) (1946), Part II: The Fair Maiden

God, People, World, Hope

“Punk: This is completely ridiculous on multiple, multiple levels. I mean there's so many things going through my head right now. This doesn't belong to you [holds Slammy award and looks at Ric Flair]. You haven't even been here in the past calender year. And the fact that anybody even voted for John Cena to be Superstar of the Year is absolutely atrocious. This is possibly the worst year of John Cena's life. He got beat by a guy that I'm gonna decimate at the Royal Rumble, I beat him at Summerslam…he lost last night, he's the first superstar to cash in his Money in the Bank contract and lose, he's a loser like everybody in Phildelphia, and he's a loser like you”

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

points to Flair
December 17, 2012 (2012 Slammy Awards)
WWE Raw

Life, Money, Guy, Past

“We are at a juncture today that really is more of a threshold, even more of a watershed, than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in 1941. We are currently in a war, but it is not a war on terrorism. In fact, that has been a great confusion, and the sooner we drop that term, the better. This would be like President Franklin Roosevelt saying in World War II, 'We are engaged in a war against kamikazes and blitzkrieg.' Like them, terrorism is a method, a tool, a weapon that has been used against us. And part of the reason we suffered such a horrific attack is that we were not prepared.”

John Lehman (1942) American banker and government official

At the 130th Annual Meeting of the U.S. Naval Institute and Annapolis Naval History Symposium on 31 March 2004. http://www.usni.org/seminars/annualmeeting/04/annualmeeting04Lehman.htm, http://www.johnflehman.com/pdf/proceedings_MAR2004.pdf (PFD)

War, World, Suffering, Parting

“[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

Source: The Great Divorce (1944–1945), Ch. 9

Death, Pleasure, Dreams, Suffering

“The fact was that he suffered from an incurable malady which, it seemed, attacked only Homo sapiens among all the intelligent races of the universe. That disease was religious mania.
Throughout the earlier part of its history, the human race had brought forth an endless succession of prophets, seers, messiahs, and evangelists who convinced themselves and their followers that to them alone were the secrets of the universe revealed. Some of them succeeded in establishing religions which survived for many generations and influenced billions of men; others were forgotten even before their deaths.
The rise of science, which with monotonous regularity refuted the cosmologies of the prophets and produced miracles which they could never match, eventually destroyed all these faiths. It did not destroy the awe, not the reverence and humility, which all intelligent beings felt as they contemplated the stupendous universe in which they found themselves. What it did weaken, and finally obliterate, were the countless religions, each of which claimed with unbelievable arrogance, that it was the sole repository of the truth and that its millions of rivals and predecessors were all mistaken.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The City and the Stars

Source: The City and the Stars (1956), Chapter 13 (p. 99)

Death, Men, Truth, Secret

“Another test came slightly later in Jammu and Kashmir which a Hindu prince had managed to save from the Islamic monster in spite of machinations by Mountbatten and British die-hards, and in the face of undisguised hostility from a Soviet stooge masquerading as the Prime Minister of India. But a large part of that precious patrimony was soon surrendered to Islamic imperialism in order to demonstrate India’s ‘democratic’ credentials before an international opinion which wondered for quite some time why India was smitten with such a grave sense of guilt. The rest of the region, which had been saved by a brave soldiery at the cost of so much blood and toil, was handed over to a haughty sheikh who had never hidden his intention of setting up a separate sultanate. The Valley was very soon barred even to the sons of the soil who had to flee from their homes in the Pakistan-occupied parts of Jammu and Kashmir.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

