Quotes about existence (7338 quotes, page 21)

“You are no doubt aware that the Almighty, desiring to lead us to perfection and to improve our state of society, has revealed to us laws which are to regulate our actions. These laws, however, presuppose an advanced state of intellectual culture. We must first form a conception of the Existence of the Creator according to our capabilities; that is, we must have a knowledge of Metaphysics. But this discipline can only be approached after the study of Physics: for the science of Physics borders on Metaphysics, and must even precede it in the course of our studies, as is clear to all who are familiar with these questions.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Introduction

Law , Question , Knowledge , Study

“The Christian religion is, above all the religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity, and humanity, let the blackguard Paine say what he will; it is resignation to God, it is goodness itself to man.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

(26 July 1796).
1750s, Diaries (1750s-1790s)

Wisdom , God , Pain , Religion

“For instance the idea of intuition, imagination, inspiration.... is related in the principle to an invisible world.... when I call these drawings 'The Secret Block' then I try to stress this part of reality as the most important part because spiritual existence is firstly... I find if we are only confronted with this hard part of the world, this already done part of the world, we are not.... related to the whole idea of reality.... the mission of the art is to make visible the whole reality..”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote from 'A. Beuys in the wilderness', 1974 (lecture at the Ulster Museum); as cited in Joseph Beuys and the Celtic Wor(l)d: A Language of Healing, Victoria Walters, LIT Verlag Münster, 2012, p. 198
1970's

Secret , World , Art , Imagination

“In all living beings exists the self-benediction, ‘would that I were never to cease. May I live on’. And this self-benediction cannot exist in him who has not experienced the nature of death. And by this experience of a former life is inferred. This is the affliction of Love of Life, which flows by its own potency.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

In pp. 104-105.
Sources, The Yoga Darsana Of Patanjali With The Sankhya Pravacana Commentary Of Vyasa

Love , Life , Death , Nature

“Thus men continue to accuse themselves of being unjust, violent, cruel, and treacherous to one another, but they do not accuse themselves of cutting the throats of other animals and of feeding upon their mangled limbs, which, nevertheless, is the single cause of that injustice, of that violence, of that cruelty, and of that treachery. … Men believe themselves to be just, provided that they fulfil, in regard to their fellows, the duties which have been prescribed to them. But it is goodness which is the justice of man; and it is impossible, I repeat it, to be good towards one's fellow without being so towards other existences.”

Jean-Antoine Gleizes (1773–1843) French writer

Thalysie: the New Existence. Quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating https://archive.org/stream/ethicsofdietcate00will/ethicsofdietcate00will#page/n3/mode/2up by Howard Williams (London: F. Pitman, 1883), p. 214.

Men , Justice , Animals

“Dotty: Archie says the Church is a monument to irrationality.
George: … The National Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality! — and so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover's favour, or a home for stray dogs! You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!”

Tom Stoppard Jumpers

Act I
Jumpers (1972)

Stupidity , World , Dogs , Home

“Besides the fact of the Christians rejecting all the heathen ceremonies, we must not forget that they plainly maintained that all the heathen religions were false. The Christians thus declared war against the heathen rites, and it is hardly necessary to observe that this was a declaration of hostility against the Roman government, which tolerated all the various forms of superstition that existed in the empire, and could not consistently tolerate another religion, which declared that all the rest were false and all the splendid ceremonies of the empire only a worship of devils.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

M. Aurelius Antoninus

Hostility , War , Religion , Falseness

“In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth's crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts. Their last meal is sometimes preserved in peat or in ice, but their thoughts and feelings are gone.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Lighthousekeeping (2004)

Love , Feeling , Waiting , Heart

“I am not saying that gas chambers did not exist. I did not see them myself. I haven't studied the questions specially. But I believe it is a minor point in the history of the Second World War.”

Jean-Marie Le Pen (1928) French right-wing and nationalist politician

Controversial statement on the Holocaust (13 September 1987), in which he referred to the Nazi gas chambers as a "minor point" [point de detail] in the history of the Second World War, as quoted in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (1993) http://books.google.com/books?id=b8IvAAAAYAAJ&q=%22But+I+believe+that+it+is+a+minor+point

War , World , History , Question

“Some teachers of mankind — as Plato… the first Christians, the orthodox Muslims, and the Buddhists — have gone so far as to repudiate art. …[They consider it] so highly dangerous in its power to infect people against their wills, that mankind will lose far less by banishing all art than by tolerating each and every art. …such people were wrong in repudiating all art, for they denied that which cannot be denied — one of the indispensable means of communication, without which mankind could not exist. …Now there is only fear, lest we should be deprived of any pleasures art can afford, so any type of art is patronized. And I think the last error is much grosser than the first and that its consequences are far more harmful.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

People , Pleasure , Fear , Art

“"Why are you filming this?"
"When the cat is away, the mice will play… Always good to remind the mice that in this case, when the cat is away, the mice will all be eaten by demons. I'm going to send this video file to everyone one of our Downworlder contacts around the world. Just a reminder that there are demons we need Shadowhunters to destroy. That's why they exist."”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Maia Roberts and Lily, the vampire, pg. 505-506
The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)

World , Cats

“It’s relevant that people whose polling places are schools are more likely to vote for sales taxes that will fund education. Or that judges become more likely to deny parole the longer they go without a break. Or that people serve themselves more food when using a large plate. Such effects, even when they’re small, can make a practical difference, especially when they influence votes and justice and health. But their existence doesn’t undermine the idea of a rational and deliberative self. To think otherwise would be like concluding that because salt adds flavor to food, nothing else does.”

