Quotes about fill
page 11

“We know that the Egyptian priests were aware, not only that the soil beneath the plains of the Nile, but that also the hills bounding the great valley, contained marine shells; and it could hardly have escaped the observation of Eastern philosophers, that some soils were filled with fossil remains, since so many national works were executed on a magnificent scale by oriental monarchs in very remote eras.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.2, p. 8
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

“Why, the very first act of the State, the compulsory assessment and collection of taxes, is itself an aggression, a violation of equal liberty, and, as such, initiates every subsequent act, even those acts which would be purely defensive if paid out of a treasury filled by voluntary contributions. How is it possible to sanction, under the law of equal liberty, the confiscation of a man's earnings to pay for protection which he has not sought and does not desire? And, if this is an outrage, what name shall we give to such confiscation when the victim is given, instead of bread, a stone, instead of protection, oppression? To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury. But that is exactly what the State is doing.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

The Relation of the State to the Invididual (1890)

Law

“Soon after this the blacks who brought me on board went off, and left me abandoned to despair. I now saw myself deprived of all chance of returning to my native country, or even the least glimpse of hope of gaining the shore, which I now considered as friendly; and I even wished for my former slavery in preference to my present situation, which was filled with horrors of every kind, still heightened by my ignorance of what I was to undergo. I was not long suffered to indulge my grief; I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste any thing. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me; but soon, to my grief, two of the white men offered me eatables; and, on my refusing to eat, one of them held me fast by the hands, and laid me across I think the windlass, and tied my feet, while the other flogged me severely. I had never experienced any thing of this kind before; and although, not being used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it, yet nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side, but I could not; and, besides, the crew used to watch us very closely who were not chained down to the decks, lest we should leap into the water: and I have seen some of these poor African prisoners most severely cut for attempting to do so, and hourly whipped for not eating. This indeed was often the case with myself.”

Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) African abolitionist

Chap. II
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)

Life, Death, Men, Fear

“We seldom stop to think that we are still creatures of the sea, able to leave it only because, from birth to death, we wear the water-filled space suits of our skins.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

Space and the Spirit of Man (1965)

Death, Birth, Thinking, Water

“Ramallah is not Auschwitz. Israel is not the Third Reich. We have no death camps and we haven't massacred one third of the Palestinian population in gas chambers. Therefore, everything we do is quite all right. We may fill the occupied territories with tear gas and blood, we may kill and injure and torture and blackmail and dispossess, we may surround millions by electric fences and tanks in tiny enclaves, we may hold them under siege and daily bombing, we may make pregnant women walk to hospitals, and we shoot ambulances too, don't we. But as long as we fall even an inch short of the atrocities of Nazi Germany, it's all fine and good, and don't you dare make the comparison.”

Ran HaCohen (1964) Israeli academic and translator

"The Auschwitz Logic" http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/h040102.html, Antiwar.com (2002-04-01)

Death, Women, Tear

“This dance is the joy of existence. I am filled with you.
Skin, blood, bone, brain, and soul.
There's no room for lack of trust, or trust.
Nothing in this existence but that existence.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

"We Three" Ch. 11 : Union
The Essential Rumi (1995)

Soul, Joy, Dance

“… one morning, when it was barely light, I woke up because of a golden light that filled the whole wall above my bed, and I saw something like a picture of the Holy Virgin, surrounded by several other personages … and several angels, some of whom were as big as she, while others were like little children. It was like a tableau, and yet the Holy Virgin was alive, in heaven, and the angels were changing position. I believe this lasted for a very long time. I looked, as if praying without words, and I was struck with amazement; I had never seen anything so beautiful. At the beginning, all of the light was like very vibrant gold; it faded little by little, and, as it faded, the face and the hands of the Holy Virgin became more alive and clearer. I was not frightened in the least but filled with a new joy that was both intense and very sweet.”

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

The vision of Mary, p. 166
My Early Years (1968)

Children, Beauty, Angels, Light

“… We talked while the full moon mounted in the sky, words filling up the narrow space between us, as much a buffer as a link. Hours passed and then suddenly at my foot there was a wriggle of the soil. A kangaroo mouse emerged, a creature that I have never otherwise seen except fleeing at a distance. I put my hand on the man’s shoulder to call his attention to this surprise, and we fell silent and watched the strangely fearless mouse do its work for a long time, then resumed the conversation more slowly and more softly as the creature continued to refine its tunnel entrance and the mound of gravelly earth at its mouth, indifferent to our presence. Bats swooped down and snatched invisible meals from the air, and coyotes began to howl, more of them, closer and more persistently than I’ve ever heard before or since, a whole orchestra of drawn-out cries into the dawn.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

Time, Indifference

“Affirmative action, rightly understood, would justify a wide variety of outreach programs for those whose lives have been stultified by poverty, broken families, bad schools, and neighborhoods filled with drugs, crime and gangs. One can heartily commend a program for tutoring young blacks, or young whites, who had never had a genuine teacher in a real classroom. One cannot, however, commend a program of raising the grades of young blacks, but not young whites, without having raised their skills. And what possible justification can there be there for giving scholarship assistance to the child of a black middle-class family, while denying it to a poor white? Can one imagine a more crass disregard for the genuine meaning of the Equal Protection Clause? The priests of this new religion of 'affirmative action' are not without material interests. Hundreds of millions of corporate dollars are spent annually on 'sensitivity training'. Within the universities, centers for black, brown and women's (i. e., feminist) studies are being established, with vast amount of patronage bestowed upon them. Traditional courses in Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare and the Bible continue to appear in the catalogs, but they are increasingly taught by 'deconstructionists', who have no interest in the texts, but only in subjective reactions to the texts.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

1990s, The Party of Lincoln vs. The Party of Bureaucrats (1996)

Women, School, Family, Religion

“More and more American pharmacists are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control because of their personal moral objections. Hey, you know what would really teach us a lesson? If you took off your pretend doctor jacket and got another job. … Now, of course, I know the other side is saying, yes, but this is a moral issue. Yeah, but the problem is, not everyone gets their morals from the same book. You go by the book that says slavery is okay but sex is wrong until after marriage, at which point it becomes a blessed sacrament between a husband and the wife who is withholding it.
In conclusion, let me say to all the activist pharmacists out there, the ones who think sex is bad probably because sex with them always is. Fellas, a pharmacist is not a law-giver, not even a doctor. In the medical pecking order, you rank somewhere in between a chiropractor and a tree surgeon.
You don't answer to a law above the laws of men. You work for Sav-On. The doctors are the ones who make medical decisions because they went to medical school, whereas you were transferred from the counter where people drop off film.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

New Rules (2005)

Men, Marriage, People, Books

“You need to laugh more. Life is filled with too many problems, to not laugh every day. … We need to have a sense of humor going into this because it's too tough without it.”

