Quotes about experiment (5425 quotes, page 41)

“Inflation and Employment in capitalist countries, in my own view, the change is the other way around: the constraints on the pressure of demand tend to be excessive, with the result that unemployment is much greater than can be justified by the needs of resource-allocation, and the rate of economic growth is appreciably less than it could be.
The main reason for this is that the distribution of power and, ultimately, the distribution of incomes, changes in favor of labor the faster the economy grows and the nearer it is to full employment, and over a longer period it changes in favor of capital the greater the volume of unemployment. This is the real reason why the continuance of Keynesian policies after the war led to a recrudescence of long-discredited ideas that go by the name of “monetarism.” The main attraction of monetarism was not its intellectual simplicity— inflation is a matter of the money supply, period— but that it elevated the fear of inflation to the unique position which could not be justified by the experience of numerous countries who habitually suffer from it.”

Nicholas Kaldor (1908–1986) British/Hungarian economist

Nicholas Kaldor, Economics without Equilibrium (1985), p.37-38

Money , War , Fear , Way

“Postmodernists place an overriding emphasis on the limited, partial, subjective character of people's individual experiences--rejecting the strategy of collective struggle against institutions of oppression and exploitation to instead focus on individual and " in any particular situation.”

Sharon Smith (writer) (1956) American historian

A Marxist Case For Intersectionality (2017)

People

“All characteristics of material things as they are presented to us in the acts of external perception (e. g. colour) are endowed with the separateness of spatial extension, but it is only when we build up a single connected real world out of all our experiences that the spatial extension, which is a constituent of every perception, becomes a part of one and the same all-inclusive space. … every material thing can, without changing content, equally well occupy a position in Space different from its present one. This immediately gives us the property of the homogeneity of space which is the root of the conception, Congruence.”

Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

Introduction
Space—Time—Matter (1952)

World , Change , Parting

“Except in a few metropolitan ghettos, my experience has been that few Negroes have any interest at all in this organization, much less give any allegiance to its pessimistic doctrines. The Black Muslims are a quasi-religious, sociopolitical movement that has appealed to some Negroes who formerly were Christians. For the first time, the Negro was presented with a choice of a religion other than Christianity. What this appeal actually represented was an indictment of Christian failures to live up to Christianity's precepts; for there is nothing in Christianity, nor in the Bible, that justifies racial segregation. But when the Negroes' genuine fighting spirit rose during 1963, the appeal of the Muslims began to diminish.”

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

In reference to the Black Muslims who advocated Black Nacionalism. At his Interview in Playboy (January 1965) https://web.archive.org/web/20080706183244/http://www.playboy.com/arts-entertainment/features/mlk/04.html
1960s

Religion , Failure , Time , Fight

“There are too many "creative writing" courses and seminars, in which young wirters are constantly being taught to rewrite the previous generation. They should be experimenting on their own. Every writer faces different problems which he must solve for himself.”

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter

"Conversation with Dos Passos," New Leader, Feb 23 1959

Problem

“The storming of the Mannerheim Line was regarded as a model of operational and tactical art. Troops were taught to overcome the enemy's protracted defense by a gradual accumulation of forces and a patient "gnawing through" of breaches in the enemy's fortifications in accordance with all the rules of engineering science. Insufficient attention was paid to questions of co-operation among different branches and services of the armed forces under rapidly changing conditions. We had to retrain ourselves under enemy fire, paying a high price for the experience and knowledge without which we could not beat Hitler's army.”

Sergei Biriuzov (1904–1964) Soviet military commander

Quoted in "The Winter War: The Soviet Attack on Finland" - Page 146 - by Eloise Engle, Eloise Paananen, Lauri Paananen - History - 1992

Art , Question , Knowledge , Science

“Harry Dresden: There’s power in the night. There’s terror in the darkness. Despite all our accumulated history, learning, and experience, we remember. We remember times when we were too small to reach the light switch on the wall, and when the darkness itself was enough to make us cry out in fear. Get a good ways out from civilization-say, miles and miles away on a lightless lake-and the darkness is there, waiting. Twilight means more than just time to call the children in from playing outside. Fading light means more than just the end of another day. Night is when terrible things emerge from their sleep and seek soft flesh and hot blood. Night is when unseen beings with no regard for what our people have built and no place in what we have deemed the natural order look in at our world from outside, and think dark and alien thoughts. And sometimes, just sometimes, they do things.”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

Source: The Dresden Files, Turn Coat (2009), Chapter 40

Children , People , World , Fear

“Like all obsessions, Ballard's novel is occasionally boring and frequently ridiculous. The invariance of its intensity is not something the reviewer can easily suggest. Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different - a disused - part of the reader's brain. You finish the book with some bafflement and irritation. But this is only half the experience. You then sit around waiting for the novel to come and haunt you. And it does.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Review of The Day of Creation by J. G. Ballard, p. 109
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)

Books , Waiting , Parting

“My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my "Blackness" than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

" Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community http://pt.scribd.com/doc/2305083/Princeton-Educated-Blacks-and-the-Black-Community", senior thesis, Princeton University (1985), p. 14-15 quoted in "Michelle Obama thesis was on racial divide" by Jeffrey Ressner at Politico.com (23 February 2008) http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=42FC5818-3048-5C12-005E33B3C0F4E64B
1980s

Feeling

“That's what music is about, and those are the types of experiences I value most in looking for the visceral and unidentifiable thing it is that makes music music, and not something else.”

Mark Heard (1951–1992) American musician and record producer

Life in the Industry: A Musician's Diary

Music

“They make poor observations, because they choose among the results of their experiments only what suits their object, neglecting whatever is unrelated to it and carefully setting aside everything which might tend toward the idea they wish to combat.”

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) French physiologist

Introduction à l'Étude de la Médecine Expérimentale (1865)

Idea

“Mathematical and physiological researches have shown that the space of experience is simply an actual case of many conceivable cases, about whose peculiar properties experience alone can instruct us.”

Ernst Mach (1838–1916) Austrian physicist and university educator

Source: 20th century, Popular Scientific Lectures, (Chicago, 1910), p. 205; On the space of experience.

