Quotes about everything
page 34

“And then I awoke and yet continued to dream… painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement. I thought of my grand old friend Henri Rousseau [French Primitive painter, died in 1910] that Homer in the porter's lodge whose prehistoric dreams have sometimes brought me near the gods. I saluted him in my dream. Near him I saw William Blake, noble emanation of English genius...'Have confidence in your objects,' he said, 'do not let yourself be intimidated by the horror of the world. Everything is ordered and correct and must fulfill its destiny in order to attain perfection. Seek this path'... I awoke and found myself in Holland in the midst of boundless world turmoil. But my belief in the final release and absolution of all things, whether they please or torment, was newly strengthened. Peacefully I laid my head among the pillows… to sleep, and dream, again.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

1930s, On my Painting (1938)

God, World, Dreams, Confidence

“A painting grows like a plant. Use all colours, all shapes. Everything that attracts and excites me is a part of me. Painting is about proportions, relationships which breathe life. "Painting is a harmony which runs parallel to nature."”

Stefan Szczesny (1951) German painter and sculptor

Mustique (2002)

Life, Nature, Parting, Painting

“Having the chance to watch … Meet Your Meat, it was probably one of the first punches. Once I made that connection between loving an animal and eating an animal is when things clicked in my brain. Latinos have this obsession with everything fried, with a lot of animal protein, and, yeah, it’s true—we have a lot of problems with obesity, we have a lot of problems with diabetes, we have a lot of problems with asthma. We have a lot of problems with a lot of things that come from it. And I couldn't believe that to create a toothpaste, or to create a shampoo, there are a lot of animals that have to suffer for that. As you become a vegan, you start learning that everything in your life has to become cruelty free.”

Natalia Villaveces (1979) Colombian television host

"Natalia Villaveces' Exclusive PETA Interview", video on PETA's YouTube channel (12 July 2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX2alBCT70s.

Love, Life, Problem, Suffering

“Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, The Engines of God (1994), Chapter 30 (p. 398)

People

“Israel is an embattled country. They rely very heavily on U. S. support. So they have developed a very sophisticated system of propaganda. They don't call it propaganda. They call it hasbarah. It is the only country I know of in the world that refers to propaganda as explanation. The Ministry of Propaganda is the Ministry of Explanation. The idea being that our position on everything is so obviously correct that if we only explain it to people, they will see that it is right.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Interview by Burton Levine in Shmate: A Journal of Progressive Jewish Thought, May 1988 http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/198805--.htm. Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1980s

People, World, Idea, Support

“Two forces are emerging that will moot global warming. First, the end of the population explosion will, over the decades, reduce the increases in demand for just about everything. Second, the increase in the cost of both finding and using hydrocarbons will increase the hunger for alternatives.”

George Friedman (1949) American businessman and political scientist

Source: The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (2009), p. 252

Hunger

“I felt that everything is beautiful, but [not? ] that which man tries intentionally to make beautiful; that the work of an ordinary bricklayer is more valid than the artwork of all but a very few artists.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

Quotes from 'Notes from 1969', Ellsworth Kelly; as quoted in the exhibition catalogue, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 13 December
1969 - 1980

Beauty

“I had felt compelled to report everything important that I had found out, as if I were writing an academic paper. Instead of submitting a formal report, I could have simply informed the IR authorities that I had some ideas and information on the IR program that I wanted to discuss with them. In that case, the IR people might have given my criticisms some attention. In any event, they would have been more likely to let me know whether any of the recommendations in my other reports had been acted on—and with what results.”

William Foote Whyte (1914–2000) American sociologist

Source: Participant observer, 1994, p. 196; As cited in: Ickis (2014)

People, Idea

“I think cynicism is the worst thing because it kills everything. There’s no more honesty, no more poetry, no more freshness. Cynicism is the worst thing — a kind of smart person who’s got all the answers. This is death. It kills creation. There’s no love, no tenderness, nothing at all left. There’s no hatred even, nothing. Equally dangerous is the detached attitude that says, “Everything is fun!””

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, Conversation. Interview with Byron Dobell (1957), p. 38

Love, Death, Thinking, Personality

“Everything lives and perishes through magnetism; one thing affects another one, even at great distances, and its "congenitals" may be influenced to health and disease by the power of this sympathy, at any time, and notwithstanding the intervening space.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter VII

Health, Disease, Time

“I hate analyzing stuff. I do the bare minimum. When it comes to interpretation, I just play it and go from there. I think emotion is everything. When you get the notes, you've just scratched the surface. The best things happen spontaneously, on stage. I'm doing three concerts here; I guarantee that none of them will be the same. We're not machines.”

Sarah Chang (1980) violinist

JS online 1999 http://www2.jsonline.com/enter/performingarts/strini/jun99/chang03060299.asp

Hate, Thinking

“The lovers, appearing happy,
walk, holding hands.
Though it appears everything is perfect,
only they know the truth.”

