Quotes about follower
page 4

“As regards the Sādōcaeans and Boēthosians, they are the sectarians who are anathemised in our prayer. The followers of Jesus are "the Baptists" who adopted the doctrine of baptism, being baptized in the Jordan."”

Judah Halevi book Kuzari

Part Three, "the Baptists" refers to the word meshumadim in the jewish prayer, followed by the words "will have no hope", the hebrew word can be explained in other ways
Kuzari (1140)

“What I try to appeal through my works is simple. The opinion is just a simple message that follows: "Love all the creatures! Love everything that has life"! I have been trying to express this message in every one of my works. Though it has taken the different forms like "the presentation of nature," "the blessing of life," "the suspicion of too much science-oriented civilisation," anti-war and so on.”

Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) Japanese cartoonist and animator

As quoted in Japan-zone http://www.japan-zone.com/modern/tezuka_osamu.shtml

Love, Life, War, Nature

“We know today that nothing will restore the pre-machine condition of reasonably universal employment save an artificial allocation of working hours involving the use of more men than formerly to perform a given task.... The primary function of society, in spite of all the sophistries spurred of selfishness, is to give men better conditions than they could get without it; and the basic need today is jobs for all—not for "property" for a few of the luck and the acquisitive.... In view of the urgent need for change, there is something almost obscene in the chatter of the selfish about various psychological evils allegedly inherent in a New Deal promising decent economic security and humane leisure for all instead of for a few.... What is worth answering is the kindred outcry about "regimentation", "collective slavery", "violation of Anglo-Saxon freedom", "destruction of the right of the individual to make his own way" and so on; with liberal references to Stalin, Hitler, Mustapha Kemal, and other extremist dictators who have sought to control men's personal, intellectual, and artistic lives, and traditional habits and folkways, as well as their economic fortunes. Naturally the Anglo-Saxon balks at any programme calculated to limit his freedom as a man and a thinker or to disturb his inherited perspectives and daily customs—and need we say that no plan ever proposed in an Anglo-Saxon country would conceivably seek to limit such freedom or disturb such perspectives and customs? Here we have a deliberate smoke-screen—conscious and malicious confusion of terms. A decent planned society would indeed vary to some extent the existing regulations (for there are such) governing commercial and economic life. Yet who save a self-confessed Philistine or Marxist (the plutocrat can cite "Das Kapital" for his purpose!) would claim that the details and conditions of our merely economic activities form more than a trivial fraction of our whole lives and personalities? That which is essential and distinctive about a man is not the routine of material struggle he follows in his office; but the civilised way he lives, outside his office, the life whose maintenance is the object of his struggle. So long as his office work gains him a decently abundant and undisputedly free life, it matters little what that work is—what the ownership of the enterprise, and what and how distributed its profits, if profits there be. We have seen that no system proposes to deny skill and diligence an adequate remuneration. What more may skill and diligence legitimately ask? Nor is any lessening in the pride of achievement contemplated. Man will thrill just as much at the overcoming of vast obstacles, and the construction of great works, whether his deeds be performed for service or for profit. As it is, the greatest human achievements have never been for profit. Would Keats or Newton or Lucretius or Einstein or Santayana flourish less under a rationally planned society? Any intimation that a man's life is wholly his industrial life, and that a planned economic order means a suppression of his personality, is really both a piece of crass ignorance and an insult to human nature. Incidentally, it is curious that no one has yet pointed to the drastically regulated economic life of the early Mass. Bay colony as something "American!"”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Unpublished (and probably unsent) letter to the Providence Journal (13 April 1934), quoted in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy, edited by J. T. Joshi, pp. 115-116
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, Men, Way, Nature

“God’s heart has a special place for the poor, so much so that he himself “became poor” (2 Cor 8:9). The entire history of our redemption is marked by the presence of the poor. Salvation came to us from the “yes” uttered by a lowly maiden from a small town on the fringes of a great empire. The Saviour was born in a manger, in the midst of animals, like children of poor families; he was presented at the Temple along with two turtledoves, the offering made by those who could not afford a lamb (cf. Lk 2:24; Lev 5:7); he was raised in a home of ordinary workers and worked with his own hands to earn his bread. When he began to preach the Kingdom, crowds of the dispossessed followed him, illustrating his words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” (Lk 4:18). He assured those burdened by sorrow and crushed by poverty that God has a special place for them in his heart: “Blessed are you poor, yours is the kingdom of God” (Lk 6:20); he made himself one of them: “I was hungry and you gave me food to eat”, and he taught them that mercy towards all of these is the key to heaven”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

cf. Mt 25:5ff.
Section 197
2010s, 2013, Evangelii Gaudium · The Joy of the Gospel

God, Children, Family, Food

“ I asked my guide how it was possible the judicious part of them could suffer such incoherent prating? "We are obliged," said he, "to suffer it, because no one knows, when a brother rises up to hold forth, whether he will be moved by the spirit or by folly. In this uncertainty, we listen patiently to every one. We even allow our women to speak in public; two or three of them are often inspired at the same time, and then a most charming noise is heard in the Lord's house." "You have no priests, then?" said I. "No, no, friend," replied the Quaker; "heaven make us thankful!" Then opening one of the books of their sect, he read the following words in an emphatic tone: "'God forbid we should presume to ordain any one to receive the Holy Spirit on the Lord's day, in exclusion to the rest of the faithful!' ”

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

Further account of his conversations with Andrew Pit
The History of the Quakers (1762)

Women, God, Books, Faith

“The man changed position, turned his back on the wardrobe blocking the door and let his right arm slide down toward the side on which the dog is lying. A minute later, he was awake. He was thirsty. He turned on his bedside light, got up, shuffled his feet into the slippers which were, as always, providing a pillow for the dog's head, and went into the kitchen. Death followed him. The man filled a glass with water and drank it. At this point, the dog appeared, slaked his thirst in the water-dish next to the back door and then looked up at his master. I suppose you want to go out, said the cellist. He opened the door and waited until the animal came back. A little water remained in his glass. Death looked at it and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed. She would have been equally incapable of imagining it when she'd had to make people die of thirst in the desert, but at the time she hadn't even tried. The dog returned, wagging his tail. Let's go back to sleep, said the man. They went into the bedroom again, the dog turned around twice, then curled up into a ball. The man drew the sheet up to his neck, coughed twice and soon afterward was asleep again. Sitting in her corner, death was watching. Much later, the dog got up from the carpet and jumped onto the sofa. For the first time in her life, death knew what it felt like to have a dog on her lap.”

José Saramago book Death with Interruptions

Source: Death with Interruptions (2005), p. 172

Life, Death, People, Dogs

“It follows at once from the last proposition that the centre of gravity of any triangle is at the intersection of the lines drawn from any two angles to the middle points of the opposite sides respectively.”

Archimedes book On the Equilibrium of Planes

Book 1, Proposition 14.
On the Equilibrium of Planes

“But that a camel-merchant should stir up insurrection in his village; that in league with some miserable followers he persuades them that he talks with the angel Gabriel; that he boasts of having been carried to heaven, where he received in part this unintelligible book, each page of which makes common sense shudder; that, to pay homage to this book, he delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse, at least if he was not born a Turk, or if superstition has not extinguished all natural light in him.”

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

Mais qu’un marchand de chameaux excite une sédition dans sa bourgade; qu’associé à quelques malheureux coracites il leur persuade qu’il s’entretient avec l’ange Gabriel; qu’il se vante d’avoir été ravi au ciel, et d’y avoir reçu une partie de ce livre inintelligible qui fait frémir le sens commun à chaque page; que, pour faire respecter ce livre, il porte dans sa patrie le fer et la flamme; qu’il égorge les pères, qu’il ravisse les filles, qu’il donne aux vaincus le choix de sa religion ou de la mort, c’est assurément ce que nul homme ne peut excuser, à moins qu’il ne soit né Turc, et que la superstition n’étouffe en lui toute lumière naturelle.
Referring to Muhammad, in a letter to Frederick II of Prussia (December 1740), published in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, Vol. 7 (1869), edited by Georges Avenel, p. 105
Citas

Death, Books, Religion, Angels

“Were a man to live as long as Methuselah, and to spend all his days in the highest delights sin can offer, one hour of the anguish and tribulation that must follow, would far outweigh them.”

