Quotes about faculty

A collection of quotes on the topic of faculty, man, use, other.

Quotes about faculty

“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and your discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”

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

As quoted by Wayne Dyer http://n-spire.com/archives/011802.html The Mahābhāṣya

World, Dreams, Personality

“Avarice dulls the faculties of judgment and wisdom.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

Wisdom

“Realisation is not acquisition of anything new nor is it a new faculty. It is only removal of all camouflage”

Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) Indian religious leader

“Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.”

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) Italian composer

“If anyone possesses this faculty, then his attention is in reality directed beyond the world, whether he is aware of it or not.”

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

Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation (1943)
Context: If anyone possesses this faculty, then his attention is in reality directed beyond the world, whether he is aware of it or not.
The link which attaches the human being to the reality outside the world is, like the reality itself, beyond the reach of human faculties. The respect that it makes us feel as soon as it is recognized cannot be shown to us by evidence or testimony.

World, Reality

“I confess I know not what a sceptic can answer to this, nor by what good argument he can plead even for a hearing; for either his reasoning is sophistry, and so deserves contempt; or there is no truth in the human faculties, and then why should we reason?”

Thomas Reid (1710–1796) Scottish philosopher

Source: Thomas Reid's Inquiry and Essays

Truth

“As far as socialism is concerned, it is not a heavenly message like Islam but a mere system for regulating the relations between man and his utilization of the means of production in this world. If we decide to regulate our national wealth, it is not against the essence of Islam. God has created man and has given him the faculty of mind to choose between good and bad, between virtue and vice. We have chose social justice instead of exploitation of man by man and this is how we can practically help the individual Muslim and direct him to [a] virtuous life. However, the reactionaries wanted to create a rift between socialism and Islam because socialism is not in their interest.”

Siad Barre (1919–1995) Head of State of Somalia

Speech (1972), as quoted by Ioan Myrddin (1980), A Modern History of Somalia, Wilture Enterprises (International) Ltd.

Life, God, World, Justice

“Though I have always made it my practice to be pleasant to everybody, I have not once actually experienced friendship. I have only the most painful recollections of my various acquaintances with the exception of such companions in pleasure as Horiki. I have frantically played the clown in order to disentangle myself from these painful relationships, only to wear myself out as a result. Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy. I know that I am liked by other people, but I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others. (I should add that I have very strong doubts as to whether even human beings really possess this faculty.) It was hardly to be expected that someone like myself could ever develop any close friends—besides, I lacked even the ability to pay visits. The front door of another person’s house terrified me more than the gate of Inferno in the Divine Comedy, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I really felt I could detect within the door the presence of a horrible dragon-like monster writhing there with a dank, raw smell.”

Osamu Dazai book No Longer Human

The Third Notebook: Part One
No Longer Human

Love, Pain, Friendship, People

“We wish, in a word, equality — equality in fact as a corollary, or rather, as primordial condition of liberty. From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs; that is what we wish sincerely and energetically.”

Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) Russian revolutionary, philosopher, and theorist of collectivist anarchism

As quoted in The Old Order and the New (1890) by J. Morris Davidson

Sincerity

“Two artists can suggest two different subject matters and two completely different pictures by using the same spot. Every picture demonstrates certain aspects from the inner life of the painter who made it. For this reason, the orthodox Tachist is wary of letting himself be influenced by Leonardo's famous wall... I grant the painter the right to speak, to laugh, to take a stand and to draw upon all his hallucinatory faculties. But I absolutely refuse to live like a Tachist.”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

Quote from 'Max Ernst im Gesprach mit Eduard Roditi' (1967), as cited in Max Ernst, Écritures Paris, 1970, p. 416
1951 - 1976

Life, Drawing

“All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but a mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovers his own image, but enlarged and reversed — that is, divinized. The history of religion, of the birth, grandeur, and decline of the gods who have succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the development of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind.”

Mikhail Bakunin book God and the State

God and the State (1871; publ. 1882)

Men, God, Faith, Religion

“Habits and faculties are necessarily affected by the corresponding acts”

Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece

Golden Sayings of Epictetus
Context: If you have given way to anger, be sure that over and above the evil involved therein, you have strengthened the habit, and added fuel to the fire. If overcome by a temptation of the flesh, do not reckon it a single defeat, but that you have also strengthened your dissolute habits. Habits and faculties are necessarily affected by the corresponding acts... One who has had fever, even when it has left him, is not in the same condition of health as before, unless indeed his cure is complete. Something of the same sort is true also of diseases of the mind. Behind, there remains a legacy of traces and of blisters: and unless these are effectually erased, subsequent blows on the same spot will produce no longer mere blisters, but sores. If you do not wish to be prone to anger, do not feed the habit; give it nothing which may tend to its increase. At first, keep quiet and count the days when you were not angry: 'I used to be angry every day, then every other day: next every two, next every three days!' and if you succeed in passing thirty days, sacrifice to the Gods in thanksgiving. (75).

“Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"As I Please," Tribune (28 April 1944) https://books.google.com/books?id=fCRLPIbLP8IC&pg=PA133&dq=%22it+is+almost+impossible+to+think+without+talking%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZi9qjndzZAhURrVkKHbDDCxkQ6AEILjAB#v=onepage&q=%22it%20is%20almost%20impossible%20to%20think%20without%20talking%22&f=false "As I Please" (1943–1947) Context: The greatest mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret freedom which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense, because your thoughts are never entirely your own. Philosophers, writers, artists, even scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking.... Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.