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

Appears
Lyrics, Loveppears

Happiness, Truth, Lovers, Appearance

“Let no one charge us with capricious inconsistency in our actions against Albinus, and let no one think that I am disloyal to this alleged friend or lacking in feeling toward him. 2. We gave this man everything, even a share of the established empire, a thing which a man would hardly do for his own brother. Indeed, I bestowed upon him that which you entrusted to me alone. Surely Albinus has shown little gratitude for the many benefits I have lavished upon him. 3. Now |87 he is collecting an army to take up arms against us, scornful of your valor and indifferent to his pledge of good faith to me, wishing in his insatiable greed to seize at the risk of disaster that which he has already received in part without war and without bloodshed, showing no respect for the gods by whom he has often sworn, and counting as worthless the labors you performed on our joint behalf with such courage and devotion to duty. 4. In what you accomplished, he also had a share, and he would have had an even greater share of the honor you gained for us both if he had only kept his word. For, just as it is unfair to initiate wrong actions, so also it is cowardly to make no defense against unjust treatment. Now when we took the field against Niger, we had reasons for our hostility, not entirely logical, perhaps, but inevitable. We did not hate him because he had seized the empire after it was already ours, but rather each one of us, motivated by an equal desire for glory, sought the empire for himself alone, when it was still in dispute and lay prostrate before all. 5. But Albinus has violated his pledges and broken his oaths, and although he received from me that which a man normally gives only to his son, he has chosen to be hostile rather than friendly and belligerent instead of peaceful. And just as we were generous to him previously and showered fame and honor upon him, so let us now punish him with our arms for his treachery and cowardice. 6. His army, small and island-bred, will not stand against your might. For you, who by your valor and readiness to act on your own behalf have been victorious in many battles and have gained control of the entire East, how can you fail to emerge victorious with the greatest of ease when you have so large a number of allies and when virtually the entire army is here. Whereas they, by contrast, are few in number and lack a brave and competent general to lead them. 7. Who does not know Albinus' effeminate nature? Who does not know that his way |88 of life has prepared him more for the chorus than for the battlefield? Let us therefore go forth against him with confidence, relying on our customary zeal and valor, with the gods as our allies, gods against whom he has acted impiously in breaking his oaths, and let us be mindful of the victories we have won, victories which that man ridicules.”

Septimius Severus (145–211) Emperor of Ancient Rome

Herodian, Book 3, Chapter 6.

Life, God, Hate, Hostility

“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

"Fictions of Every Kind" in Books and Bookmen (February 1971)

Literature, Reality, Science

“It's offense you maybe can't live with because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look down into it you see there are evil things down there, and they have little yellow eyes that don't blink, and there's a stink down there in that dark and after a while you think maybe there's a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on the water, but if I saw a guy doing that I'd scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn't look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense.”

Stephen King book It

It (1986)

Guy, Star, Thinking, Universe

“He who wants to educate himself in Chess must evade what is dead in Chess…the habit of playing with inferior opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief, everything that leads to standstill or to anarchy.”

Emanuel Lasker (1868–1941) German World Chess Champion and grandmaster, contract bridge player, mathematician, and philosopher

Source: Lasker's Manual of Chess (1925), p. 338

Education, Dead

“Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

God, Color, Christ

“It is clear to see that it is not them but me, who had lost my self-identity. As I hide behind these books I read, while scribbling my poetry, like art could save a wretch like me, with some ideal ideology that no one can hope to achieve. And I am never real; it is just a sketch of me. And everything I have made is trite and cheap and a waste of paint, of tape, of time”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

Waste of Paint
Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)

Books, Hope, Art, Time

“Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight.”

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. 213

Art, History, Thinking, Training

“The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the romantic spirit has dried up, that there is no shame today … We're all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

"Hip, Hell, and the Navigator" in Western Review No. 23 (Winter 1959); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988) edited by J. Michael Lennon.

Time

“I wrote, after an early rejection, "X turned down Wrinkle, turned it down with one hand while saying that he loved it, but didn't quite dare to do it, as it really isn't classifiable. I know it isn't really classifiable, and am wondering if i'll have to go through the usual hell with this that I seem to go through with everything I write. But this book I'm sure of. If I've ever written a book that says how I feel about God and the universe, this is it. This is my psalm of praise…”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Section 4.10
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

Love, God, Books, Feeling

“"No, no no," she said. "You don't understand. Not that kind of longing. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine … where you couldn't see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn't (not yet) come and I didn't know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

Psyche
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)

Happiness, Beauty, Home, Mountain

“Nothing is part of everything.”

Dejan Stojanovic book The Sign and Its Children

"While the Sign Sleeps," p. 17
The Sign and Its Children (2000), Sequence: “The Sign and Nothing”

Parting

“Our new little house [Kirchner moved to the Wildboden house] is a real joy to us. We shall live here comfortably and in great new order. This will really come to be a turning point of my life. Everything must be put in clear order and the little house furnished as simply and modestly as possible, while still being beautiful and intimate.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

Quote from his Diary, 1923; as quoted by Kornfield, E. W.; Stauffer, Christine E. Stauffer (1992). Biography Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Kirchner Museum Davos. Retrieved March 21, 2016; from Wikipedia: Kirchner
1920's

Life, Beauty, Joy, Housing

“If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man's challenge to God. It's worded quite simply: We have the power to destroy everything that You have created. If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is 4 600 000 000 years old. It could end in an afternoon.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

The End of Imagination August, 1998 http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1516/15160040.htm. Articles

God, World, Way

“The doctrine of false position has been but little studied in the United States. In France it is understood perfectly. There everything is solved by false position, just as chymists solve everything by attraction and repulsion, mathematicians by circles and tangents, old people by loss and gain, young people by love and courtship.”

