Quotes about following (4399 quotes, page 36)

“The composer (organizer of sound) will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time. The 'frame' or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time. No rhythm will be beyond the composer's reach.
NEW METHODS WILL BE DISCOVERED, BEARING A DEFINITE RELATION TO SCHOENBERG'S TWELVE-TONE SYSTEM”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

1930s
Source: 'The Future of Music: Credo' (1937); in: 'Silence: lectures and writings by Cage, John', Publisher Middletown, Conn. Wesleyan University Press, June 1961, 4/SILENCE

Time

“Our first introduction to Frank Withers came on December 2, 1963. In our earlier sessions, we had never been able to maintain any consistency between one sitting and another. When the Seth sessions began, one session began to instantly reinforce earlier ones. Seth specified that we have sessions twice a week, naming the evenings and the time. Sessions varied from two to three hours each. Sometimes they were longer. We have followed this schedule ever since, and sessions still continue.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: How To Develop Your ESP Power (1966), p. 11

Time

“Follow your desire as long as you live and do not perform more than is ordered; do not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit… When riches are gained, follow desire, for riches will not profit if one is sluggish.”

Ptahhotep Ancient Egyptian vizier

Maxim no. 11.
The Maxims of Ptahhotep (c. 2350 BCE)

Time

“Suppose a surface to be part red and part blue; so that every point on it is either red or blue, and of course, no part can be both red and blue. What then, is the color of the surface in the immediate neighborhood of the point. …it follows that the boundary is half red and half blue. In like manner, we find it necessary to hold that consciousness essentially occupies time… Thus, the present is half past and half time to come. …Take another case: the velocity of a particle at any instant of time is its mean velocity during an infinitesimal instant in which that time is consumed. Just so, my immediate feeling is my feeling through an infinitesimal duration containing the present instant.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Law of Mind (1892)

Color , Feeling , Time , Past

“Hayek, highly influenced by Mach as a young man, began reading him immediately following his return from service in World War I. He remarked about four decades later that he was “stimulated by Mach’s work to study psychology and the physiology of the senses,” though his interest in these areas derived as much from disagreement as agreement with Mach’s work.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

War , World , Sense , Study

“Religion is one thing, and science another. What if they conflict? Religion is a matter of faith. Faith always gives satisfaction, whereas the truth does not always do so. As for me, I follow Anatole France who enjoins us to keep religion in one compartment of our head and skepticism in another.”

Epifanio de los Santos (1871–1928) Filipino politician

As quoted in “Don Pañong – Genius" by A.V.H. Hartendorp in Philippine Magazine (September 1929), p. 211.
ULOL

Truth , Faith , Religion , Science

“The seven dwarfs were devastated when an eighth joined them one morning before they went to work. He went straight into their house, took little plates and cutlery out of his waistcoat, grabbed the mining tools and was the first dwarf to set off for work. Caught off-guard by his cheeky but honest manner, the others followed, angry because he was showing them the way along the path they took every day and surprised when they found he had turned into dark grotto into a glass palace with Snow White hewn in gold. For these established prospectors it was terrible to behold the intruder appropriating for himself the right to mine the virgin goldmine.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 216 (1993)

Way , Housing

“Be sure from nature never to depart;
To copy nature is the task of art.
The noblest poets own her sovereign sway,
And ever follow where she leads the way.”

Christopher Pitt (1699–1748) English poet

Book II, p. 69
Vida's Art of Poetry (1725)

Art , Way , Nature

“The shocked silence that followed was decidedly baffled. And even, possibly, a little thoughtful, if that was not too much to hope.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

Source: World of the Five Gods series, Paladin of Souls (2003), p. 31

Hope , Silence

“The length of life takes the leading place among inquiries about events following birth.”

Ptolemy (100–170) Greco-Egyptian writer and astronomer of Alexandria

Book III, sec. 10
Tetrabiblos

Life , Birth

“Neither perfect knowledge of the past nor complete awareness of the current state of the arts gives sufficient foresight to indicate profitable action. Even for this more restricted objective, the pervasive effects of uncertainty prevent the ascertainment of actions which are supposed to be optimal in achieving profits. Now the consequence of this is that modes of behavior replace optimum equilibrium conditions as guiding rules of action. Therefore, in the following sections two forms of conscious adaptive behavior are emphasized.”

Armen Alchian (1914–2013) American economist

"Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory", 1950

Art , Behavior , Optimism , Knowledge

“You wonder what I am doing? Well, so do I, in truth. Days seem to dawn, suns to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep. What I have done, what I am doing, what I am going to do, puzzle and bewilder me. Have you ever been a leaf and fallen from your tree in autumn and been really puzzled about it? That's the feeling.”

T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935) British archaeologist, military officer, and diplomat

Letter to Eric Kennington (6 May 1935)

Truth , Feeling , Autumn , Sleep

“In homage to Guillaume Apollinaire [famous French poet, art-critic, writer and defender of Cubism], who had just died and who, on several occasions, seemed to us to have followed a discipline of this kind, without however having sacrificed to it any mediocre literary means, Soupault and I baptized the new mode of pure expression which we had at our disposal and which we wished to pass on to our friends, by the name of SURREALISM. I believe that there is no point today in dwelling any further on this word and that the meaning we gave it initially has generally prevailed over its Apollinarian sense.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Breton's quote refers to the start of the term Surrealism, together with Philippe Soupault
Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

Art , Sense

“Many friendships are swift and accidental, the result of a chance meeting, followed by a permanent separation.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

Friendship , Chance

“The greater part of the substance of the following Essays has already been published in the form of Oral Discourses, addressed to widely different audiences, during the past three years. Upon the subject of the second Essay, I delivered six Lectures to the Working Men in 1860, and two, to the members of the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh in 1862.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Advertisement to the Reader, p. 7
1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863)

Men , Past , Parting

“What is it that separates human beings from the so called lower animals? Well as I see it, it's exactly one half dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism — as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glow-worms or raccoons — Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake. Now, since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human. Capisce?”