Ysabella Brave (1979) American singer

"Everyday Bravery" (25 March 2007)

Life, Problem, Sense

“PINCHES OF SALT: Are the humanoids pilling the chemistry into reactions they have no control over? Have the wolves of the universal law already started to blow the door down? Is the back door still open? Who the hell cares with a hundred billion freon - filled hair sprays still on sale? Who am I to ctiticise my own crisis?”

Roy Harper (singer) (1941) British musician

Law, Hell, Universe

“In a lifetime filled with despicable statements and support for history’s worst regimes, MIT professor Noam Chomsky has finally hit absolute bottom as he visits the leader of the Hizballah terror gang, calls the United States a “leading terrorist state,” and supports Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons—to deter “Israeli aggression.””

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

May 11, 2006 http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=20501_Noam_Chomsky_Supports_Hizballah_Iran&only

History, Support

“Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 11

People, Fools, Time

“I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass — which is better than trying to fill them.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“It is often difficult to fill an active healthy man's leisure. He is bored when not working; he paces the floor like a caged animal and sinks naturally into vices which are merely the means of getting numberless vivid sensations from his body with which to fill his empty hours. Modern civilization, with its inventions and machines, has increased the number of these hours, and we must learn how to use them.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Nature, Learning, Animals

“In each of the cathedral churches there was a bishop, or an archbishop of fools, elected; and in the churches immediately dependent upon the papal see a pope of fools. These mock pontiffs had usually a proper suit of ecclesiastics who attended upon them, and assisted at the divine service, most of them attired in ridiculous dresses resembling pantomimical players and buffoons; they were accompanied by large crowds of the laity, some being disguised with masks of a monstrous fashion, and others having their faces smutted; in one instance to frighten the beholders, and in the other to excite their laughter: and some, again, assuming the habits of females, practised all the wanton airs of the loosest and most abandoned of the sex. During the divine service this motley crowd were not contended with singing of indecent songs in the choir, but some of them ate, and drank, and played at dice upon the altar, by the side of the priest who celebrated the mass. After the service they put filth into the censers, and ran about the church, leaping, dancing, laughing, singing, breaking obscene jests, and exposing themselves in the most unseemly attitudes with shameless impudence. Another part of these ridiculous ceremonies was, to shave the precentor of fools upon a stage erected before the church, in the presence of the populace; and during the operation, he amused them with lewd and vulgar discourses, accompanied by actions equally reprehensible. The bishop, or the pope of fools, performed the divine service habited in the pontifical garments, and gave his benediction to the people before they quitted the church. He was afterwards seated in an open carriage, and drawn about to the different parts of the town, attended by a large train of ecclesiastics and laymen promiscuously mingled together; and many of the most profligate of the latter assumed clerical habits in order to give their impious fooleries the greater effect; they had also with them carts filled with ordure, which they threw occasionally upon the populace assembled to see the procession. These spectacles were always exhibited at Christmas-time, or near to it, but not confined to one particular day.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 345
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Festival of Fools

People, Fools, Sex, Fashion

“Charles went towards the table, but he had no lady-like powers of filling four sheets with nothing, and the letter was soon sealed.”

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

The Monthly Magazine

“Mahmood Shah’s next effort was against the port of Jugut, with a view of making converts of the infidels, an object from which he had been hitherto deterred by the reports he received of the approaches to it…”“The King, after an arduous march, at length arrived before the fort of Jugut a place filled with infidels, misled by the infernal minded bramins… The army was employed in destroying the temple at Jugut, and in building a mosque in its stead; while measures, which occupied three or four months in completing, were in progress for equipping a fleet to attack the island of Bete…”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

Sultãn Mahmûd BegDhã of Gujarat (AD 1458-1511) Dwarka (Gujarat)
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

Effort

“When you're with somebody for a long time or have a child with someone, you start to expect them to be this person you had in mind. Then if they don't fill the expectation, resentment starts to come up.”

Jaime Pressly (1977) American actress, model, producer

Jaime Pressly Opens Up About Her Divorce And Memoir

Time, Personality

“Childhood is that time in which we never question the fact that every adult act is not only an autonomous occurrence in the universe, but that it is also filled, packed, overflowing with meaning, whether that meaning works for ill or good, whether the ill or good is or is not comprehended.
Adulthood is that time in which we see that all human actions follow forms, whether well or badly, and it is the perseverance of the forms that is, whether for better or worse, their meaning.
Various cultures make the transition at various ages, which transition period lasts for varying lengths of time, one accomplishing it in a week with careful dances, ancient prayers, and isolate and specified rituals; another, letting it take its own course, offering no help for it, and allowing it to run on frequently for years. But at the center of the changeover there is a period—whether it be a moment’s vision or a year-long suspicion—where the maturing youth sees all adult behavior as merely formal and totally meaningless.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Section 3 (p. 114)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

Youth, Age, Behavior, Question

“The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy…”

Georges Rouault (1871–1958) French painter

Quotes, 1940-1950, Stella Vespertina. (1947)