Mathematics

“A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 7 “The Question of Sex” (p. 95)

Winter

“The environment is located in the mind of the actor and is imposed by him on experience in order to make that experience more meaningful. It is seldom dawns on organizational theorists to look for environments inside of heads rather than outside of them.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Karl. E. Weick (1977, p. 273), as cited in: James R. Taylor, Elizabeth J. Van Ever. The Emergent Organization: Communication As Its Site and Surface. (1999), p. 285
1970s

“One simple method is to take a pen or pencil and hold it up against a blank wall or ceiling. Now concentrate on the pen as if it is the most important thing in the world. Then allow your sense to relax, so you see the pen against the background of the wall. Concentrate again. Relax again. Keep on doing this until you become aware of the ability to focus attention at will. You will find that this unaccustomed activity of the will is tiring; it produces a sense of strain behind the eyes. My own perception is that if you persist, in spite of the strain, the result is acute discomfort, followed by a sudden immense relief - the 'peak experience.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Access to Inner Worlds (1990), p. 33

World , Sense

“Religion in terms of “personal experience is an independent functioning of the human mind, something unique, possessing and autonomous character. It is something inward and personal which unifies all values and organizes all experiences. It is the reaction to the whole of man to the whole of reality. It may be called spiritual life, as distinct from a merely intellectual or moral or aesthetic activity or a combination of them.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Life , Religion , Reality , Personality

“It is time to move forward together. Stronger for the bitter experiences we have shared, wiser for the suffering inflicted on us and more compassionate for having the capacity to forgive. For all its faults and cruelties, Fiji remains a country full of promise and hope simply demonstrated by the goodwill that has endured and the love we have for this land that is our home.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Our Country at the Crossroads - 2001 Parkinson Memorial Lecture Series, 15 August 2001 http://www.usp.ac.fj/journ/docs/news/wansolnews/wansol1508013.html.

Love , Hope , Home , Forgiveness

“A defect, as such, does not imply determinations in any direction. The individual's happiness is in the continuous unfolding of his experience, and also in the fruitfulness of his suffering. The criterion of his happiness is his power and permission to grow into his own self, with all that this involves. This, in turn, depends on other circumstances; the reality or mere ostensibility of his reception; the degree to which he is allowed, together with his defects and inherited birth constellations, to be integrated into his community; and the degree to which the community is permitted to become integrated into what he, the individual, represents.”

Martti Siirala (1889–1948) Finnish philosopher

Medicine in Metamorphosis (2003).

Communication , Birth , Reality , Suffering

“Ambition is ever tempered by experience. Otherwise, fortune makes fools of us all.”

Mark Kingwell (1963) Canadian philosopher

Source: The World We Want (2000), Chapter 3, Virtues And Vices, p. 77.

Fools

“Several fallacies have been accepted too freely recently about the position of our manufacturing industry in the balance of our economy. The biggest fallacy is the view that salvation lies in services, and only in services. The corollary to that is that it is inevitable and desirable that over the past two decades there has been a reduction of nearly 3 million in employment in manufacturing industry. That is a massive reduction and represents nearly 40 per cent. of the total in manufacturing industry over that time. I do not believe that that should have been the case. That has been precipitate and dangerous and it has not been associated with an increase in productivity which has led to our maintaining our relative manufacturing position…I have come increasingly to the view that the Government stand back too much from industry. In my experience, they do so more than any other Government in the European Community. They do so more than the United States Government. We have to remember the vast US defence involvement in industry. They certainly stand back more than do the Japanese Government. To some extent, the motive is the feeling that we have had an uncompetitive and rather complacent industry which must be exposed to the full blasts of competition, and if that means contracts, even Government contracts, going overseas, we should shrug our shoulders and say that the wind should be stimulating. That process has been carried much further in Britain than in any other comparable rival country. I am resolutely opposed to protectionism. I am sure that it diminishes the employment and wealth-creating capacity of the world as a whole. That would be the result of plunging back into that policy. I also believe, however, that this totally arm's-length approach in the relationship between Government and industry is something that no other comparable Government contemplate to the extent that we do. It is not producing good results for British industry and it is a recipe for a further decline in Britain's position in the Western world. The Government should examine it carefully and reverse it in several important respects.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1986/jul/07/future-of-manufacturing-industry in the House of Commons (7 July 1986).
1980s

World , Feeling , Communication , Motivation

“New methods change the experience, and new experiences change man. Whenever we hear sounds, we are changed, we are no longer the same, and this is more the case when we hear organized sounds; music.”

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) German composer

http://www.ubu.com/film/stockhausen_tuning.html
Tuning In (1981) BBC documentary on Stockhausen.
Attributed

Music , Change

“Experience is the only prophecy of wise men.”

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) French writer, poet, and politician

Speech at Mâcon (1847)

Men

“The French symbolists had a special term to express their love for things that had lost their objective significance, namely, ‘spleen.’ The conscious, challenging arbitrariness in the choice of objects, its ‘absurdity’ and ‘perverseness,’ as if by a silent gesture discloses the irrationality of utilitarian logic, which it then slaps in the face in order to demonstrate its inadequacy with regard to human experience. And while making it conscious, by this shock, of the fact that it forgets the subject, the gesture simultaneously expresses the subject’s sorrow over his inability to achieve an objective order. Twentieth-century society is not troubled by such inconsistencies. For it, meaning can be achieved in only one way—service for a purpose.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 38.