Alexander Bryan Johnson (1786–1867) United States philosopher and banker

The Philosophical Emperor, a Political Experiment, or, The Progress of a False Position: (1841)

Love, People, Study, Loss

“The master of a private dwelling will not allow any untidiness or unseemliness to be seen in the house, such as a couch upset, or the table littered with rubbish, or vessels of price thrown away into dirty corners, while those which serve ignobler uses are thrust forward for entering guests to see. He has everything arranged neatly and in the proper place, where it stands to most advantage; and then he can welcome his guests, without any misgivings that he need be ashamed of opening the interior of his house to receive them. The same duty, I take it, is incumbent on that master of our "tabernacle," the mind; it has to arrange everything within us, and to put each particular faculty of the soul, which the Creator has fashioned to be our implement or our vessel, to fitting and noble uses.”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

On Virginity, Chapter 18

Soul, Fashion, Housing

“I believe,” said the first lady, “that our souls are in our hands. For we do everything to the world with our hands. Sometimes I think we don’t use our hands half enough; it’s certain we don’t use our heads.”

Ray Bradbury book The Golden Apples of the Sun

Embroidery (1951)
The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)

World, Soul, Thinking

“The absent no longer entered our thoughts. One spoke of them who knows what happened to them? but their fate was not on our minds. We were incapable of thinking. Our senses were numbed, everything was fading into a fog. We no longer clung to anything. The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us. In one terrifying moment of lucidity, I thought of us as damned souls wandering through the void, souls condemned to wander through space until the end of time, seeking redemption, seeking oblivion, without any hope of finding either.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Fate, Hope, Soul, Thinking

“Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way of realizing everything and every one comes out of them in repeating. More and more then every one comes to be clear to some one.”

Gertrude Stein book The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans (1925)

Way, Feeling

“[Vegan lifestyle] just shows a different side of me that I love to express and the fact that I love my life so much and I look into it so much that I try to make everything as efficient as possible and do everything that I was put on earth to do. … Every five blocks there’s a McDonald’s, but there may be one Whole Foods every 30 blocks or every 30 miles. You’ve just got to have the dedication to where you’re like, ‘OK, I’m passing all these obstacles just to go to the goal.’ It’s just like living in the hood and somebody trying to get over the addiction of drugs. On every corner you’ve got somebody asking you, ‘Yo, you good?’ You’re just trying to make it to the bus stop and go to work and live a clean life, but somebody at every corner just keeps stopping you and saying, ‘We got this weed. We got this coke. I got that new s--t.’ It’s the same thing. You’ve just got to be strong, and you’ll fight through it and know what’s best for you.”

Bryant Jennings (1984) boxer

"Meet Bryant Jennings: The Vegan Gunning to Be Heavyweight Champion" https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2599932-meet-bryant-jennings-the-vegan-gunning-to-be-heavyweight-champion, interview with Bleacher Report (December 17, 2015).

Love, Life, Food, Strong

“Did it ever occur to you that everybody is more or less afraid of nearly everything, and that courage isn't a damn thing but a habit of not dodging things because you're afraid of them?”

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) American writer

"The Cure" (unpublished story, first printed in The Hunter and Other Stories in 2013)
Short Stories

Courage

“Everything that I carry tied up in me, can be found anywhere else, freed.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Todo lo que llevo atado en mí, se halla suelto, en cualquier parte.
Voces (1943)

“Cigarettes and chocolate milk
These are just a couple of my cravings
Everything it seems I like's a little bit stronger
A little bit thicker
A little bit harmful for me.”

Rufus Wainwright (1973) American-Canadian singer-songwriter and composer

Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk
Song lyrics, Poses (2001)

“I feel that segregation is totally unchristian, and that it is against everything the Christian religion stands for.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

In his letter to Sally Canada (19 September 1956), as quoted in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr (1992), by Carson & Holloran, Volumes 2-3, p. 373
1950s

Religion, Feeling

“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only of principaly [sic] from human relation[ships]. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”

Christopher McCandless (1968–1992) American hiker and explorer

In a letter to Russell Fritz (as known as Ron Franz), April 1992

God, Courage, Thinking, Relation ships

“.. keep working quietly and have faith in what I tell you, never ask how someone else did it or is doing, try to understand nature, observe everything, try to learn to see and find your easiest way to represent it; one can make different choices from nature, follow what the heart tells you, for which you feel the most.... search for what contains effect, something what wants to tell clear things.”

Paul Gabriël (1828–1903) painter (1828-1903)

translation from the Dutch original: Fons Heijnsbroek
1880's + 1890's

Faith, Way, Feeling, Search

“The concepts of purposive behavior and teleology have long been associated with a mysterious, self-perfecting or goal-seeking capacity or final cause, usually of superhuman or super-natural origin. To move forward to the study of events, scientific thinking had to reject these beliefs in purpose and these concepts of teleological operations for a strictly mechanistic and deterministic view of nature. This mechanistic conception became firmly established with the demonstration that the universe was based on the operation of anonymous particles moving at random, in a disorderly fashion, giving rise, by their multiplicity, to order and regularity of a statistical nature, as in classical physics and gas laws. The unchallenged success of these concepts and methods in physics and astronomy, and later in chemistry, gave biology and physiology their major orientation. This approach to problems of organisms was reinforced by the analytical preoccupation of the Western European culture and languages. The basic assumptions of our traditions and the persistent implications of the language we use almost compel us to approach everything we study as composed of separate, discrete parts or factors which we must try to isolate and identify as potential causes. Hence, we derive our preoccupation with the study of the relation of two variables. We are witnessing today a search for new approaches, for new and more comprehensive concepts and for methods capable of dealing with the large wholes of organisms and personalities.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

L.K. Frank (1948) "Foreword". In L. K. Frank, G. E. Hutchinson, W. K. Livingston, W. S. McCulloch, & N. Wiener, Teleological mechanisms. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sc., 1948, 50, 189-96; As cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) "General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications". p. 16-17

Law, Behavior, Search, Fashion

“Everything was dying, yet death did not suffice. Life had hidden resources. In a thousand ways it was concentrating strength, hoarding its energies in seed, chrysalis, and nectar, preparing for the warrior sweep out of exile that would undo the defeat of winter. Spring was implicit.”