Matthew Henry (1662–1714) Theologician from Wales

A commentary upon the holy Bible: Job to Salomon's song (1835), p. 418.

“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

“Actually, it doesn't matter – Krishna or Christ – the name is the same. The main point is to follow the injunctions of the Vedic scriptures that recommend chanting the name of God in this age.”

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) Indian guru

The Science of Self-Realization http://www.krishna.com/books/the-science-of-self-realization. Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1977. Vanipedia http://vanisource.org/wiki/SSR4a_Krsna_or_Christ_-_The_Name_Is_the_Same

God, Age, Christ

“Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you’re wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn't love you anymore.”

Lady Gaga (1986) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Cosmopolitan (April 2010).

Inspirational, Love, Women, Men

“[…]his back is fairly turned?
The pair of goodly palaces are burned,
The gardens ravaged, and your Guelf is drunk
A week with joy; the next, his laughter sunk
In sobs of blood, for he found, some strange way,
Old Salinguerra back again; I say
Old Salinguerra in the town once more
Uprooting, overturning, flame before
Blood fetlock-high beneath him; Azzo fled;
Who scaped the carnage followed; then the dead
Were pushed aside from Salinguerra's throne.
He ruled once more Ferrara, all alone.
Till Azzo, stunned awhile, revived, would pounce;
Coupled with Boniface, like lynx and ounce.”

Robert Browning book Sordello

Book the First
Sordello (1840)

Way, Laughter, Joy, Dead

“On May 27, the New York Times published one of the most incredible sentences I’ve ever seen. They ran an article about the Nixon-Kissinger interchanges. Kissinger fought very hard through the courts to try to prevent it, but the courts permitted it. You read through it, and you see the following statement embedded in it. Nixon at one point informs Kissinger, his right-hand Eichmann, that he wanted bombing of Cambodia. And Kissinger loyally transmits the order to the Pentagon to carry out "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves." That is the most explicit call for what we call genocide when other people do it that I’ve ever seen in the historical record. Right at this moment there is a prosecution of Milošević going on in the international tribunal, and the prosecutors are kind of hampered because they can’t find direct orders, or a direct connection even, linking Milošević to any atrocities on the ground. Suppose they found a statement like this. Suppose a document came out from Milošević saying, "Reduce Kosovo to rubble. Anything that flies on anything that moves."”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

They would be overjoyed. The trial would be over. He would be sent away for multiple life sentences - if it was a U.S. trial, immediately the electric chair. Interview by David Barsamian on Alternative Radio, June 11, 2004 http://www.isreview.org/issues/37/chomsky.shtml Quotes 2000s, 2004

Life, People, Time, Reading

“Philosophy is possible only because the material ensemble called “man” is endowed with very sophisticated software. But also, this software, human language, is dependent on the condition of the hardware. Now: the hardware will be consumed in the solar explosion, taking philosophical thought with it (along with all other thought) as it goes up in flames. So the problem of the technological sciences can be stated as follows: how can we provide this software with a hardware that is independent of the conditions of life on earth? That is: how can we make thought without a body possible?”

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) French philosopher

Source: Thought Without a Body? (1994), p. 291

Life, Problem, Science, Dependency

“Fundamentalism is terrifying because it is based purely on emotion, rather than intelligence. It prevents followers from thinking as individuals and about the good of the world.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

Daily Telegraph interview (2006)

World, Intelligence, Thinking

“I ordered my coffee and sat down on one of their chairs to relax. A few moments later, when I looked up from my drink, I saw a young couple standing in line. The two of them were kissing passionately. The boy looked like an obnoxious punk; he was tall and wore baggy pants. The girl was a pretty blonde! They looked like they were in the throes of passionate sexual attraction to each other, rubbing their bodies together and tongue kissing in front of everyone. I was absolutely livid with envious hatred. When they left the store I followed them to their car and splashed my coffee all over them.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), 19-22, UC Santa Barbara, Building to Violence

Cars, Girl, Boy, Coffee

“I am a follower of hyaluronic acid – always in small doses of course – to fill wrinkles and fine lines.”

Isabelle Adjani (1955) French actress

Isabelle Adjani: the constant plastic surgery claims http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/8578187/Isabelle-Adjani-the-constant-plastic-surgery-claims.html, 16 Jun 2011.

“Dostoyevsky is ahead of his time - a few daring steps. You follow him, dizzying, fearful, incredulous; but you follow. He won't let loose, you have to follow. … You simply have to call him unique. He comes from nowhere and belongs nowhere. And yet he is always a Russian.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Dostojewski ist seiner Zeit noch um ein paar gewagte Schritte voraus. Man folgt ihm schwindelnd, bange, ungläubig; aber man folgt. Er lässt nicht locker, man muss folgen. … Man muss ihn einfach als Unikum nehmen. Er kommt von nirgendwo und gehört nirgendwo hin. Und dabei bleibt er doch stets Russe.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Fear, Time

“What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!”

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

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

“They [Georgian military forces] launched their attacks at 23:30 [on August 7]. I learned about it the following morning. I spoke to Bush. He said 'No one wants war.' We expected something would happen, I met him again at the stadium. I can't tell you in detail the content of the conversation, but I had the feeling that his administration wouldn't do anything about stopping the conflict, It's a court which makes a king. Maybe the court thought the king shouldn't intervene.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

Speaking to western journalists and academics in Sochi for the first time since the Georgia crisis began. (September 2008) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/12/putin.georgia 2006- 2010

War, Feeling, Learning

“The same King [Greek Empire] placed holiness in abstinence from marriage. Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical history tells us, that Musanus wrote a tract against those who fell away to the heresy of the Encratites, which was then newly risen, and had introduced pernicious errors; and that Tatian, the disciple of Justin, was the author thereof; and that Irenæus in his first book against heresies teaches this… But although the followers of Tatian were at first condemned as heretics by the name of Encratites, or Continentes; their principles could not be yet quite exploded: for Montanus refined upon them, and made only second marriages unlawful; he also introduced frequent fastings, and annual, fasting days, the keeping of Lent, and feeding upon dried meats. The Apostolici, about the middle of the third century, condemned marriage, and were a branch of the disciples of Tatian. The Hierocitæ in Egypt, in the latter end of the third century, also condemned marriage. Paul the Eremite [Hermit] fled into the wilderness from the persecution of Decius, and lived there a solitary life till the reign of Constantine the great, but made no disciples. Antony did the like in the persecution of Dioclesian, or a little before, and made disciples; and many others soon followed his example.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Vol. I, Ch. 13: Of the King who did according to his will, and magnified himself above every God, and honored Mahuzzims, and regarded not the desire of women
Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733)

Life, Marriage, Books, Error

“I feel how inside of me word follows word and thought follows thought, growing to the last act of creation. Holy hour of bringing forth, you are pain and pleasure, and a longing for form, image and essence. I am only the instrument that God uses to sing his song. I am only the vessel that nature smilingly fills with new wine.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Ich fühle, wie in mir sich wachsend Wort an Wort, Gedanke an Gedanke reiht zum letzten Akt der Schöpfung. Heilige Stunde des Gebärens, Schmerz bist du und Lust und eine Sehnsucht nach Form, Gestalt und Wesen. Ich bin nur Instrument, darauf der alte Gott sein Lied singt. Ich bin nur harrendes Gefäß, in das Natur den neuen Wein mit Lächeln füllt.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

God, Pain, Pleasure, Feeling

“Pure Mathematics is the class of all propositions of the form “p implies q,” where p and q are propositions containing one or more variables, the same in the two propositions, and neither p nor q contains any constants except logical constants. And logical constants are all notions definable in terms of the following: Implication, the relation of a term to a class of which it is a member, the notion of such that, the notion of relation, and such further notions as may be involved in the general notion of propositions of the above form. In addition to these, mathematics uses a notion which is not a constituent of the propositions which it considers, namely the notion of truth.”