Paul Bloom (1963) Canadian/American psychologist

“The War on Reason,” The Atlantic, March 2014, pp. 64–70

People , Health , Education , School

“All those to whom I looked up, were of opinion that the pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were the greatest and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I was convinced, but to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/138/mode/1up p. 138

Happiness , Pleasure , Truth , Feeling

“The role of discourse in society is active; it not only re-confirms and re-enacts existing social relationships and patterns of behavior, it also renegotiates social relationships and introduces new meanings and new behaviors.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 2

Behavior

“We are frankly amused to think that many a novice may perhaps pay for his too literal comprehension of the remarks of one cubist, and his faith in the existence of an Absolute Truth, by painfully juxtaposing the six faces of a cube or the two ears of a model seen in profile.”

Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) French painter

1910s, Du Cubisme (1912)

Truth , Faith , Thinking

“The holocaust tragedy has been abducted by Israeli strategists, with few Jewish protests, for Israel's ideological acrobatics. As Palestinian recent history has shown, no Palestinian engagement with the holocaust will be satisfactory to Israel and its supporters. Israeli demands that Palestinians recognize the holocaust are not about the holocaust at all, but rather about the other part of the package, namely recognizing and submitting to Israel's "right to exist" as a colonial-settler racist state. The Palestinian authority has given up, but the Palestinian people should continue to resist this Zionist package deal. Their resistance is the only remaining obstacle to a complete Zionist victory, one that seeks to be sealed by Zionism's rewriting of both Palestinian and Jewish histories.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
"Palestinians and Jewish History: Recognition or Submission?"

People , History , Support , Victory

“I have lost my sense of a universe. They say this is the richest era of human existence; but I think a man can be richer in knowing every atom of a single golden island in a blue sea than by spending his days striding among all the worlds.”

Robert Silverberg book The Man in the Maze

Source: The Man in the Maze (1969), Chapter 1, section 2 (pp. 13-14)

World , Thinking , Sense , Universe

“We suffer: the external world begins to exist...; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

Pain , World , Suffering

“That original intelligence, say the MAGIANS, who is the first principle of all things, discovers himself immediately to the mind and understanding alone; but has placed the sun as his image in the visible universe; and when that bright luminary diffuses its beams over the earth and the firmament, it is a faint copy of the glory which resides in the higher heavens. If you would escape the displeasure of this divine being, you must be careful never to set your bare foot upon the ground, nor spit into a fire, nor throw any water upon it, even though it were consuming a whole city. Who can express the perfections of the Almighty? say the Mahometans. Even the noblest of his works, if compared to him, are but dust and rubbish. How much more must human conception fall short of his infinite perfections? His smile and favour renders men for ever happy; and to obtain it for your children, the best method is to cut off from them, while infants, a little bit of skin, about half the breadth of a farthing. Take two bits of cloth, say the Roman catholics, about an inch or an inch and a half square, join them by the corners with two strings or pieces of tape about sixteen inches long, throw this over your head, and make one of the bits of cloth lie upon your breast, and the other upon your back, keeping them next your skin: There is not a better secret for recommending yourself to that infinite Being, who exists from eternity to eternity.”

David Hume The Natural History of Religion

Part VII - Confirmation of this doctrine
The Natural History of Religion (1757)

Men , Children , Lie , Secret

“That Being, who gave me existence, and through almost threescore years has been continually showering his favors upon me, whose very chastisements have been blessings to me; can I doubt that he loves me? And, if he loves me, can I doubt that he will go on to take care of me, not only here but hereafter? This to some may seem presumption; to me it appears the best grounded hope; hope of the future built on experience of the past.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Letter to George Whitefield (19 June 1764), published in The Works of Benjamin Franklin (1856).
Epistles

Love , Hope , Appearance , Past

“If human beings were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible… This does not mean, however, that humans are not, and do not have to be, something, that they are simply consigned to nothingness and therefore can freely decide whether to be or not to be, to adopt or not to adopt this or that destiny (nihilism and decisionism coincide at this point). There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this is not an essence nor properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality.”

Giorgio Agamben (1942) Italian philosopher

Source: The Coming Community (1993), Ch. 11 : Ethics

“There have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Great Divorce

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

Men , God , Christ

“Eyes exist in the savage state.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

L'œil existe à l'état sauvage.
Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, (1926) Andre Breton

“The secret to successful scrying was to realize that the future was not fixed and there was no way of predicting it. None. All one could do was to identify what already existed unacknowledged. Lovers pledged themselves to each other long before their first kiss. Murder was implicit in friendship. A carcinoma that looked like a speck of dust on the X-ray spelled death. So much of what appeared to be random event was simply the working out of consequences.”

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 13 (p. 222)

Death , Friendship , Secret , Way

“The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the beautiful exists for the gratification of an observer, it is independent of him. In this sense music, too, has no aim (object), and the mere fact that this particular art is so closely bound up with our feelings by no means justifies the assumption that its aesthetic principles depend on this union.”

Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) austrian musician and musicologist

The Beautiful in Music (1854)

Beauty , Art , Music , Feeling

“You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 17

“A year ago we liberated them from the Fascist Monster, and they still sit doing their best to smile politely at us, as hungry as ever, more disease-ridden than ever before, in the ruins of their beautiful city where law and order have ceased to exist. And what is the prize that is to be eventually won? The rebirth of democracy. The glorious prospect of being able one day to choose their rulers from a list of powerful men, most of whose corruptions are generally known and accepted with weary resignation. The days of Benito Mussolini must seem like a lost paradise compared with this.”

Norman Lewis book Naples '44

Naples '44

Men , Disease , Law , Smile

“In recent years there has been increased interest in the effects of internal communication on decision processes. A number of hypotheses relating the bias in information to the final decision have been proposed. In this paper we discuss two laboratory experiments which were designed to test two such hypotheses. The first experiment tests the hypothesis that cost and sales estimations are made with the implicit assumption that a biased pay-off structure exists. The second experiment tests explicitly the effects of biased and unbiased pay-off structures on estimation within an organization. An analysis of the data for the two experiments is made and some implications for further research are drawn from the results.”

Richard Cyert (1921–1998) American economist

Richard Cyert, James G. March, William H. Starbuck. (1961) "Two experiments on bias and conflict in organisational estimation," Management Science, 254–64; Abstract

Communication , Decision

“If they are unwilling to give, they should at least lend with all readiness and alacrity, not with the prospect of receiving anything back except the principal. … In place of the interest which they determine not to accept they receive a further bonus of the fairest and most precious things that human life has to give, mercy neighborliness, charity, magnanimity, a good report and good fame. And what acquisition can rival these? Nay, even the great king will appear as the poorest of men if compared with a single virtue. For his wealth is soulless, buried deep in store-houses and recesses of the earth, but the wealth of virtue lies in the sovereign part of the soul, and the purest part of existence.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

213.
On the Virtues

Life , Men , Soul , Appearance

“On the whole, a man who denies the existence of the effects arranged according to the causes in the question of arts, or whose wisdom cannot understand it, then he has no knowledge of the art of its Maker.”

Averroes book On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy

On the Harmony of Religions and Philosophy

Wisdom , Art , Understanding , Question

“Man's position in the world is defined by the fact that in every dimension of his being and behavior he finds himself at every moment between two boundaries. This condition appears as the formal structure of our existence, filled always with different contents in life's diverse provinces, activities, and destinies. We feel that the content and value of every hour stands between a higher and a lower; every thought between a wiser and a more foolish; every possession between a more extended and a more limited; every deed between a greater and a lesser measure of meaning, adequacy, and morality.”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

Source: The View of Life (1918), p. 1. Opening line of first essay "Life as Transcendence"

Life , World , Behavior , Feeling

“Shortly before the 1860 election, Frederick Douglass offered a succinct summary of the dilemma confronting opponents of slavery like Lincoln, who worked within the political system rather than outside it. Abstractly, Douglass wrote, most northerners would agree that slavery was wrong. The challenge was to find a way of 'translating antislavery sentiment into antislavery action'. The constitution barred interference with slavery in the states where it already existed. For Lincoln, as for most Republicans, antislavery action meant not attacking slavery where it was but working to prevent slavery's westward expansion. Lincoln, however, did talk about a future without slavery. The aim of the Republican Party, he insisted, was to put the institution on the road to "ultimate extinction", a phrase he borrowed from Henry Clay. Ultimate extinction could take a long time. Lincoln once said that slavery might survive for another hundred years. But to the South, Lincoln seemed as dangerous as an abolitionist, because he was committed to the eventual end of slavery. This was why his election in 1860 led inexorably to secession and civil war.”

Eric Foner (1943) American historian

"Our Lincoln" http://www.ericfoner.com/articles/012609nation.html (26 January 2009), The Nation
2000s

War , Way , Time , Future

“The universe may
be as great as they say.
But it wouldn't be missed
if it didn't exist.”

Piet Hein (1905–1996) Danish puzzle designer, mathematician, author, poet

Nothing Is Indespensable : Grook to warn the universe against megalomania
Grooks

Universe

“The hardship of it was a pleasure. Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames. Objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterward, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch: Cogito ergo sum. For him that had not been true; his truth had been: Sentio ergo sum. I feel, so I exist. He enjoyed this fearful, miserable, confused life, and not only because it made more sense than nonlife. He could never explain that to anyone.”

Brian W. Aldiss book Greybeard

Source: Greybeard (1964), Chapter 3 “The River: Swifford Fair” (p. 75)

Life , Pleasure , Truth , Fear

“I guess that singing is probably a very selfish thing. I guess it doesn't matter what you do. It's selfish in a way 'cause there's satisfaction involved and so. As a singer, you sometimes have to justify your reason for existence in a sort of a way because: what really are you doing for people, they say?”

Anne Murray (1945) Canadian singer

On singing as a job, as quoted in a 1971 CBC interview: "Anne Murray thinks singing is selfish: The Vault", CBC/Radio-Canada, CBC.ca, 14 February 2018 http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1161696323776

People , Way , Singing , Selfishness

“The prototype of the rule creator, but not the only variety as we shall see, is the crusading reformer. He is interested in the content of rules. The existing rules do not satisfy him because there is some evil which profoundly disturbs him. He feels that nothing can be right in the world until rules are made to correct it. He operates with an absolute ethic; what he sees is truly and totally evil with no qualification. Any means is justified to do away with it. The crusader is fervent and righteous, often self-righteous.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (1963), p. 147.