Tom Robbins Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)

Beauty , Imagination , Animals

“Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner.”

W. Somerset Maugham book Of Human Bondage

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 53

“There is an inescapable moral dimensions of human existence. It follows that investigation must take account of that proposition. Yet psychologists have been among the most determined opponents of this claim, predictably in the name of what they deem to be science. They hope, at least in their technical activities, to be above the fray.”

Solomon Asch (1907–1996) American psychologist

Solomon Asch, "Comments on D. T. Campell's Chapter", in The Legacy of Solomon Asch : Essays in Cognition and Social Psychology (1990) edited by Irvin Rock, p. 53.

Hope , Science

“The road out would be treacherous, and I didn’t know where it would lead but I followed it anyway. It was a strange world ahead that would unfold, a thunderhead of a world with jagged lightning edges. Many got it wrong and never did get it right. I went straight into it. It was wide open. One thing for sure, not only was it not run by God, but it wasn’t run by the devil either.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Source: Chronicles: Vol. One (2004), p. 293

God , World

“I will not take final Nirvana until I have nuns and female disciples who are accomplished…until I have laywomen followers…who will…. teach the Dhamma”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

as quoted by Dr Bettany Hughes Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11785181/Feminism-started-with-the-Buddha-and-Confucius-25-centuries-ago.html
Unclassified

“India can best develop herself and serve humanity by being herself and following the law of her own nature. This does not mean, as some narrowly and blindly suppose, the rejection of everything new that comes to us in the stream of Time or happens to have been first developed or powerfully expressed by the West. Such an attitude would be intellectually absurd, physically impossible, and above all unspiritual; true spirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our human self-development. It means simply to keep our centre, our essential way of being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve out of it all we do and create.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

The Renaissance in India (1918)

Law , Way , Nature , Light

“Ziyauddin Barani voiced his opinion against the Hanafi school when he wrote as follows in his Fatwa-i-Jahandari: “If Mahmud… had gone to India once more, he would have brought under his sword all the Brahmans of Hind who, in that vast land, are the cause of the continuance of the laws of infidelity and of the strength of idolators; he would have cut off the heads of two or three hundred thousand Hindu chiefs. He would not have returned his Hindu-slaughtering sword to its scabbard until the whole of Hind had accepted Islam. For Mahmud was a Shafiite, and according to Imam Shafii the decree for Hindus is Islam or death, that is to say, they should either be put to death or accept Islam. It is not lawful to accept jiziya from Hindus who have neither a prophet nor a revealed book.””

Ziauddin Barani (1285–1357) Indian Muslim historian and political thinker (1285–1357)

Fatwa-i-Jahandari, quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. ISBN 9788185990231
Fatawa-i-Jahandari

Death , Books , School , Law

“The chief innovator of symbolism in algebra was François Viète… an amateur in the sense that his professional life was devoted to the law… John Wallis… says that Viète, in denoting a class of numbers by a letter, followed the custom of lawyers who discussed legal cases by using arbitrary names [for the litigants]… and later the abbreviations… and still more briefly A, B, and C. Actually, letters had been used occasionally by the Greek Diophantus and by the Hindus. However, in these cases letters were confined to designating a fixed unknown number, powers of that number, and some operations. Viète recognized that a more extensive use of letters, and, in particular, the use of letters to denote classes of numbers, would permit the development of a new kind of mathematics; this he called logistica speciosa in distinction from logistica numerosa.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

...the growth of symbolism was slow. Even simple ideas take hold slowly. Only in the last few centuries has the use of symbolism become widespread and effective.
Source: Mathematics and the Physical World (1959), p. 60

Life , Law , Mathematics , Idea

“The reformer Yeltsin represents the tendency which wants to reduce the gigantic state apparatus. Consequently he follows in Trotsky's footsteps.”

Ernest Mandel (1923–1995) Belgian economist and Marxist philosopher

New Times, 21 March 1990. Quote from Harpal Brar's Trotskyism or Leninism?, pp. 56.

“One of my earliest recollections in life was being taken for holidays to the little farm where my father had been born. … The cows "gave" milk, the hens "gave" eggs … but I couldn't for the life of me see what the pigs "gave", and they seemed … such friendly creatures, always glad to see me, and grateful for almost anything that was thrown to them in the sty. … I still have vivid recollections of the whole process from start to finish, including all the screams of course, which were only feet away from where this pig's companion still lived. And then, when the pig had finally expired, the women came out, one after another, with buckets of this scalding water, and the body of the pig was scraped – all the hairs were taken away. The thing that shocked me, along with the chief impact of the whole setup, was that my Uncle George, of whom I thought very highly, was part of the crew, and I suppose at that point I decided that farms, and uncles, had to be re-assessed. They weren't all they seemed to be, on the face of it, to a little, hitherto uninformed boy. And it followed that this idyllic scene was nothing more than Death Row. A Death Row where every creature's days were numbered by the point at which it was no longer of service to human beings.”

Donald Watson (1910–2005) English vegan activist

Interview with George D. Rodger (15 December 2002), in VeganSociety.com https://www.vegansociety.com/sites/default/files/DW_Interview_2002_Unabridged_Transcript.pdf.