Freedom

“Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart — one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Black Cat

Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?
The Black Cat (1843)

Soul, Time, Heart, Stupidity

“Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

People, Soul

“Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.”

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) Austrian writer

Source: The Burning Secret and other stories

Intelligence, Passion

“Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

People, Soul, Indifference

“It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Love, Truth, Sadness

“Since everything that lives is obliged to expend and receive life, there is an exchange of modifications between the living creature and its environment.
And yet, once that vital necessity is satisfied, our species—a positively strange species—thinks it must create for itself other needs and tasks besides that of preserving life. … Whatever may be the origin or cause of this curious deviation, the human species is engaged in an immense adventure, an adventure whose objective and end it does not know. …
The same senses, the same muscles, the same limbs—more, the same types of signs, the same instruments of exchange, the same languages, the same modes of logic—enter into the most indispensable acts of our lives, as they figure into the most gratuitous. …
In short, man has not two sets of tools, he has only one, and this one set must serve him for the preservation of his life and his physiological rhythm, and expend itself at other times on illusions and on the labours of our great adventure. …
The same muscles and nerves produce walking as well as dancing, exactly as our linguistic faculty enables us to express our needs and ideas, while the same words and forms can be combined to produce works of poetry. A single mechanism is employed in both cases for two entirely different purposes.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), pp. 158-159

Life, Idea, Thinking, Sense

“The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to speak out the most hidden and intimate things.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Maxims

Men, Books

“What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty!
In form and moving how express and admirable!
In action how like an angel,
in apprehension how like a god!”

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Hamlet, Act II, scene ii.
Hamlet (1600–1)

For Men, God, Angels

“Not all the faculties and senses have to be employed in things, but only those that are required; as for the others, leave them unoccupied for God.”

John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint

The Sayings of Light and Love

God, Sense

“For when every judgement is the act of hym that judgeth, it behoveth that every man performe hys worke and purpose, not by any forayne or straunge power or facultie, but by his owne proper power, and strength.”

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480) philosopher of the early 6th century

Tr. George Colville (1556); source https://books.google.com/books?id=649EAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA129 The Consolation of Philosophy · De Consolatione Philosophiae, Book V

““Culture” means … the cultivation of the mind, the taking care and improving of the native faculties of the mind in accordance with the nature of the mind. Just as the soil needs cultivators of the soil, the mind needs teachers. But teachers are not as easy to come by as farmers. The teachers themselves are pupils and must be pupils. But there cannot be an infinite regress: ultimately there must be teachers who are not in turn pupils. Those teachers who are not in turn pupils are the great minds.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

“What is liberal education,” p. 3
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968)

Nature, Teachers

“We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.”

Thornton Wilder book The Eighth Day

The Eighth Day (1967)

Death, Birth

“Is it what you call civilization that makes England flourish? Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an island, almost unknown to the ancients, the arbiter of the world? Clearly not. It is the inhabitants that have done this. It is an affair of race.… All is race, there is no other truth.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Bk. I, Ch. 13.
Books, Coningsby (1844), Tancred (1847)

Truth, World, Universe

“It appears to general observation, that revolutions create genius and talents; but those events do no more than bring them forward. There is existing in man, a mass of sense lying in a dormant state, and which, unless something excites it to action, will descend with him, in that condition, to the grave. As it is to the advantage of society that the whole of its faculties should be employed, the construction of government ought to be such as to bring forward, by a quiet and regular operation, all that extent of capacity which never fails to appear in revolutions.”

Thomas Paine book Rights of Man

Part 2.5 Chapter III. Of the old and new systems of government
1790s, Rights of Man, Part 2 (1792)

Lying, Sense, Appearance

“Once your faith, sir, persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life. In days gone by, there were people who said to us: "You believe in incomprehensible, contradictory and impossible things because we have commanded you to; now then, commit unjust acts because we likewise order you to do so." Nothing could be more convincing. Certainly anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. If you do not use the intelligence with which God endowed your mind to resist believing impossibilities, you will not be able to use the sense of injustice which God planted in your heart to resist a command to do evil. Once a single faculty of your soul has been tyrannized, all the other faculties will submit to the same fate. This has been the cause of all the religious crimes that have flooded the earth. (Translation from Norman Lewis Torrey: Les Philosophes. The Philosophers of the Enlightenment and Modern Democracy. Capricorn Books, 1961, pp. 277-8)”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Questions sur les miracles (1765)
Widely used paraphrase: "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities".

Life, God, Fate, People

“What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern: the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful. …There are great truths to tell, if we had either the courage to announce them or the temper to receive them.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Book 4, Chap. 1.
Books, Coningsby (1844)

Men, Truth, World, Beauty

“Infant prodigies do not necessarily become great musicians. I have had over three thousand pupils, and I am convinced that the proficiency which some display is no more than a manifestation of dexterity and an extraordinary natural imitative faculty of children.”

Alfred Cortot (1877–1962) Franco-Swiss pianist and conductor

"Do Infant Prodigies Become Great Musicians?", Music & Letters (Apr., 1935)

Children, Nature

“A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.”

John Ciardi (1916–1986) American poet, professor, translator

Saturday Review, Volume 49 (1966)

Universe

“But the female mind has demonstrated a capacity for all the mental acquirements and achievements of men, and as generations ensue that capacity will be expanded; the average woman will be as well educated as the average man, and then better educated, for the dormant faculties of her brain will be stimulated to an activity that will be all the more intense and powerful because of centuries of repose. Woman will ignore precedent and startle civilization with their progress.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

"When woman is boss", Colliers, January 30, 1926

Men, Education

“Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present…This faculty of understanding the living is, in very truth, the master quality of the historian.”