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

Principles of Mathematics (1903), Ch. I: Definition of Pure Mathematics, p. 3
1900s

Truth, Mathematics

“For reasons mentioned at the beginning of this section, we cannot offer here a precise structural definition of semantical category and will content ourselves with the following approximate formulation: two expressions belong to the same semantical category if (I) there is a sentential function which contains one of these expressions, and if (2) no sentential function which contains one of these expressions ceases to be a sentential function if this expression is replaced in it by the other. It follows from this that the relation of belonging to the same category is reflective, symmetrical and transitive. By applying the principle of abstraction, all the expressions of the language which are parts of sentential functions can be divided into mutually exclusive classes, for two expressions are put into one and the same class if and only if they belong to the same semantical category, and each of these classes is called a semantical category. Among the simplest examples of semantical categories it suffices to mention the category of the sentential functions, together with the categories which include respectively the names of individuals, of classes of individuals, of two-termed relations between individuals, and so on. Variables (or expressions with variables) which represent names of the given categories likewise belong to the same category.”

Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) Polish-American logician

Source: The Semantic Conception of Truth (1952), p. 45; as cited in: Schaff (1962) pp. 36-37.

Parting

“Economics has always flourished and acquired energy from controversies generated by practical policy questions of the day. That was true in the times of Smith, and Ricardo, and Keynes, and it is true today. These periods of division and revolution and counterrevolution are generally followed by periods of synthesis and consolidation from which the science emerges stronger. i am optimistic that this will happen again, and that the best of the insights of the new clasicals will be absorbed in a mainstream, in which the essential insights of Keynesian economists also survive.”

James Tobin (1918–2002) American economist

James Tobin, in Conversations with Economists (1983) by Arjo Klamer
1970s and later

Question, Science, Time

“Are you going to offer yourselves here to the weapons of the enemy, undefended, unavenged? Why is it then you have arms? And why have you undertaken an offensive war? You who are ever turbulent in peace, and laggard in war. What hopes have you in standing here? Do you expect that some god will protect you and bear you hence? A way is to be made with the sword. Come you, who wish to behold your homes, your parents, your wives, and your children; follow me in the way in which you shall see me lead you on. It is not a wall or rampart that blocks your path, but armed men like yourselves. Their equals in courage, you are their superiors by force of necessity, which is the last and greatest weapon.”
Vos telis hostium estis indefensi, inulti? quid igitur arma habetis, aut quid ultro bellum intulistis, in otio tumultuosi, in bello segnes? quid hic stantibus spei est? an deum aliquem protecturum uos rapturumque hinc putatis? ferro via facienda est. hac qua me praegressum uideritis, agite, qui uisuri domos parentes coniuges liberos estis, ite mecum. non murus nec uallum sed armati armatis obstant. virtute pares, necessitate, quae ultimum ac maximum telum est, superiores estis'.

Livy (-59–17 BC) Roman historian

Book IV, sec. 28
History of Rome

Men, God, War, Children

“Indiana was really, I suppose, a Democratic State. It has always been put down in the book as a state that might be carried by a close and careful and perfect organization and a great deal of— [from audience: “soap,” in reference to purchased votes, the word being followed by laughter]. I see reporters here, and therefore I will simply say that everybody showed a great deal of interest in the occasion, and distributed tracts and political documents all through the country.”

Chester A. Arthur (1829–1886) American politician, 21st President of the United States (in office from 1881 to 1885)

The remarks concerned the presidential election of 1880.
As quoted in The New York Times (12 February 1881).
1880s

Books, Laughter, Perfection, Country

“The torturing and testing of parents, is followed by shortage (of sustenance), and being driven towards belittlement and humiliation.”

Ali al-Hadi (829–868) imam

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 369.
Religious Wisdom

Parent

“Karl Marx and Adam Smith both subscribed to this view. They both saw successful growth as dependent on the development of efficient property rights. Their followers appear in the main to have forgotten this.”

Douglass C. North (1920–2015) American Economist

Source: The rise of the western world, 1973, p. 157

Appearance, Success, Dependency

“For if they imagine infinite spaces of time before the world, during which God could not have been idle, in like manner they may conceive outside the world infinite realms of space, in which, if any one says that the Omnipotent cannot hold His hand from working, will it not follow that they must adopt Epicurus’ dream of innumerable worlds? with this difference only, that he asserts that they are formed and destroyed by the fortuitous movements of atoms, while they will hold that they are made by God’s hand, if they maintain that, throughout the boundless immensity of space, stretching interminably in every direction round the world, God cannot rest, and that the worlds which they suppose Him to make cannot be destroyed. …neither does it follow that we should suppose that God was guided by chance when He created the world in that and no earlier time, although previous times had been running by during an infinite past, and though there was no difference by which one time could be chosen in preference to another. But if they say that the thoughts of men are idle when they conceive infinite places, since there is no place beside the world, we reply that, by the same showing, it is vain to conceive of the past times of God’s rest, since there is no time before the world.”

Aurelius Augustinus book The City of God

XI, 5
The City of God (early 400s)

Men, God, World, Dreams

“What do you say about making a libation out of this cup to any god? …I may and I must pray to the gods to prosper my journey from this to that other world—may this, then, which is my prayer, be granted to me. [Then holding the cup to his lips, quite readily and cheerfully he drank off the poison. And hitherto most of us had been able to control their sorrow; but now, when we saw him drinking, and saw too, that he had finished the draft, we could no longer forbear, and in spite of myself my own tears were flowing fast; so that I covered my face and wept over myself, for certainly I was not weeping over him, but at my own calamity at having lost such a companion. Nor was I the first, for Crito, when he found himself unable to restrain his tears, had got up, and moved away, and I followed; and at that moment, Apollodorus, who had been weeping all the time, broke out in a loud cry which made cowards of us all. Socrates alone retained his calmness:] What is this strange outcry? …I sent away the women mainly in order that they might not offend in this way, for I have heard that a man should die in peace. Be quiet then, and have patience.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Women, God, World, Peace

“I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the purse that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something no matter what it might be, even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our admiration.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Source: 1920s, "Picasso Speaks" (1923), p. 315

Life, Search, Understanding, Painting

“In reading this author [ Montaigne ] and comparing him with Epictetus, I have found that they are assuredly the two greatest defenders of the two most celebrated sects of the world, and the only ones conformable to reason, since we can only follow one of these two roads, namely: either that there is a God, and then we place in him the sovereign good; or that he is uncertain, and that then the true good is also uncertain, since he is incapable of it.”

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

Conversation on Epictetus and Montaigne

God, World, Reading

“A good deal of the corporate planning I have observed is like a ritual rain dance; it has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think it does. Moreover, it seems to me that much of the advice and instruction related to corporate planning is directed at improving the dancing, not the weather.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1980s, Creating the Corporate Future, 1981, p. ix in the Preface: "Creating the Corporate Future: Plan or be Planned For," Wiley, April 27, 1981

Thinking, Dance, Weather

“We don’t love Jesus enough. If you go to church, you know He loves you, because you hear it all the time. But do we love Him? I know I don’t tell Him enough. As part of my personal relationship with Jesus, when I get up in the morning, I tell Him, “I need you to know I love you.” And, forgiveness the heart and soul of the movie: forgiving at all costs. It’s hard for Christians, whether we’re working in the film business, or living in the Third Reich, but that’s why we’re Christian. Our Lord has told us to pray “… forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us…” We may feel this is hard, but how we feel has nothing to do with it. What is important is obedience; we must obey Christ’s command. Is following Christ’s command easy? No. But it is the way of the great.”