Life , Death , Women , Boy

“Jane Whitney: GG Allin brags he's about to become the leader, the messiah for America's youth. He already claims to have a million followers. Where ever he goes he plays to sell out crowds and this is what they see: concerts filled with violence, bloodshed and sexual assault. GG Allin wants to lead America's young people in a bloody revolution to take over the country and he says nothing can be done to stop him.”

GG Allin (1956–1993) American singer-songwriter

GG Allin on The Jane Whitney Show July 16. 1993. Documentary watched March 1, 2010.
On The Jane Whitney Show

People , Youth , Country

“The present report is a preliminary summary on one phase of a series of experimental studies of group life which has as its aim a scientific approach to such questions as the following : What underlies such differing patterns of group behavior as rebellion against authority, persecution of a scapegoat, apathetic submissiveness to authoritarian domination, or attack upon an outgroup? How may differences in subgroup structure, group stratification, and potency of ego- centered and group-centered goals be utilized as criteria for predicting the social resultants of different group atmospheres? Is not democratic group life more pleasant, but authoritarianism more efficient?”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, Patterns of aggressive behavior in experimentally created “social climates”, 1939, p. 271.

Life , Behavior , Question , Study

“I was in Brooklyn and it was freezing cold. I was living in a room with no windows and paying too much in rent. I envisioned sitting under a palm tree. I followed my nose from there.”

Tod A (1965) American musician

(on why he left America to travel the world) ALARM Magazine (July 7, 2008).

Tree

“And so, uh, uh, a wonderful book, um, American Grace by, uh, Putnam and Campbell, um, uh, is the ultimate authority on this. What they find is that, um, it doesn’t matter what religion you are, and it doesn’t matter what you believe, if you are part of a religious community, then on average, you’re a better citizen, you give more to charity. Religion does bring out the good in people. Now, secular people can be perfectly good, too, but on average, they give less and they give less of their time. So, I’d like to think that I simply, as a secular atheist scientist, followed the evidence, and it showed me that I was wrong in thinking that religion was evil.”

Jonathan Haidt (1963) American psychologist

"The Psychology Behind Morality" (12 June 2014) http://www.onbeing.org/program/jonathan-haidt-the-psychology-behind-morality/transcript/6347#main_content

People , Books , Religion , Communication

“The emperor Antoninus was a practical moralist. From his youth he followed a laborious discipline, and though his high station placed him above all want or the fear of it, he lived as frugally and temperately as the poorest philosopher.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

The Philosophy of Antoninus

Youth , Fear

“For a time our efforts seem to create, and to adorn, and to perfect, until we forget our origin and destination, substituting self for that divine hand which alone can unite the elements of worlds as they float in gasses, equally from His mysterious laboratory, and scatter them again into thin air when the works of His hand cease to find favour in His view.
Let those who would substitute the voice of the created for that of the Creator, who shout "the people, the people," instead of hymning the praises of their God, who vainly imagine that the masses are sufficient for all things, remember their insignificance and tremble. They are but mites amid millions of other mites, that the goodness of providence has produced for its own wise ends; their boasted countries, with their vaunted climates and productions, have temporary possessions of but small portions of a globe that floats, a point, in space, following the course pointed out by an invisible finger, and which will one day be suddenly struck out of its orbit, as it was originally put there, by the hand that made it. Let that dread Being, then, be never made to act a second part in human affairs, or the rebellious vanity of our race imagine that either numbers, or capacity, or success, or power in arms, is aught more than a short-lived gift of His beneficence, to be resumed when His purposes are accomplished.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

The Crater; or, Vulcan's Peak: A Tale of the Pacific http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11573/11573-h/11573-h.htm (1847), Ch. XXX

God , People , World , Imagination

“I shall be most grateful to the gods if I am not disappointed in the opinion which I have of you. For, while we find that the great majority of other men seek the society of those friends who join them in their follies and not of those to admonish them, just as they prefer the most pleasant to the most wholesome, you, I think, are minded otherwise as I judge from the industry you display in your general education. For when one sets for himself the highest standard of conduct, it is probable that in his relation to others he will approve only of those who exhort him to virtue. But most of all you would be spurred on to strive for noble deeds if you should realize that it is from them most of all that we also derive pleasure in the true sense. For while the result of indolence and love of surfeit is that pain follows on the heels of pleasure, on the other hand, devoted toil in the pursuit of virtue, and self-control in the ordering of one's life always yield delights that are pure and more abiding. In the former case we experience pain following upon pleasure, in the latter we enjoy pleasure after pain.”

Isocrates (-436–-338 BC) ancient greek rhetorician

Verses 45-46.
To Demonicus

Love , Life , Men , God

“Not a single Storm Trooper would have followed Röhm. The whole body was merely a revolt of leaders, and only quite a small group of the leaders were willing to take part.”

Viktor Lutze (1890–1943) SA Stabschef

Quoted in "Bulletin of International News" - Page 51.

Parting

“It is because simplicity and vastness are both beautiful that we seek by preference simple facts and vast facts; that we take delight, now in following the giant courses of the stars, now in scrutinizing the microscope that prodigious smallness which is also a vastness, and now in seeking in geological ages the traces of a past that attracts us because of its remoteness.”