Disease, Joy

“I should say today that it's tragic that people lose faith in what was once an honourable profession but people will lose faith in journalists. There's nothing one can do about it. People no longer trust journalists - we'll have to turn to politics instead for our belief in people. I almost mean that. Although, of course, anybody can talk about snouts in troughs and go on about it, for journalists to do so is almost beyond belief. Beyond belief. I know lots of journalists - I know more journalists than I know politicians - and I've never met a more venal and disgusting crowd of people when it comes to expenses and allowances… Not all [of them] but then not all human beings are either. I've cheated expenses. I've fiddled things. You have, of course you have. Let's not confuse what politicians get really wrong - things like wars, things where people die - with the rather tedious bourgeois obsession with whether or not they've charged for their wisteria. It's not that important, it really isn't. It isn't what we're fighting for. It isn't what voting is for and the idea that 'Oh, we've all lost faith in politics' [is] nonsense. It's a journalistic made-up frenzy. I know you don't want me to say that. You want me to say "No, it matters, it's important." It isn't it. Believe me, it isn't. It's not the big deal; it's not what we should be worrying about. I know no one's going to pay any attention and newspapers will great joy over filling yards and yards of newsprint with tiny, pointless details of this politician's or that politician's squalid and sad little life as they see it. It's not the big picture, it really isn't. You know, we get the politicians we deserve, it's our fault as much as anybody else's. This has been going on for years and suddenly because a journalist discovers it it's the biggest story ever! It's absolute nonsense, it really is.”

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

On the expenses scandal in the UK. On Newsnight on the BBC Website http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8045869.stm 2000s

Life, War, People, Sadness

“The promise of a future life is held to have such prominence in Christ's teaching as to lead Paul to say that the Master "brought life and immortality to light." How did he do this? By filling the life of to-day with the consciousness of eternal things, of truths and principles which would not change if the whole visible universe were to pass away.
No one to-day, I think, will maintain that Christ created the hope which he aroused to an activity before undreamed of. The majority of the Jews believed in a life after death, as is shown by the segregation of the Sadducees from the orthodox of the synagogue. The new teaching vindicated the spiritual rights and interests of man. From the depths of his own heart was evolved the consciousness of a good that could not die. Man, the creature of a day, has a vested interest in things eternal.”

Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) American abolitionist, social activist, and poet

Beyond the Veil

Life, Death, Truth, Hope

“No man loves God who hates his kind,
Who tramples on his brother's heart and soul;
Who seeks to shackle, cloud, or fog the mind
By fears of hell has not perceived our goal.

God-sent are all religions blest;
And Christ, the Way, the Truth, the Life,
To give the heavy laden rest
And peace from sorrow, sin, and strife.

Behold the Universal Spirit came
To all the churches, not to one alone;
On Pentecostal morn a tongue of flame
Round each apostle as a halo shone.

Since then, as vultures ravenous with greed,
We oft have battled for an empty name,
And sought by dogma, edict, cult, or creed,
To send each other to the quenchless flame.

Is Christ then twain? Was Cephas, Paul,
To save the world, nailed to the tree?
Then why divisions here at all?
Christ's love enfolds both you and me.

His pure sweet love is not confined
By creed which segregate and raise a wall.
His love enfolds, embraces human kind,
No matter what ourselves or Him we call.

Then why not take Him at His word?
Why hold to creeds which tear apart?
But one thing matters, be it heard
That brother love fill every heart.

There's but one thing the world has need to know.
There's but one balm for all our human woe:

There's but one way that leads to heaven above--
That way is human sympathy and love.”

Max Heindel (1865–1919) American asrologer and occultist

Creed or Christ (1909) Source: http://www.rosicrucian.com/rcc/rcceng00.htm http://www.rosicrucian.com/rcc/rcceng00.htm

Love, Life, God, Hate

“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.”

Daniel Handler book The Slippery Slope

The Slippery Slope (2003)

Fate

“Robert G. Ingersoll and Wendell Phillips were the two greatest orators of their time, and probably of all time. Their power sprang from their passion for freedom, for truth, for justice, for a world filled with light and with happy human beings. But for this divine passion neither would have scaled the sublime heights of immortal achievement. The sacred fire burned within them and when they were aroused it flashed from their eyes and rolled from their inspired lips in torrents of eloquence.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

The Secret of Efficient Expression (1911)

Happiness, Truth, World, Justice

“When panting sighs the bosom fill,
And hands by chance united thrill
At once with one delicious pain
The pulses and the nerves of twain;
When eyes that erst could meet with ease,
Do seek, yet, seeking, shyly shun
Ecstatic conscious unison,—
The sure beginnings, say, be these
Prelusive to the strain of love
Which angels sing in heaven above?”

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) English poet

Love and Reason http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/C/CloughArthurHugh/verse/poemsproseremains/lovereason.html, st. 1 (1844).

Love, Pain, Angels, Singing

“The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.”

Raymond Chandler book The Big Sleep

Source: The Big Sleep (1939), chapter 2

Men, Dead

“There is no getting away from the conclusion reached by the African educationalist Abdou Moumini that “colonial education corrupted the thinking and sensibilities of the African and filled him with abnormal complexes.””

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 393.

Education, Thinking

“The incomprehensible richness and loftiness of the Divine Nature, its outpouring generosity toward all in common, fills a man with wonder.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)

Nature

“There are two Americas. One is the America of Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson; the other is the America of Teddy Roosevelt and the modern superpatriots. One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good-humored, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power.”

J. William Fulbright (1905–1995) American politician

Source: The Arrogance of Power (1966), p. 245

Passion

“Return, O Power of the Pentecost, return to Thy people! Shed down Thy flame on many heads! To us, as to our fathers and to those of the old time before them, give fullness of grace! Without Thee we can do nothing; but filled with the Holy Ghost, the excellency of the power will be of Thee, O God! and not of us.”

William Arthur (minister) (1819–1901) Wesleyan Methodist minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 323.

God, People, Time

“The digressions [ in Homer] are not meant to keep the reader in suspense … An episode that will increase suspense by retarding the action must be so constructed that it will not fill the present entirely, will not put the crisis, whose resolution is being awaited, entirely out of the reader’s mind, and thereby destroy the mood of suspense; the crisis and the suspense must continue, must remain vibrant in the background. But Homer—and to this we shall have to return later—knows no background. What he narrates is for the time being the only present, and fills both the stage and the reader’s mind completely.”