Marc Bloch (1886–1944) French historian, medievalist, and historiographer

The Historian's Craft, pg.43

Truth, Understanding, Past

“My father was a schoolmaster in a little North German town, and for the very reason that at home culture was a means of livelihood, I detested learning and literature from childhood onwards. That is nature's way. In pursuance of her mysterious design to safeguard the creative faculty, she is apt to make children scorn their father's bent. She does not want to encourage an easy, effortless acceptance of a heritage, a mere handing down of acquisitions from one generation to the next. She sows the seeds of discord, and will only allow children to follow in their parent's footsteps after they have made laborious but fruitful detours.”

Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) Austrian writer

Confusion of Feelings or Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. Von D (1927)

Children, Way, Home, Literature

“When I arrived at Harvard in 1969, my fellow first-year graduate students and I were taken up to the roof of the Widener Library by a well-known professor of classics. He told us how many Episcopal churches could be seen from that vantage point. As a Jew (in fact a convert from Episcopalian Christianity), I knew that my husband and I would have been forbidden to marry in Harvard's church, which had just refused to accept a Jewish wedding. As a woman I could not eat in the main dining room of the faculty club, even as a member's guest. Only a few years before, a woman would not have been able to use the undergraduate library. In 1972 I became the first female to hold the Junior Fellowship that relieved certain graduate students from teaching so that they could get on with their research. At that time I received a letter of congratulation from a prestigious classicist saying that it would be difficult to know what to call a female fellow, since "fellowess" was an awkward term. Perhaps the Greek language could solve the problem: since the masculine for "fellow" in Greek was hetairos, I could be called a hetaira. Hetaira, however, as I knew, is the ancient Greek word not for “fellowess” but for “courtesan.””

Martha C. Nussbaum (1947) American philosopher

[Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, https://books.google.com/books?id=V7QrAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA6, 1 October 1998, Harvard University Press, 978-0-674-73546-0, 6–7]

Problem, Wedding, Time

“All classes, therefore, must be brought under women’s influence; for all require to be reminded constantly of the great truth that Reason and Activity are subordinate to Feeling. Of their influence upon philosophers I have spoken. If they are men worthy of their mission, they will be conscious of the tendency which their life has to harden them and lead them into useless speculation; and they will feel the need of renewing the ardour of their social sympathy at its native source. Feeling, when it is pure and deep, corrects its own errors, because they clash with the good to which it is ever tending. But erroneous use of the intellectual or practical faculties, cannot be even recognized, much less corrected, without the aid of Affection, which is the only part of our nature that suffers directly from such errors. Therefore whenever either the philosopher or the people deviate from duty, it will be the part of women to remonstrate with them gently, and recall them to the true social principles which are entrusted to their special charge.”

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) French philosopher

Source: A General View of Positivism (1848, 1856), p. 253-254

Life, Women, Men, People

“But take a brief glance at real life. In present-day economic life you will find, not only competition and monopoly, but also their synthesis, which is not a formula but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. That equation, however, far from alleviating the difficulties of the present situation, as bourgeois economists suppose, gives rise to a situation even more difficult and involved. Thus, by changing the basis upon which the present economic relations rest, by abolishing the present mode of production, you abolish not only competition, monopoly and their antagonism, but also their unity, their synthesis, the movement whereby a true balance is maintained between competition and monopoly.

Let me now give you an example of Mr Proudhon's dialectics. Freedom and slavery constitute an antagonism. There is no need for me to speak either of the good or of the bad aspects of freedom. As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World. After these reflections on slavery, what will the good Mr Proudhon do? He will seek the synthesis of liberty and slavery, the true golden mean, in other words the balance between slavery and liberty. Mr Proudhon understands perfectly well that men manufacture worsted, linens and silks; and whatever credit is due for understanding such a trifle! What Mr Proudhon does not understand is that, according to their faculties, men also produce the social relations in which they produce worsted and linens. Still less does Mr Proudhon understand that those who produce social relations in conformity with their material productivity also produce the ideas, categories, i. e. the ideal abstract expressions of those same social relations. Indeed, the categories are no more eternal than the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. To Mr Proudhon, on the contrary, the prime cause consists in abstractions and categories. According to him it is these and not men which make history. The abstraction, the category regarded as such, i. e. as distinct from man and his material activity, is, of course, immortal, immutable, impassive. It is nothing but an entity of pure reason, which is only another way of saying that an abstraction, regarded as such, is abstract. An admirable tautology! Hence, to Mr Proudhon, economic relations, seen in the form of categories, are eternal formulas without origin or progress. To put it another way: Mr Proudhon does not directly assert that to him bourgeois life is an eternal truth; he says so indirectly, by deifying the categories which express bourgeois relations in the form of thought. He regards the products of bourgeois society as spontaneous entities, endowed with a life of their own, eternal, the moment these present themselves to him in the shape of categories, of thought. Thus he fails to rise above the bourgeois horizon. Because he operates with bourgeois thoughts and assumes them to be eternally true, he looks for the synthesis of those thoughts, their balance, and fails to see that their present manner of maintaining a balance is the only possible one.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov, (28 December 1846), Rue d'Orleans, 42, Faubourg Namur, Marx Engels Collected Works Vol. 38, p. 95; International Publishers (1975). First Published: in full in the French original in M.M. Stasyulevich i yego sovremenniki v ikh perepiske, Vol. III, 1912