Henri Poincaré book Science and Method

C’est parce que la simplicité, parce que la grandeur est belle, que nous rechercherons de préférence les faits simples et les faits grandioses, que nous nous complairons tantôt à suivre la course gigantesque des astres, tantôt à scruter avec le microscope cette prodigieuse petitesse qui est aussi une grandeur, tantôt à rechercher dans les temps géologiques les traces d’un passé qui nous attire parce qu’il est lointain.
Part I. Ch. 1 : The Selection of Facts, p. 23
Science and Method (1908)

Age , Beauty , Star , Past

“I have to make the declaration, but can you doubt what our policy will be? We have but one aim and one single, irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us—nothing. We will never parley, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air, until, with God's help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its peoples from his yoke. Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe. That is our policy and that is our declaration. It follows therefore that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Radio broadcast (22 June 1941) on the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 1121
The Second World War (1939–1945)

God , People , Help , Fight

“.. include prima facie but not ipso facto the following: (a) Homosexuality or gross indecency with another male person; (b) Possession of or trading in an illegal narcotic or other drug; (c) Living upon the earnings of prostitution; (d) Membership in the Communist Party or one of its front organizations (see schedule attached); (e) “Trainism”; (f) Advocating the violent overthrow of the government; (g) Slandering the President of the United States; (h)...”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

.
October “THE ROUGH DRAFT”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Personality

“He is a fool who leaves things close at hand to follow what is out of reach.”

Plutarch book Moralia

Of Garrulity.
Attributed to Hesiod, Frag. 219
Moralia, Others

Fools

“As I was writing about Grace Marks, and about her interlude in the Asylum, I came to see her in context — the context of other people's opinions, both the popular images of madness and the scientific explanations for it available at the time. A lot of what was believed and said on the subject appears like sheer lunacy to us now. But we shouldn't be too arrogant — how many of our own theories will look silly when those who follow us have come up with something better? But whatever the scientists may come up with, writers and artists will continue to portray altered mental states, simply because few aspects of our nature fascinate people so much. The so-called mad person will always represent a possible future for every member of the audience — who knows when such a malady may strike? When "mad," at least in literature, you aren't yourself; you take on another self, a self that is either not you at all, or a truer, more elemental one than the person you're used to seeing in the mirror. You're in danger of becoming, in Shakespeare's works, a mere picture or beast, and in Susanna Moodie's words, a mere machine; or else you may become an inspired prophet, a truth-sayer, a shaman, one who oversteps the boundaries of the ordinarily visible and audible, and also, and especially, the ordinarily sayable. Portraying this process is deep power for the artist, partly because it's a little too close to the process of artistic creation itself, and partly because the prospect of losing our self and being taken over by another, unfamiliar self is one of our deepest human fears.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

People , Truth , Fear , Literature

“So much of acting is technical. Actually, I don’t want people to think that acting is technical, that you don’t need to have a rich fountain of emotional life and all those kinds of things, and know how to focus and concentrate and have good imagination and all of the other things that really make up an actor. One of the things they teach you, for example, in acting class is respond to your instinct, to your moment-to-moment instincts. If they just did that, they’d never get the shot, you know? Because you’d be walking all over… You’d be doing it differently every time. And the camera guys and the light guys, they need to know what you’re going to do. That’s what I mean by, if you just followed your instinct, or follow your impulses, which is what they say to you in acting class, you have to do that but you have to do it in a very confined window.”

Tobin Bell (1942) American actor

Interview: Tobin Bell Discusses His Career and His New Horror Film Dark House https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/interview-tobin-bell-discusses-his-career-and-his-new-horror-film-dark-house/ (March 14, 2014)

Life , People , Guy , Imagination

“The distance that the dead have gone
Does not at first appear;
Their coming back seems possible
For many an ardent year.

And then, that we have followed them
We more than half suspect,
So intimate have we become
With their dear retrospect.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Time and Eternity, p. 229
Collected Poems (1993)

Appearance , Dead

“The reality of buried truths raised suddenly into light is like a scalpel driven solely by an intent to slash, irregardless of whether or not a healing follows. And within the dim corridors of such an observation dwells many dangers indeed; chief among them perhaps, the horror of a man glimpsing his image in a shard of truth’s mirror and discovering he is––or at least that some fundamental segment of him remains––as yet, a lost and broken little boy.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(The Us That Never Was, p. 29).
Book Sources, The American Poet Who Went Home Again (2008)

Truth , Boy , Reality , Light

“Here is how [life] happens. We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace -- whatever we think we need. To do this, we enact the role we call "me," trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things.In the process, we place the people in our lives into compartments and define how they should behave to our advantage. Because we cannot force them to follow our desires, we deal with projections of them created in our minds. But they will be contrary and have wills of their own. Eventually new projections of us are dealing with new projections of them. Sometimes versions of ourselves disagree. We succumb to temptation — but, oh, father, what else was I gonna do? I feel like hell. I repent. I'll do it again… This has not been a conventional review. There is no need to name the characters, name the actors, assign adjectives to their acting. Look at who is in this cast. You know what I think of them. This film must not have seemed strange to them. It's what they do all day, especially waiting around for the director to make up his mind.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/synecdoche-new-york-2008 of Synecdoche, New York (5 November 2008)
Reviews, Four star reviews

Life , People , Education , Food

“It follows that the more definition is given, the more omniscient the management must be, so that no functions are left whole or partly undischarged, no person is overburdened with undelegated responsibility, or left without the authority to do his job properly.”

Tom Burns (1913–2001) British sociologist

Source: The Management of Innovation, 1961, p. 123

Personality

“If you have goals and the stick-with-it-ness to make things happen, people will feel threatened by you, especially if your goals don’t include them. They believe that if you take a piece of pie, then that leaves less pie for them. Seeing you follow your dreams leaves them realizing that they’re not following theirs. In truth, there is unlimited pie for everyone!”