Love , Way , Forgetting

“So long as you “have” yourself, have yourself as an object, your experience of man is only as of a thing among things.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

Source: What is Man? (1938), p. 148

“"Information" in most, if not all, of its connotations seems to rest upon the notion of selective power. The Shannon theory regards the information source, in emitting the signals (signs), as exerting a selective power upon the ensemble of messages. for example, observes that what people value in a source of information (i. e., what they are prepared to pay for) depends upon its exclusiveness and prediction power; he cites instances of a newspaper editor hoping for a "scoop" and a racegoer receiving information from a tipster. "Exclusiveness" here implies the selecting of that one particular recipient out of the population, while the "prediction" value of information rests upon the power it gives to the recipient to select his future action, out of the whole range of prior uncertainty as to what action to take. Again, signs have the power to select responses in people, such responses depending upon a totality of conditions. Human communication channels consist of individuals in conversation, or in various forms of social intercourse. Each individual and each conversation is unique; different people react to signs in different ways, depending each upon their own past experiences and upon the environment at the time. It is such variations, such differences, which gives rise to the principal problems in the study of human communication.”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

Source: On Human Communication (1957), Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic Information, p. 244-5 Source: See Weaver's section of reference 297. Source: (1951). Lectures on Communication Theory, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Colin Cherry / Quotes / On Human Communication (1957) / Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic Information

Time , Way , Future , People

“The world of experience, both physical and psychic, is entirely composed of elements - spatial, tactile, accoustical, thermal, etc. Combinations of these elements make up different "phenomena", both psychic and physical. If the law of causality, inferred for all these phenomena - i. e. for the world of elements connected by various relations - is applicable to "things in themselves" serving as an immediate link between "phenomena" and "things", it is clear that "phenomena" and "things in themselves" are of the same nature. "Things in themselves" would then represent a direct continuation of the world of empirical elements and in fact would be only combinations of elements.”

Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) Physician, philosopher, writer

Alexander Bogdanov, cited in: ‎James Patrick Scanlan, (1965). : Pre-revolutionary philosophy and theology. Philosophers in exile. Marxists and Communists. p. 398

World , Law , Nature

“It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.”

Borís Pasternak (1890–1960) Russian writer

Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series (1963) edited by George Plimpton.

Life

“But just like voices, thoughts are underpinned by physical stuff. We know this because alterations to the brain change the kinds of thoughts we can think. In a state of deep sleep, there are no thoughts. When the brain transitions into dream sleep, there are unbidden, bizarre thoughts. During the day we enjoy our normal, well-accepted thoughts, which people enthusiastically modulate by spiking the chemical cocktails of the brain with alcohol, narcotics, cigarettes, coffee, or physical exercise. The state of the physical material determines the state of the thoughts. And the physical material is absolutely necessary for normal thinking to tick along. If you were to injure your pinkie in an accident you’d be distressed, but your conscious experience would be no different. By contrast, if you were to damage an equivalently sized piece of brain tissue, this might change your capacity to understand music, name animals, see colors, judge risk, make decisions, read signals from your body, or understand the concept of a mirror—thereby unmasking the strange, veiled workings of the machinery beneath. Our hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, comic instincts, great ideas, fetishes, senses of humor, and desires all emerge from this strange organ—and when the brain changes, so do we. So although it’s easy to intuit that thoughts don’t have a physical basis, that they are something like feathers on the wind, they in fact depend directly on the integrity of the enigmatic, three-pound mission control center.”

David Eagleman (1971) neuroscientist and author

Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain

People , Alcohol , Fear , Dreams

“The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.”

Mark Manson (1984) American writer and blogger

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 1, “Don’t Try” (p. 9)

“The man to watch, the man to put your money on, is not the man who wants to make "a survey" or a "more detailed study" but the man with the notebook, the man with the alternative hypotheses and the crucial experiments, the man who knows how to answer your Question of disproof and is already working on it.”

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

John R. Platt (1964). Cited in: William M. Block, M. Dale Strickland, Bret A. Collier, Markus J. Peterson (2008) Wildlife Study Design. Springer. p. 20 among other places.

Money , Question , Study

“History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts.”

Gilbert Highet (1906–1978) British academic

Peoples, Places and Books (1953) http://www.dim.uchile.cl/~anmoreir/varios/byzantium.html

Books , Age , World , Travel

“It is a mistake,” he said, “to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century.”

Isaac Asimov book The Gods Themselves

Section 1, Chapter 7, p. 56; the book is set in the year 2100.
The Gods Themselves (1972)

Fight

“I want to say the first thing that Qaddafi, he thinks that we are six million human beings, nameless. That’s how Qaddafi is looking at us. In our country, when Qaddafi’s regime, there’s no names, can mention except Qaddafi’s names. No heroes, even athletes or singers. We knew after the revolution that there was an office to try to disappear the stars. If there is any names, singers, we have the experience that there were singer idol in Beirut, big event between all Arab countries, and he won and after that when he come back to Libya, and we didn’t hear about him, he disappeared.
So, now I want to tell you that the whole population needs rehabilitation from Qaddafi’s regime. Comprehensive repression for all the people, all the details, chaos, turmoil that he tried to put the country through during the 42 years, so he tried consolidating power in his hands and demands the various state institutions.”

Salwa Bugaighis (1963–2014) Libyan activist

Interview with Salwa Bugaighis, 2012

People , Star , Thinking , Country

“I would pinpoint 1958 as a special time in my career. I had for some years been working with the Classification Research Group in London, and in 1957 we had held a small but successful conference to which Jesse Shera, Gene Garfield and others had come from the USA. In 1958 I published my first book, Classification and Indexing in Science, and attended the International Conference on Scientific Information in Washington. This was my first visit to the USA - I flew in a US Army transport plane with, John O'Connor and Desmond Bernal. The experience of attending the conference, and of other visits I paid at that time, led to the writing of my second book, On Retrieval System Theory…”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Brian Campbell Vickery (1999) " New Information Vistas http://faculty.libsci.sc.edu/bob/ISP/vickery2.htm".