Jim Caviezel (1968) actor

Jim Caviezel on what he learned playing St. Luke—and why he thinks “We don’t love Jesus enough” http://www.catholicworldreport.com/2018/03/11/jim-caviezel-on-what-he-learned-playing-st-luke-and-why-he-thinks-we-dont-love-jesus-enough/ (March 11, 2018)

Love, Way, Feeling, Soul

“Her majesty, being now in possession of her imperial crown and estate pertaining to it, cannot forsake that faith that the whole world knows her to have followed and practiced since her birth; she desires, rather, by God's grace, to preserve it till her death; and she desires greatly that her subjects may come to embrace the same faith quietly and with charity, whereby she shall receive great happiness.”

Mary I of England (1516–1558) Queen of England and Ireland

Proclamation concerning Religion (1553-08-18).

Death, God, World, Faith

“The object of this paper is to give a satisfactory account of the Foundations of Mathematics in accordance with the general method of Frege, Whitehead and Russell. Following these authorities, I hold that mathematics is part of logic, and so belong to what may be called the logical school as opposed to the formalist and intuitionist schools. I have therefore taken Principia Mathematica as a basis for discussion and ammendment; and believe myself to have discovered how, by using the work of Mr Ludwig Wittgenstein, it can be rendered free from the serious objections which have caused its rejection by the majority of German authorities, who have deserted altogether its line of approach.”

Frank P. Ramsey (1903–1930) British mathematician, philosopher

Preface
The Foundations of Mathematics (1925)

School, Mathematics, Parting

“I would not have him sorrow at my hard lot, or say at the burial, Thus we lay out Socrates, or, Thus we follow him to the grave or bury him; for false words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. Be of good cheer then, my good Crito, and say that you are burying my body only, and do with that as is usual, and as you think best.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Soul, Thinking, Evil, Falseness

“I must confess that I am unable to appreciate the merits of Confucius. His writings are largely occupied with trivial points of etiquette, and his main concern is to teach people how to behave correctly on various occasions. When one compares him, however, with the traditional religious teachers of some other ages and races, one must admit that he has great merits, even if they are mainly negative. His system, as developed by his followers, is one of pure ethics, without religious dogma; it has not given rise to a powerful priesthood, and it has not led to persecution. It certainly has succeeded in producing a whole nation possessed of exquisite manners and perfect courtesy. Nor is Chinese courtesy merely conventional; it is quite as reliable in situations for which no precedent has been provided. And it is not confined to one class; it exists even in the humblest coolie. It is humiliating to watch the brutal insolence of white men received by the Chinese with a quiet dignity which cannot demean itself to answer rudeness with rudeness. Europeans often regard this as weakness, but it is really strength, the strength by which the Chinese have hitherto conquered all their conquerors.”

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

The Problem of China (1922), Ch. XI: Chinese and Western Civilization Contrasted
1920s

Men, People, Age, Teachers

“Moreover, there is this harm too, and one of vast extent, and touching men generally, that by insincerity and lying faith and truth are lost, which are the firmest bonds of human society, and, when they are lost, supreme confusion follows in life, so that men seem in nothing to differ from devils.”

John Henry Newman (1801–1890) English cleric and cardinal

Apologia Pro Vita Sua [A defense of one's own life] (1864)

Life, Men, Truth, Faith

“Listen, even before your religion was born not even two thousand years ago the Chinese had a very high philosophy and knew a path leading them to the Divine; and when they think of Westerners, they think of them as barbarians. And you are going there to convert those who know more about it than you? What are you going to teach them? To be insincere, to perform hollow ceremonies instead of following a profound philosophy and a detachment from life which lead them to a more spiritual consciousness?”

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

On her opinion given to the Priest who was on his way to China as a missionary, quoted in "Diary notes and Meeting with Sri Aurobindo" and also in The Mother: The Story of Her Life by Georges Van Vrekhem (2004) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=8hgG8aweqncC&pg=RA1-PA40, p. 40

Life, Religion, Thinking

“Modern scientists attempt excursions to other planets, but they have no information of how many different types of oceans and seas there are within the universe. According to their experience, the Moon is full of dust, but this does not explain how it gives us soothing rays from a distance of millions of miles. As far as we are concerned, we follow the authority of Vyasadeva and Sukadeva Gosvami, who have described the universal situation according to the Vedic literature. These authorities differ from modern scientists who conclude from their imperfect sensual experience that only this planet is inhabited by living beings whereas the other planets are all vacant or full of dust.”

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) Indian guru

Srimad Bhagavatam, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1999. Canto 7, Chapter 4, verse 15, purport. Vedabase http://www.vedabase.com/en/sb/7/4/15 Quotes from Books: Loving God, Quotes from Books: Regression of Science

Literature, Universe, Sea

“When a young man, I read somewhere the following: God the Almighty said, "All that is too complex is unnecessary, and it is simple that is needed" … So this has been my lifetime motto – I have been creating weapons to defend the borders of my fatherland, to be simple and reliable.”

Mikhail Kalashnikov (1919–2013) Soviet and Russian small arms designer

"Kalashnikov, 90, decries 'criminal' use of rifle" by Dmitry Solovyov, at Reuters (26 October 2009) http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLQ148454

God, Reading

“There is a value called “mind” as there is a value oil, wheat, or gold. … One can invest in that value, one can “follow” it as they say on the stock exchange; one can watch its fluctuations in I know not what price list which is the world’s general opinion of it. … All these rising and falling values constitute the great market of human affairs. And of these the unfortunate value mind does not stop falling.”

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

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), p. 161

World

“I always believed that at some time fate would take from me the terrible effort and duty of educating myself. I believed that, when the time came, I would discover a philosopher to educate me, a true philosopher whom one could follow without any misgiving because one would have more faith in him than one had in oneself. Then I asked myself: what would be the principles by which he would educate you?—and I reflected on what he might say about the two educational maxims which are being hatched in our time. One of them demands that the educator should quickly recognize the real strength of his pupil and then direct all his efforts and energy and heat at them so as to help that one virtue to attain true maturity and fruitfulness. The other maxim, on the contrary, requires that the educator should draw forth and nourish all the forces which exist in his pupil and bring them to a harmonious relationship with one another. … But where do we discover a harmonious whole at all, a simultaneous sounding of many voice in one nature, if not in such men as Cellini, men in whom everything, knowledge, desire, love, hate, strives towards a central point, a root force, and where a harmonious system is constructed through the compelling domination of this living centre? And so perhaps these two maxims are not opposites at all? Perhaps the one simply says that man should have a center and the other than he should also have a periphery? That educating philosopher of whom I dreamed would, I came to think, not only discover the central force, he would also know how to prevent its acting destructively on the other forces: his educational task would, it seemed to me, be to mould the whole man into a living solar and planetary system and to understand its higher laws of motion.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

“Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.2, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), pp. 130-131
Untimely Meditations (1876)

Love, Men, Hate, Fate

“They who have a care of their souls, and do not merely live in the fashions of the body, say farewell to all this; they will not walk in the ways of the blind: and when philosophy offers them purification and release from evil, they feel that they ought not resist her influence, and to her they incline, and whither she leads they follow her.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Way, Feeling, Soul, Fashion

“Just like Lord Jesus Christ. He never advised to, for economic development, for industrial development, or this and that. So many things. He sacrificed everything for God. That is one test, that "Here is a lover of God." He was punished that "You, you stop this preaching," but he did not. So that is love of God. He sacrificed everything. That is love of God. So the ideal is Lord Jesus Christ, and the follower must be, at least to some extent, to that point. That is test. So we say that you follow any religious path. That doesn't matter. We want to see whether you are lover of God. That is our propaganda. And if one is serious about loving God, it doesn't matter in which way he'll develop that dormant love.”