RuPaul (1960) Actriz de Televisa, dueña y señora de los ejidos cacaoahuateros

Source: Workin' It!: RuPaul's Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style http://books.google.co.in/books?id=Uaa558nGDmgC&pg=PA6, HarperCollins, 2 February 2010, p. 6

People , Truth , Dreams , Feeling

“Sanskrit is constructed like geometry and follows a rigorous logic. It is theoretically possible to explain the meaning of the words according to the combined sense of the relative letters, syllables and roots. Sanskrit has no meanings by connotations and consequently does not age. Panini's language is in no way different from that of Hindu scholars conferring in Sanskrit today.”

Alain Daniélou (1907–1994) French historian, musicologist, Indologist and expert on Shaivite Hinduism

Alain Danielou in: Virtue, Success, Pleasure, and Liberation: The Four Aims of Life in the Tradition of Ancient India https://books.google.co.in/books?id=IMSngEmfdS0C&pg=PA17, Inner Traditions / Bear & Co, 1 August 1993 , p. 17.

Age , Way , Sense

“This submission to the threshold of a cross is at the very root of our following Jesus; it changes the game completely.”

Alan Hirsch (1959) South African missionary

Source: The Faith of Leap (2011), p. 80

Game , Change

“There are readers—and I am one of them—whose reading is rather like a series of intoxications. We fall in love with a book; it is our book, we feel, for life; we shall not need another. We cram-throat our friends with it in the cruellest fashion; make it a Gospel, which we preach in a spirit of propaganda and indignation, putting a woe on the world for a neglect of which last week we were equally guilty.
I am not at all sorry that I have never been cured of this form of youthful susceptibility; one may after all become the victim of more inadvisable forms of folly. My infatuations have at least one advantage; they may lead to satiety, but they do not often end in disillusion. I have, of course (who hasn’t?), my Bluebeard’s closet of dead loves, abandoned for ever; but for the most part I find that the objects of my former adoration are quite capable of awakening my old affection. My experiences of love at first sight, being followed by love at second or third or fourth sight, I enjoy the bliss of both the constant and the inconstant lover. Indeed, these returns to old books—as I have just now returned to Montaigne’s Essays—have often proved, in a life of desultory reading, to be among the pleasantest experiences of that pleasant scheme of existence.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

“Montaigne,” p. 1
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Love , Life , Books , Youth

“The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter One, p. 13

World , Nature , Thinking , Sense

“Such was the character, such the inflexible rule of austere Cato – to observe moderation and hold fast to the limit, to follow nature, to give his life for his country, to believe that he was born to serve the whole world and not himself.”
Hi mores, haec duri inmota Catonis secta fuit, servare modum finemque tenere naturamque sequi patriaeque inpendere vitam nec sibi sed toti genitum se credere mundo.

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia

Book II, line 380 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia

Life , World , Nature , Country

“He (Piet Mondrian) couldn't look after himself properly. He was terrible [sic] thin, and seemed to live mostly on currants and vegetable stew, because he followed the Haye diet.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

Quote of Naum Gabo (1962), as cited in: Carel Blotkamp, Piet Mondrian (1994) Mondriaan: destructie als kunst
1936 - 1977

“The famous Lord Hallifax (though so much talked of) was rather a pretender to taste, than really possessed of it.—When I had finished the two or three first books of my translation of the Iliad, that lord, "desired to have the pleasure of hearing them read at his house." Addison, Congreve, and Garth, were there at the reading.—In four or five places, Lord Hallifax stopped me very civilly; and with a speech, each time of much the same kind: "I beg your pardon, Mr. Pope, but there is something in that passage that does not quite please me.—Be so good as to mark the place, and consider it a little at your leisure.—I am sure you can give it a little turn."—I returned from Lord Hallifax's with Dr. Garth, in his chariot; and as we were going along, was saying to the doctor, that my lord had laid me under a good deal of difficulty, by such loose and general observations; that I had been thinking over the passages almost ever since, and could not guess at what it was that offended his lordship in either of them.—Garth laughed heartily at my embarrassment; said, I had not been long enough acquainted with Lord Hallifax, to know his way yet: that I need not puzzle myself in looking those places over and over when I got home. "All you need do, (said he) is to leave them just as they are; call on Lord Hallifax two or three months hence, thank him for his kind observations on those passages; and then read them to him as altered. I have known him much longer than you have, and will be answerable for the event."—I followed his advice; waited on Lord Hallifax some time after: said, I hoped he would find his objections to those passages removed[; ] read them to him exactly as they were at first; and his lordship was extremely pleased with them, and cried out, "Ay now, Mr. Pope, they are perfectly right! nothing can be better."”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

As quoted in Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men (1820) by Joseph Spence [published from the original papers; with notes, and a life of the author, by Samuel Weller Singer]; "Spence's Anecdotes", Section IV. pp. 134–136.
Attributed

Pleasure , Books , Hope , Way

“With the assistance of mathematics, I can see a property of the ninety-nine dimensional surfaces hidden from the naked eye. If an increase in the price of fertilizer alone always increases the amount the firm buys of caviar, from that fact alone I can predict the answer to the following experiment which I have never seen performed and upon which I have no observations: an increase in the price of caviar alone will increase the amount the firm buys of fertilizer. In thermodynamics such reciprocity or integrability conditions are known as Maxwell Conditions; in economics they are known as Hotelling conditions in honor of Harold Hotelling’s 1932 work.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

Source: 1950s–1970s, Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics, 1970, p. 67

Mathematics

“I don't think traders can follow rules for very long unless they reflect their own trading style. Eventually, a breaking point is reached and the trader has to quit or change, or find a new set of rules he can follow. This seems to be part of the process of evolution and growth of a trader.”