Life, Men, Truth, World

“Encourage therefore his inquisitiveness all you can, by satisfying his demands, and informing his judgement, as far as it is capable. When his reasons are any way tolerable, let him find the credit and commendation of it, without being laugh'd at for his mistake be gently put into the right; and if he shew a forwardness to be reasoning about things that come in his way, take care, as much as you can, that no body check this inclination in him, or mislead it by captious or fallacious ways of talking with him. For when all is done, this is the highest and most important faculty of our minds, deserves the greatest care and attention in cultivating it: the right improvement, and exercise of our reason being the highest perfection that a man can attain to in his life.”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Sec. 122
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

Life, Way, Exercises, Perfection

“It is a complaint without foundation that "to very few people is granted the faculty of comprehending what is imparted to them, and that most, through dullness of understanding, lose their labor and their time." On the contrary, you will find the greater number of men both ready in conceiving and quick in learning, since such quickness is natural to man. As birds are born to fly, horses to run, and wild beasts to show fierceness, so to us peculiarly belong activity and sagacity of understanding.”
Falsa enim est querela, paucissimis hominibus vim percipiendi quae tradantur esse concessam, plerosque vero laborem ac tempora tarditate ingenii perdere. Nam contra plures reperias et faciles in excogitando et ad discendum promptos. Quippe id est homini naturale, ac sicut aves ad volatum, equi ad cursum, ad saevitiam ferae gignuntur, ita nobis propria est mentis agitatio atque sollertia.

Quintilian (35–96) ancient Roman rhetor

Book I, Chapter I, 1; translation by Rev. John Selby Watson
De Institutione Oratoria (c. 95 AD)

Men, People, Understanding, Nature

“Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.”

Smedley D. Butler (1881–1940) United States Marine Corps General, 2 time Medal of Honor recipient and activist

War is a racket (1935)

Animals

Edgar Allan Poe book The Black Cat

The Black Cat (1843)

Stupidity, Law, Soul, Understanding

“The relationship of soul and body is different in man and woman; the relationship of soul to body differs in their psychic life as well as that of the spiritual faculties to each other. The feminine species expresses a unity and wholeness of the toal psychosomatic personality and a harmonious development of faculties. The masculine species strives to enhance individual abilities in order that they may attain their highest achievements.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), Problems of Women's Education (1932)

Life, Soul, Personality

“If religion be false, it is the basest imposition under heaven; but if the religion of Christ be true, it is the most solemn truth that ever was known! It is not a thing that a man dares to trifle with if it be true, for it is at his soul's peril to make a jest of it. If it be not true it is detestable, but if it be true it deserves all a man's faculties to consider it, and all his powers to obey it. It is not a trifle. Briefly consider why it is not. It deals with your soul. If it dealt with your body it were no trifle, for it is well to have the limbs of the body sound, but it has to do with your soul. As much as a man is better than the garments that he wears, so much is the soul better than the body. It is your immortal soul it deals with. Your soul has to live for ever, and the religion of Christ deals with its destiny. Can you laugh at such words as heaven and hell, at glory and at damnation? If you can, if you think these trifles, then is the faith of Christ to be trifled with. Consider also with whom it connects you—with God; before whom angels bow themselves and veil their faces. Is HE to be trifled with? Trifle with your monarch if you will, but not with the King of kings, the Lord of lords. Recollect that those who have ever known anything of it tell you it is no child's play. The saints will tell you it is no trifle to be converted. They will never forget the pangs of conviction, nor the joys of faith. They tell you it is no trifle to have religion, for it carries them through all their conflicts, bears them up under all distresses, cheers them under every gloom, and sustains them in all labour. They find it no mockery. The Christian life to them is something so solemn, that when they think of it they fall down before God, and say, "Hold thou me up and I shall be safe." And sinners, too, when they are in their senses, find it no trifle. When they come to die they find it no little thing to die without Christ. When conscience gets the grip of them, and shakes them, they find it no small thing to be without a hope of pardon—with guilt upon the conscience, and no means of getting rid of it. And, sirs, true ministers of God feel it to be no trifle. I do myself feel it to be such an awful thing to preach God's gospel, that if it were not "Woe unto me if I do not preach the gospel," I would resign my charge this moment. I would not for the proudest consideration under heaven know the agony of mind I felt but this one morning before I ventured upon this platform! Nothing but the hope of winning souls from death and hell, and a stern conviction that we have to deal with the grandest of all realities, would bring me here.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

Religion—a Reality part II. Secondly, "It is not a vain thing"—that is, IT IS NO TRIFLE. (June 22nd, 1862) http://www.biblebb.com/files/spurgeon/0457.HTM

Life, Death, God, Truth

“The Author of the piece, is entitled to much credit for the goodness of his Pen: and I could wish he had as much credit for the rectitude of his Heart — for, as Men see thro’ different Optics, and are induced by the reflecting faculties of the Mind, to use different means to attain the same end; the Author of the Address, should have had more charity, than to mark for Suspicion, the Man who should recommend Moderation and longer forbearance — or, in other words, who should not think as he thinks, and act as he advises. But he had another plan in view, in which candor and liberality of Sentiment, regard to justice, and love of Country, have no part; and he was right, to insinuate the darkest suspicion, to effect the blackest designs.
That the Address is drawn with great art, and is designed to answer the most insidious purposes. That it is calculated to impress the Mind, with an idea of premeditated injustice in the Sovereign power of the United States, and rouse all those resentments which must unavoidably flow from such a belief. That the secret Mover of this Scheme (whoever he may be) intended to take advantage of the passions, while they were warmed by the recollection of past distresses, without giving time for cool, deliberative thinking, & that composure of Mind which is so necessary to give dignity & stability to measures, is rendered too obvious, by the mode of conducting the business, to need other proof than a reference to the proceeding.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