Books , Science , Time , Success

“Experience is the consequence of activity. The manager literally wades into the swarm of "events" that surround him and actively tries to unrandomize them and impose some order: The manager acts physically in the environment, attends to some of it, ignores most of it, talks to other people about what they see and are doing.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1970s, Social Psychology of Organizing, (1979), p. 148

People

“One man I know, and one only, who can be praised for his achievements in this science. Of discourses and battles of words he takes no heed: he follows the works of wisdom, and in these finds rest. What others strive to see dimly and blindly, like bats in twilight, he gazes at in the full light of day, because he is a master of experiment. Through experiment he gains knowledge of natural things, medical, chemical, indeed of everything in the heavens or earth. He is ashamed that things should be known to laymen, old women, soldiers, ploughmen, of which he is ignorant. Therefore he has looked closely into the doings of those who work in metals and minerals of all kinds; he knows everything relating to the art of war, the making of weapons, and the chase; he has looked closely into agriculture, mensuration, and farming work; he has even taken note of the remedies, lot casting, and charms used by old women and by wizards and magicians, and of the deceptions and devices of conjurors, so that nothing which deserves inquiry should escape him, and that he may be able to expose the falsehoods of magicians. If philosophy is to be carried to its perfection and is to be handled with utility and certainty, his aid is indispensable. As for reward, he neither receives nor seeks it. If he frequented kings and princes, he would easily find those who would bestow on him honours and wealth. Or, if in Paris he would display the results of his researches, the whole world would follow him. But since either of these courses would hinder him from pursuing the great experiments in which he delights, he puts honour and wealth aside, knowing well that his wisdom would secure him wealth whenever he chose. For the last three years he has been working at the production of a mirror that shall produce combustion at a fixed distance; a problem which the Latins have neither solved nor attempted, though books have been written upon the subject.”

Roger Bacon book Opus Tertium

Bridges assumes that Bacon refers here to Peter Peregrinus of Maricourt.
Source: Opus Tertium, c. 1267, Ch. 13 as quoted in J. H. Bridges, The 'Opus Majus' of Roger Bacon (1900) Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=6F0XAQAAMAAJ Preface p.xxv

Wisdom , Women , War , Books

“In all my experiments I could, owing to lack of time, pay attention to only those matters which appeared to have a bearing upon practical optics. I could either not touch other questions, or at most not follow them very far. Since the path thus traced in optical experiments seems to promise to lead to interesting results, it is greatly to be desired that skilled investigators should devote attention to it.”

Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826) German optical physicist

Prismatic and Diffraction Spectra: Memoirs (1899) Tr. & Ed. J. S. Ames p. 10

Question , Appearance , Time

“As you can experience days or hours within its framework in the dream state and not age for the comparable amount of physical time, so as you develop, you will be able to rest and be refreshed within psychological time even when you are awake. This will aid your mental and physical state to an amazing degree. You will discover and added vitality and a decreased need to sleep. Within any given five minutes of clock time, for example you may find an hour of resting which is independent of clock time.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 152

Age , Dreams , Sleep , Time

“A guy like Hando is abhorrent to me— the philosophy that governs his life is something that disgusts me completely— so that was an interesting learning experience.”

Russell Crowe (1964) New Zealand-born Australian actor, film producer and musician

On playing a neo-Nazi skinhead in one of his earliest roles.
GQ Interview (2005)

Life , Guy , Learning

“The pure normative standpoint that Kant’s ethics tries to occupy, a standpoint in which we consider only the normatively relevant features of a possible world, abstracting strictly from the real world and the empirical accidents of concrete situations, is an expression of what Dewey called “the quest for certainty.” In an insecure world, weak humans struggle convulsively to reach some kind of stability; the a priori is an overcompensation in thought for experienced human weakness. This is one of the origins of Kant’s notorious rigidity, his authoritarian devotion to “principles,” and his tendency to promote local habits of thought to constituents of the absolute framework in which alone (purportedly) any coherent experience was possible; thus, Euclidean geometry is declared the a priori condition of human experience, and sadistic remnants of Puritanism become demands of pure practical reason. Classical liberalism rejected Kant’s practical philosophy, but perhaps this is not enough. Perhaps one should also reject the very idea of a pure normative standpoint.”

Raymond Geuss (1946) British philosopher

“Liberalism and its Discontents,” pp. 20-21.
Outside Ethics (2005)

World , Idea

“To sum up: numbers appear to represent both an attribute of matter and the unconscious foundation of our mental process. For this reason, number forms, according to Jung, that particular element that unites the realms of matter and psyche. It is “real” in a double sense, as an archetypal image and as a qualitative manifestation in the realm of outer-world experience.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Number and Time (1974), p. .52

World , Sense , Appearance

“It's those who lie outside ordinary experience who have the most to teach us.”

Malcolm Gladwell book Outliers

Malcolm Gladwell (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. p. 198

Lie

“One day, almost exactly 25 years ago - it was at the beginning of the bleak winter of 1940 - I entered André Lwoff’s office at the Pasteur Institute. I wanted to discuss with him some of the rather surprising observations I had recently made.
I was working then at the old Sorbonne, in an ancient laboratory that opened on a gallery full of stuffed monkeys. Demobilized in August in the Free Zone after the disaster of 1940, I had succeeded in locating my family living in the Northern Zone and had resumed my work with desperate eagerness. I interrupted work from time to time only to help circulate the first clandestine tracts. I wanted to complete as quickly as possible my doctoral dissertation, which, under the strongly biometric influence of Georges Teissier, I had devoted to the study of the kinetics of bacterial growth. Having determined the constants of growth in the presence of different carbohydrates, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to determine the same constants in paired mixtures of carbohydrates From the first experiment on, I noticed that, whereas the growth was kinetically normal in the presence of certain mixtures (that is, it exhibited a single exponential phase), two complete growth cycles could be observed in other carbohydrate mixtures, these cycles consisting of two exponential phases separated by a-complete cessation of growth.”

Jacques Monod (1910–1976) French biologist

Introduction
From enzymatic adaptation to allosteric transitions (1965)

Family , Study , Winter , Time

“[In] economics… you can disguise charlatanism under the weight of equations and nobody can catch you since there is no such thing as a controlled experiment. Now the spirit of such methods, called scientism by its detractors, continued into the discipline of finance as a few technicians thought their mathematical knowledge could lead them to understand markets. The practice of financial engineering came along with massive doses of pseudoscience.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Fooled by Randomness

page 115
Fooled by Randomness (2001)

Mathematics , Understanding , Knowledge

“Management is defined here as the accomplishment of desired objectives by establishing an environment favorable to performance by people operating in organized groups. Each of the managerial functions (planning, organizing, staffing,, directing, and controlling) is analyzed and described in a systematic way. As this is done, both the distilled experience of practicing managers and the findings of scholars are presented. This is approached in such a way that the reader may grasp the relationships between each of the functions, obtain a clear view of the major principles underlying them.”