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 19, “Ashes” (p. 330)

Life, Death, Way, Spring

“That's what happened in our career. He never let me fall. In 1983, when I wanted to leave everything behind, it was Kamal Haasan who cajoled me back to the material world.”

Rajinikanth (1950) Indian actor

In "I'd do anything Rajni asks me to: Kamal Haasan (14 December 2011)"

World

“Aggression has been committed, and the country's leadership, not only Muammar Gaddafi, has been killed. And how was it killed? Well, if they had shot him in a battle, it's one thing, but they humiliated and tormented him, they shot at him, they violated him when he was wounded, they twisted his neck and arms, and then they tortured him to death. It's worse than the Nazis once did. Besides, the United States, Italy, France and Germany have up to $150 billion of Libyan money now. They are very interested to grab this wealth. Everything will be even worse in Libya, because it has colossal deposits of resources, and everyone has rushed there to grab those riches.”

Alexander Lukashenko (1954) President of Belarus since 20 July 1994

Reaction upon the death of Muammar Gaddafi, 3 November, 2011. http://wireupdate.com/libya-belarusian-president-lukashenko-says-nato-did-worse-than-the-nazis.html.

Death, Money, Country, Wealth

“Just observe what you are. What you are is the fact: the fact that you are jealous, anxious, envious, brutal, demanding, violent. That is what you are. Look at it, be aware; don’t shape it, don’t guide it, don’t deny it, don’t have opinions about it. By looking at it without condemnation, without judgement, without comparison, you observe; out of that observation, out of that awareness comes affection. Now, go still further. And you can do this in one flash. It can only be done in one flash — not first from the outside and then working further and deeper and deeper and deeper; it does not work that way, it is all done with one sweep, from the outermost to the most inward, to the innermost depth. Out of this, in this, there is attention — attention to the whistle of that train, the noise, the coughing, the way you are jerking your legs about; attention whereby you listen to what is said, you find out what is true and what is false in what is being said, and you do not set up the speaker as an authority. So this attention comes out of this extraordinarily complex existence of contradiction, misery and utter despair. And when the mind is attentive, it can then give focus, which then is quite a different thing; then it can concentrate but that concentration is not the concentration of exclusion. Then the mind can give attention to whatever it is doing, and that attention becomes much more efficient, much more vital, because you are taking everything in.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Vol. XIV, p. 301
Posthumous publications, The Collected Works

Jerk, Way, Falseness, Training

“I must say, in my non-strategic… ‘cuz I’m under attack all the time, if you see it on Twitter. The [unclear] call me gay, it’s just, they’re vicious, there are death threats, and everything. And so, there are times where I’m not thinking as clearly as I should, and in those unclear moments, I always think to myself, ‘Fire the first shot.’Bring it on. Because I know who’s on our side. They can only win a rhetorical and propaganda war. They cannot win. We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns. [laughter] I’m not kidding. They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they’re dealing with.And I have people who come up to me in the military, major named people in the military, who grab me and they go, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing, we’ve got your back.’They understand that. These are the unspoken things we know, they know. They know who’s on their side, they’ve got Janeane Garofalo, we are freaked out by that. When push comes to shove, they know who’s on our side. They are the bullies on the playground, and they’re starting to realize, what if we were to fight back, what if we were to slap back?”

Andrew Breitbart (1969–2012) American writer and publisher

Speaking to a Massachusetts tea party group http://www.mediaite.com/online/andrew-breitbart-to-tea-partiers-we-outnumber-liberals-and-we-have-the-guns/ (September 16, 2011)

Death, War, People, Game

“""We work in order to be at leisure."" […] Doesn't this statement appear almost immoral to the man or woman of the world of ""total work""? Is it not an attack on the basic principles of human society?
Now I have not merely constructed a sentence to prove a point. The statement was actually made — by Aristotle [Nichomachean Ethics X, 7 (1177b4–6)]. Yes, Aristotle: the sober, industrious realist, and the fact that he said it, gives the statement special significance. What he says in a more literal translation would be: ""We are not-at-leisure in order to be-at-leisure."" For the Greeks, ""not-leisure"" was the word for the world of everyday work; and not only to indicate its ""hustle and bustle,"" but the work itself. The Greek language had only this negative term for it (ά-σχολία), as did Latin (neg-otium).
The context not only of this sentence but also of another one from Aristotle's Politics (stating that the ""pivot"" around which everything turns is leisure [Politics VII, 3 (1337b33)]) shows that these notions were not considered extraordinary, but only self-evident. […] Could this also imply that people in our day no longer have direct access to the original meaning of leisure?”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), Leisure, the Basis of Culture, pp. 4–5

People, World, Appearance

“I can count on one of my hands, how many competent people are working in the [Hungarian] media today. But the situation is also woeful in the areas of theatre, film production and fine arts. The whole Hungarian culture is in a deep crisis, the putrescence reigning this country – in a cultural, economic, political, moral and mentalecological sense – consumes everything.”