Ed Seykota (1946) American commodities trader

Source: Schwager, Market Wizards, page 166

Thinking , Change , Parting

“For many years I visualized the Soviet Union as a land where the sun never came out and enslaved Catholic peasants labored under lowering skies for their godless rulers.
But our theology was often very practical: All men are created equal. Do onto others as you would have them do onto you. Follow the Ten Commandments, which we studied at length, except for adultery, “which you children don’t have to worry about.””

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Source: Life Itself : A Memoir (2011), Ch. 54 : How I Believe In God

Men , Children , Study , Sun

“Murder of non-Muslims is a merit : “The murder of infidels (even if they are innocent) is counted a merit in a Muslim. It is not necessary that he (Muslim) should have his own passion or mortify his flesh, it is not necessary for him to grow a rich growth of spirituality. He has only to slay a certain class of his fellow-beings (non-Muslims) or plunder their lands and wealth and this act is itself would raise his (Muslim’s) soul to Heaven. A religion where followers are taught to regard robbery and murder as a religious duty, is incompatible with the progress of manking or with the peace of the world.”

Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958) Indian historian

The History of Aurangazeb. Vol. 3, pp. 161-169 by Sir Jadunath Sarkar; published by Orient Longman 1972

World , Peace , Religion , Soul

“Reconstruction is merely a special case of economic progress. If we are to understand its problems thoroughly, we must examine what is meant by economic progress and try to discover how it comes about… Economic progress is not altogether easy to define and is even more difficult to measure. Nevertheless, the phrase clearly corresponds to a meaningful idea. We have only to contrast a savage society with our own. In a savage society, the same customs, the same techniques, the same ways of doing everything, from ploughing to praying, are maintained generation after generation, son following exactly in the footsteps of his father and daughter in the footsteps of her mother, without deviating an inch from the well-trodden way. In modern civilized society, on the other hand, there is constant change and flux; we are constantly improving on the methods of our ancestors, and indeed one of the surest ways to discredit anything is to call it "old-fashioned!"”

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

Source: 1940s, The Economics of Peace, 1945, p. 73

Way , Idea , Fashion , Understanding

“When Acheson was first joined State as Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs, he writes the following in a section entitled "My Search for a Function"…"My official duties were summed up in the Department of State Bulletin by misleading platitudes…Both (Secretary) Hull and the President…knew me and, surely, had not asked me into the Department to perform the largely nonexistent duties defined in the Bulletin."”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), State Department Management, Leadership Perspectives

Search

“In the stupendous rush of change which is coming on the human world as a result of the present tornado of upheaval, ancient India's culture, attacked by European modernism, overpowered in the material field, betrayed by the indifference of her children, may perish for ever along with the soul of the nation that holds it in its keeping…. Each nation is a Shakti or power of the evolving spirit in humanity and lives by the principle which it embodies. India is the Bharata Shakti, the living energy of a great spiritual conception, and fidelity to it is the very principle of her existence…. To follow a law or principle involuntarily or ignorantly or contrary to the truth of one's consciousness is a falsehood and a self-destruction. To allow oneself to be killed, like the lamb attacked by the wolf, brings no growth, farthers no development, assures no spiritual merit. Concert or unity may come in good time, but it must be an underlying unity with a free differentiation, not a swallowing up of one by another or an incongruous and inharmonious mixture. Nor can it come before the world is ready for these greater things. To lay down one's arms in a state of war is to invite destruction and it can serve no compensating spiritual purpose…. India is indeed awaking and defending herself, but not sufficiently and not with the whole-heartedness, the clear sight and the firm resolution which can alone save her from the peril. Today it is close; let her choose,… for the choice is imperatively before her, to live or to perish.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

December, 1918
India's Rebirth

War , Children , Truth , World

“Population regulates itself by the funds which are to employ it, and therefore always increases or diminishes with the increase or the diminution of capital. Every reduction of capital is therefore necessarily followed by a less effective demand for corn, by a fall in price, and by diminished cultivation.”

David Ricardo (1772–1823) British political economist, broker and politician

Source: The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) (Third Edition), Chapter II, On Rent, p. 41

“The non-violent resistors can summarize their message in the following simple terms: we will take direct action against injustice without waiting for other agencies to act. We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices. We will do this peacefully, openly and cheerfully because our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of non-violence because our end is a community at peace with itself. We will try to persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts. We will always be willing to talk and seek fair compromise, but we are ready to suffer when necessary and even risk our lives to become witnesses to the truth as we see it.”

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

1960s, The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousnes (1960)
Variant: The non-violent resistors can summarize their message in the following simple terms: we will take direct action against injustice without waiting for other agencies to act. We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices. We will do this peacefully, openly and cheerfully because our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of non-violence because our end is a community at peace with itself. We will try to persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts. We will always be willing to talk and seek fair compromise, but we are ready to suffer when necessary and even risk our lives to become witnesses to the truth as we see it.

Truth , Peace , Law , Communication

“Will we solve the crises of next hundred years? asked Krulwich. “Yes, if we are honest and smart,” said Wilson. “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” Until we understand ourselves, concluded the Pulitzer-prize winning author of On Human Nature, “until we answer those huge questions of philosophy that the philosophers abandoned a couple of generations ago—Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?—rationally,” we’re on very thin ground.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

Quoted in Harvard Magazine http://harvardmagazine.com/breaking-news/james-watson-edward-o-wilson-intellectual-entente from a public discussion between Wilson and James Watson moderated by NPR correspondent Robert Krulwich, September 9, 2009.