1780s, The Newburgh Address (1783)

Love, Men, Secret, Justice

“Despotic government supports itself by abject civilization, in which debasement of the human mind, and wretchedness in the mass of the people, are the chief criterions. Such governments consider man merely as an animal; that the exercise of intellectual faculty is not his privilege; that he has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them; and they politically depend more upon breaking the spirit of the people by poverty, than they fear enraging it by desperation.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1790s, Agrarian Justice (1797)

People, Fear, Law, Exercises

“What a pity and what a poverty of spirit, to assert that beasts are machines deprived of knowledge and sentiment, which affect all their operations in the same manner, which learn nothing, never improve, &c. […] Some barbarians seize this dog, who so prodigiously excels man in friendship, they nail him to a table, and dissect him living, to show the mezarian veins. You discover in him all the same organs of sentiment which are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature arranged all the springs of sentiment in this animal that he should not feel? Has he nerves to be incapable of suffering? Do not suppose this impertinent contradiction in nature. […] The animal has received those of sentiment, memory, and a certain number of ideas. Who has bestowed these gifts, who has given these faculties? He who has made the herb of the field to grow, and who makes the earth gravitate towards the sun.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

" Beasts https://books.google.it/books?id=WQpJAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA8", in A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 2, J. and H. L. Hunt, 1824, p. 9 Citas, Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)

Friendship, Dogs, Feeling, Spring

“Every mission constitutes a pledge of duty. Every man is bound to consecrate his every faculty to its fulfilment. He will derive his rule of action from the profound conviction of that duty.”

Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) Italian patriot, politician and philosopher

Life and Writings: Young Europe: General Principles; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 207

“To those who inquire as to the purpose of mathematics, the usual answer will be that it facilitates the making of machines, the travelling from place to place, and the victory over foreign nations, whether in war or commerce. … The reasoning faculty itself is generally conceived, by those who urge its cultivation, as merely a means for the avoidance of pitfalls and a help in the discovery of rules for the guidance of practical life.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1900s, "The Study of Mathematics" (November 1907)

Life, War, Travel, Mathematics

“What would the Senate do with me, an inexperienced legislator who lacks the faculty of self-deception, essential requisite for anyone wanting to guide others.”

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa book The Leopard

Che cosa se ne farebbe il Senato di me, di un legislatore inesperto cui manca la facoltà d'ingannare sé stesso, questo requisito essenziale per chi voglia guidare gli altri?
Page 148
Il Gattopardo (1958)

“Well then, I will tell you. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and I myself have founded great empires; but upon what did these creations of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded His empire upon love, and to this very day millions will die for Him. I think I understand something of human nature; and I tell you, all these were men, and I am a man: none else is like Him; Jesus Christ was more than a man. I have inspired multitudes with such an enthusiastic devotion that they would have died for me but to do this it was necessary that I should be visibly present with the electric influence of my looks, my words, of my voice. When I saw men and spoke to them, I lighted up the flame of self-devotion in their hearts. Christ alone has succeeded in so raising the mind of man toward the unseen, that it becomes insensible to the barriers of time and space. Across a chasm of eighteen hundred years, Jesus Christ makes a demand which is beyond all others difficult to satisfy; He asks for that which a philosopher may often seek in vain at the hands of his friends, or a father of his children, or a bride of her spouse, or a man of his brother. He asks for the human heart; He will have it entirely to Himself. He demands it unconditionally; and forthwith His demand is granted. Wonderful! In defiance of time and space, the soul of man, with all its powers and faculties, becomes an annexation to the empire of Christ. All who sincerely believe in Him, experience that remarkable, supernatural love toward Him. This phenomenon is unaccountable; it is altogether beyond the scope of man's creative powers. Time, the great destroyer, is powerless to extinguish this sacred flame; time can neither exhaust its strength nor put a limit to its range. This is it, which strikes me most; I have often thought of it. This it is which proves to me quite convincingly the Divinity of Jesus Christ.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

In a statement about Jesus Christ. While exiled on the rock of St. Helena, Napoleon called Count Montholon to his side and asked him, "Can you tell me who Jesus Christ was?" Upon the Count declining to respond Napoleon countered. Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other Gods http://books.google.com/books?id=jSI9HnMHdPsC&pg=PA149&lpg=PA149&dq=napoleon+jesus+among+gods&source=bl&ots=CdsDSjamnm&sig=K3l7Ek972r7pyEFT681lbf3PVSQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=nBqhUf3RL4au9AS37ICwCQ&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA, p. 149, in Henry Parry Liddon (1868) The Divinity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; Eight Lectures. New edition. https://books.google.com/books?id=IcINAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA148&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false pp. 147-148, and in Henry Parry Liddon (1869) The Divinity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; Eight Lectures. Fourth edition. https://ia800203.us.archive.org/15/items/divinityofourlord00libbrich/divinityofourlord00libbrich.pdf pp. 147-148. Attributed

Love, Men, Children, Soul

“External objects produce decided effects upon the brain. A man shut up between four walls soon loses the power to associate words and ideas together. How many prisoners in solitary confinement become idiots, if not mad, for want of exercise for the thinking faculty!”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Les objets extérieurs ont une action réelle sur le cerveau. Qui s’enferme entre quatre murs finit par perdre la faculté d’associer les idées et les mots. Que de prisonniers cellulaires devenus imbéciles, sinon fous, par le défaut d’exercice des facultés pensantes.
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XXVI: The worst peril of all