Erich Auerbach Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Source: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), p. 4

Mood, Time

“Pride fills me. I am sick with the pride that destroyed me.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Lews Therin Telamon
(15 October 1994)

“I scrawled Song Birds across the blue
stuck the sticky note to my wall.
Needed to remember
there was a time people cut out
the tongues of Song Birds
to eat them as delicacies.
That afternoon I went outside
and thousands of Song Birds
filled the Rosscarrock sky.
I cried a song of remorse.”

Sheri-D Wilson (1958) Canadian Spoken Word Poet

"Autopsy of a Turvy World"
Autopsy of a Turvy World (2008)

People, Bird, Time

“With-it ministries are filled with people so passionate, they're driven to become innovative. They create opportunities.”

Craig Groeschel (1967) American priest

It – How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It (2008, Zondervan)

People, Passion

“…"That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up."”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Disease

“Augmentation, on the other hand, Mr. President, is defined in the GAB as the act of filling up a deficiency in any existing P/A/P of an agency or office from savings in other items of the said agency’s appropriations, and therefore, a non-existent P/A/P cannot be funded by augmentation from savings.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

“Now when the spirit in us wakes and broods,
Filled with home yearnings, drowsily it flings
From its deep heart high dreams and mystic moods,
Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things;
Clothing the vast with a familiar face;
Reaching its right hand forth to greet the starry race.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Love, Dreams, Home, Mood

“The sheep are down at the water, a-drinkin' their bloomin' fill,
An' me and the dog are dozin', as herders and collies will;
The world may be movin' somewheres, but here it is standin' still.”

Arthur Chapman (poet) (1873–1935) American poet and newspaper columnist

The Herder's Reverie http://www.cowboypoetry.com/ac.htm#Reverie, st. 1. Out Where the West Begins and Other Western Verses http://www.cowboypoetry.com/ac.htm#outbk (1917)

World, Dogs, Water

“O tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire;
One morn is in the mighty heaven,
And one in our desire.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Ode http://www.potw.org/archive/potw369.html, st. 1 1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

“The real difficulties which beset this question, do not arise from anything in Ireland, so much as from the constitution of the Government. This House, and the other House of Parliament, are almost exclusively aristocratic in their character. The Administration is therefore necessarily the same, and on the Treasury benches aristocracy reigns supreme. Not fewer than seven Members of the Cabinet are Members of the House of Lords; and every other Member of it is either a Lord by title, or on the very threshold of the peerage by birth or marriage. I am not blaming them for this; it may even be that from neither House of Parliament can fourteen better men be chosen to fill their places. But I maintain that in the present position of Ireland, and looking at human nature as it is, it is not possible that fourteen Gentlemen, circumstanced as these are, can meet round the Council table, and with unbiassed minds fairly discuss the question of Ireland, as it now presents itself to this House, to the country, and to the world.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1848/aug/25/employment-of-the-poor-ireland in the House of Commons (25 August 1848). 1840s

Men, Marriage, World, Birth

“The belief that the body of the Virgin was not interred on earth, but was taken to heaven, has deprived them of all pretext for manufacturing any relics of her remains, which otherwise might have been sufficiently abundant to fill a whole churchyard; yet in order to have at least something belonging to her, they sought to indemnify themselves for the absence of other relics with the possession of her hair and her milk. The hair is shown in several churches in Rome, and at Salvatierra in Spain, at Macon, St Flour, Cluny, Nevers, and in many other towns. With regard to the milk, there is not perhaps a town, a convent, or nunnery, where it is now shown in large or small quantites. Indeed, had the Virgin been a wet-nurse her whole life, or a dairy, she could not have produced more than is shown as hers in various parts.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Johnstone and Hunter edition (1854), p. 248
A Treatise of Relics (1543)

Life, Parting

“The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.”

John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman

Quoted in "http://www.bethblog.com/" http://www.bethblog.com/2010/10/29/john-carmack-discusses-rage-on-iphoneipadipod-touch/

Game, Suffering

“Though deepest dark our efforts should enfold,
Unwearied mine to find the vein of gold;
Forget not oft to lift the hope on high;
The rosy dawn again shall fill the sky.

And by that lovely light, all truth-revealed,
The cherished forms which sad distrust concealed,
Transfigured, yet the same, will round us stand,
The kindred angels of a faithful band;
Ruby and ebon cross both cast aside,
No lamp is needed, for the night has died.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Life Without and Life Within (1859), Sub Rosa, Crux

Love, Truth, Sadness, Faith

“Pop life
Everybody needs a thrill
Pop life
We all got a space 2 fill
Pop life
Everybody can't be on top
But life it ain't real funky
Unless it's got that pop
Dig it.”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

Pop Life
Song lyrics, Around the World in a Day (1985)

Life

“I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs, and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Life, Music, Idea, Thinking

“MAJOR URWICK and Dr. Metcalf have rendered a conspicuous service by editing this collection of Mary Follett’s lectures on business management. They contain teaching which was of importance when the lectures were delivered, and which many people felt should be preserved in a collated form and given a wider public. The circumstances of today have increased that importance. Many people are being called upon to fill new administrative posts, and these lectures teach the principles which should underly all administrative method.”

Seebohm Rowntree (1871–1954) British philanthropist industrialist and sociologist writer

Seebohm Rowntree, "Preface" to Mary Parker Follett with Henry C. Metcalf, and Lyndall Urwick (eds.). Dynamic administration: the collected papers of Mary Parker Follett. Harper & Brother Publishing, 1942

People, Business

“The sun was out, the sun was rising in the sky. Importantly the rooster strode across the floor, hopped up to a window sill, filled his chest, and crowed a mighty crow— to crow the sun up in the sky and sunlight into his busy hen house.”

Meindert DeJong book Along Came a Dog

Along Came a Dog (1958)

Business, Sun, Housing

“Christ imparts to all believers all the spiritual blessings that He is filled with, and withholds none from any that have union with Him, be these blessings never so great, or they that receive them never so weak and contemptible in outward respects..”