God , Understanding , Question , Nature

“There is a multilayering of global networks in the key strategic activities that structure and destructure the planet. When these multilayered networks overlap in some node, when there is a node that belongs to different networks, two major consequences follow. First, economies of synergy between these different networks take place in that node: between financial markets and media businesses; or between academic research and technology development and innovation; between politics and media.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

The Rise of the Network Society, 1996

Business

“Farewell, false love, I took you for
The woman that I lost last year
Forever as I think:
I loved her but I will not see
Her any more in Germany.
O Milky Way, sister in whiteness
To Canaan's rivers and the bright
Bodies of lovers drowned,
Can we follow toilsomely
Your path to other nebulae?”

Guillaume Apollinaire book Alcools

Adieu faux amour confondu
Avec la femme qui s'éloigne
Avec celle que j'ai perdue
L'année dernière en Allemagne
Et que je ne reverrai plus
Voie lactée ô sœur lumineuse
Des blancs ruisseaux de Chanaan
Et des corps blancs des amoureuses
Nageurs morts suivrons-nous d’ahan
Ton cours vers d'autres nébuleuses
"La Chanson du Mal-Aimé" (Song of the Poorly Loved), line 56; translation by William Meredith, from Francis Steegmuller Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) p. 95.
Alcools (1912)

Love , Way , Lovers , Thinking

“Briefly, the scientists working the Oregon coast found that sand could be controlled only by the use of one type of grass (European beach grass) and by a system of follow-up plantings with other growth. The grass sets up a beachhead by holding down the sand in an intricate lacing of roots. This permits certain other plants to gain a foothold. The beach grass is extremely difficult to grow in nurseries, and part of the solution to the dune problem involved working out a system for propagating and handling the grass.”

Frank Herbert book Dune

"They Stopped the Moving Sands" part of a letter to his agent Lurton Blassingame, outlining an article on how the USDA was using poverty grasses to protect Florence, Oregon from harmful sand dunes (11 July 1957); the article was never published, but did develop several of the ideas that led to "Dune"; as quoted in The Road to Dune (2005), p. 266
General sources

Problem , Grass , Parting

“Member for Islwyn was going to have a single currency willy-nilly. He has already made up his mind. The argument that he uses is that, if others have it, we must. That is an argument for a flock of sheep, not for people who are sent here to analyse the problem and to use our minds and our reason to say which course we should follow.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech in the House of Commons (20 November 1991) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108291
Post-Prime Ministerial

People , Problem

“Accordingly the primordial state of things which I picture is an even distribution of protons and electrons, extremely diffuse and filling all (spherical) space, remaining nearly balanced for an exceedingly long time until its inherent instability prevails. We shall see later that the density of this distribution can be calculated; it was about one proton and electron per litre. There is no hurry for anything to begin to happen. But at last small irregular tendencies accumulate, and evolution gets under way. The first stage is the formation of condensations ultimately to become the galaxies; this, as we have seen, started off an expansion, which then automatically increased in speed until it is now manifested to us in the recession of the spiral nebulae.

As the matter drew closer together in the condensations, the various evolutionary processes followed—evolution of stars, evolution of the more complex elements, evolution of planets and life.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

pp. 56–57 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KHyV4-2EyrUC&pg=PA56
The Expanding Universe (1933)

Life , Way , Star , Time

“De Chirico [Italian painter, later admired by the Surrealists as 'early Surrealist'] found himself in 1912 confronted with the problem of following one of the roads already opened or of opening a new road. He avoided Fauvism as well as Cubism and introduced what could be called 'metaphysical painting'. Instead of exploiting the coming medium of abstraction, he organized on his canvases the meeting of elements which could only meet in a 'metaphysical world'. These elements, painted in the minutest technique, were 'exposed' on a horizontal plane in orthodox perspective. This technique, in opposition to the Cubist or the purely abstract formula in full bloom at the moment, protected de Chirico’s position and allowed him to lay down the foundation of what was to become Surrealism ten years later.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote by Marcel Duchamp, 1943, from 'Appreciations of other artists': Giorgio de Chirico (painter, writer, illustrator); as cited in Catalog, Collection of the Societé Anonyme, eds. Michel Sanouillet / Elmer Peterson, London 1975, pp. 143- 159
1921 - 1950

World , Problem , Painting

“We are taught all this [the motion of the earth on its axis and around the sun] by the order of succession, in which those phenomena (various planetary happenings) follow each other, and by the harmony of the world, if we will only, as the saying goes, look at the matter with both eyes.”