Harold Koontz (1909–1984)

Source: Principles of management, 1968, p. 1 (1968 edition)

People , Way

“She too had found the experience transforming. How could she not? A demon had been exorcised. Several. And just when she felt more capable of love than she had ever been, she found herself alone.”

Carl Sagan book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 23 (p. 407)

Love

“By new style I meant mainly technical aspects. It is impossible to experience things from an entirely new angle through will-power; it has to mature in solitude.”

Otto Mueller (1874–1930) German painter and printmaker of the expressionist movement

from (letter 03 205) and (letter 03 147); as quoted in Otto Mueller: A Stand-Alone Modernist, Dieter W. Posselt; 2006 / new edition 2010, Books on Demand, GmbH, Norderstedt, Germany - ISBN:978-3-8448-6866-1, unpaged

Solitude

“The socialist system of society should only be, and can only be, an historical product, born out of the school of its own experiences, born in the course of its realization, as a result of the developments of living history, which – just like organic nature of which, in the last analysis, it forms a part – has the fine habit of always producing along with any real social need the means to its satisfaction, along with the task simultaneously the solution. However, if such is the case, then it is clear that socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed or introduced by ukase. It has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force – against property, etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot. New Territory. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and opening new ways.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: The Russian Revolution (1918), Chapter Six, "The Problem of Dictatorship"

School , Way , History , Nature

“[about how people in the 90's used "awesome" wrongly]
Webster's dictionary defines awesome as "anything that leaves you in awe and wonder." Like winning the lottery—twice. That's awesome. Getting a call from the IRS saying you've been audited and they owe you $50,000—that would be awesome. Ladies, you wake up tomorrow morning and the newspaper reads, "Scientists have discovered a way for men to experience childbirth." That would be awesome. Getting invited to the Playboy Mansion—on trampoline night, that would be awesome. And I started thinking, ladies and gentlemen, what would be awesome for Bill Engvall? What would leave me in awe and wonder? And it would have to be, if I left this stage tonight and I went back to my hotel room, and Shania Twain met me at my door, wearing nothing but a fur coat, holding a note from my wife that said, "Have a good time!"”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

THAT would be AWESOME! It ain't gonna happen—but that would be awesome.
Now That's Awesome (2000)

Men , People , Way , Thinking

“In an age of democracy and of peaceful or warlike communion among all parts of humanity, philosophy, like poetry and politics, must be prophetic. The content of its prophecy is a vision of how it is that we may respond, right now and with the instruments at hand, to the experience of being lost in a void that is made up of time, into the beginning and end of which we cannot see, and that is indifferent to our concerns. It is a prophecy of the path of our unchaining and of our ascent in a world of time, in which we remain always bound to death and forever denied insight into the ultimate nature of reality…. No philosopher or philosophical tradition in the last two centuries has had a monopoly on this prophecy. It is everywhere.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 27

Death , Age , World , Peace

“We are nations forged from many traditions and faiths, proving year after year that diversity is our strength. From vastly different origins and experiences, we have come to the same conclusions: that freedom and democracy are the strongest bases for both peace and prosperity, and that they are universal aspirations, constrained neither by culture nor levels of economic development.”

Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1924–2018) 10th Prime Minister of India

New York September 7, 2000 Asia Society Annual Dinner
Quotes from ataljee.org

Peace , Faith , Democracy , Freedom

“I was lying in an easy-chair, in front of a garden. I saw that the spiritual power was still active in me: I could go on with occult experiments in spite of the illness. I used to concentrate on things and persons and circumstances and wanted to see if the power worked. It worked very well on the mental and vital planes. Then I broadened the field of activity. I could go on doing my work in various parts of France and America and other places. I could clearly see the faces of the persons worked upon. They could be made to do what they by themselves could not. These were controlled experiments … I could see that nothing could stop the work: even without my body the work could go on … Wherever the call was, I could attend.”

The Mother (1878–1973) spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo

Her notings in the diary when she was very ill in April 1915, quoted in "Diary notes and Meeting with Sri Aurobindo", also in Chapter 10 Return to France http://www.motherandsriaurobindo.org/Content.aspx?ContentURL=_staticcontent/sriaurobindoashram/-00%20e-library@@@/-03%20disciples/k%20r%20srinivas%20iyengar/On%20The%20Mother/-12_Return%20to%20France.htm, p. 136

Lying , Parting , Personality

“I too have a growing inner certainty that there is a deposit of pure gold in me which ought to be passed on. The trouble is that I am more and more convinced by my experience and observation of my contemporaries that there is no one to receive it.
It's a dense mass. What gets added to it is of a piece with the rest. As the mass grows it becomes more and more dense. I can't parcel it out into little pieces.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Letter from Simone Weil to her parents, August 1943, five weeks before her death, quoted in introduction, p. 1
Lectures on Philosophy (1959)

“One has to stress once again, that the mechanical world view and psychophysical interpretation accompanying it are based not on the instructions of the philosophizing mind, but on the clear and accurate facts discovered by experiment and observation; and in the cases of non-correspondence (very rare, fortunately) between the requirements of the mind and the facts, reason must adjust to the facts, and not vice versa.”

Yakov Frenkel (1894–1952) Russian physicist

as quoted [Viktor Yakovlevich Frenkel, Yakov Ilich Frenkel: his work, life, and letters, Birkhäuser, 1996, 3764327413, 25-26]

World

“I was never drawn to experiment with language; I take note of such experiments, but avoid them in my own writing. The reason is that the substance of life claims me completely. To indulge in linguistic experiments is to ignore the greater part of this substance, leaving all but a tiny portion untouched and unused, as if a musician were to ceaselessly play an instrument with his little finger only.”