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) Indian guru

Room Conversation - August 14, 1971, London. Vanipedia http://vaniquotes.org/wiki/We_say_that_you_follow_any_religious_path._That_doesn%27t_matter._We_want_to_see_whether_you_are_lover_of_God._That_is_our_propaganda._And_if_one_is_serious_about_loving_God,_it_doesn%27t_matter_in_which_way_he%27ll_develop_that_dormant_love Quotes from other Sources, Quotes from other Sources: Loving God

Love, God, Way, Lovers

“Little effort was made to explain Saddam's culpability, his misuse of Iraqi resources, or the fact that we were not embargoing medicine or food. I was exasperated that our TV was showing what amounted to Iraqi propaganda… I must have been crazy; I should have answered the question by reframing it and pointing out the inherent flaws in the premise behind it. Saddam Hussein could have prevented any child from suffering simply by meeting his obligations. Instead, I said the following: 'I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.' As soon as I had spoken, I wished for the power to freeze time and take back those words. My reply had been a terrible mistake, hasty, clumsy, and wrong. Nothing matters more than the lives of innocent people. I had fallen into a trap and said something that I simply did not mean. That is no one's fault but my own.”

Madeleine K. Albright (1937–2022) Former U.S. Secretary of State

Comment on Stahl interview in Madam Secretary (2003), pp. 274-275
2000s

People, Food, Question, Thinking

“Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx’s proletarian socialism logically follows. This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Anarchism or Socialism (1906)

World

“The Court's justification for consulting its own notions rather than following the original meaning of the Constitution, as I would, apparently is based on the belief of the majority of the Court that for this Court to be bound by the original meaning of the Constitution is an intolerable and debilitating evil; that our Constitution should not be 'shackled to the political theory of a particular era,' and that to save the country from the original Constitution the Court must have constant power to renew it and keep it abreast of this Court's more enlightened theories of what is best for our society. It seems to me that this is an attack not only on the great value of our Constitution itself but also on the concept of a written constitution which is to survive through the years as originally written unless changed through the amendment process which the Framers wisely provided.”

Hugo Black (1886–1971) U.S. Supreme Court justice

Dissenting in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966).

Evil, Change, Country

“I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes; I would rather have lived in a hut, with a vine growing over the door and the grapes growing and ripening in the autumn sun; I would rather have been that peasant, with my wife by my side and my children upon my knees, twining their arms of affection about me; I would rather have been that poor French peasant and gone down at last to the eternal promiscuity of the dust, followed by those who loved me; I would a thousand times rather have been that French peasant than that imperial personative of force and murder; and so I would —ten thousand thousand times.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Soliloquy at the tomb of Napoleon (1882); noted to have been misreported as "I would rather be the humblest peasant that ever lived … at peace with the world than be the greatest Christian that ever lived" by Billy Sunday (May 26, 1912), as reported in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 52-53.

Love, Children, Shoe, Autumn

“The histories of Tiberius, Caius, Claudius, and Nero, while they were in power, were falsified through terror, and after their death were written under the irritation of a recent hatred. Hence my purpose is to relate a few facts about Augustus - more particularly his last acts, then the reign of Tiberius, and all which follows, without either bitterness or partiality, from any motives to which I am far removed.”
Tiberii Gaique et Claudii ac Neronis res florentibus ipsis ob metum falsae, postquam occiderant, recentibus odiis compositae sunt. inde consilium mihi pauca de Augusto et extrema tradere, mox Tiberii principatum et cetera, sine ira et studio, quorum causas procul habeo.

Tacitus book Annals

Book I, 1; Church-Brodribb translation
Annals (117)

Death, History, Motivation

“Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit: That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom. That the Executive will, on the first day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall then be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State, or the people thereof, shall on that day be, in good faith, represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such State shall have participated, shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State, and the people thereof, are not then in rebellion against the United States.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Emancipation Proclamation (1863)

People, Faith, Effort, Freedom

“It is not light that burns, that purifies, that consumes, that divides, and that recomposes; it is fire. And this fire we are talking about always follows light.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Light

“In the preceding section attention was called to the fact that every point p of the straight line produces a separation of the same into two portions such that every point of one portion lies to the left of every point of the other. I find the essence of continuity in the converse, i. e., in the following principle:
"If all points of the straight line fall into two classes such that every point of the first class lies to the left of every point of the second class, then there exists one and only one point which produces this division of all points into two classes, this severing of the straight line into two portions."
…every one will at once grant the truth of this statement; the majority of my readers will be very much disappointed in learning that by this commonplace remark the secret of continuity is to be revealed.”

Richard Dedekind (1831–1916) German mathematician

Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen (1872)

Truth, Secret, Disappointment, Learning

“Bourgeois sport [wants] to differentiate itself strictly from play. Its bestial seriousness consists in the fact that instead of reamaining faithful to the dream of freedom by getting away from purposiveness, the treatment of play as a duty puts it among useful purposes and thereby wipes out the trace of freedom in it. This is particularly valid for contemporary mass music. It is only play as a repetition of prescribed models, and the playful release from responsibility which is thereby achieved does not reduce at all the time devoted to duty except by transferring the responsibility to the models, the following of which one makes into a duty for himself.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Source: On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938), p. 296

Faith, Dreams, Music, Sport

“Moreover, when our hearts are authentically open to universal communion, this sense of fraternity excludes nothing and no one. It follows that our indifference or cruelty towards fellow creatures of this world sooner or later affects the treatment we mete out to other human beings. We have only one heart, and the same wretchedness which leads us to mistreat an animal will not be long in showing itself in our relationships with other people.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

§ 92
2010s, 2015, Laudato si' : Care for Our Common Home

People, World, Sense, Universe

“Such was the will of the Father that his Son, blessed and glorious, whom he gave to us, and who was born for us, should by his own blood, sacrifice, and oblation, offer himself on the altar of the cross, not for himself, by whom "all things were made," but for our sins, leaving us an example that we should follow his steps.”

Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) Catholic saint and founder of the Franciscan Order

Letter to all the Faithful

“A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time. I have said "full-grown person" because the child or the adolescent who may look like a small philistine is only a small parrot mimicking the ways of confirmed vulgarians, and it is easier to be a parrot than to be a white heron. "Vulgarian" is more or less synonymous with "philistine": the stress in a vulgarian is not so much on the conventionalism of a philistine as on the vulgarity of some of his conventional notions. I may also use the terms genteel and bourgeois. Genteel implies the lace-curtain refined vulgarity which is worse than simple coarseness. To burp in company may be rude, but to say "excuse me" after a burp is genteel and thus worse than vulgar. The term bourgeois I use following Flaubert, not Marx. Bourgeois in Flaubert's sense is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. A bourgeois is a smug philistine, a dignified vulgarian.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lectures on Russian Literature

Lectures on Russian Literature (1982)

Way, Idea, Nature, Sense

“I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.”

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

From a speech (1933)

Fight

“If man is the more normal, healthy and happy, … the more successfully he can repress, displace, deny, rationalize, dramatize himself and deceive others, then it follows that the suffering of the neurotic comes … from painful truth. … Spiritually the neurotic has been long since where psychoanalysis wants to bring him without being able to, namely at that point of seeing through the deception of the world of sense, the falsity of reality. He suffers, not from all the pathological mechanisms which are psychically necessary for living … but in the refusal of these mechanisms, which is just what robs him of the illusions important for living.”

Otto Rank (1884–1939) Austrian psychologist

Source: Truth and Reality (1936), pp. 42-43

Pain, Truth, World, Reality

“If you ever wonder whether America is big enough to hold multitudes, strong enough to withstand the forces of change, brave enough to live up to our ideals even in times of trial, then look to the generations of ordinary citizens who have proven again and again that we are worthy of that. That’s our great inheritance -- what ordinary people have done to build this country and make these words live. And it’s our generation’s task to follow their example in this journey -- to keep building an America where no matter who we are or what we look like, or who we love or what we believe, we can make of our lives what we will. You will not and should not forget your history and your past. That adds to the richness of American life. But you are now American. You’ve got obligations as citizens. And I’m absolutely confident you will meet them.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Naturalization Ceremony speech (December 2015)

Love, Life, People, Confidence

“I feel that you have not only reflected honor upon the state which for its good fortune has you as its chief executive, but upon the whole nation. It is incumbent upon every man throughout this country not only to hold up your hands in the course you have been following, but to show his realization that the matter is one of vital concern to us all.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, Letter to Winfield T. Durbin (1903)

Feeling, Country

“We allow ourselves to be blown by the winds because we do know what we want: our hearts know it, even if our thoughts are sometimes slow to follow- but in the end they do catch up with our hearts and then we think we have made a decision.”