Exercises, Idea, Thinking, Madness

“Reason, sometimes, seems to me to be the faculty our soul possesses of understanding nothing about our body!”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Eryximachus, p. 46
L'Âme et la danse (1921)

Soul, Understanding

“Sensitivity is the principle of all action. A being, albeit animated, who would feel nothing, would never act, for what would its motive for acting be? God himself is sensitive since he acts. All men are therefore sensitive, and perhaps to the same degree, but not in the same manner. There is a purely passive physical and organic sensitivity which seems to have as its end only the preservation of our bodies and of our species through the direction of pleasure and pain. There is another sensitivity that I call active and moral which is nothing other than the faculty of attaching our affections to beings who are foreign to us. This type, about which study of nerve pairs teaches nothing, seems to offer a fairly clear analogy for souls to the magnetic faculty of bodies. Its strength is in proportion to the relationships we feel between ourselves and other beings, and depending on the nature of these relationships it sometimes acts positively by attraction, sometimes negatively by repulsion, like the poles of a magnet. The positive or attracting action is the simple work of nature, which seeks to extend and reinforce the feeling of our being; the negative or repelling action, which compresses and diminishes the being of another, is a combination produced by reflection. From the former arise all the loving and gentle passions, and from the latter all the hateful and cruel passions.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Genevan philosopher

Second Dialogue; translated by Judith R. Bush, Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters
Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques (published 1782)

Love, Men, God, Pain

“We know in bodies only matter, and we observe the faculty of feeling only in bodies: on what foundation then can we erect an ideal being, disowned by all our knowledge?”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) French physician and philosopher

Source: The Natural History of the Soul (1745), Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter

Feeling, Knowledge

“The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand”

Arthur Schopenhauer book The World as Will and Representation

Vol. I, Ch. III, The World As Representation
The World as Will and Representation (1819; 1844; 1859)
Context: The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.

Wisdom, World, Understanding, Nature

“Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

Dune Genesis (1980)
Context: Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem.
It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane. … Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.
It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous.

People, Appearance

“Communism is oppression and slavery. Man is very willing to obey the law of duty, serve his country, and oblige his friends; but he wishes to labor when he pleases, where he pleases, and as much as he pleases. He wishes to dispose of his own time, to be governed only by necessity, to choose his friendships, his recreation, and his discipline; to act from judgment, not by command; to sacrifice himself through selfishness, not through servile obligation. Communism is essentially opposed to the free exercise of our faculties, to our noblest desires, to our deepest feelings.”

Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) French politician, mutualist philosopher, economist, and socialist

Source: What is Property? (1840), Ch. V: "Psychological Explanation of the Idea of Justice and Injustice, and the Determination of the Principle of Government and of Right," Part 2: Characteristics of Communism and of Property
Context: Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In property, inequality of conditions is the result of force, under whatever name it be disguised: physical and mental force; force of events, chance, fortune; force of accumulated property, &c. In communism, inequality springs from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence. This damaging equation is repellent to the conscience, and causes merit to complain; for, although it may be the duty of the strong to aid the weak, they prefer to do it out of generosity, — they never will endure a comparison. Give them equal opportunities of labor, and equal wages, but never allow their jealousy to be awakened by mutual suspicion of unfaithfulness in the performance of the common task.
Communism is oppression and slavery. Man is very willing to obey the law of duty, serve his country, and oblige his friends; but he wishes to labor when he pleases, where he pleases, and as much as he pleases. He wishes to dispose of his own time, to be governed only by necessity, to choose his friendships, his recreation, and his discipline; to act from judgment, not by command; to sacrifice himself through selfishness, not through servile obligation. Communism is essentially opposed to the free exercise of our faculties, to our noblest desires, to our deepest feelings. Any plan which could be devised for reconciling it with the demands of the individual reason and will would end only in changing the thing while preserving the name. Now, if we are honest truth-seekers, we shall avoid disputes about words.
Thus, communism violates the sovereignty of the conscience, and equality: the first, by restricting spontaneity of mind and heart, and freedom of thought and action; the second, by placing labor and laziness, skill and stupidity, and even vice and virtue on an equality in point of comfort. For the rest, if property is impossible on account of the desire to accumulate, communism would soon become so through the desire to shirk.

Friendship, Law, Feeling, Exercises

“I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but that if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty … to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Language of the Night

And never under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue. "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" https://books.google.com/books?id=ksOjjuy3issC&pg=PA44, in The Language of the Night (1979), p. 44

Tree, Imagination, Dead, Personality

“For many years I believed that I remembered helping my grandfather drink his whisky toddy when I was six weeks old, but I do not tell about that any more, now; I am grown old, and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the latter. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010), p. 210

Help, Sadness, Drink, Memory

“The power of the Logos, having in itself a faculty to foresee future events, not as fated, but as taking place by the choice of free agents, foretold from time to time the issues of things to come; it also became a forbidder of wickedness by means of prohibitions, and the encomiast of those who remained good.”

Tatian (120–180) Syrian writer

Ante-Nicene Christian Library: v. 3 p. 11
Address to the Greeks

Future, Time, Fate

“Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable.”

Harold Pinter (1930–2008) playwright from England

Art, Truth & Politics (2005)

Lie, Thinking, Intelligence, People

“The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Happiness, World, Exercises

“Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 19
Source: The Writings of William James

Truth, Way

“Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties or his possessions.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Personality

“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty – psychic or physical.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967), p. 26
Source: The Medium is the Massage

Way, Understanding, Knowledge, Change

“Genius is not a possession of the limited few, but exists in some degree in everyone. Where there is natural growth, a full and free play of faculties, genius will manifest itself.”