Elias Canetti (1905–1994) Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 3
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

Life , Parting

“I was raped in a driveway when I was eleven. … It was a terrible experience because we had all that gravel.”

Tallulah Bankhead (1902–1968) American actress

As quoted in The Girls : Sappho Goes to Hollywood (2001) by Diana McLellan, p. 134
I was raped in our driveway when I was eleven. … You know darling, it was a terrible experience because we had all that gravel.
As quoted in Somebody : The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando (2011), by Stefan Kanfer, p. 65

“To love is to be delighted by the happiness of someone, or to experience pleasure upon the happiness of another. I define this as true love.”

Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) German mathematician and philosopher

The Elements of True Piety (c. 1677), The Shorter Leibniz Texts (2006) http://books.google.com/books?id=oFoCY3xJ8nkC&dq edited by Lloyd H. Strickland, p. 189

Love , Pleasure , Happiness

“Whether the French were better colonists than the British is an academic question, but at least such Frenchmen as were planting in Malaya (Pierre Boulle, for instance, and Henri Fauconnier) were kept sane by their own culture and some of them (those two, anyway) produced memorable novels based on their Malayan experiences. The British were mostly philistines, and they left behind a heritage of philistinism. Kampung culture is dying, and a metropolitan culture of art galleries and orchestras seems unlikely to arise. What there is, and flourishing too, is a materialist consumerism that is threatened from the north by the communists and from the west by the militant Islam of the ayatollahs. Mr Butcher’s book deals with a race of people who may well be surveyed in terms of anthropological generalities. There was no room for the brilliant or the eccentric. British Malaya was created by courageous and suffering mediocrities. The building of Singapore in 1819 was a rather different affair.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

"White Men Sweating" - review of The British in Malaya 1880-1941: The Social History of a European Community in Colonial South-East Asia, by John G. Butcher.
Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

People , Books , Art , Courage

“In order to supply the defects of experience, we will have recourse to the probable conjectures of analogy, conclusions which we will bequeath to our posterity to be ascertained by new observations, which, if we augur rightly, will serve to establish our theory and to carry it gradually nearer to absolute certainty.”

Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) German mathematician, physicist and astronomer

The System of the World (1800)

“Of all the disciplines that I studied, practiced, learned, Zen was the essential one. It was not so much an influence on me, rather it created space. It allowed those things that were there to be there. It gave some form to my experience. And it built up in me the critical mass from which was kindled the experience that produced est.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

Interview with William Warren Bartley, cited in [Bartley, William Warren, w:William Warren Bartley, Werner Erhard: the Transformation of a Man: the Founding of est, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1978, New York, 121, 0-517-53502-5]

Study , Learning

“And art puts us, I believe, in a state of grace in which we experience a universal emotion in an, as it were, religious but in the same time perfectly natural way. General harmony, such as we find in colour, is located all around us.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 151, in: 'What he told me – I. The motif'

Art , Way , Nature , Universe

“Our sensuous appreciation of the world and of the works created by man has, no doubt, a biological foundation, one shared by all human beings, but that is no use to us when we try to evaluate a Bach fugue or a Dostoevsky novel-or even the simple experience of a landscape, as our delight in the view of a mountain or a waterfall is also determined by the traditions of our culture. The coexistence of different criteria of judgment is, in any case, by now a fact of life. Beethoven cannot be judged or even understood by the standards of Mozart, however much he may have continued them, nor Berg by the standards of Wagner or Richard Strauss, nor Elliott Carter by the values of Ives and Stravinsky.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Frontiers of Meaning: Three Informal Lectures on Music (1994), Ch. 1 : The Frontiers of Nonsense

Life , World , Mountain

“I'm increasingly convinced that the principal moral errors of contemporary western societies, especially among elites, are rooted in the triumph of Hobbes' view of human beings as basically machines for having experiences. It's the anthropology underwriting the Age of Feeling.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

Twitter post https://twitter.com/McCormickProf/status/947851434816655361 (1 January 2018)
2018

Age , Error , Feeling

“And so I have conceived that the news, properly presented, should be a sort of cross-section of the character of current human experience. It should delineate character, quality, tendencies and implications. In this way the reporter exercises his genius. Out of the current events he does not make a drab and sordid story, but rather an informing and enlightened epic. His work becomes no longer imitative, but rises to an original art.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Press Under a Free Government (1925)

Art , Way , Exercises

“So often, people ask me what is the key to success in this industry… or what would be my best advice to give to new comers… and though there are many things I could tell you from my personal experience, persistence and consistency seems to be a common thread to everything I have to say.”

Nikki SooHoo (1988) American actress

Persistently Consistent http://nikkisoohoo.com/blog/2017/10/22/persistently-consistent (October 22, 2017)

People , Success , Personality

“Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man’s existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes.”

Lewis H. Morgan (1818–1881) United States ethnologist

As quoted in Friedrich Engels's Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm

People , Age , Education , Law

“My theory has been to discover the modern synthesis by methods based upon science, methods based upon the theory of colors discovered by M. Chevreul, in conformity with the experiments of Maxwell and the measurements of N. 0. Rood; to substitute the optical mingling for the mingling of pigments; in other words, the decomposition of all the colors into their constituent elements; because the optical mingling excites much more intense luminosity than the mingling of pigments. As for the execution, we regard it as nothing; it is at any rate only unimportant, art having nothing to do with it. According to us, the sole originality consists in the character of the drawing and the vision individual to each artist.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote in a letter, circa 1886-87; as quoted in Brush and Pencil, Vol. XIII, no. 6 , article: 'Camille Pissarro' Impressionist', by Henry G. Stephens; March, 1904, pp. 414-15
1880's

Art , Color , Science , Drawing

“The great quality teacher, Shoji Shiba, often tells people that the biggest barrier to changing understanding is the following word: IAKI, which is not a Japanese word at all. It is an acronym for I ALREADY KNOW IT… Professor Shiba then goes on to say: “Yes, you may know it, but you don't know how to do it!” There is an enormous difference between knowledge and know-how… Too many executives believe that if they listen to a lecture or read a book they will know how to do something…. Nobody ever became a great lover by just reading a book or watching a video. You have to get in and do it. There are some things you can only learn through experience.”