World , Feeling , Evil

“Our idealists must own that their velleity to abolish all suffering is most fully expressed in the Fifth Wisdom of Lamaism, the doctrine that teaches that "no durable happiness, nor yet security, for any sentient being can exist while others are a prey to suffering." That truth cannot be questioned and you may take it to heart: in practical terms it means we got ourselves born on the wrong planet -- in the wrong universe.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"On the Roof of the World", Liberty Bell magazine (December 1987)
1970s, 1980s

Wisdom , Truth , Question , Suffering

“In recent years there has been increased interest in the effects of internal communication on decision processes. A number of hypotheses relating the bias in information to the final decision have been proposed. In this paper we discuss two laboratory experiments which were designed to test two such hypotheses. The first experiment tests the hypothesis that cost and sales estimations are made with the implicit assumption that a biased pay-off structure exists. The second experiment tests explicitly the effects of biased and unbiased pay-off structures on estimation within an organization. An analysis of the data for the two experiments is made and some implications for further research are drawn from the results.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

Richard Cyert, James G. March, William H. Starbuck. (1961) "Two experiments on bias and conflict in organisational estimation," Management Science, 254–64; Abstract

Communication , Decision

“A waste is a nine-year-old boy playing catch with the roof of his garage who already understands that his existence makes for the perfect insult- gay. "You're so gay" a. k. a. stupid a. k. a. dumb a. k. a. wrong. Do you have any idea how gross it feels to hide inside the pile of lies it takes to make you, Sweet Angel, comfortable?”

Buddy Wakefield (1974) American poet

A Waste
Poetry

Stupidity , Angels , Feeling , Boy

“Well, moving swiftly sideways into cognitive neuroscience…In the past twenty years we’ve made huge strides, using imaging tools, direct brain interfaces, and software simulations. We’ve pretty much disproved the existence of free will, at least as philosophers thought they understood it. A lot of our decision-making mechanics are subconscious; we only become aware of our choices once we’ve begun to act on them. And a whole lot of other things that were once thought to correlate with free will turn out also to be mechanical. If we use transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the right temporoparietal junction, we can suppress subjects’ ability to make moral judgements; we can induce mystical religious experiences: We can suppress voluntary movements, and the patients will report that they didn’t move because they didn’t want to move. The TMPJ finding is deeply significant in the philosophy of law, by the way: It strongly supports the theory that we are not actually free moral agents who make decisions—such as whether or not to break the law—of our own free will.
“In a nutshell, then, what I’m getting at is that the project of law, ever since the Code of Hammurabi—the entire idea that we can maintain social order by obtaining voluntary adherence to a code of permissible behaviour, under threat of retribution—is fundamentally misguided.” His eyes are alight; you can see him in the Cartesian lecture-theatre of your mind, pacing door-to-door as he addresses his audience. “If people don’t have free will or criminal intent in any meaningful sense, then how can they be held responsible for their actions? And if the requirements of managing a complex society mean the number of laws have exploded until nobody can keep track of them without an expert system, how can people be expected to comply with them?”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 26, “Liz: It’s Complicated” (pp. 286-287)

People , Law , Way , Idea

“The existence of the Zionist regime is tantamount to imposition of an unending and unrestrained threat so that none of the nations and Islamic countries of the region and beyond can feel secure from its threat. The closer these nations are to the epicenter of this threat, the more threatened they feel. The people of Palestine are at the very core of such a threat. They have not been able to spend a day with peace of mind for the past sixty years. Three generations of sons and daughters of Palestinians have lived and are presently living under these circumstances. The peoples of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the entire Middle East are essentially under similar situation.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

2006, 2006 International Qods Conference address

People , Peace , Feeling , Past

“Since as we have seen the entrepreneurial qualification is something which, like many other qualities, is distributed in an ethnically homogeneous group according to the law of error, the number of individuals who satisfy progressively diminishing standards in this respect continually increases. Hence, neglecting exceptional cases — of which the existence of a few Europeans in a negro population would be an example — with the progressive lightening of the task continually more people can and will become entrepreneurs, wherefore the successful appearance of an entrepreneur is followed by the appearance not simply of some others, but of ever greater numbers, though progressively less qualified.”

Joseph Alois Schumpeter The Theory of Economic Development

The Theory of Economic Development (1934), Ch. 6 : The Business Cycle

People , Law , Error , Appearance

“Because it is clear from the fossil record that almost every species that has ever existed is extinct; extinction is the rule, survival is the exception.”

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

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

“Reverence is the highest quality of man’s nature; and that individual, or nation, which has it slightly developed, is so far unfortunate. It is a strong spiritual instinct, and seeks to form channels for itself where none exists; thus Americans, in the dearth of other objects to worship, fall to worshipping themselves.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

1840s, Letters from New York (1843)
Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/63/12263.html, vol. 1, letter 18

Nature , Strong

“The poets of the last generation were extremely erudite, but their erudition was of the rather specialized type that passed as currency of the realm in a somewhat literary realm. About Darwin, Marx, Freud and Co., about all characteristically “scientific” or “modern” thinkers most of them concluded regretfully: “If they had not existed, it would not have been necessary to ignore them.””