John Flavel (1627–1691) English Presbyterian clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 608.

Christ

“From the Latin word "imponere", base of the obsolete English "impone" and translated as "impress" in modern English, Nordic hackers have coined the terms "imponator" (a device that does nothing but impress bystanders, referred to as the "imponator effect") and "imponade" (that "goo" that fills you as you get impressed with something – from "marmelade", often referred as "full of imponade", always ironic).”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Polymorphism in Common Lisp http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/28cb9d4217fe6dc3 (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

“The void is a mouth crying to be filled, a blank mind aching for thought, a cavity desperate for shape. What is not implies what is.”

Jack Vance book To Live Forever

Source: To Live Forever (1956), Chapter XI, section 1

Cry

“The Democrat Wilson was a dyed-in-the-wool bigot who as president tried to rid the national government of its few black employees, save, of course, those who could be cooks, waiters, drivers, or fill other kinds of menial jobs. Wilson was, indeed, as great a bigot toward blacks, as today's Democratic president is.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

As quoted in Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention http://non-intervention.com/1689/democrats-scourge-the-south-after-the-battle-flag-it%e2%80%99s-on-to-old-hickory/ (9 July 2015), by M. Scheuer. 2010s

Cooking

“The extensive literature addressed to the definition or characterization of science is filled with inconsistent points of view and demonstrates that an adequate definition is not easy to attain. Part of the difficulty arises from the fact that the meaning of science is not fixed, but is dynamic. As science has evolved, so has its meaning. It takes on a new meaning and significance with successive ages.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1960s, Scientific method: optimizing applied research decisions, 1962, p. 1.

Age, Literature, Science, Success

“And, oh! what beautiful years were these
When our hearts clung each to each;
When life was filled and our senses thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech.”

Langdon Smith Evolution

Evolution (1895; 1909)

Life, Beauty, Sense, Heart

“The dreamer sometimes falls into the doldrums, but is said to emerge from them again. And the absent-minded person also makes up for it with bouts of perspicacity. Sometimes he is a person whose right to exist has a justification that is not always immediately obvious to you, or more usually, you may absent-mindedly allow it to slip from your mind. Someone who has been wandering about for a long time, tossed to and fro on a stormy sea, will in the end reach his destination. Someone who has seemed to be good for nothing, unable to fill any job, any appointment, will find one in the end and, energetic and capable, will prove himself quite different from what he seemed at first.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

1880s, 1880, Letter to Theo (Cuesmes, July 1880)

Time, Personality, Sea

“Let us look back on the events which fill up the ten years of the Sullan restoration. No one of the movements, external or internal, which occurred during this period - neither the insurrection of Lepidus, nor the enterprises of the Spanish emigrants, nor the wars in Thrace and Macedonia and in Asia Minor, nor the risings of the pirates and the slaves - constituted of itself a mighty danger necessarily affecting the vital sinews of the nation; and yet the state had in all these struggles well-night fought for its very existence. The reason was that the tasks were left everywhere unperformed, so long as they might still have been performed with ease; the neglect of the simplest precautionary measures produced the most dreadful mischiefs and misfortunes, and transformed dependent classes and impotent kings into antagonists on a footing of equality. The democracy and the servile insurrection were doubtless subdued; but such as the victories were, the victor was neither inwardly elevated nor outwardly strengthened by them. It was no credit to Rome, that the two most celebrated generals of the government party had during a struggle of eight years marked by more defeats than victories failed to master the insurgent chief Sertorius and his Spanish guerrillas, and that it was only the dagger of his friends that decided the Sertorian war in favour[sic] of the legitimate government. As to the slaves, it was far less an honour[sic] to have confronted them in equal strive for years. Little more than a century had elapsed since the Hannibalic war; it must have brought a blush to the cheek of the honourable[sic] Roman, when he reflected on the fearfully rapid decline of the nation since that great age. Then the (the Roman) Italian slaves stood like a wall against the veterans of Hannibal; now the Italian militia were scattered like chaff before the bludgeons of their runaway serfs. Then every plain captain acted in case of need as general, and fought often without success, but always with honour, not it was difficult to find among all the officers of rank a leader of even ordinary efficiency. Then the government preferred to take the last farmer from the plough rather than forgo the acquisition of Spain and Greece; now they were on the eve of again abandoning both regions long since acquired, merely that they might be able to defend themselves against the insurgent slaves at home. Spartacus too as well as Hannibal had traversed Italy with an army from the Po to the Sicilian Straights, beaten both consuls, and threatened Rome with a blockade; the enterprise which had needed the greatest general of antiquity to conduct it against the Rome of former days could be undertaken against the Rome of the present by a daring captain of banditti. Was there any wonder that no fresh life sprang out of such victories over insurgents and robber-chiefs?”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Pt. 1, Chapter 2. "Rule of the Sullan Restoration"
The Government of the Restoration as a Whole
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 1

Life, War, Age, Democracy

“Man rears his cattle, his sheep, and his poultry much like household pets. His children make his lambs their playmates. Side by side his oxen toil with him in the field. In return for kindness, they give affection. What confidence they repose in him! how faithfully they serve! With winter's frost an evil day arrives,—a day of massacre, of perfidy, of bloodshed and butchery. With knife and ax he turns upon his trusted friends, the sheep that kissed his hand, the ox that plowed his field. The air is filled with shrieks and moans, with cries of terror and despair; the soil is wet with warm blood, and strewn with corpses.”

John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) American physician

Source: The Living Temple, p. 186

Children, Confidence, Kiss, Winter

“Franz Kafka is dead.He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. […] They turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees, Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 187

Children, People, Books, World

“A little longer still, and Heaven awaits thee,
And fills thy spirit with a great delight;
Then our pale joys will seem a dream forgotten,
Our Sun a darkness, and our Day a Night.”