Hostility, Home, Sense, Time

“I tried. I tried so hard to empathize with all of your weaknesses. I implored every single one of you to just say "no," and all my empathy got was for you to love Jeff Hardy that much more than you already did. But this will not deter me. I will stay the course; I still believe in teaching you people the difference between right and wrong. (Audience chants "Hardy!") Oh, obviously it's gonna be challenging, listening to you people, and by the looks of some of you, it's gonna be a big challenge. But just like any other challenge that's come down the pipe in my lifetime, I'm gonna meet that challenge head on like a man, just like I did last week. Let's take a look. (Recap of Punk's assault on Hardy) See, now I know why you people love Jeff Hardy so much. It's because you are all just like him; and, in turn, Jeff Hardy is just like all of you. The reality is, none of you have the strength to be straight-edge. (Audience resumes chant) You gravitate towards Jeff because it's the easy way out: it's easier to weak like Jeff, because you sure can't be strong like me. Oh, you can boo all you want. I know why you boo, you know why you boo. It's because I tell the truth. And the truth sometimes hurts, doesn't it? For instance, what does it say on your prescription bottle of pills? "Take one every four hours"? Well, don't tell me you people don't gobble four, six, eight at a time like they were Pez. That is drug abuse—I don't do that. I also don't smoke, and those who do are stupid. You gotta be stupid to not listen to the Surgeon General, especially when he prints the warning label on the package of smokes. You gotta be a fool. And we can talk about those funny cigarettes, and you obviously know what I'm talking about because you cheer, and that's utterly sad. That's pathetic. I…I can't even wrap my head around you people cheering, 'cause when you smoke those funny cigarettes, not only is that hazardous to your health, it's also illegal. So those who have taken a puff, not only are you poisoning yourself, you're also breaking the law, so the vast majority of everybody here in this arena is a criminal. I am not a criminal—I never have been, and I never will be. Now let's talk about alcohol. I've saved the best poison for last, see because this is a gateway drug. Don't tell me not a single one of you here has ever said, "I'm gonna go out for one drink," and one leads to two, and two drinks leads to three, and then it's a double of this, and a shot of that, and then your head winds up in the toilet, night in and night out. Congratulations, that is alcoholism. And in my book, if you even take one drink, you're an alcoholic. So I understand why you people love Jeff Hardy so much, I understand why Jeff loves you—it's because you're all weak. Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, you deserve better. This entire world deserves better. What you need is a leader. You need a strong leader who's gonna stand up in the face of adversity and just say "no."”

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

You need a strong leader that's gonna carry the banner of the World Heavyweight Championship with honor, with pride, respect, dignity, integrity, and class. What you people need is a straight-edge World Heavyweight Champion. You need CM Punk.
August 7, 2009
Friday Night SmackDown

Love, People, Health, Alcohol

“For instance, if you have by a lie hindered a man who is even now planning a murder, you are legally responsible for all the consequences. But if you have strictly adhered to the truth, public justice can find no fault with you, be the unforeseen consequence what it may. It is possible that whilst you have honestly answered Yes to the murderer’s question, whether his intended victim is in the house, the latter may have gone out unobserved, and so not have come in the way of the murderer, and the deed therefore have not been done; whereas, if you lied and said he was not in the house, and he had really gone out (though unknown to you) so that the murderer met him as he went, and executed his purpose on him, then you might with justice be accused as the cause of his death. For, if you had spoken the truth as well as you knew it, perhaps the murderer while seeking for his enemy in the house might have been caught by neighbours coming up and the deed been prevented.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives (1797)

Death, Truth, Lie, Justice

“In many ways, it (capitalism) resembles classic medieval feudalism, displaying the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers. In other ways—notably in its managerialist ethos—it is profoundly different. And the whole apparatus, rather than replacing old-fashioned industrial capitalism, is instead superimposed on top of it, blending together in a thousand points in a thousand different ways. Hardly surprising, then, that the situation seems so confusing that even those directly in the middle don’t really know quite what to make of it.”

David Graeber book Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

Way, Fashion

“Use harms and even destroys beauty. The noblest function of an object is to be contemplated.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

El use estropea y hasta destruye toda belleza. La función más noble de los objetos es la de ser contemplados.
Niebla [Mist] (1914)

Beauty

“Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence.”

David Hume book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Philo to Cleanthes, Part II
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

Wisdom, Men, World, Intelligence

“The most incurably frustrated—and, therefore, the most vehement—among the permanent misfits are those with an unfulfilled craving for creative work. Both those who try to write, paint, compose, etcetera, and fail decisively, and those who after tasting the elation of creativeness feel a drying up of the creative flow within and know that never again will they produce aught worthwhile, are alike in the grip of a desperate passion. Neither fame nor power nor riches nor even monumental achievements in other fields can still their hunger. Even the wholehearted dedication to a holy cause does not always cure them. Their unappeased hunger persists, and they are likely to become the most violent extremists in the service of their holy cause.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 37, Ch.6 Misfits
The True Believer (1951), Part Two: The Potential Converts

Hunger, Feeling, Decision, Passion

“There was no mistaking, even in the uncertain light, the hand, half crabbed, half generous, and wholly drunken, of the Consul himself, the Greek e’s, the flying buttresses of d’s, the t’s like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified an entire word.”