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

Or deplore them.
“New Year Letter”, p. 56
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

“Yet while they exist, regardless of how long, each system has a specific structure made up of certain maintained relationships among its parts, and manifests irreducible characteristics of its own.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Variant: Each system has a speciﬁc structure made up of certain maintained relationships among its parts, and manifests irreducible characteristics of its own.
Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 12.

Parting

“The courage to stand alone as if others didn't exist and think only of what you're doing. Not to get scared if people ignore you. You have to wait for years, have to die. Then after you're dead, if you're lucky, you become somebody.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The house on the hill (1949), Chapter 8, p. 105

People , Courage , Thinking , Waiting

“The President recalled the very warm ties that exist between the two countries build on civilisational links of thousands of years. We felt that there are enormous opportunities of cooperation between the two countries in the field of information and digital technologies”

Sushma Swaraj (1952–2019) Indian politician

Between India and Sri Lanka, quoted on Leader Call (February 11, 2016), "Sushma Swaraj calls on Sri Lankan PM Ranil Wickremesinghe" http://leadercall.com/2016/02/sushma-swaraj-calls-on-sri-lankan-pm-ranil-wickremesinghe/

Country

“If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on forever. But luckily we are only men — and cowards.”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) Austrian physicist

Mind and Matter (1958)

Men , War , World , Fear

“Wrongly do the Greeks suppose that aught begins or ceases to be; for nothing comes into being or is destroyed; but all is an aggregation or secretion of pre-existent things: so that all-becoming might more correctly be called becoming-mixed, and all corruption, becoming-separate.”

Anaxagoras (-500–-428 BC) ancient Greek philosopher

quoted in Heinrich Ritter, Tr. from German by Alexander James William Morrison, The History of Ancient Philosophy, Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=pUgXAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA284 (1838)

Secret

“Or, to go a step further, let us glance at what science has done to establish rational foundations for physical and moral health. Science tells us how we ought to live in order to preserve the health of our own bodies, how to maintain in good conditions of existence the crowded masses of our population. But does not all the vast amount of work done in these two directions remain a dead letter in our books? We know it does. And why? Because science today exists only for a handful of privileged persons, because social inequality which divides society into two classes — the wage-slaves and the grabbers of capital — renders all its teachings as to the conditions of a rational existence only the bitterest irony to nine-tenths of mankind.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

An Appeal to the Young (1880)

Health , Books , Science , Personality

“Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves — that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

Problem , Thinking , Suffering

“I am about to take a rapid review of the history of the French Revolution, which began the era of new societies in Europe, as the English Revolution had begun the era of new governments. This revolution not only modified the political power, but it entirely changed the internal existence of the nation. The forms of the society of the Middle Ages still remained. The land was divided into hostile provinces, the population into rival classes. The nobility had lost all their powers, but still retained all their distinctions: the people had no rights, royalty no limits; France was in an utter confusion of arbitrary administration, of class legislation and special privileges to special bodies. For these abuses the revolution substituted a system more conformable with justice, and better suited to our times. It substituted law in the place of arbitrary will, equality in that of privilege; delivered men from the distinctions of classes, the land from the barriers of provinces, trade from the shackles of corporations and fellowships, agriculture from feudal subjection and the oppression of tithes, property from the impediment of entails, and brought everything to the condition of one state, one system of law, one people.”

François Mignet (1796–1884) French historian and journalist

History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 http://clc-library-org-docs.angelfire.com/hfrr.html, Introduction

Men , Hostility , People , Age

“Then, above all, the English people have a curious sense of humour, rather than wit. Humour comes from the heart; wit comes from the brain. We can laugh at ourselves. Do you remember what Ruskin said? "The English laugh is the purest and truest in the metals that can be minted," and indeed, only Heaven can know what the country owes to it. Well, laughter is one of the best things that God has given us, and with hearty laughter neither malice nor indecency can exist. And of all men who have shown us what that laughter can mean, none was like Dickens, every one of whose characters is English to the marrow; and if I might mention a living writer, I think the truest Englishmen are found in Mr. Priestley's novels.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast from London (25 September 1933), quoted in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 13.
1933

Men , God , People , Thinking

“Fascism is the result of the collapse of Europe's spiritual and social order… catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and tenets as unalterable natural laws. They suddenly exposed the vacuum behind the facade of society.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 24

Men , Law , Nature

“Management as an activity has always existed to make people’s desires through organized effort. Management facilitates the efforts of people in organized groups and arises when people seek to cooperate to achieve goals.”

Daniel A. Wren (1932) American business theorist

Source: The evolution of management thought, 1972, p. 11-12 (in 1972 edition)

People , Effort

“The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.”

J.M. Coetzee book Diary of a Bad Year

Source: Diary of a Bad Year (2007), p. 17

Religion , Law , Nature , Time

“As opposed to [megatechnics], an organic system directs itself to qualitative richness, amplitude, spaciousness, free from quantitative pressure and crowding, since self-regulation, self-correction, and self-propulsion are as much an integral property of organisms as nutrition, reproduction, growth, and repair. Balance, wholeness, completeness, continuous interplay between inner and outer, the subjective and the objective aspects of existence are identifying characteristics of the organic model; and the general name for an economy based on such a model is an economy of plenitude.”