Róbert Puzsér (1974) hungarian publicist

Egy kezemen meg tudom számolni, hány alkalmas ember dolgozik ma a médiában. De siralmas a helyzet a színház, a filmgyártás és a képzőművészet területén is. Az egész magyar kultúra mélységes válságban van, a rothadás, ami uralja az országot – kulturálisan, gazdaságilag, politikailag, etikailag és mentálökológiailag – mindent elemésztő.
Idegen test az RTL Klubon - Puzsér Róbert-interjú, hvg.hu, 2012. március 20.
Quotes from him, Interviews

People, Art, Sense, Country

“Everything here is freeEverything but you and meThis painting never driesStupidity tries<BR”

Elliott Smith (1969–2003) American singer-songwriter

Stupidity tries.
Lyrics, Figure 8 (2000)

Painting

“.. when making a painting after a study, it costs me a lot of effort to follow this study very well. One is very much inclined to make something different, so-called better, and that's why people usually get confused. A good outdoor-study has a breath of nature in it which must not be neglected or destroyed. You have to get everything out of that study and not just a third or half. If you can really improve one or the other: a la bonheur, but otherwise it is advisable to follow the study obediently as a guide.”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek (original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) ..groote moeite kost het [me om] bij het maken van een schilderij naar een studie, deze werkelijk goed te volgen. Men is maar al te zeer geneigd, er iets anders, zoogenaamd iets beters, van te maken, en daardoor geraakt men meestal juist van de wijs. Een goede buiten-studie heeft een adem der natuur in zich, dien men niet mag verwaarloozen of vernietigen. Men moet uit zo'n studie alles halen, wat er in zit en niet een derde of de helft. Kan men waarlijk het een of ander verbeteren, a la bonheur, maar anders is het raadzaam, de studie gehoorzaam te volgen als gids. Quote of Roelofs; recorded and cited by his student nl:Frans Smissaert in 1891, as quoted in Zó Hollands - Het Hollandse landschap in de Nederlandse kunst sinds 1850, Antoon Erftemeijer https://www.franshalsmuseum.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/zohollands_eindversie_def_1.pdf; Frans Hals museum | De Hallen, Haarlem 2011, p. 16 undated quotes

People, Nature, Effort, Study

“In England … everything becomes professional … even the rogues of that island are pedants.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

“Selected Aphorisms from the Lyceum (1797)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #67

“I want to move forward, I don't want to move back. And I don't want to hurt the Clintons. I really don't. She went through a lot. And suffered greatly in many different ways. And I am not looking to hurt them at all. The campaign was vicious. They say it was the most vicious primary and the most vicious campaign. I guess, added together, it was definitely the most vicious; probably, I assume you sold a lot of newspapers. … It's just not something that I feel very strongly about. … I'm not looking to look back and go through this. This was a very painful period. This was a very painful election with all of the email things and all of the foundation things and all of the everything that they went through and the whole country went through. This was a very painful period of time.”

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

About not prosecuting Hillary Clinton.
2010s, 2016, November, New York Times Interview (November 23, 2016)

Pain, Way, Feeling, Suffering

“Everything that promotes the welfare, the advancement and the growth of the individual is right. And everything that interferes with the welfare, the advancement and the growth of the individual is wrong. This is the only natural standard by which we can judge what is right and what is wrong. It is therefore the true standard, being based upon the nature, the principle and the purpose of life itself.”

Christian D. Larson (1874–1962) Prolific author of metaphysical and New Thought books

What is Truth (1912)

Life, Nature

“"Anne, my sister Anne, do you see nothing coming?"
"I see nothing but the sun that makes everything dusty, and the grass that grows green."”

Charles Perrault (1628–1703) French author

Tales of Mother Goose, 1727, "Bluebeard"

Sister, Grass, Sun

“How are we to reconcile our supreme duty towards memory with the need to forget that is essential to life? No generation has had to confront this paradox with such urgency. The survivors wanted to communicate everything to the living: the victim's solitude and sorrow, the tears of mothers driven to madness, the prayers of the doomed beneath a fiery sky.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

Life, Communication, Solitude, Tear

“What is divine is full of Providence. Even chance is not divorced from nature, from the inweaving and enfolding of things governed by Providence. Everything proceeds from it.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Hays translation
All that is from the gods is full of Providence.
II, 3
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book II

Nature, Chance

“Joe Levine behaved like he owned me. My husband thought it was all terrific as long as I kept bringing in the money. I started objecting to everything, but it was too late. The sex-symbol image had already started. I turned down parts and they blacklisted me. The press attacked me viciously at every opportunity. I came very close to suicide.”

Carroll Baker (1931) American actress

On her tumultuous relationship with producer Joe Levine, profile http://projects.latimes.com/hollywood/star-walk/carroll-baker/ in the Los Angeles Times by Patricia Brennan (1987)

Money, Sex, Suicide, Parting

“[About Edith Stein] I see her groping, wonder-filled prayer, which in the beginning resembles a conversation she is conducting with herself and is very managed. It is half like a question she puts to herself without knowing exactly what she means; it may be that the step she takes does not need to be completed by her; the question does not need to be perfectly articulated; perhaps God would be able to intervene in the middle of her step, in order to make his presence known and answer her question in a much more profound way than she herself would have expected or even would have been capable of expecting. And God truly answers. She prays more and more and finally receives a victorious certainty and rejoices. From this moment of victorious certainty on, everything is perfectly simple and unambiguous. She will follow the path God shows to her; she belongs to him; she has rediscovered her childlike cheerfulness, which has increased and become clearly manifest through love and faith.”

Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967) Swiss doctor and mystic

Book of All Saints (1966)

Love, God, Faith, Way

“People used to make records, as in the record of an event, the event of people playing music in a room, and now everything's cross-marketing, its about sunglasses and shoes, or guns and drugs that you choose.”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

Fuel
Song lyrics

People, Music, Shoe

“Ah, you flavour everything; you are the vanilla of society.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Vol. I, ch. 9
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

“Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.”