Robert Henri (1865–1929) American painter

Nature

“Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1890s, The Mountains of California (1894), chapter 5: The Passes 
Context: Accidents in the mountains are less common than in the lowlands, and these mountain mansions are decent, delightful, even divine, places to die in, compared with the doleful chambers of civilization. Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain-passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action. Even the sick should try these so-called dangerous passes, because for every unfortunate they kill, they cure a thousand.

World, Fear, Home, Mountain

“I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff (Ch. XXXIII).
Source: Wuthering Heights (1847)
Context: I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when every thing is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me — now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives. I could do it, and none could hinder me; but where is the use? I don't care for striking — I can't take the trouble to raise my hand! That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case. I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.

“We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act … Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.”

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

" Notebook N http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/vanWyhe_notebooks.html" (1838) page 36 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=25&itemID=CUL-DAR126.-&viewtype=text quoted in [Darwin's Religious Odyssey, 2002, William E., Phipps, Trinity Press International, 9781563383847, 32, http://books.google.com/books?id=0TA81BTW3dIC&pg=PA32] also quoted in On Evolution: The Development of the Theory of Natural Selection (1996) edited by Thomas F. Glick and David Kohn, page 81 Other letters, notebooks, journal articles, recollected statements Source: Notebooks

Law, Universe, Sun

“Old professors never die, they just lose their faculties.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

“I didn’t know what was more disturbing—the fact that something was obviously wrong, or that three faculty members of the world’s premiere spy school had forgotten to lock the door.”

Ally Carter I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Source: I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

World, School

“It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious faculty; by judging all members on one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.”

Christopher Hitchens Letters to a Young Contrarian

Source: Letters to a Young Contrarian

“The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.”

John Stuart Mill book On Liberty

Source: On Liberty

Feeling, Exercises

“What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Life, Wisdom, School, Learning

“To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers

Reality, Joy

“You have been compelled to cultivate your reflective faculties for want of occasions for frittering away your life on silly trifles.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Source: Wuthering Heights

Life

“I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.”

William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) American conservative author and commentator

People, Books

“This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.”

Neal Stephenson book Cryptonomicon

Source: Cryptonomicon

People, Education, Learning

“Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced”

Barbara W. Tuchman (1912–1989) American historian and author

Learning

“True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one’s own the suffering and joys of others.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

Portraits and Aphorisms (1903), Pretexts

Imagination, Suffering, Joy

“The effects of subunit power on organizational decision making and the bases of subunit power are examined in a large midwestern state university. It is hypothesized that subunits acquire power to the extent that they provide resources critical to the organization and that power affects resource allocations within organizations in so far as the resource is critical to the subunits and scarce within the organization. Departmental power is found to be most highly correlated with the department's ability to obtain outside grants and contracts, with national prestige and the relative size of the graduate program following closely in importance. Power is used most in the allocation of graduate university fellowships, the most critical and scarce resource, and is unrelated to the allocation of summer faculty fellowships, the least critical and scarce resource.”

Gerald R. Salancik (1943–1996) American organizational theorist

Gerald R. Salancik, and Jeffrey Pfeffer. "The bases and use of power in organizational decision making: The case of a university." Administrative Science Quarterly (1974): 453-473; p. 454; Abstract.

Decision, Universe, Summer

“On hearing: "It’s an extremely important faculty which helps to balance the nervous system. Besides, people do not hear or see the same thing. There are specialists, especially in France, that measure hearing and determine the frequencies that the ear cannot hear or can only hear at greater intensity. This can cause psychological problems".”

Vangelis (1943) Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, pop rock, and orchestral music

1979

People, Problem, Help

“FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY is getting to be respectable again after centuries of hanging around with phrenologists and other dubious types. By faculty psychology I mean, roughly, the view that many fundamentally different kinds of psychological mechanisms must be postulated in order to explain the facts of mental life. Faculty psychology takes seriously the apparent heterogeneity of the mental and is impressed by such prima facie differences as between, say, sensation and perception, volition and cognition, learning and remembering, or language and thought.”

Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) American philosopher

Source: Modularity of Mind (1983), p. 1

Life, Learning

“I’m sick of hearing how far we’ve come. I’m sick of hearing how in some cases women are superseding men, progressing to positions of middle and upper management. Above all, I’m sick of hearing about the pipeline, about the path to the top supposedly thick with women who will, in the fullness of time, be rewarded for their patience and virtue. The following figures speak for themselves: Three percent of Fortune 500 companies are headed by women; 16.8 percent of members of the U. S. Congress are women; 7 percent of tenured engineering faculty in four-year institutions are women. The fact is that so far as leadership is concerned, women in nearly every realm are hardly any better off than they were a generation ago.”

Barbara Kellerman (1939) American academic

Barbara Kellerman in Harvard Business Review; Cited in " Quote of the week: Barbara Kellerman http://theweek.com/articles/494754/quote-week-barbara-kellerman," at theweek.com, April 30, 2010.

Women, Men, Time, Patience

“Progress, in the sense of acquisition, is something; but progress in the sense of being, is a great deal more. To grow higher, deeper, wider, as the years go on; to conquer difficulties, and acquire more and more power; to feel all one's faculties unfolding, and truth descending into the soul, — this makes life worth living.”

James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888) American theologian and writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 565.