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) English poet and songwriter

"A Little Longer".
Legends and Lyrics: A Book of Verses (1858)

Dreams, Sun, Joy, Night

“None of you knows what creativity means. To paint a picture, to write a poem? No! To recast one’s whole age, to impose upon it the stamp of one’s will, to fill it with beauty, to overwhelm it, to overpower it with one’s spirit.”

Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914) German author

cited in Zarathustra’s Children (2000), p. 178

Age, Beauty, Painting

“The Senate is a place filled with goodwill and good intentions, and if the road to hell is paved with them, then it's a pretty good detour.”

Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978) Vice-President of the USA under Lyndon B. Johnson

Reported in Newsweek (January 23, 1978), p. 23.

Hell

“We in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the pre-meditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Notes on the Next War (1935)

War, Time, Country

“As for the passions and studies of the mind: avoid envy; anxious fears; anger fretting inwards; subtle and knotty inquisitions; joys and exhilarations in excess; sadness not communicated. Entertain hopes; mirth rather than joy; variety of delights, rather than surfeit of them; wonder and admiration, and therefore novelties; studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and contemplations of nature.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Regimen of Health
Essays (1625)

Sadness, Fear, Hope, History

“Tain’t by turnin’ out to hack folks
You’re agoin’ to git your right,
Nor by lookin’ down on black folks
Coz you’re put upon by white;
Slavery ain’t o’ nary color,
’Tain’t the hide thet makes it wus,
All it keers fer in a feller
’S jest to make him fill its pus.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

No. 1, st. 6
The Biglow Papers (1848–1866), Series I (1848)

Color

“Harry Dresden: On the whole, we're a murderous race. According to Genesis, it took as few as four people to make the planet too crowded to stand, and the first murder was a fratricide. Genesis says that in a fit of jealous rage, the very first child born to mortal parents, Cain, snapped and popped the first metaphorical cap in another human being. The attack was a bloody, brutal, violent, reprehensible killing. Cain's brother Abel probably never saw it coming. As I opened the door to my apartment, I was filled with a sense of empathic sympathy and intuitive understanding. For freaking Cain.”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

Source: The Dresden Files, Dead Beat (2005), Chapter 1, opening lines

People, Understanding, Parent, Sense

“Our prayers can be more than empty wishes, vain hopes or feeble aspirations – but only when they are prayed from faith-filled hearts.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)

Faith, Hope, Heart

“Since Judaism made Christianity possible and gave it the character of a religion essentially free from magic, it rendered an important service from the point of view of economic history. For the dominance of magic outside the sphere in which Christianity has prevailed in one of the most serious obstructions to the rationalization of economic life. Magic involves a stereotyping of technology and economic relations. When attempts were made in China to inaugurate the building of railroads and factories a conflict with geomancy ensued … Similar is the relation to capitalism of the castes in India. Every new technical process which an Indian employs signifies for him first of all that he leaves his caste and falls into another, necessarily lower … An additional fact is that every caste makes every other caste impure. In consequence, workmen who dare not accept a vessel filled with water from each other's hands, cannot be employed together in the same factory room. Obviously, capitalism could not develop in an economic group thus bound hand and foot by magical means.”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Max Weber, General Economic History, trans. by Frank Knight, 1961. p 265

Life, Religion, History, Water

“I have [drawings of] about twelve figures of diggers and men who are working in a potato field, and I wonder if I could not make something of it, you have still a few, for instance, a man who fills a bag with potatoes. Well, I do not know for sure, but sooner or later I shall accomplish that, for I looked at it so attentively this summer, and here in the dunes I could make a good study of the earth and the sky, and then boldly put in the figures.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in letter 169, from The Hague, January, 1882; as cited in Vincent van Gogh, Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, catalog-page: Dutch Period: - 4. Potato Diggers 1880s, 1882

Men, Study, Summer, Drawing

“A manufacturing organization being a live, human thing, is like a municipality. Many of our shops are as fruitful fields for riddance of graft as are many of our cities. The graft in the shop consists mostly in the distortion of the managing and planning body into a wire-pulling and influence machine with easy berths filled by incompetents or idlers. This condition often exists not because of any intentional desire to be disloyal on the part of the employees, but simply on account of the work being allowed to drift without systematic attention to departmental organization.”

Hugo Diemer (1870–1937) American mechanical engineer

Source: "Industrial Engineering," 1905, p. 67

Parting

“Tarzan sat in a brown study for a long time after he finished reading the letter. It was filled with so many new and wonderful things that his brain was in a whirl as he attempted to digest them all.
So they did not know that he was Tarzan of the Apes. He would tell them.
In his tree he had constructed a rude shelter of leaves and boughs, beneath which, protected from the rain, he had placed the few treasures brought from the cabin. Among these were some pencils.
He took one, and beneath Jane Porter's signature he wrote: I am Tarzan of the Apes”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 18 : The Jungle Toll

Tree, Study, Time, Reading

“Reagan is the only man to take the presidency as a part-time job, a means of filling up the otherwise empty hours of retirement.”

Simon Hoggart (1946–2014) English journalist and broadcaster

Hoggart's Guardian column 11 Sep 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/sep/11/politics.guardiancolumnists

Time, Parting

“The laws which governed the spontaneous jumps of the kangaroos were shown to be of the simplest; out of any number of kangaroos a certain proportion always jumped within a specified time, and nothing seemed to be able to change this number. Also, before the jumps took place, there was nothing in the world of phenomena to distinguish those kangaroos that were about to jump from those that were not… to help fill the quota demanded by the statistical law. As discontinuity marched into the world of phenomena through one door, causality walked out through another.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

World, Law, Change, Time

“When my mouth shall be filled with dust, and the worm shall feed, and feed sweetly upon me, when the ambitious man shall have no satisfaction if the poorest alive tread upon him, nor the poorest receive any contentment in being made equal to princes, for they shall be equal but in dust.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

XXVI Sermons, No. 26, Death's Duel, last sermon, February 15, 1631

“There are two things in the world that can never get on together—religion and common sense. Religion deals with the next life, common sense with this; religion points to the sky, common sense to the earth; religion is all imagination, common sense all reason; religion deals with what nobody can understand, common sense with what everybody can understand; religion gives us no return for our investments but flash notes on the bank of expectation, common sense gives us good interest and full security for our capital. They are as opposite as two things can possibly be, and they are always at strife. Religion is always trying to fill the world with delusions, and common sense is always trying to drive them away. Religion says Live for the next world, and common sense says Live for this.”