Ted Nelson (1937) American information technologist, philosopher, and sociologist; coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia"

quoted by Gary Wolf in "The Curse of Xanadu" http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu_pr.html in Wired (6/1995)

God, People, Fools

“In this world everything that is won to the ideal, is an eternal (or imperishable, - "impérissable", Fr.) good.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 53.

World

“For the sake of research,
the big picture
and definitive conclusions,
one would have to transcend time,
in which everything scurries and whirls.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"We're Extremely Fortunate"
Poems New and Collected (1998), The End and the Beginning (1993)

Time

“Narrated Anas bin Malik: The Prophet said, "Nobody who enters Paradise likes to go back to the world even if he got everything on the earth, except a Mujahid who wishes to return to the world so that he may be martyred ten times because of the dignity he receives (from Allah)." Narrated Al-Mughira bin Shu'ba: Our Prophet told us about the message of our Lord that "Whoever amongst us is killed will go to Paradise." Umar asked the Prophet, "Is it not true that our men who are killed will go to Paradise and their's (i. e. those of the Pagan's) will go to the (Hell) fire?"”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

The Prophet said, "Yes."
[4, 52, 72]
Sunni Hadith

Men, World, Hell, Time

“Europe is no longer Europe, it is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense… I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion… I am disgusted by the anti-Semitism of many Italians, of many Europeans… Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history! They don't know who Churchill was! In Italy, they don't even know who Cavour was!… Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty… State-run television stations contribute to the resurgent anti-Semitism, crying only over Palestinian deaths while playing down Israeli deaths, glossing over them in unwilling tones… The increased presence of Muslims in Italy and in Europe is directly proportional to our loss of freedom… The Muslims refuse our culture and try to impose their culture on us. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture-it is toward my values, my principles, my civilization… The struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions… The West reveals a hatred of itself, which is strange and can only be considered pathological; it now sees only what is deplorable and destructive… These charlatans care about the Palestinians as much as I care about the charlatans. That is not at all… When I was given the news, I laughed. The trial is nothing else but a demonstration that everything I've written is true… President Bush has said, 'We refuse to live in fear.'…Beautiful sentence, very beautiful. I loved it! But inexact, Mr. President, because the West does live in fear. People are afraid to speak against the Islamic world. Afraid to offend, and to be punished for offending, the sons of Allah. You can insult the Christians, the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Jews. You can slander the Catholics, you can spit on the Madonna and Jesus Christ. But, woe betide the citizen who pronounces a word against the Islamic religion.”

Oriana Fallaci (1929–2006) Italian writer

A Sermon for the West">From "A Sermon for the West" By Oriana Fallaci - Oct. 22, 2002 Address to an audience at the American Enterprise Institute

Love, Death, People, Truth

“For people like us it is necessary to be a bit stronger, more self-critical, more observant than the usual run. Whether we happen to come already enhanced with these qualities, as some have claimed, or whether our situation invests them in us, we have traditionally - and we do have a long and proud tradition - been a little finer, a little firmer, more sensitive and flexible than others… There will be times when only your own spine can support you, moments when only your own wit can inspire you, days when nothing but exacting self-control can raise you from bed, nights when nothing but your word can impel you into society. But of all these disciplines, there is nothing you must hold to more sternly than to be kind and sympathetic. The easiest armor to put on is always cruelty. That armor will, indeed, see you through everything. Vicious condescension toward those without your strength can make you feel momentarily superior. But that easy armor must be forgone. Don't ever curdle that creamy brow with lines of easy disdain, or curl those lips with a popular sneer. Of all the models available, the one of gentleman in our late war is most succinct: Face what you have to face with humor, dignity, and style; protect yourself with knightly grace; have contempt for your own weakness and never encourage it in others; but never, Ralph, never for an instant permit yourself to feel anything other than pity and deepest sympathy for unfortunate comrades who have, after all, fallen in the same battle.”

Robert Patrick (playwright) (1937) Playwright, poet, lyricist, short story writer, novelist

One of Those People
Untold Decades: Seven Comedies of Gay Romance (1988)

War, People, Feeling, Support

“Everything passes
Everything changes
Just do what you think you should do
And someday maybe
Who knows, baby
I'll come and be cryin' to you”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), To Ramona

Thinking, Change, Baby

“It has been said that in controversy everything depends upon whether truth be put in the first or in the second place. And so in constitutional law much depends upon whether "liberty" be given precedence.”

George Howard Earle, Jr. (1856–1928) American lawyer

From The Liberty to Trade as Buttressed by National Law (1909) by George H. Earle, Jr.

Truth, Law, Dependency

“Many thanks for your letter and the Gauguin woodcuts... One can see, incidentally, that Gauguin had Persian miniatures, Indian batik and Chinese art in his very blood. The shapes of the birds and the horse show that clearly. But although it looks very well, Gauguin can't stimulate us present-day artists much. We need a direct route from life to plastic form. And we get it by perpetually drawing everything we see.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

Letter to Nele van de Velde ((daughter of Henry van de Velde), Frauenkirch, 29 November 1920; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 224-225
1920's

Life, Art, Bird, Horse

“All the Apollo people were working hard, working long hours, and were dedicated to making certain everything they did, they were doing to the very best of their ability.”

Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) American astronaut; first person to walk on the moon

Source: 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing (2009)

People

“When Jesus said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," it was the mind that he was speaking about. The Kingdom of Heaven must begin within a mind which exists for the sake of the whole. Such a mind is so broad that the entire universe can be embraced by it; the whole Kingdom, including all of mankind, can come within that mind. In that case, who should be the center of your mind — the nation, the world, or God? Yes, it should be God. If your mind is embracing everything, that means you are trying to capture or embrace the mind of God.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

Chapter 11 The Textbook of Love http://www.unification.net/truelove/tl1-11.html 1984-02-05

God, World, Universe

“Mitch…was the kind of man who added something to everything he touched and everyone he came in contact with. I was envious of his view on life. He saw it all as a big game, where the only way to win was to be good to other people, to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and like what you see.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Taylor McAden, Chapter 25, p. 300
2000s, The Rescue (2000)

Life, People, Way, Game

“The poem, through candor, brings back a power again
That gives a candid kind to everything.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract

“At present there is an extremely exaggerated formation of groups (students on the School of Art in Vitebsk) around 'trend'; there are 1. young people following Malevich and 2. young people following me. We both belong to the left-wing artistic movement, although we have different ideas about ends and means. Obviously it would take too long to talk about this problem now… But there is one thing I will tell you: Although I was born in Russia - and what is more: in the "settlement territory" – I was trained abroad and am all the more sensitive to everything that is taking place here in the field of art (the fine arts). The memory of the splendour of the original is much to painful for me.. [to live – crossed out]”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Quote in Chagall's letter to Pavel Davidovitch Ettering, 2 April, 1920, as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 73
1920's

Pain, People, School, Art

“But sometimes things happen that no one hopes for. Events that cause everything you've worked towards, the life you've carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No one is to blame, but you're left with a wound you can't heal on your own and can't believe you'll ever learn to accept, so you struggle to escape the pain. Only time can heal wounds as deep as that - a lot of time - and all you can really do is place yourself in its hands and try to consider the passing of each day a victory. You tough it out moment by moment, hour by hour, and after some weeks or months you begin to see signs of recovery. Slowly the wound heals into a scar.”

Ryū Murakami book Audition

Source: Audition (1997), Chapter Three

Life, Pain, Hope, Learning

“I always come back to variations of the question that my son asked me when he was three. We were sitting in a jacuzzi, and he said, "Dad, why do we exist?" There is no other question. Nobody has any other question. We have variations of this one question, from three onwards. So when you spend time in a company, in a bureaucracy, in an organization and you're saying, boy -- how many people do you know who on their death beds said, boy, I wish I had spent more time at the office? So there's a whole thing of having the courage now -- not in a week, not in two months, not when you find out you have something -- to say, no, what am I doing this for? Stop everything. Let me do something else. And it will be okay, it will be much better than what you're doing, if you're stuck in a process.”

Ricardo Semler (1959) Brazilian businessman

TED: "How to run a company with (almost) no rules" https://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_how_to_run_a_company_with_almost_no_rules/ (October 2014)

Death, People, Boy, Courage

“For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I was fed up with books, which I still continued to gulp down with indiscreet voracity, and searched for a key to the highest truths; there must be a key, and I was certain that, owing to some monstrous conspiracy to my detriment and the world's, I would not get in school. In school they loaded with me with tons of notions that I diligently digested, but which did not warm the blood in my veins. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: "I will understand this, too, I will understand everything, but not the way they want me to. I will find a shortcut, I will make a lock-pick, I will push open the doors."
It was enervating, nauseating, to listen to lectures on the problem of being and knowing, when everything around us was a mystery pressing to be revealed: the old wood of the benches, the sun's sphere beyond the windowpanes and the roofs, the vain flight of the pappus down in the June air. Would all the philosophers and all the armies of the world be able to construct this little fly? No, nor even understand it: this was a shame and an abomination, another road must be found.”

Primo Levi book The Periodic Table

"Hydrogen"
The Periodic Table (1975)

Life, Truth, Books, World

“Just as the number one never can be reduced to zero, once we act or speak, our action or speech is never completely erased. An old oriental saying tells us, "sow good, and the harvest will be good. Sow evil and reap evil". We must understand that everything we do comes back to ourselves. Therefore before wishing for our own happiness and welfare and that of our children, we must do good in secret. To do good in secret means to act without seeking attention and praise, to act without any hope of reward. This is called "intoku."”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

Among the various ways of performing intoku, to walk the way of the universe and to lead others along this way is best.
20. Intoku - good done in secret
Ki Sayings (2003)

Happiness, Children, Secret, Hope

“There is usually enough of everything on the table except cream.”

E. W. Howe (1853–1937) Novelist, magazine and newspaper editor

Country Town Sayings (1911), p31.

“In the depths of our crater lake, everything is silent. The volcano's been extinct for ages. Layer upon layer of solitude, like folds of soft mud. The little bit of light that manages to penetrate to the depths lights up the surroundings like the remains of some faint, distant memory. At these depths there's no sign of life. I don't know how long she looks at me -not at me, maybe, but at the spot where I am. Time's rules don't apply here. Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 23, Kafka Temura

Life, Age, Solitude, Light

“In Erlangen, for instance, in January 1946 he spoke of meeting a German Jew who had lost everything — parents, brothers, and sisters too. 'I could not help myself', said Niemöller, 'I had to tell him, "Dear brother, fellow man, Jew, before you say anything, I say to you: I acknowledge my guilt and beg you to forgive me and my people for this sin."' Niemöller's stance was by no means entirely welcome to the 1,200 students to whom he was preaching. They shouted and jeered as he preached that Germany must accept responsibility for the five or six million murdered Jews. Students in Marburg and Göttingen similarly heckled him. But Niemöller insisted that "We must openly declare that we are not innocent of the Nazi murders, of the murder of German communists, Poles, Jews, and the people in German-occupied countries. No doubt others made mistakes too, but the wave of crime started here and here it reached its highest peak. The guilt exists, there is no doubt about that — even if there were no other guilt than that of the six million clay urns containing the ashes of incinerated Jews from all over Europe. And this guilt lies heavily upon the German people and the German name, even upon Christendom. For in our world and in our name have these things been done."”