Life, Truth, Feeling, Soul

“Big industry, and the limitless expansion of production which it makes possible, bring within the range of feasibility a social order in which so much is produced that every member of society will be in a position to exercise and develop all his powers and faculties in complete freedom. It thus appears that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, produce misery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery and these catastrophic depressions.
We see with the greatest clarity: (i) That all these evils are from now on to be ascribed solely to a social order which no longer corresponds to the requirements of the real situation; and (ii) That it is possible, through a new social order, to do away with these evils altogether.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

Exercises, Freedom, Appearance, Evil

“All our talents increase in the using, and every faculty, both good and bad, strengthens by exercise: therefore, if you choose to use the bad, or those which tend to evil, till they become your masters, and neglect the good till they dwindle away, you have only yourself to blame.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXIII : First weeks of Matrimony; Helen to Arthur

Exercises, Evil

“This reaction of man upon himself, is one of his noblest attributes; it offers, indeed, the finest field for the display of his activity. As a member of the social body, he is subjected every instant to the necessity of these causes, and pays them a regular tribute; but as a man, employing all the energy of his intellectual faculties, he in some measure masters these causes, and modifies their effects, thus constantly endeavouring to improve his condition.”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

Introductory
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)

“We have an autocracy which — which runs this university. It's managed. We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the Regents in his telephone conversation, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received — from a well-meaning liberal — was the following: He said, "Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his Board of Directors?" That's the answer.Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be — have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product! Don't mean — Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!”

Mario Savio (1942–1996) American activist

Speech, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mariosaviosproulhallsitin.htm Sproul Hall, University of California, Berkeley (1964-12-02).

Imagination, Universe

“Tis strange how like a very dunce,
Man, with his bumps upon his sconce,
Has lived so long, and yet no knowledge he
Has had, till lately, of Phrenology—
A science that by simple dint of
Head-combing he should find a hint of,
When scratching o'er those little pole-hills
The faculties throw up like mole hills.”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

Thomas Hood, Craniology, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 597.
20th century

Knowledge, Science

“Whether you do your work with notes or without them, do it courageously, earnestly, with devotion; with a glad sense of the greatness of it, and a full consecration of every force and faculty to it.”

Richard Salter Storrs (1821–1900) American Congregational clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 483.

Courage, Sense

“there is an irrepressible tendency in every man to develop himself according to the magnitude which Nature has made him of; to speak out, to act out, what nature has laid in him. This is proper, fit, inevitable; nay it is a duty, and even the summary of duties for a man. The meaning of life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this: To unfold your self, to work what thing you have the faculty for.”

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

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

Life, Nature

“It is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech … that are the true ends of knowledge … but it is a restitution and reinvesting, in great part, of man to the sovereignty and power, for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names, he shall again command them.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603) Works, Vol. 1, p. 83; The Works of Francis Bacon (1819) p. 133, https://books.google.com/books?id=xgE9AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA133 Vol. 2

Pleasure, Knowledge, Victory, Parting

“Cosmic Consciousness is a third form which is as far above Self Consciousness as is that above Simple Consciousness. With this form, of course, both simple and self consciousness persist (as simple consciousness persists when self consciousness is acquired), but added to them is the new faculty”

Richard Maurice Bucke (1837–1902) prominent Canadian psychiatrist in the late 19th century

First Words
Cosmic Consciousness (1901)
Context: Cosmic Consciousness … is a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man. This last is called Self Consciousness and is that faculty upon which rests all of our life (both subjective and objective) which is not common to us and the higher animals, except that small part of it which is derived from the few individuals who have had the higher consciousness above named. To make the matter clear it must be understood that there are three forms or grades of consciousness. (1) Simple Consciousness, which is possessed by say the upper half of the animal kingdom. By means of this faculty a dog or a horse is just as conscious of the things about him as a man is; he is also conscious of his own limbs and body and he knows that these are a part of himself. (2) Over and above this Simple Consciousness, which is possessed by man as by animals, man has another which is called Self Consciousness. By virtue of this faculty man is not only conscious of trees, rocks, waters, his own limbs and body, but he becomes conscious of himself as a distinct entity apart from all the rest of the universe. It is as good as certain that no animal can realize himself in that way. … The animal is, as it were, immersed in his consciousness as a fish in the sea, he cannot, even in imagination, get outside of it for one moment so as to realize it. … Cosmic Consciousness is a third form which is as far above Self Consciousness as is that above Simple Consciousness. With this form, of course, both simple and self consciousness persist (as simple consciousness persists when self consciousness is acquired), but added to them is the new faculty … The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as its name implies, a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe … Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment or illumination which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence — would make him almost a member of a new species. To this is added a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as striking and more important both to the individual and to the race than is the enhanced intellectual power. With these come, what may be called, a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.

“Laura and I have come to Blacksburg today with hearts full of sorrow. This is a day of mourning for the Virginia Tech community -- and it is a day of sadness for our entire nation. We've come to express our sympathy. In this time of anguish, I hope you know that people all over this country are thinking about you, and asking God to provide comfort for all who have been affected.Yesterday began like any other day. Students woke up, and they grabbed their backpacks and they headed for class. And soon the day took a dark turn, with students and faculty barricading themselves in classrooms and dormitories -- confused, terrified, and deeply worried. By the end of the morning, it was the worst day of violence on a college campus in American history -- and for many of you here today, it was the worst day of your lives.It's impossible to make sense of such violence and suffering. Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now they're gone -- and they leave behind grieving families, and grieving classmates, and a grieving nation.”

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

Remarks by the President at Virginia Tech Memorial Convocation http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/04/20070417-1.html (April 17, 2007) 2000s, 2007

God, Fate, People, Sadness