Muhammad Asad book The Road to Mecca

Page 68.
The Road to Mecca (1954)

Thinking, Decision, Heart

“None of us can or should expect a transformation in race relations overnight. Every time something like this happens, somebody says we have to have a conversation about race. We talk a lot about race. There’s no shortcut. And we don’t need more talk. None of us should believe that a handful of gun safety measures will prevent every tragedy. It will not. People of goodwill will continue to debate the merits of various policies, as our democracy requires -- this is a big, raucous place, America is. And there are good people on both sides of these debates. Whatever solutions we find will necessarily be incomplete. But it would be a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood for, I believe, if we allowed ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again. Once the eulogies have been delivered, once the TV cameras move on, to go back to business as usual -- that’s what we so often do to avoid uncomfortable truths about the prejudice that still infects our society. To settle for symbolic gestures without following up with the hard work of more lasting change -- that’s how we lose our way again. It would be a refutation of the forgiveness expressed by those families if we merely slipped into old habits, whereby those who disagree with us are not merely wrong but bad; where we shout instead of listen; where we barricade ourselves behind preconceived notions or well-practiced cynicism.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Eulogy for the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney (June 2015)

People, Truth, Family, Way

“As a man's conduct is controlled by public fact, so is her religion ruled by authority. The daughter should follow her mother's religion, the wife her husband's. Were that religion false, the docility which leads mother and daughter to submit to nature's laws would blot out the sin of error in the sight of Goddess. Unable to judge for themselves they should accept the judgment of father and husband as that of the church. While men unaided cannot deduce the rules of their faith, neither can they assign limits to that faith by the evidence of reason; they allow themselves to be driven hither and thither by all sorts of external influences, they are ever above or below the truth. Extreme in everything, they are either altogether reckless or altogether pious; you never find them able to combine virtue and piety. Their natural exaggeration is not wholly to blame; the ill-regulated control exercised over them by men is partly responsible. Loose morals bring religion into contempt; the terrors of remorse make it a tyrant; this is why women have always too much or too little religion. As a woman's religion is controlled by authority it is more important to show her plainly what to believe than to explain the reasons for belief; for faith attached to ideas half-understood is the main source of fanaticism, and faith demanded on behalf of what is absurd leads to madness or unbelief. Whether our catechisms tend to produce impiety rather than fanaticism I cannot say, but I do know that they lead to one or other. In the first place, when you teach religion to little girls never make it gloomy or tiresome, never make it a task or a duty, and therefore never give them anything to learn by heart, not even their prayers. Be content to say your own prayers regularly in their presence, but do not compel them to join you. Let their prayers be short, as Christ himself has taught us. Let them always be said with becoming reverence and respect; remember that if we ask the Almighty to give heed to our words, we should at least give heed to what we mean to say.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau book Emile, or On Education

Emile, or On Education (1762), Book V

Women, Men, Truth, Faith

“The whole sense of the book might be summed up the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Original German: Man könnte den ganzen Sinn des Buches etwa in die Worte fassen: Was sich überhaupt sagen lässt, lässt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
Introduction
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

Books, Sense, Silence

“Be guided by feeling alone. We are only simple mortals, subject to error; so listen to the advice of others, but follow only what you understand and can unite in your own feeling.”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Quote from Corot's 'Notebooks', ca. 1856, as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 241
1850s

Error, Feeling, Understanding

“The ideal of strictly scientific method in mathematics which I have tried to realise here, and which perhaps might be named after Euclid I should like to describe in the following way… The novelty of this book does not lie in the content of the theorems but in the development of the proofs and the foundations on which they are based… With this book I accomplish an object which I had in view in my Begriffsschrift of 1879 and which I announced in my Grundlagen der Arithmetik. I am here trying to prove the opinion on the concept of number that I expressed in the book last mentioned.”

Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) mathematician, logician, philosopher

Vol. 1. pp. 137-140, as cited in: Ralph H. Johnson (2012), Manifest Rationality: A Pragmatic Theory of Argument, p. 87
Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, 1893 and 1903

Lie, Books, Way, Mathematics

“This is a good day to die. Follow me!”

Sitting Bull (1831–1890) Hunkpapa Lakota medicine man and holy man

Rallying cry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn (25 June 1876), quoted in Campaigns of General Custer in the North-west by Judson Elliott Walker

“If they were real men, following the tradition they would commit a hara-kiri and calm down at last. All they're doing is making noise”

Dmitry Rogozin (1963) Russian diplomat

in Twitter, referring to the Japanese complaint about PM Medvedev's visit to the Kuril islands. http://news.yahoo.com/japan-protests-russian-pm-visits-disputed-kuril-islands-053050767.html

Men

“The distribution of tasks among the various employees follows a simple rule, which is that the duty of the members of each category is to do as much work as they possibly can, so that only a small part of that work need be passed to the category above. This means that the clerks are obliged to work without cease from morning to night, whereas the senior clerks do so only now and then, the deputies very rarely, and the Registrar almost never.”

José Saramago book All the Names

Source: All the Names (1997), p. 2

Parting, Night

“In Foundations of the Theory of Signs (p. 6), the three terms in question were defined follows: pragmatics as the study of "the relation of signs to interpreters", semantics as the study of "the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable", syntactics as the study of "the formal relations of signs to one another."”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: Writings on the General Theory of Signs, 1971, p. 301

Question, Study

“Rationality requires a complete knowledge and anticipation of the consequences that will follow on each choice. In fact, knowledge of consequences is always fragmentary”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947

Knowledge

“MALCOLM X: Freedom, justice and equality are our principal ambitions. And to faithfully serve and follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is the guiding goal of every Muslim. Mr. Muhammad teaches us the knowledge of our own selves, and of our own people. He cleans us up--morally, mentally and spiritually--and he reforms us of the vices that have blinded us here in the Western society. He stops black men from getting drunk, stops their dope addiction if they had it, stops nicotine, gambling, stealing, lying, cheating, fornication, adultery, prostitution, juvenile delinquency. I think of this whenever somebody talks about someone investigating us. Why investigate the Honorable Elijah Muhammad? They should subsidize him. He's cleaning up the mess that white men have made. He's saving the Government millions of dollars, taking black men off of welfare, showing them how to do something for themselves. And Mr. Muhammad teaches us love for our own kind. The white man has taught the black people in this country to hate themselves as inferior, to hate each other, to be divided against each other. Messenger Muhammad restores our love for our own kind, which enables us to work together in unity and harmony. He shows us how to pool our financial resources and our talents, then to work together toward a common objective. Among other things, we have small businesses in most major cities in this country, and we want to create many more. We are taught by Mr. Muhammad that it is very important to improve the black man's economy, and his thrift. But to do this, we must have land of our own. The brainwashed black man can never learn to stand on his own two feet until he is on his own. We must learn to become our own producers, manufacturers and traders; we must have industry of our own, to employ our own. The white man resists this because he wants to keep the black man under his thumb and jurisdiction in white society. He wants to keep the black man always dependent and begging--for jobs, food, clothes, shelter, education. The white man doesn't want to lose somebody to be supreme over. He wants to keep the black man where he can be watched and retarded.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Mr. Muhammad teaches that as soon as we separate from the white man, we will learn that we can do without the white man just as he can do without us. The white man knows that once black men get off to themselves and learn they can do for themselves, the black man's full potential will explode and he will surpass the white man.
Playboy interview, regarding the ambition of the Black Muslims
Attributed

Love, Men, Hate, People

“I do so dearly believe that no half-heartedness and no worldly fear must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

Letter to Edith, as quoted in J. R. R. Tolkien: a biography (1977) by Humphrey Carpenter, p. 66

Fear, Light

“The Esterhazy affair, thus, Mr. President, comes down to this: a guilty man is being passed off as innocent. For almost two months we have been following this nasty business hour by hour. I am being brief, for this is but the abridged version of a story whose sordid pages will some day be written out in full.”