Myron Tribus (1921–2016) American academic

Myron Tribus "You Cannot Lead What You Do Not Understand — You Do Not Understand What You Haven't Done". Journal of Innovative Management, Fall 1996; As quoted in: William J. Altier (1999) The Thinking Manager's Toolbox. p. 9

People , Books , Lovers , Understanding

“One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium. This committee had men like Compton and Tolman and Smyth and Urey and Rabi and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they'd ask me questions and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there's this other possibility we have to consider against it.

So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn't repeat and emphasize his point. Finally at the end, Tolman, who's the chairman, would say, "Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it's true that Compton's argument is the best of all, and now we have to go ahead."

It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best -- summing it all up -- without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

from the First Annual Santa Barbara Lectures on Science and Society, University of California at Santa Barbara (1975)

Men , Way , Guy , Idea

“It all has to do with my feelings, my mood or state of mind. Most times my experiences, things I desire, it could be good depends on how the listener’s level of perception is structured.”

Slim Burna (1988) Nigerian singer and record producer

On what inspires his lyrics
During an interview with Africa Upcoming http://www.africaupcoming.com/exclusive-interview-meet-gabriel-soprinye-halliday-idaomienyenimim-a-k-a-slim-burna/ (September 12, 2013)

Feeling , Mood , Time , Dependency

“In the history of thought… objectivity was sometimes on the side of one man against the rest of humankind. For example, in Copernicus' time the objective astronomical reality existed only for him, while hundreds of millions of people were mistaken in this regard… Copernicus alone embraced the accumulated astronomical experience up to that time in its entirety and was able to organize it harmoniously with the methods which corresponded to the level achieved by the collective efforts of humankind; other people possessed only parts and fragments of this experience, so that it remained unorganized in all its fullness.”

Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) Physician, philosopher, writer

Alexander Bogdanov, cited in: Kenneth M. Stokes. Paradigm Lost: A Cultural and Systems Theoretical Critique of Political Economy. p. 1995

People , History , Reality , Effort

“I have learned, by some experience, that virtue and patriotism, vice and selfishness, are found in all parties, and that they differ less in their motives than in the policies they pursue.”

William H. Seward (1801–1872) American lawyer and politician

On the Irrepressible Conflict (1858)

Motivation , Learning , Selfishness

“Jivanmukti is not something to be attained after death, nor is it to be experienced or bestowed upon you in another world. It is a state of perfect awareness and equanimity, which can be experienced here and now in this world, while living in the body. Having come to experience the highest truth of oneness with the Self, such blessed souls do not have to be born again. They merge with the infinite consciousness.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

The Timeless Path (2009)

Death , Truth , World , Soul

“To be honest, when you're younger and cooler, you say those sort of things don't mean anything, but then on the day when they pat you on the back and they say, "Look, mate, we're noticing what you're doing-thanks very much;' you think of the people who spent a life in the cinema and didn't receive that kind of accolade, and it's sort of a humbling experience. And it's very nice and all that. But it doesn't change the way I do things.”

Russell Crowe (1964) New Zealand-born Australian actor, film producer and musician

On winning an Oscar for Gladiator.
GQ Interview (2005)

Life , People , Way , Thinking

“One of the things about Adrianne I was always grateful for was that she always wanted to learn and experience more things in the world. She was very thoughtful and interested. She loved literature and reading.”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

Molly Vetter, friend of Wadewitz — quoted in: Wetzel, Diane. (April 23, 2014). "NP grad, Wikipedia editor dies in Calif." http://www.nptelegraph.com/news/np-grad-wikipedia-editor-dies-in-calif/article_c7be4462-ab39-53ad-b3e8-9055b51d3bdf.html NPTelegraph.com. North Platte, Nebraska. — and: Wetzel, Diane (April 23, 2014). "North Platte grad, 37, Wikipedia editor, dies in climbing fall" http://www.omaha.com/article/20140423/NEWS/140429478/1707. Omaha World-Herald (Omaha, Nebraska).
About

Love , World , Literature , Learning

“Who can think that this eviction of Germans was undertaken only as a temporary experiment? Those who adopted the decision on the eviction of the Germans from these territories, and who understood that Poles from other Polish districts would at once move into these territories, cannot suggest after a while to carry out reverse measures. The very idea of involving millions of people in such experiments is unbelievable, quite apart from the cruelty of it, both towards the Poles and the Germans themselves.”

Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986) Soviet politician and diplomat

As quoted in The German-Polish Frontier (1959) by Walter M. Drzewieniecki, p. 71

People , Idea , Thinking , Decision

“To see me as a person on screen would be one of the dullest experiences you could ever wish to experience.”

Peter Sellers (1925–1980) British film actor, comedian and singer

As quoted in The Hollywood Book of Extravagance: The Totally Infamous, Mostly Disastrous, and Always Compelling Excesses of America's Film and TV Idols (2007) by James Robert Parish, p. 93

Personality

“Life seems to be an experience in ascending and descending. You think you're beginning to live for a single aim — for self-development, or the discovery of cosmic truths — when all you're really doing is to move from place to place as if devoted primarily to real estate.”

Margaret Caroline Anderson (1886–1973) American magazine editor

The Fiery Fountains (1951), part 1.

Life , Truth , Thinking

“The simplicity attached to the operation of an electric vehicle by any person of ordinary intelligence is too well known to need comment at this point; but it is found from experience that there is the same difference in the care taken of an electric vehicle that there is among men who attend dynamos and steam engines, or drive horses, with a corresponding difference in troubles and aggravations.”