George William Foote (1850–1915) British secularist and journal editor

"Christianity and Common Sense" http://www.ftarchives.net/foote/flowers/114commonsense.htm, p. 114 Flowers of Freethought (1893)

Life, World, Religion, Imagination

“The spread-the-work schemes, in brief, rest on the same sort of illusion that we have been considering. The people who support such schemes think only of the employment they would provide for particular persons or groups; they do not stop to consider what their whole effect would be on everybody.The spread-the-work schemes rest also, as we began by pointing out, on the false assumption that there is just a fixed amount of work to be done. There could be no greater fallacy. There is no limit to the amount of work to be done as long as any human need or wish that work could fill remains unsatisfied. In a modern exchange economy, the most work will be done when prices, costs, and wages are in the best relations to each other.”

Henry Hazlitt book Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson (1946), Spread-the-Work Schemes (ch. 8)

People, Support, Thinking, Personality

“The organizer who creates roles, who creates the holes that will force the pegs to their shape, is a prime creator of personality itself. When we ask of a man, "What is he?" the answer is usually given in terms of his major role, job, or position in society; he is the place that he fills, a painter, a priest, a politician, a criminal.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, The Organizational Revolution: A study in the ethics of economic organization, 1953, p. 80, quoted in: Paul S. Adler eds. (2009) The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies: Classical Foundations. p. 552

Personality

“What see we here? Forms, nothing more! Forms fill the brightest, strongest eye,
We know not substance; 'mid the shades shadows ourselves we live and die.”

Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, lin…

The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

“Although I was quiet as a child, I had this resistless passion inside of me–this need and hunger to create my own world. Poetry filled that void, and its words fed that vital necessity of ownership.”

Masiela Lusha (1985) Albanian actress, writer, author

On her poetry as a child http://reelladies.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/reel-lady-masiela-lusha/

Hunger, World, Passion

“Man's greatest concern is to know how he shall properly fill his place in the universe and correctly understand what he must be in order to be a man.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Part III : Selection on Education from Kant's other Writings, Ch. I Pedagogical Fragments, # 53
The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant (1904)

Understanding, Universe

“While we seek to fill up life in a way that will best secure the ends of our existence here, our whole plan and course of action should be such as will not hinder but serve our preparation for a future world.”

Albert Barnes (1798–1870) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 383.

Life, World, Way, Future

“For our genius of a father did not limit himself to math. His brain was an octopus, the tentacles of which extended in all directions. He could scan Latin verse and Greek verse as well, and it was as if he were hearing Homer or Theocritus in person. Not to mention the fact that he read Greek from volumes filled with characters which in no way resembled the ones in our Greek grammar or book of excerpts from Greek literature. He also read Sanskrit, with its truly bizarre letters. He spoke Italian like Dante, Spanish like Cervantes, and so for almost every living language.”

André Weil (1906–1998) French mathematician

From At home with André and Simone Weil by Sylvie Weil, pp. 31–32 https://books.google.com/books?id=OdeDlT9-GBUC&pg=PA31 Quote About

Books, Way, Literature, Reading

“I got God on my side.
I'm just trying to survive.
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love?
Fear's a powerful thing;
It can turn your heart black you can trust.
It'll take your God filled soul
And fill it with devils and dust”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Devils & Dust"
Song lyrics, Devils & Dust (2005)

Love, God, Fear, Soul

“[begin list of sophomoric puns] I bet he'd find a place up the chimney of any woman. He's certainly good at filling their stockings. Trouble is, he wouldn't be much good as a lover as he can only come once a year. [end list of sophomoric puns] (Why Chicks Dig Father Christmas)”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Fully Ramblomatic, Essays

Lovers, Christmas

“Man is in pursuit of two goals: he is looking for happinesse and, being by essence empty ("étant vide par essence", Fr.), he is trying to fill (or take up, - "remplir", Fr.) his life; the latter reason play a more considerable role than we ordinarily think. What we take for vainglory, ambition, love of power and riches (or wealth), is often, indeed, a need to mask this emptiness, a need to let one's hair down (or to live it up), to put oneself on a false scent or trail.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

de se donner le change", Fr.
Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 56.

Love, Life, Thinking, Change

“She takes the rain, turns it to sun,
And my soul she fills it.
Where once was a desert
Rivers now run, and my storms she stills it…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Earth Moving (1989)

Soul, Sun

“In England, where judges were named and removable at the will of an hereditary executive, from which branch most misrule was feared, and has flowed, it was a great point gained, by fixing them for life, to make them independent of that executive. But in a government founded on the public will, this principle operates in an opposite direction, and against that will. There, too, they were still removable on a concurrence of the executive and legislative branches. But we have made them independent of the nation itself. They are irremovable, but by their own body, for any depravities of conduct, and even by their own body for the imbecilities of dotage. The justices of the inferior courts are self- chosen, are for life, and perpetuate their own body in succession forever, so that a faction once possessing themselves of the bench of a county, can never be broken up, but hold their county in chains, forever indissoluble. Yet these justices are the real executive as well as judiciary, in all our minor and most ordinary concerns. They tax us at will; fill the office of sheriff, the most important of all the executive officers of the county; name nearly all our military leaders, which leaders, once named, are removable but by themselves. The juries, our judges of all fact, and of law when they choose it, are not selected by the people, nor amenable to them. They are chosen by an officer named by the court and executive. Chosen, did I say? Picked up by the sheriff from the loungings of the court yard, after everything respectable has retired from it. Where then is our republicanism to be found? Not in our constitution certainly, but merely in the spirit of our people. That would oblige even a despot to govern us republicanly. Owing to this spirit, and to nothing in the form of our constitution, all things have gone well. But this fact, so triumphantly misquoted by the enemies of reformation, is not the fruit of our constitution, but has prevailed in spite of it. Our functionaries have done well, because generally honest men. If any were not so, they feared to show it.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1810s, Letter to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval) (1816)