Emile Zola J’accuse…!

J'accuse! (1898)

Business

“Christianity is not satisfied with producing merely the specious guise of virtue. She requires the substantial reality, which may stand the scrutinizing eye of that Being “who searches the heart.” Meaning therefore that the Christian should live and breathe; in an atmosphere, as it were, of benevolence, she forbids whatever can tend to obstruct its diffusion or vitiate its purity. It is on this principle that Emulation is forbidden: for, besides that this passion almost insensibly degenerates into envy, and that it derives its origin chiefly from pride and a desire of self-exaltation; how can we easily love our neighbour as ourselves, if we consider him at the same time our rival, and are intent upon surpassing him in the pursuit of whatever is the subject of our competition?
Christianity, again, teaches us not to set our hearts on earthly possessions and earthly honours; and thereby provides for our really loving, or even cordially forgiving, those who have been more successful than ourselves in the attainment of them, or who have even designedly thwarted us in the pursuit. “Let the rich,” says the Apostle, “rejoice in that he is brought low.” How can he who means to attempt, in any degree, to obey this precept, be irreconcilably hostile towards any one who may have been instrumental in his depression?
Christianity also teaches us not to prize human estimation at a very high rate; and thereby provides for the practice of her injunction, to love from the heart those who, justly or unjustly, may have attacked our reputation, and wounded our character. She commands not the shew, but the reality of meekness and gentleness; and by thus taking away the aliment of anger and the fomenters of discord, she provides for the maintenance of peace, and the restoration of good temper among men, when it may have sustained a temporary interruption.
It is another capital excellence of Christianity, that she values moral attainments at a far higher rate than intellectual acquisitions, and proposes to conduct her followers to the heights of virtue rather than of knowledge. On the contrary, most of the false religious systems which have prevailed in the world, have proposed to reward the labour of their votary, by drawing aside the veil which concealed from the vulgar eye their hidden mysteries, and by introducing him to the knowledge of their deeper and more sacred doctrines.”

William Wilberforce (1759–1833) English politician

Source: Real Christianity (1797), p. 257.

Love, Men, Hostility, World

“At the best of times his face was unreadable. Now his face was a book written in a language long forgotten, in an alphabet unimagined. Silas wrapped the shadows around him like a blanket, and stared after the way the boy had gone, and did not move to follow.”

Neil Gaiman book The Graveyard Book

Source: The Graveyard Book (2008), Ch. 6

Books, Way, Boy, Time

“Each country whose frontiers are consumed by carnage is seen tearing from its heart ever more warriors of full blood and force. One's eyes follow the flow of these living tributaries to the River of Death. To north and south and west ajar there are battles on every side. Turn where you will, there is war in every corner of that vastness.”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 1 - The Vision

Death, War, Tear, Heart

“From all we have said, it will now be evident, one would think, to the most prejudiced reader that modern English Law, following obsequiously a deluded or apathetic stage of public opinion, has solved the problem of the division of rights and duties between the sexes, by conceding to woman all rights, and imposing on man all duties.”

Ernest Belfort Bax (1854–1926) British barrister and journalist

11: A Sex Noblesse http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Legal_Subjection_of_Men#A_Sex_Noblesse The Legal Subjection of Men (1908)

Law, Sex, Problem, Thinking

“Nevertheless, the fact that there are dangers in following a given course merely means that we should follow it with a cautious realization of these dangers, and not that we should abandon it, if on the whole it is the right course.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)

“Any man who would change the World in a significant way must have showmanship, a genial willingness to shed other people’s blood, and a plausible new religion to introduce during the brief period of repentance and horror that usually follows bloodshed.
“Every failure of Earthling leadership has been traceable to a lack on the part of the leader,” says Rumfoord, “of at least one of these three things.”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 7 “Victory” (p. 174)

People, World, Religion, Way

“I, however, saw substance in the plea that the defeated ruling party should not be asked to form the Ministry as it had forfeited the mandate of the people. But I also saw the danger of vesting discretion without objective criteria in the President. While the monarchy in Britain is hereditary and unconnected with parties, the President of India is elected by the majority party and his actions could be partisan or liable to be questioned as partisan. On the other hand, if he followed strictly the criterion of calling the largest party, he would avoid the charge of partisanship. Besides, the President would not be able to play politics by calling a party other than the largest on the basis of his subjective assessment that such a party, in his opinion, was capable of providing a stable government.”

R. Venkataraman (1910–2009) seventh Vice-President of India and the 8th President of India

His assessment when the Congress Party headed by Rajiv Gandhi had lost the elections (in November 1989) but was still the largest party.
Source: Commissions and Omissions by Indian Presidents and Their Conflicts with the Prime Ministers Under the Constitution: 1977-2001, p. 153.

People, Question

“I have said this to explain the stanza that follows, in which the soul replies to those who call in question its holy tranquillity, who will have it wholly occupied with outward duties, that its light may shine before the world: these persons have no conception of the fibres and the unseen root whence the sap is drawn, and which nourish the fruit.”

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

Note to Stanza 28 part 4
Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom, Notes to the Stanzas

World, Soul, Question, Light

“Grasp the subject, the words will follow.”
Rem tene, verba sequentur.

Cato the Elder (-234–-149 BC) politician, writer and economist (0234-0149)

Cato's advice to orators (as quoted in Julius Victor, Art of Rhetoric. p. 197, Orell.; see also Wilhelm Sigismund Teuffel, Teuffel's History of Roman literature, Vol. 1 (1873), p. 158)
Cf. Dionysius Halicarnassensis, De Isocrate, ch. 12: "βούλεται δὲ ἡ φύσις τοῖς νοήμασιν ἕπεσθαι τὴν λέξιν, οὐ τῇ λέξει τὰ νοήματα." [Νature has it that style is in the service of thought, not the other way around.]
Variant translations:
Stick to your subject, and words will follow.
Get hold of the matter, the words will come of themselves.
Lay hold of the subject, and the words will follow.
Keep to the subject and the words will come.
Grasp the point, the words will follow.
Seize the subject; the words will follow.
Stick to the point; the words will follow.
Master the facts; the words will follow.
Lay hold of the substance, the words will follow.
Hold fast to the matter, the words will come.
Hang onto your meaning, and the words will come.
Have a grip of your theme and the words will come.
Hold the idea and the words will follow.
Stick to the meaning, and the words will take care of themselves.

“I’ve no regrets in my personal and professional life. Being a spiritual person, I believe whatever happens, happens for the good. I simply follow what dad says, ‘With music, you can reach out and spread happiness.”

Yuvan Shankar Raja (1979) Indian musician

Yuvan Unplugged (2009)

Life, Music, Personality, Happiness

“Now, then, tell me, if you please, what possible result of good would follow the issuing of such a proclamation as you desire? Understand, I raise no objections against it on legal or constitutional grounds; for, as commander — in — chief of the army and navy, in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy. Nor do I urge objections of a moral nature, in view of possible consequences of insurrection and massacre at the South. I view the matter as a practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Reply to an Emancipation Memorial (1862)

War, Understanding, Nature, Time

“3. Finally, we are contemporaries of a new departure in the doctrine of truth, following the dissolution of its relation of organic concretion to knowledge. It is noticeable, after the fact, that to this day veracity, as I call it, has reigned without quarter: however strange it may seem, it is quite appropriate to say that truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere). Moreover, this theme of truth crosses the paths of Heidegger (who was the first to subtract it from knowledge), the mathematicians (who broke with the object at the end of the last century, just as they broke with adequation), and the modern theories of the subject (which displace truth from its subject pronunciation).”