Malcolm Lowry book Under the Volcano

Source: Under the Volcano (1947), Ch. I (p. 35)

Light, Flying

“Today's secularists too often have very little accurate knowledge about religion, and even less desire to learn. This is problematic insofar as their sense of self is constructed in opposition to religion. Above all, the secularist is not a Jew, is not a Christian, not a Muslim, and so on. But is it intellectually responsible to define one's identity against something that one does not understand?”

Jacques Berlinerblau (1966) Associate Professor, Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service,…

Source: The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (2005), p. 1

Religion, Understanding, Knowledge, Sense

“A man who leads a life of tranquillity and reflection, who is not disturbed at home and meddles not with the affairs of the world, may keep his mind at ease and his thoughts in one even course. But such a man has not been tried. All his Ethical philosophy and his passive virtue might turn out to be idle words, if he were once exposed to the rude realities of human existence.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

The Philosophy of Antoninus

Life, World, Home, Reality

“Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the identity of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.”

George H. W. Bush (1924–2018) American politician, 41st President of the United States

Speech at CIA headquarters to Agency employees (26 April 1999) https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/1999/bush_speech_042699.html

Life, Guy, Anger

“I didn't say that my son died for Israel. I've never said that. I saw somebody wrote that and it wasn't my words. Those aren't even words that I would say.”

Cindy Sheehan (1957) American antiwar activist

Cindy Sheehan Sheehan says someone else made up the "my son died for Israel" quote that has been attributed to her Interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2005/08/cindy-sheehan-mother-of-spc-casey.html CNN.com 4 March 2004 2004

“All is the Self or Brahman. The saint, the sinner, the lamb, the tiger, even the murderer, as far as they have any reality, can be nothing else, because there is nothing else.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Reality

“As always, when the opportunity arose, Joe took a long, astute look at the girl whom, if he could have managed it, he would have had as his mistress, or, even better, his wife. It did not seem possible that Wendy Wright had been born out of blood and internal organs like other people. In proximity to her he felt himself to be a squat, oily, sweating, uneducated nurt whose stomach rattled and whose breath wheezed. Near her he became aware of the physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed. Seeing her face, he discovered that his own consisted of a garish mask; noticing her body made him feel like a low-class windup toy. All her colors possessed a subtle quality, indirectly lit. Her eyes, those green and tumbled stones, looked impassively at everything; he had never seen fear in them, or aversion, or contempt. What she saw she accepted. Generally she seemed calm. But more than that she struck him as being durable, untroubled and cool, not subject to wear, or to fatigue, or to physical illness and decline. Probably she was twenty-five or -six, but he could not imagine her looking younger, and certainly she would never look older. She had too much control over herself and outside reality for that.”

Philip K. Dick book Ubik

Source: Ubik (1969), Chapter 5 (pp. 58-59)

People, Fear, Color, Feeling

“For all human beings, love is a constant preoccupation—a never-ending central theme. Indeed, the ultimate motivation behind interactions among people is often the desire to experience some form of love. The fact that love is so important has major implications for leadership. In particular, the degree to which leaders acknowledge the value of love in their own lives and in the lives of others can determine the success or failure of their undertakings. Far from being irrelevant or impractical, the intention to express love is fundamental for effective leadership. This is so because in the final analysis, a leader’s motivation is communicated to others in countless subtle ways. Leaders whose actions are perceived as self-serving often create disharmony, resentment, and disloyalty. On the other hand, those who base their behavior upon a genuine empathy and concern for others can gain loyalty and support that make the attainment of even difficult goals possible.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Leadership For An Age of Higher Consciousness, Volume 1: Administration from a Metaphysical Perspective (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: The Phenomenon of Love

Love, People, Way, Behavior

“When variations could be so extravagantly successful, displacement of one humanoid population by another even more effective group of hunters must have occurred frequently. Survival was more likely for the more formidable in battle as well as for the more efficient in the hunt.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.1.