Lewis Mumford book The Myth of the Machine

The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970)

“I myself have experienced the volcanic existential depths of the Greek language. It was during a performance of Medea by Tzeni Karezi at the Herod Atticus theatre in Athens, when she was pleading to the callous Jason to take pity on her and she used the word ' splachniasou'. 'Pity' is too weak a word to describe the emotional and psychological depths ' splachniasou' expresses. 'Splachna 'is the part of the body where a woman carries her unborn children, the very root of ontological existence. How deep can you get!”

Angelique Rockas South African actress and founder of Internationalist Theatre, London

On the Greek language
Interview on Helenism .net (September 2011)

Children , Parting

“The man of half-grown intelligence, when he observes an object which is bathed in the glow of a seeming beauty, thinks that that object is in its essence beautiful, no matter what it is that so prepossesses him with the pleasure of the eye. He will not go deeper into the subject. But the other, whose mind's eye is clear, and who can inspect such appearances, will neglect those elements which are the material only upon which the Form of Beauty works; to him they will be but the ladder by which he climbs to the prospect of that Intellectual Beauty, in accordance with their share in which all other beauties get their existence and their name.”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

On Virginity, Chapter 11

Pleasure , Beauty , Intelligence , Thinking

“I follow you — because I must. Do you think I am not afraid of death? I am afraid because I do not know what there is, and see only darkness without end; which makes me recoil. I do not know whether there be nothingness, or existence without space and time; perhaps some midplanetary wind carries the spiritual monad from star to star to implant it in an ever-renewing existence. I do not know whether there be immense restlessness, or a peace so perfect as only Omnipotence and Love can bestow on us. But since you have died through my "I do not know," how could I remain here — and live?
The more I fear, the more I do not know, — the more I cannot let you go alone; I cannot, Aniela mine, — and I follow. Together we shall sink into nothingness, or together begin a new life; and here below where we have suffered let us be buried in oblivion.”

Henryk Sienkiewicz book Without Dogma

Rome, 5 December
Without Dogma (1891)

Love , Life , Death , Fear

“Orwell's defenders always look to contextualize Orwell's shortcomings in a historic moment. Whatever his infraction, he was a victim of circumstance—times were different then, and, for example, Hitler was looking really good for a minute there. Orwell never meant that his books should be employed to stultify schoolchildren. And yet that's what "Animal Farm" is—an educational missile aimed at any healthy impulse towards reform. The argument that "Animal Farm" is a generalized indictment of totalitarianism is simply unsupportable by the text or any existing presentation of the text. Rather, the intelligence of the pigs as opposed to the stupidity of the other animals, and the ultimate hopelessness of revolution, renders "Animal Farm" a de facto endorsement of the status quo.”

John Reed (novelist) (1969) American writer

Saint George and the Damn Truth http://www.mobylives.com/Orwell_Reed.html

Books , Stupidity , Education , Intelligence

“Vertical and horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces; they exist everywhere and dominate everything; their reciprocal action constitutes 'life'. I recognized that the equilibrium of any particular aspect of nature rests on the equivalence of its opposites.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in 'Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art', Piet Mondrian (1937), in 'Documents of modern Art', for Wittenborn, New York 1945, p. 13; as quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 55
1930's

Life , Nature

“It is likely … that human society cannot exist without some source of sacredness. Those states which have sought openly to remove it have tended in the end to assume divinity themselves.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 146.

“Fritz Nonnenbruch, the financial editor of the Voelkischer Beobachter, states: ‘There exists no law which binds the State. The state can do what it regards as necessary, because it has the authority…. The next stage of National-Socialist economic policy consists of replacing capitalist laws by policy.”

Günter Reimann (1904–2005) German economist

Source: The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism, 2014, p. 13 (Fritz Nonnenbruch, Die Dynamische Wirtschaft (Munich, Centralverlag der N.S.D.A.P., 1936), pp. 114-119

Law

“I’m your apprentice!” Simon protested. “When are you going to teach me something?”
“Idiot boy! What do you think I’m doing? I’m trying to teach you to read and to write. That’s the most important thing. What do you want to learn?”
“Magic!” Simon said immediately. Morgenes stared at him.
“And what about reading…?” the doctor asked ominously.
Simon was cross. As usual, people seemed determined to balk him at every turn. “I don’t know,” he said. What’s so important about reading and letters, anyway? Books are just stories about things. Why should I want to read books?”
Morgenes grinned, an old stoat finding a hole in the henyard fence. “Ah, boy, how can I be mad at you…what a wonderful, charming, perfectly stupid thing to say!” The doctor chuckled appreciatively, deep in his throat.
“What do you mean?” Simon’s eyebrows moved together as he frowned. “Why is it wonderful and stupid?”
“Wonderful because I have such a wonderful answer,” Morgenes laughed. Stupid because…because young people are made stupid, I suppose—as tortoises are made with shells, and wasps with stings—it is their protection against life’s unkindnesses.”
“Begging your pardon?” Simon was totally flummoxed now.
“Books,” Morgenes said grandly, leaning back on his precarious stool, “—books are magic. That is the simple answer. And books are traps as well.”
“Magic? Traps?”
“Books are a form of magic—” the doctor lifted the volume he had just laid on the stack, “—because they span time and distance more surely than any spell or charm. What did so-and-so think about such-and-such two hundred years agone? Can you fly back through the ages and ask him? No—or at least, probably not.
But, ah! If he wrote down his thoughts, if somewhere there exists a scroll, or a book of his logical discourses…he speaks to you! Across centuries! And if you wish to visit far Nascadu or lost Khandia, you have also but to open a book….”
“Yes, yes, I suppose I understand all that.” Simon did not try to hide his disappointment. This was not what he had meant by the word “magic.” “What about traps, then? Why ‘traps’?”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Morgenes leaned forward, waggling the leather-bound volume under Simon’s nose. “A piece of writing is a trap,” he said cheerily, “and the best kind. A book, you see, is the only kind of trap that keeps its captive—which is knowledge—alive forever. The more books you have,” the doctor waved an all-encompassing hand about the room, “the more traps, then the better chance of capturing some particular, elusive, shining beast—one that might otherwise die unseen.”
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 7, “The Conqueror Star” (pp. 92-93).