Clinton Edgar Woods (1863) American engineer

Source: The Electric Automobile (1900), p. 14; Cited in: Imes Chui (2006, p. 106)

Men , Intelligence , Horse , Personality

“I myself represent the style of a Bach who was a human being with all his heights and depths, who knew life very well. My Bach is the experience of my playing the whole literature; and filling the different voices with their own life, vitality, vividness; it’s the independent speaking-until-singing of the different voices; and lastly it’s a balance between pianistic virtuosity and something chamber-music-like.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Life , Music , Literature , Singing

“In spite of Darwin's hopes, the acceptance of his views has led to no real improvement — scarcely indeed to any change at all in either the practice or aims of systematists. In a famous passage in the Origin he confidently declares that when his interpretation is generally adopted "Systematists will be able to pursue their labours as at present; but they will not be incessantly haunted by the shadowy doubt whether this or that form be a true species. This, I feel sure, and I speak after experience, will be no slight relief. The endless disputes whether or not some fifty species of British brambles are good species will cease." Those disputes nevertheless proceed almost exactly as before. It is true that biologists in general do not, as formerly, participate in these discussions because they have abandoned systematics altogether; but those who are engaged in the actual work of naming and cataloguing animals and plants usually debate the old questions in the old way. There is still the same divergence of opinion and of practice, some inclining to make much of small differences, others to neglect them. Not only does the work of the sytematists as a whole proceed as if Darwin had never written but their attitude towards these problems is but little changed.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Source: Problems In Genetics (1913), p. 10

Hope , Way , Feeling , Confidence

“Dicko: Oh my God, you can dance can't you. Hey look, fantastic song for you. You look wonderful. If you can't do bling on a disco night when can you? That was just a real eye opener for me. That was just a real, real joyous experience for me. What we've noticed, and certainly at the finals stage is there is the performance that defines someone and shows their true star potential. For me that was yours. That was terrific.”

Hayley Jensen (1983) Australian singer

Australian Idol, Final Performances, Final 9

God , Star , Dance , Night

“It is the mistake of a coxcomb, whose experience of affection is all to come—if it ever comes—to say that women are won by mere good looks. Though it does not owe its birth to them. Gratitude and Vanity are the nurses that rock the cradle of Love.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Love , Women , Birth , Gratitude

“There is no authority for God’s existence except the inward conviction that is born of mystical experience.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.72

God

“Mere numbers cannot bring out… the intimate essence of the experiment. This conviction comes naturally when one watches a subject at work … What things can happen! What reflections, what remarks, what feelings, or, on the other hand, what blind automatism, what absence of ideas!… The experimenter judges what may be going on in (the subject’s) mind, and certainly feels difficulty in expressing all the oscillations of a thought in a simple, brutal number, which can have only a deceptive precision. How, in fact, could it sum up what would need several pages of description!”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Alfred Binet (1900), La suggestibilite, Paris: Schleicher. p. 119–120); As cited in: Carson (1999, 363-4)

Feeling , Idea , Nature

“Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

which they do not control
Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5d5aa24e-23a4-11de-996a-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1, Financial Times, 2009-04-07.
Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world (2009)

Life , Business , Learning

“A deepened, high-energy democracy does not seek to replace the real world of interests and of interest-bearing individuals with the selfless citizen and with the all-consuming theater of public life. It is not a flight into republican purism and fantasy. It wants to enhance our ordinary powers, enlarge the scope of our ordinary sympathies and ambitions, and render more intense our ordinary experience. It seeks to do so by diminishing the distance between the ordinary moves we may within institutional and ideological contexts take for granted and the extraordinary initiatives by which we challenge and change pieces of those contexts. Its agent and its beneficiary are one and the same: the real thing—the frail, self-interested, longing individual in the flesh, the victim of circumstance whom no circumstance can ever completely or definitively confine.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Left Alternative

Source: The Left Alternative (2009), p. 30-1

Life , World , Democracy , Change

“The thing is plain. All that men really understand is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know and motives to study or practise. The rest is affectation and imposture.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On the Ignorance of the Learned"
Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Men , Motivation , Understanding , Study

“At the invitation of Her Majesty's Government, the United States is about to station on the soil of the United Kingdom nuclear weapons which, we are told, will be used only after consultation and by joint decision with Her Majesty's Government. Anyone who, after the experience of the last few days and of recent years, imagines that the United States will defer to the views of the Government of this country is living in a dangerous fool's paradise. Anyone in office who entertains that illusion is in no position to serve the security of this country.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1983/oct/26/grenada-invasion in the House of Commons (26 October 1983) during the debate on the American invasion of Grenada.
1980s

Fools , Imagination , Decision , Country

“Herbert Casson was a highly prolific writer on management, with a career as a management guru spanning some four decades. A skilled writer who was also a successful entrepreneur, he used his own experiences and acute observations of the world around him to develop a philosophy of management based on the concept of ‘efficiency’. He published more than seventy books, which by the time of his death had sold more than half a million copies around the world. Something of a maverick, he was never really accepted by the business academic community in either Britain or America. His books were popular and populist, highly entertaining and full of penetrating insight.”

Herbert N. Casson (1869–1951) Canadian journalist and writer

Morgen Witzel (2003), Fifty Key Figures in Management. p. 42

Death , Books , World , Communication

“Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established truths about the human mind: our conventional sense of self is an illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: 2010s, Waking Up (2014), p. 8

Truth , World , Way , Thinking

“Of all the institutions in their lives, only the Catholic Church has seemed aware of the fact that my mother and father are thinkers—persons aware of the experience of their lives. Other institutions—the nation’s political parties, the industries of mass entertainment and communications, the companies that employed them—have all treated my parents with condescension.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Communication , Parent , Personality

“His great novel The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) has certainly enlarged my life – an unusual experience for a life which is well on in its eighties. Reading and rereading it has made me realize how many ways there are of being alive, how many doors there are, close to one, which someone else's touch may open.”

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957) Sicilian writer and prince

E. M. Forster, Introduction to Lampedusa's Two Stories and a Memory (New York: Pantheon, 1962) p. 13.
Criticism

Life , Way , Reading

“What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?”

David Hume book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

§ 8.18
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

History , Dependency

“.. [from Pollock Helen took over] the concern with line, fluid line, calligraphy, and.... experiments with line not as line but as shape.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

Quote from MoMA Highlights, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published in 1999, p. 219 http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=78722
1990s - 2000s