Success

“One gets as much information as a witness of activity from a fleeting glance [in the photo], like a quick look, sometimes in motion, as one does staring at the subject. Because even if you remain stationary your mind wanders, and it's that kind of activity that I would like to get into the photograph – a confirmation of the fact that everything is moving.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1980's, I don't necessarily desire a perfect photography,' 1981

Photo

“It did not seem at all improbable to McCulloch now. The infinite fullness of time brings about everything, he thought: even intelligent lobsters, even a divine octopus.”

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

Short fiction, Homefaring (1983)

Intelligence, Time

“Certainly, Vollard, but listen: will you have a special dish without butter prepared for me? Mind you, no flowers on the table, and you must have dinner at half past seven sharp. I know you won't have your cat around and please don't allow anybody to bring a dog. And if there are to be any women I hope they won't come reeking of perfume. How horrible all those odors are when there are so many things that really smell good, like toast - or even manure! Ah - (a short hesitation), and very few lights. My eyes, you know, my poor eyes!”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

"Early Encounters" (p. 20)
Quoted by Vollard who came to invite Degas for dinner, that evening
posthumous quotes, Degas: An Intimate Portrait' (1927)

Women, Dogs, Hope, Cats

“Above all, it's creative thinking that lies at the basis of discoveries. You must dare to think differently, see things from different sides, in order to come across fortuitous new ideas frequently. You should develop even the most stupid ideas and when you do this systematically, there will always come something useful out of it.”

Simon van der Meer (1925–2011) Dutch physicist

in De Libero van het CERN. Jaarboek 1985. Vereniging voor Technische Physica. TU Delft. p. 61.

Stupidity, Idea, Thinking

“I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose. I know there are professors in this country who 'ligate' arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

'Scholastic and Bedside Teaching', Introductory Lecture to the Medical Class of Harvard University (6 Nov 1867). In Medical Essays 1842-1882 (1891), 302.

Country

“I wanted work that didn't involve incredible assumptions about everything. I couldn't begin to think about the order of the universe or, the nature of American society. I didn't want work that was general or universal in the usual sense. I didn't want it to claim too much. Obviously the means and the structure couldn't be separate and couldn't even be thought of as two things joined. Neither word meant anything. A shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself. It shouldn't be concealed as part of a fairly different whole. The shapes and materials shouldn't be altered by their context.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Donald Judd (1967), in: Perspecta 11 (1967), p. 44; Quoted in: James Fitzsimmons (1979) Art International. Vol 23. p. 69
1960s

Color, Nature, Thinking, Sense

“Thank you very much. Good Heavens. Um, I can't thank you enough, Hollywood Foreign Press, for honouring me in this capacity. I don't wish to burden you with my debts, which are heavy and numerous but, um, I think that everybody involved in the making of this film knows that we owe all our pride and all our joy to the genius of Jane Austen. And, um, it occurred to me to wonder how she would react to an evening like this… [Puts down statue on stage, reads paper] This is what I came up with”

Emma Thompson (1959) British actress and writer

Golden Globe Award Speech

Thinking, Reading, Joy

“God has made man a cosmopolite. He created seas for ships to glide on, the wind to push them, and the stars to guide them even in darkest night.”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

"Los Viajes"

God, Star, Sea, Night

“29 million people have no health insurance today in America. We pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. One out of five Americans can't even afford the prescriptions their doctors are writing. Millions of people have high deductibles and co-payments. I don't know what economists Secretary Clinton is talking to, but what I have said, is that the family right in the middle of the economy would pay $500 dollars more in taxes, and get a reduction in their healthcare costs of $5,000 dollars. In my view healthcare is a right of all people, not a privilege, and I will fight for that.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

2010s, 2016, Democratic Presidential Debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (11 February 2016)

People, Health, World, Family

“You can lose yourself or disappear in a big city. You can even change your identity and live a new life. You can indulge in a very long investigation to find a trace of malice, starting only with one or two addresses in an isolated neighbourhood. I have always been fascinated by the short note that sometimes appears on search records: Last known address. Themes of disappearance, identity and the passing of time are closely bound up with the topography of cities. That is why since the 19th century, cities have been the territory of novelists, and some of the greatest of them are linked to a single city: Balzac and Paris, Dickens and London, Dostoyevsky and Saint Petersburg, Tokyo and Nagai Kafū, Stockholm and Hjalmar Söderberg.”