Life, Men, People, Fear

“The traditional picture of the blind old singer of Chios is largely made up of memories that go back to the time when a poet was a vates— a priestly and God-inspired seer. His blindness is merely the outward sign of the inward light that fills his being and enables him to see things others cannot see. This bodily infirmity expresses— as does the lameness of the divine smith Hephaestus—a second idea that was current in primitive times, that a maker of poems, ornaments and other products of handicraft can only come from the ranks of those who are unfit for war and foray. But apart from this feature, the legendary ‘Homer’ is an almost perfect example of the mythical poet who was still half-divine, a wonder-worker and a prophet. We find the clearest embodiment of this idea in Orpheus, the primeval singer who had his harp from Apollo and instruction in the art of song from the Muse herself; with his music he could move not merely men and beasts but even rocks and could reclaim Eurydice from the bonds of death.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter III. Greece and Rome

Death, Men, God, War

“I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do justice. …. He that does not fill a place at home, cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you have not seen at home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. Do you suppose there is any country where they do not scald milk-pans, and swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book The Conduct of Life

The Conduct of Life, Chapter 4, “Culture,” p. 145

Men, Justice, Beauty, Travel

“All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 5, p. 145 (See also: Rene Girard)

Spring

“Returning to town in the stage-coach, which was filled with Mr. Gilman's guests, we stopped for a minute or two at Kentish Town. A woman asked the coachman, "Are you full inside?" Upon which Lamb put his head through the window and said, "I am quite full inside; that last piece of pudding at Mr. Gilman's did the business for me."”

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) English essayist

Autobiographical Recollections (Leslie) ; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Business

“The continent had to be discovered emotionally. It had to become a homeland and feel like home. The sense of overpowering space, the isolation, the warmth of summer, the garish light, the shiny-leafed trees, the birds and insects, the smell of air filled with dust, the strange silences, and the landscapes in all their oddness had to become familiar.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

A Land Half Won (1980)

Feeling, Home, Bird, Sense

“Now I think I'm going down to the well tonight
And I'm going to drink till I get my fill.
And I hope when I get old I don't sit around thinking about it,
But I probably will.
Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture
A little of the glory of,
Well time slips away and leaves you with nothing mister but boring stories of glory days.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Glory Days"
Song lyrics, Born in the U.S.A. (1984)

Hope, Drink, Thinking, Time

“My beloved friend, keep your hand in that of the Master, walk daily by His side, so that you may lead others into the realms of true happiness, where a religion of hate, (which poisons both body and soul) will be unknown, having in its place the "Golden Rule" way, which is the "Jesus Way" of life, will reign supreme. Then, we can walk and talk with Jesus momentarily, because we will be attuned to His will and wishes, thus making the Creation story of the world non-debatable as to its reality. God, my beloved friend is infinite the highest embodiment of love. We are finite, surrounded and often filled with hate. We can only understand the infinite as we loose the finite and take on the infinite.”

George Washington Carver (1864–1943) botanist

George Washington Carver: In His Own Words http://books.google.es/books?id=JcncXGNSJQQC&hl=es&source=gbs_navlinks_s (1991), edited by Gary R. Kremer, University of Missouri Press, p. 135

Love, Life, God, Hate

“Our ethics and our politics assume, largely without question or serious discussion, that the division between human and 'animal' is absolute. 'Pro-life', to take just one example, is a potent political badge, associated with a gamut of ethical issues such as opposition to abortion and euthanasia.
What it really means is pro-human-life. Abortion clinic bombers are not known for their veganism, nor do Roman Catholics show any particular reluctance to have their suffering pets 'put to sleep'. In the minds of many confused people, a single-celled human zygote, which has no nerves and cannot suffer, is infinitely sacred, simply because it is 'human'. No other cells enjoy this exalted status.
But such 'essentialism' is deeply un-evolutionary. If there were a heaven in which all the animals who ever lived could frolic, we would find an interbreeding continuum between every species and every other. For example I could interbreed with a female who could interbreed with a male who could… fill in a few gaps, probably not very many in this case… who could interbreed with a chimpanzee.
We could construct longer, but still unbroken chains of interbreeding individuals to connect a human with a warthog, a kangaroo, a catfish. This is not a matter of speculative conjecture; it necessarily follows from the fact of evolution.
A successful hybridisation between a human and a chimpanzee. Even if the hybrid were infertile like a mule, the shock waves that would be sent through society would be salutary. This is why a distinguished biologist described this possibility as the most immoral scientific experiment he could imagine: it would change everything! It cannot be ruled out as impossible, but it would be surprising.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Richard Dawkins Chimpanzee Hybrid? The Guardian, Jan 2009 https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2009/jan/02/richard-dawkins-chimpanzee-hybrid?commentpage=2

Life, People, Imagination, Question

“The world is filled with millions of 17, 19 and 21 year olds with the necessary programming skills, no day job yet, and a passion to create. Think of the Internet as the great egalitarian environment where multi-billion dollar conglomerates are regularly out-maneuvered by the efforts of individuals.”

Richard Menta American journalist

Source MP3: You Can't Catch Me http://web.archive.org/web/20031217084752/www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2000/catch.html - 6/16/2000 Quotes from the MP3 Newswire

World, Thinking, Effort, Passion

“Ganga Devi wife of Kumar Kampana (died 1374 CE) of Vijayanagar writes as follows in her Madhuravijayam regarding the state of things in the Madura region when it was under Muslim rule:
"The temples in the land have fallen into neglect, as worship in them has been stopped… The sweet odour of the sacrificial smoke and chant of the Vedas have deserted the villages which are now filled with the foul smell of roasted flesh and the fierce noise of the ruffianly Turushkas… The wicked mlechchas pollute the religion of the Hindus every day."”

Gangadevi Indian princess and Sanskrit poetess

Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1999). Theory and practice of Muslim state in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 4

Religion