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor

Sermons in Erlangen, Marburg, Göttingen and Frankfurt (January 1946), as quoted in Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984 (1984) by James Bentley, p. 177

People, World, Forgiveness, Parent

“Five hundred years ago, when faced with an eclipse, many of us would have believed it was the work of an angry god. But as we've unearthed the language of the Code, we've discovered that the apparent mysteries of our world can be understood without invoking the supernatural. And this for me is what's so remarkable. That despite the incredible complexity of the world we live in, it can all, ultimately, be explained by numbers. Just like the orbit of the planets, life too follows a pattern. And it can all be reduced to cause and effect. In the end, even the flip of a coin is determined by how fast it's spinning and how long it takes to hit the ground. The ultimate symbol of chance isn't random at all. It only appears that way. When we don't understand the Code, the only way we can make sense of our world is to make up stories. But the truth is far more extraordinary. Everything has mathematics at its heart. When everything is stripped away all that remains is the Code.”

Marcus du Sautoy (1965) British professor of mathematics

Conclusion in BBC's The Code, episode 3.

Life, God, Truth, World

“What we have done in Mangalore is a big success story in out fight against indecency. We are thankful to our Mangalore cadre for everything that they have done.”

Pramod Muthalik (1963) Indian politician

Defending the 2009 Mangalore pub attack, as quoted in " Mangalore pub row: Sri Ram Sene men get bail http://www.ibnlive.com/news/india/alerts-muthalik-bail-mangalore-ncw-307618.html", IBNLive (31 January 2009)

Success, Fight

“Yes, I abandoned everything. Painting required it. It was all or nothing.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

Painting

“[…] although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to coöperate with the good, that it may prevail. I try to increase the power God has given me to see the best in everything and every one, and make that Best a part of my life.”

Helen Keller book Optimism

Optimism (1903)

Life, God, World, Optimism

“[Self-determination] is one of the fundamental principles of democracy, the ability to rule yourself. They don't want to give us that. We are not free. We have everything a nation needs, except a land to call our own.”

Eugène Terre'Blanche (1941–2010) South African police officer, farmer, political activist, white supremacist

Interview by Antoinette Keyser http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=249083&area=/insight/insight__national/, (25 August 2005).

Democracy

“In other words: Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing. Against the revolution, nothing, because the revolution also has its rights, and the first right of the revolution is the right to exist, and no one can oppose the revolution's right to exist. Inasmuch as the revolution embodies the interests of the people, inasmuch as the revolution symbolizes the interests of the whole naion, no one can justly claim a right to oppose it.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Words to Intellectuals (1961)

People

“In scriptural texts we think important, the point is made over and over again: Your moral activities can affect the rain, the harvest, and the health of everything you love. The link between moral choices and material outcomes is made continually, and it is received and studied toward normative action. The texts suggest the interruption of desire, of consumption, and of acquisition.”

Laurie Zoloth (1950) American ethicist

"Interrupting Your Life: An Ethics for the Coming Storm" (2014)

Love, Health, Thinking, Study

“Everything we feared about communism – that we would lose our houses and savings and be forced to labor eternally for meager wages with no voice in the system – has come true under capitalism.”

Jeff Sparrow (1969) Australian writer

Communism: A Love Story (2007)

Fear, Communication, Housing

“If you're a young man, you know, you live in a sexual tyranny anyway and your penis is Kim Jong. Sex decides everything. You can have a car crash. You lie in the ditch thinking: "What is the erotic twist in the situation? I can't quite seem to see it yet."”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

on men.
Yeah, Yeah (2011)

Lie, Sex, Cars, Thinking

“It was always worth everything to get away by himself, climb a bit, and study the heavens.”

Fritz Leiber book The Wanderer

Source: The Wanderer (1964), Chapter 3 (p. 26).

Study

“Pearson shut out of science everything which the nineteenth-century had brought into it. He told his scholars that they must put up with a fraction of the universe, and a very small fraction at that — the circle reached by the senses, where sequence could be taken for granted.”

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

Adams quotes — and takes the title of this chapter — from Karl Pearson's classic work The Grammar of Science: "In the chaos behind sensations, in the 'beyond' of sense-impressions, we cannot infer necessity, order or routine, for these are concepts formed by the mind of man on this side of sense-impressions." "Briefly chaos is all that science can logically assert of the supersensuous."
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Sense, Universe, Science

“Years go by, the time it does fly
And every single second is a moment in time
That passes oh so quick, and it seems like nothing
But when you're looking back well it amounts to everything”

Tomas Kalnoky (1980) American musician

"1234, 1234," from "Keasbey Nights" (2003)

Time, Flying

“Everything seemed to happen when you were looking the other way.”

Pat Cadigan book Synners

Source: Synners (1991), Chapter 22 (p. 238)

Way

“Everyday we see evidence of biological growth in technological systems. This is one of the marks of the network economy: that biology has taken root in technology. And this is one of the reasons why networks change everything.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

Change