Patrick Modiano (1945) French writer

From Nobel Lecture (2014)

Life, Search, Appearance, Change

“And though they may both have felt that something had died between them, something they may not even have been aware or until it was gone and disappeared from their lives forever, they must've felt - both of them - that there was something of themselves, something important, that could not live at all in any other way but by their being together, much as they had been before.”

Richard Ford (1944) American novelist and short story writer

Source: Wildlife (1990), p. 176

Way

“Sedgwick has managed to convert pedestrian critical skills and little discernible knowledge in history, philosophy, psychology, art or even pre-modern literature into a lucrative academic career.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 222

Art, History, Literature, Knowledge

“I've come to assert that I am a judge and I will not be consigned the unquestioned opinions of others. But even more than that, I have come to say that isn't it time to move on? Isn't it time to realize that being angry with me solves no problems? Isn't it time to acknowledge that the problem of race has defied simple solutions and that not one of us, not a single one of us can lay claim to the solution? Isn't it time that we respect ourselves and each other as we have demanded respect from others? Isn't it time to ignore those whose sole occupation is sowing seeds of discord and animus? That is self-hatred. Isn't it time to continue diligently to search for lasting solutions? I believe that the time has come today. God bless each of you, and may God keep you.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

God, Search, Problem, Time

“This period of blue monochrome was the product of my pursuit of the indefinable in painting which that master, Eugène Delacroix [Romantic French painter] was able to indicate even in his day.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

In 1957; p. 33
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

Painting

“What I love about this team is the fact that you can feel the energy and trust - even after the defeat against Sweden. That's the really special thing about this group. Even when we were a player down and a goal behind in extra time, you sensed that something was going to happen. The team kept fighting. You can't teach that. It's a feeling - and we play with that feeling.”

Hope Solo (1981) American association football player

As quoted in "Brazil-USA Quotes: USA goalkeeper and Player of the Match Hope Solo" http://www.fifa.com/womensworldcup/matches/round=255995/match=300144440/quotes.html, fifa.com (July 10, 2011) 2010s

Love, Feeling, Sense, Time

“I cannot analyse my heart, though it then stood still within me. But the thing that swayed me to my purpose was not altogether the thought that Captain Claret was about to degrade me, and that I had taken an oath with my soul that he should not. No, I felt my man's manhood so bottomless within me, that no word, no blow, no scourge of Captain Claret could cut me deep enough for that. I but swung to an instinct in me — the instinct diffused through all animated nature, the same that prompts even a worm to turn under the heel. Locking souls-with him, I meant to drag Captain Claret from this earthly tribunal of his to that of Jehovah and let Him decide between us. No other way could I escape the scourge.”

Herman Melville book White-Jacket

Source: White-Jacket (1850), Ch. 67

Way, Soul, Nature, Heart

“They (the Hindus) differ from us in religion… There is very little disputing about theological topics among themselves; at the most they fight with words, but they will never stake their soul or body or their property on religious controversy. … in all manners and usages they differ from us to such a degree as to frighten their children with us… and as to declare us to be devil’s breed and our doings as the very opposite of all that is good and proper, …. they call all foreigners as mleccha, i. e. impure, and forbid having any connection with them, be it by intermarriage or any other kind of relationship, or by sitting, eating, and drinking with them, because thereby they think, they would be polluted… They are not allowed to receive anybody who does not belong to them, even if he wished it, or was inclined to their religion.”

Al-Biruni (973–1048) Persian scholar and polymath

Alberuni, I, pp.19-20. quoted from K.S. Lal, Indian Muslims who are they, 1990
From Alberuni's India

Children, Religion, Soul, Drink

“In those days you didn't have to deal with the black market. You could go to your physician and just say, 'Listen, I want to gain some weight, and I want to take something.' Then the physician would say, 'Do it six weeks before competition, then it will be safe.' And that's what you would do. The dosage that was taken then versus taken now is not even 10 percent. It's probably 5 percent.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heritage