Life , People , Books , Age

“The great error of the wisest known nations of antiquity, the Greeks and Romans, was the preference invariable given to the imagined interests of an imaginary existence called the state or country, and the real interests of the real existences, or human beings, upon whom, individually and collectively, their laws could alone operate. Another error was the opposition in which they invariably placed the interests of their own nation to the interests of all other nations; and a third and greater error, was the elevating into a virtue this selfish preference of their own national interests, under the name of patriotism. The moderns are growing a little wise on these matters, but they are still very ignorant.”

Frances Wright (1795–1852) American activist

Independence Day speech (1828)

Law , Error , Imagination , Selfishness

“I began my talk by saying that I had not written my plays for purposes of discussion. At once, I felt a ripple of panic run through the hall. I suddenly realised why. To everyone present, discussion was the whole point of drama. That was why the faculty had been endowed — that was why all those buildings had been put up! I had undermined the entire reason for their existence.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

"Tom Stoppard," profile by Kenneth Tynan, The New Yorker (1977-12-19).
Interviews and profiles

“In a detached person nothing merely temporal is born in possessiveness. His eyes are opened. He becomes fully aware and, receiving his blessed existence and life, is one with Him; for all things are here one in the He becomes fully aware and, receiving his blessed existence and life, is one with Him; for all things are here one in the One One.”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Life of the Servant

Life , Personality

“If the chiefs as leaders are going to earn and maintain the respect of the people of Fiji and preserve the uniqueness of the traditional and cultural structures they need to also recognise that the differences that exist between us all cannot and should not be ignored.”

Koila Nailatikau (1953) Fijian politician

Source: Senate speech, 24 August, 2005 (excerpts)

People

“Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man… begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization — the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

"Corporate Man," The New York Times (22 January 1984)

Life , Women , Men , Health

“His [the Philistine’s] existence is not animated by any keen desire for knowledge and insight for their own sake, or by any desire for really aesthetic pleasures which is so entirely akin to it. If, however, any pleasures of this kind are forced on him by fashion or authority, he will dispose of them as briefly as possible as a kind of compulsory labour.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Kein Drang nach Erkenntniß und Einsicht, um ihrer selbst Willen, belebt sein [des Philisters] Daseyn, auch keiner nach eigentlich ästhetischen Genüssen, als welcher dem ersteren durchaus verwandt ist. Was dennoch von Genüssen solcher Art etwan Mode, oder Auktorität, ihm aufdringt, wird er als eine Art Zwangsarbeit möglichst kurz abthun.
E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 344
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Pleasure , Fashion , Knowledge , Animals

“Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, not pro-market in the sense of fostering truly free and open competition.”

Luigi Zingales (1963) Professor at University of Chicago

"Capitalism After the Crisis" http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/capitalism-after-the-crisis, National Affairs, issue 1 (Fall 2009), retrieved on 2012-10-17

Business , Sense

“They (Native Americans) didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Q and A session following her address to the graduating class of The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, March 6, 1974 - found in Endgame: Resistance, by Derrick Jensen, Seven Stories Press, 2006, pg 220

Men , Animals , Fight , Parting

“When people fear surveillance, whether it exists or not, they grow afraid to speak their minds and hearts freely to their government or to anyone else.”

Sam Ervin (1896–1985) Democratic United States Senator from North Carolina

Quoted in Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), p. 549

People , Fear , Heart

“Evidently Proclus does not advocate here simply a superstition, but science; for notwithstanding that it is occult, and unknown to our scholars, who deny its possibilities, magic is still a science. It is firmly and solely based on the mysterious affinities existing between organic and inorganic bodies, the visible productions of the four kingdoms, and the invisible powers of the universe. That which science calls gravitation, the ancients and the mediaeval hermetists called magnetism, attraction, affinity. It is the universal law, which is understood by Plato and explained in Timaeus as the attraction of lesser bodies to larger ones, and of similar bodies to similar, the latter exhibiting a magnetic power rather than following the law of gravitation. The anti-Aristotelean formula that gravity causes all bodies to descend with equal rapidity, without reference to their weight, the difference being caused by some other unknown agency, would seem to point a great deal more forcibly to magnetism than to gravitation, the former attracting rather in virtue of the substance than of the weight. A thorough familiarity with the occult faculties of everything existing in nature, visible as well as invisible; their mutual relations, attractions, and repulsions; the cause of these, traced to the spiritual principle which pervades and animates all things; the ability to furnish the best conditions for this principle to manifest itself, in other words a profound and exhaustive knowledge of natural law — this was and is the basis of magic.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

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

Law , Nature , Knowledge , Universe

“A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.”