Alain Badiou (1937) French writer and philosopher

Introduction
Being and Event (1988)

Truth, Departure, Knowledge

“Tjaden reappears. He is still quite excited and again joins the conversation, wondering just how a war gets started. 'Mostly by one country badly offending another,' answers Albert with a slight air of superiority. Then Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. 'A country? I don't follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat.' 'Are you really as stupid as that, or are you just pulling my leg?' growls Kropp. 'I don't mean that at all. One people offends the other—' 'Then I haven't any business here at all,' replies Tjaden, 'I don't feel myself offended.' 'Well, let me tell you,' says Albert sourly,' it doesn't apply to tramps like you.”

Erich Maria Remarque book All Quiet on the Western Front

'Then I can be going home right away,' retorts Tjaden, and we all laugh.
Source: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Ch. 9

War, People, Stupidity, Feeling

“The soul, being a harmony, can never utter a note at variance with the tensions and relaxations and vibrations and other affections of the strings out of which she is composed; she can only follow, she cannot lead them? …And yet do we not now discover the soul to be doing the exact opposite—leading the elements of which she is believed to be composed; almost always opposing and coercing them in all sorts of ways throughout life… threatening and reprimanding the desires, passions, fears, as if talking to a thing which is not herself…”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Life, Fear, Way, Soul

“But we have to follow through, even when the politics are hard. Because in the eyes of innocent men and women and children who, through no fault of their own, have had to flee everything that they know, everything that they love, we have to have the empathy to see ourselves. We have to imagine what it would be like for our family, for our children, if the unspeakable happened to us. And we should all understand that, ultimately, our world will be more secure if we are prepared to help those in need and the nations who are carrying the largest burden with respect to accommodating these refugees.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, United Nations Address (September 2016)

Love, Women, Men, Children

“But right now, the key is to make sure that the public is following instructions. For those of you who still need additional information about how to respond, you can go to Ready. gov -- that’s Ready. gov. And that website should provide you with all the information that your family needs in terms of how you can prepare for this storm.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks by the President on Hurricane Sandy http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2012/10/29/president-obama-makes-statement-hurricane-sandy#transcript, quoted in * 2012-10-29 FEMA, W.H. send storm victims to Internet Steve Friess Politico http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/83024.html?hp=l10 2012-11-02 2012

Family

“I tend to follow a very nocturnal sort of existence mainly because I don't much care for sunlight. Bright colors of any kind depress me, in fact. And my moods are more or less inversely related to the clarity of the sky, on any given day. A matter of fact, my private motto has always been that behind every silver lining there is a cloud.”

Glenn Gould (1932–1982) Canadian pianist

transcribed from The Life and Times of Glenn Gould

Color, Mood

“In the beginning of the year 1665 I found the method of approximating Series and the Rule for reducing any dignity of any Binomial into such a series. The same year in May I found the method of tangents of Gregory and Slusius, and in November had the direct method of Fluxions, and the next year in January had the Theory of Colours, and in May following I had entrance into the inverse method of Fluxions. And the same year I began to think of gravity extending to the orb of the Moon, and having found out how to estimate the force with which [a] globe revolving within a sphere presses the surface of the sphere, from Kepler's Rule of the periodical times of the Planets being in a sesquialterate proportion of their distances from the centers of their orbs I deduced that the forces which keep the Planets in their Orbs must [be] reciprocally as the squares of their distances from the centers about which they revolve: and thereby compared the force requisite to keep the Moon in her orb with the force of gravity at the surface of the earth, and found them answer pretty nearly. All this was in the two plague years of 1665 and 1666, for in those days I was in the prime of my age for invention, and minded Mathematicks and Philosophy more than at any time since. What Mr Hugens has published since about centrifugal forces I suppose he had before me. At length in the winter between the years 1676 and 1677 I found the Proposition that by a centrifugal force reciprocally as the square of the distance a Planet must revolve in an Ellipsis about the center of the force placed in the lower umbilicus of the Ellipsis and with a radius drawn to that center describe areas proportional to the times. And in the winter between the years 1683 and 1684 this Proposition with the Demonstration was entered in the Register book of the R. Society. And this is the first instance upon record of any Proposition in the higher Geometry found out by the method in dispute. In the year 1689 Mr Leibnitz, endeavouring to rival me, published a Demonstration of the same Proposition upon another supposition, but his Demonstration proved erroneous for want of skill in the method.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

(ca. 1716) A Catalogue of the Portsmouth Collection of Books and Papers Written by Or Belonging to Sir Isaac Newton https://books.google.com/books?id=3wcjAAAAMAAJ&pg=PR18 (1888) Preface Also partially quoted in Sir Sidney Lee (ed.), The Dictionary of National Biography Vol.40 http://books.google.com/books?id=NycJAAAAIAAJ (1894)

Books, Age, Thinking, Winter

“When you are losing it can seem like there is a black cloud following you around, but like they say there is a silver lining in every cloud.”

Mario Andretti (1940) Italian-American racing driver

Super Speedway. Dir. Stephen Low. Perf. Mario Andretti, Michael Andretti. DVD. Openwheel Productions Inc., 1997..
1990s

“I am distressed, almost discouraged, and fatigued to the point of slightly ill... Never have I been so unlucky with the weather. Never three suitable days in succession, so I have to be always making changes [in his paintings] for everything is growing and turning green. And I have dreamed of painting the Creuse [river in the South of France] just as we saw it... In short, by dint of changes I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, and then there is that river that shrinks, swells again, green one day, then yellow, sometimes almost dry, and which tomorrow will be a torrent, after the terrible rain that is falling at the moment. In fact, I am very worried. Write to me; I have a great need of comfort.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

In his letter from Normandy to art-critic and friend Gustave Geffroy, 24 April 1889; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 129
1870 - 1890

Dreams, Nature, Change, Success

“I discuss with myself questions of politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to follow any idea, wise or mad that may present itself. … My ideas are my harlots.”

Denis Diderot book Rameau's Nephew

Je m’entretiens avec moi-même de politique, d’amour, de goût ou de philosophie ; j’abandonne mon esprit à tout son libertinage ; je le laisse maître de suivre la première idée sage ou folle qui se présente … Mes pensées ce sont mes catins.
Variant translations:
My ideas are my whores.
My thoughts are my trollops.
Rameau's Nephew (1762)

Love, Idea, Question, Madness

“I shall not attempt to paint to you the feelings of this heart, nor the majestic beauty and glory which surrounded us on this occasion; but you will believe me when I say, that earth, nor men, with the eloquence of time, cannot begin to clothe language in as interesting and sublime a manner as this holy personage. No; nor has this earth power to give the joy, to bestow the peace, or comprehend the wisdom which was contained in each sentence as they were delivered by the power of the Holy Spirit! Man may deceive his fellow-men, deception may follow deception, and the children of the wicked one may have power to seduce the foolish and untaught, till naught but fiction feeds the many, and the fruit of falsehood carries in its current the giddy to the grave; but one touch with the finger of his love, yes, one ray of glory from the upper world, or one word from the mouth of the Savior, from the bosom of eternity, strikes it all into insignificance, and blots it forever from the mind. The assurance that we were in the presence of an angel, the certainty that we heard the voice of Jesus, and the truth unsullied as it flowed from a pure personage, dictated by the will of God, is to me past description, and I shall ever look upon this expression of the Savior’s goodness with wonder and thanksgiving while I am permitted to tarry; and in those mansions where perfection dwells and sin never comes, I hope to adore in that day which shall never cease.”

Oliver Cowdery (1806–1850) American Mormon leader

Letter from Oliver Cowder to W.W. Phelps (Letter I), (September 7, 1834). Published in Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate, Vol. I. No. 1. Kirtland, Ohio, October, 1834. Published in Letters by Oliver Cowdery to W.W. Phelps on the Rise of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Liverpool, 1844.

Love, Wisdom, Men, God

Quotes about follower page 4

Quotes about follower
page 4