1992
Attributed

“In a country with more than 300 million people, it is remarkable how obsessed the media have become with just one—Donald Trump. What is even more remarkable is that, after seven years of repeated disasters, both domestically and internationally, under a glib egomaniac in the White House, so many potential voters are turning to another glib egomaniac to be his successor.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

"Conservatives Against Trump" http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430126/donald-trump-conservatives-oppose-nomination (21 January 2016), National Review 2010s

People, Housing, Country

“Angels are those beings who have been on an earth like this, and have passed through the same ordeals that we are now passing through. They have kept their first estate far enough to preserve themselves in the Priesthood. They did not so violate the law of the Priesthood and condemn themselves to the sin against the Holy Ghost as to be finally lost. They are not crowned with the celestial ones. They are persons who have lived upon an earth, but did not magnify the Priesthood in that high degree that many others have done who have become Gods, even the sons of God. Human beings that pertain to this world, who do not magnify or are not capable of magnifying their high calling in the Priesthood and receive crowns of glory, immortality, and eternal lives, will also, when they again receive their bodies, become angels and will receive a glory. They are single, without families or kingdoms to reign over. All the difference between men and angels is, men are passing through the day of trial that angels have already passed through.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 9:102 (January 5, 1860)
1860s

Men, God, World, Family

“[Rose, taken out for the evening by Pinkie] She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present – she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

Memory, Past, Future, Heart

“Dharma is the repository of the nation’s soul. If Dharma is destroyed, the Nation perishes. Any one who abandons Dharma, betrays the nation…… Since Dharma is supreme, our ideal of the State has been Dharma Rajya…… What constitutes the good of the people, Dharma alone can decide. Therefore a democratic government Jana Rajya must also be rooted in Dharma i. e. a Dharma Rajya… Since in the West injustice and atrocities were perpetrated, bitter conflicts and battles were fought in the name of religion, all these were en bloc listed on the debit side of Dharma also. We feel that in the name of Dharma also battles were fought. However battles of religion and battles of Dharma are two different things. Religion means a creed or a sect, it does not mean Dharma. Dharma is very wide concept. It is concerned with all aspects of life. It sustains the society. Even further, it sustains the whole world. That which sustains is Dharma.”

Deendayal Upadhyaya (1916–1968) RSS thinker and co-founder of the political party Bharatiya Jana Sangh

Quoted from Talreja, K. M. (2000). Holy Vedas and holy Bible: A comparative study. New Delhi: Rashtriya Chetana Sangathan.

Life, People, World, Religion

“In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind — a struggle which had engaged me for several months — might have a fatal outcome.”

William Styron book Darkness Visible

I, first lines
Darkness Visible (1990)

“In Europe, with its centuries of struggle against Christian hegemony, nobody minds that the ruling party in Germany is called Christlich-Demokratische Union…. But in India, any hint of a "Hindu" party upholding "Hindu values" (even if explained as a "common Indian heritage shared by the minorities as well") is declared intolerable by judges and journalists,-- and by the leaders of the very party concerned.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

1990s, BJP vis-à-vis Hindu Resurgence (1997)

“I like science and I love gym. Oh, and I like art, but I'm really bad at it. I'm just a terrible drawer. I can't draw a circle. Even with a ruler, I can't draw a straight line.”

Daniel Radcliffe (1989) English actor

About Favorite Subject in School http://www.danradcliffe.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=23&Itemid=28

Love, Art, Science, Drawing

“I have a woman's body: I have hips, I have boobs, I have a butt. There is nothing I can change about those things even if I lose weight. You have to learn to accept your body and like your body. But, it's true, when I started modeling people were always telling me that I had to change. They told me to cut my hair because long hair is not versatile enough. And they gave me this stuff to put in my water. They said: "Drink this and then you won't be so hungry, dah-dee-dah-dee-dah…"”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

I said: "OK, great," but I never took any of it.
Discussing the pressure to be thin in the modeling industry, as quoted by The Independent (UK) 19 February 2004.

People, Drink, Learning, Water

“So I feel that this is an encouragement to other writers in the region to persist in the their work, even if they feel that what they are doing is not popular, because in the long run it may tell on their behalf.”

Wilson Harris (1921–2018) Guyanese writer

Interview with Wilson Harris (2010) on being Knighted at Queen Elizabeth II Birthday Honours

Feeling