Isaac Asimov book Runaround

"Runaround" in Astounding Science Fiction (March 1942); later published in I, Robot (1950)
The Three Laws of Robotics (1942)

Law

“These effects of mescalin are the sort of effects you could expect to follow the administration of a drug having the power to impair the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve. When the brain runs out of sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can't be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world. As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. … Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

describing his experiment with mescaline, p. 26
The Doors of Perception (1954)

World , Beauty , Past , Personality

“(…) as long as you cling to the idea that only what has name and shape exists, the Supreme will appear to you non-existing. When you understand that names and shapes are hollow shells without any content whatsoever, and what is real is nameless and formless, pure energy of life and light of consciousness, you will be at peace – immersed in the deep silence of reality.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Reality
Source: "I am That." P.37.

Life , Peace , Idea , Understanding

“On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

The Guardian, 23 October 2004, Dumb show, http://home.valornet.com/rolandtignor/demoncrats20.htm http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/obama-barack-america-1981504-new-first
Guardian columns

God , World , Law

“And I tell you that whether or not these projection images are hallucinations, they can be dangerous and you must respect the reality in which they exist. I want to be sure that you realize that some of these constructions will belong to other systems. You are safe as long as you do not meddle. You may explore, and freely, and that is all.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 334, quoting from Session 265

Reality

“When learning's triumph o'er her barb'rous foes
First reared the stage, immortal Shakespeare rose;
Each change of many-colored life he drew,
Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new:
Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign,
And panting Time toiled after him in vain.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Prologue at the Opening of Drury Lane Theatre (1747)

Life , World , Color , Imagination

“I was twenty-one when I first went to New York, and I was so fascinated by the architecture and glad that something like that existed and that I was able to have this visual experience that I thought to myself, this is where I want to live. To me, New York had a direct link with sculpture – that must have been it. Although at twenty-one I wasn't a sculptress yet, I was just starting my studies and I didn't even know what I wanted to do... New York is a city of incredible stability and solidity. And then the height of the buildings – that impressed me, like the people who always seemed a bit happier than the Germans in the street. When I came back to Germany it seemed to me that it wasn't particularly nice, my visual surroundings – it was all so dreary. And modernism hardly features at all in Germany. Okay, there was Bauhaus and there was this and that, but modernism is practically non-existent in architecture.”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

2001 - 2010, Isa Genzken in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans' (2003)

People , Study

“Remember that faith and doubt cannot exist in the same mind at the same time, for one will dispel the other.”

Thomas S. Monson (1927–2018) president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Decisions Determine Destiny, fireside address http://speeches.byu.edu/reader/reader.php?id=10726| delivered on 6 November 2005.

Faith , Time

“After centuries of relative silence and enforced acceptance, we adapted a technique of exposing the problem by direct and dramatic methods. We had confidence that when we awakened the nation to the immorality and evil of inequality, there would be an upsurge of conscience followed by remedial action. We knew that there were solutions and that the majority of the nation were ready for them. Yet we also knew that the existence of solutions would not automatically operate to alter conditions. We had to organize, not only arguments, but people in the millions for action. Finally we had to be prepared to accept all the consequences involved in dramatizing our grievances in the unique style we had devised.”

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

1960s, Family Planning - A Special and Urgent Concern (1966)

People , Confidence , Problem , Silence

“I used to be able to look at myself and grin without giving a damn about how ugly it made me look. Now I was looking at myself the same way those people did back there. I was looking at a big guy with an ugly reputation, a guy who had no earthly reason for existing in a decent, normal society. That's what the judge had said.
I was sweating and cold at the same time. Maybe it did happen to me over there. Maybe I did have a taste for death. Maybe I liked it too much to taste anything else. Maybe I was twisted and rotted inside. Maybe I would be washed down the sewer with the rest of all the rottenness sometime. What was stopping it from happening now? Why was I me with some kind of lucky charm around my neck that kept me going when I was better off dead?”

Mickey Spillane book One Lonely Night

One Lonely Night (1951)

Death , People , Way , Guy

“There is no methodological process by which one can confirm the existence of an object independent of the confirmatory process involving oneself. The outside is a void, there is only the inside. A person's world, the inside or internal view is all that can be known. The rest can only be the object of speculation.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Karl. E. Weick, in: Barry M. Staw, Gerald R. Salancik (eds.) New directions in organizational behavior, St. Clair Press, 1977, p. 273
1970s

World , Personality

“There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (June 16, 1892)
Letters

“I say, 'I should like to die', but that's not true at all, I should like to get younger.... youth and old age are similar in more ways than one, and they are the two moments in life when one can feel one's own soul which would be a proof that it exists.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

quote in Berthe's notebook, after the death of her husband Eugène Manet, 1892; cited in Berthe Morisot, ed. Delafond and Genet-Bondeville, 1997, p. 70
1881 - 1895

Life , Youth , Age , Way