Nicolaus Copernicus book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium

Book 1, Ch. 9 as quoted by Edwin Arthur Burtt in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925)
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543)

World , Success , Sun

“I now imagine a quantum theoretician who may even admit that the quantum-theoretical description refers to ensembles of systems and not to individual systems, but who, nevertheless, clings to the idea that the type of description of the statistical quantum theory will, in its essential features, be retained in the future. He may argue as follows: True, I admit that the quantum-theoretical description is an incomplete description of the individual system. I even admit that a complete theoretical description is, in principle, thinkable. But I consider it proven that the search for such a complete description would be aimless. For the lawfulness of nature is thus constituted that the laws can be completely and suitably formulated within the framework of our incomplete description.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

"Einstein's Reply to Criticisms" (1949)

Law , Imagination , Search , Idea

“To the question how she can be the image of God, [Augustine] answers as follows: "Woman," says he, "compared to other creatures, is the image of God, for she bears dominion over them. But compared unto man, she may not be called the image of God, for she bears not rule and lordship over man, but ought to obey him," etc. [57] And how that woman ought to obey man, he speaks yet more clearly in these words, "The woman shall be subject to man as unto Christ. For woman," says he, "has not her example from the body and from the flesh, that so she shall be subject to man, as the flesh is unto the Spirit, because that the flesh in the weakness and mortality of this life lusts and strives against the Spirit, and therefore would not the Holy Ghost give example of subjection to the woman of any such thing," etc. This sentence of Augustine ought to be noted of all women, for in it he plainly affirms, that woman ought to be subject to man, that she never ought more to desire preeminence [over] him, than that she ought to desire above Christ Jesus”

John Knox (1514–1572) Scottish clergyman, writer and historian

The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate

Life , Women , God , Question

“Islam is one of the world's great religions. Let me be explicit about what I, as a historian of Islam who is not a Muslim, mean by that. Islam has brought comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and women. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance. It inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world. But Islam, like other religions, has also known periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence. It is our misfortune that part, though by no means all or even most, of the Muslim world is now going through such a period, and that much, though again not all, of that hatred is directed against us.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990)

Women , Men , People , World

“The nature of a Divine Being is seen more clearly in deeds which are loving than in deeds which are marvelous. He does not need miracle to make us love him or to prove that he is more than man. The unanswerable argument for his religion is that wherever he is sincerely followed men’s lives are changed.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.112

Love , Men , Religion , Nature

“Protocols
Number 20, paras. 26-32
The budgets of income and expenditure will be carried out side by side that they may not be obscured by distance one to another.
…The first irregularity, as we shall point out, consists in their beginning with drawing up a single budget which year after year grows owing to the following cause: this budget is dragged out to half the year, ten they demand a
Graves: Clearly, the “Protocols” author adapts the text of “Dialogues” so carelessly in his hasty attempt to Prove a Jewish conspiracy!”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.83

Drawing

“They have two distinguishing characteristics. The vast majority of them are laborers, and, as a rule, they expect the violent overthrow of existing institutions by revolution to precede the introduction of the socialistic state. I would not, by any means, say that they are all revolutionists, but the most of them undoubtedly are…
The most general demands of the social democrats are the following: The state should exist exclusively for the laborers; land and capital must become collective property, and production be carried on unitedly. Private competition, in the ordinary sense of the term, is to cease.”

Richard T. Ely (1854–1943) United States economist and author

Richard T. Ely, French and German Socialism in Modern Times http://archive.org/details/frenchandgerman00elygoog, 1883, pp. 204–205.

Sense

“"Overwrite — put down everything that comes to your mind," I was told.
"Be explicit, elaborate. Judicious pruning will be done later. Don't be afraid to name names. Lawyers will tooth-comb the book before it gets into print and protect you from libel suits. Don't be afraid to shock people. Be daring. Be spicy. Tell all!"
I did.
I followed everybody's advice. About seven hundred thirty pages were judiciously pruned in order to protect the innocent, to make it possible for the book to be sent through the U. S. mails, and to prevent me from spending the twilight years of my life in jail for criminal libel.
What's left is here.
PLEASE LIKE IT.”

Walter Slezak (1902–1983) actor

Preface, p. viii
What Time's the Next Swan? (1962)

Life , People , Books

“My beautiful Grandmother -- Caroline Garlinghouse -- came from Pittsburgh -- my mother's mother. I never met her but I have followed many of her ideas -- through my mother -- And it has given me a warm spot in my heart for your city…My grandmother's brother, Fred Garlinghouse, lived in Pittsburgh, was an engineer and apparently worked for Jones & Laughlin.”

Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) film, stage, and television actress

On Stage: Kate Hepburn, Richard Rauh and old Nixon Pittsburgh Post-Gazette July 9, 2003. http://old.post-gazette.com/ae/20030709rawson0709p5.asp

Beauty , Idea , Heart

“The Constitution forbids the passing of a bill of attainder: that is, a law entailing upon the child the disabilities and hardships imposed upon the parent. Every slave law in America might be repealed on this very ground. The slave is made a slave because his mother is a slave. But to all this it is said that the practice of the American people is against my view. I admit it. They have given the Constitution a slaveholding interpretation. I admit it. Thy have committed innumerable wrongs against the Negro in the name of the Constitution. Yes, I admit it all; and I go with him who goes farthest in denouncing these wrongs. But it does not follow that the Constitution is in favor of these wrongs because the slaveholders have given it that interpretation. To be consistent in his logic, the City Hall speaker must follow the example of some of his brothers in America — he must not only fling away the Constitution, but the Bible. The Bible must follow the Constitution, for that, too, has been interpreted for slavery by American divines. Nay, more, he must not stop with the Constitution of America, but make war with the British Constitution, for, if I mistake not, the gentleman is opposed to the union of Church and State. In America he called himself a Republican. Yet he does not go for breaking down the British Constitution, although you have a Queen on the throne, and bishops in the House of Lords.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery? (1860)

War , People , Law , Parent

“Cage took it to work in his way of making compositions then; and he used the idea of 64—the number of the hexagrams —to say that you had 64, for example, sounds; then you could cast, by chance, to find which sound first appeared, cast again, to say which sound came second, cast again, so that it's done by, in that sense, chance operations. Instead of finding out what you think should follow—say a particular sound—what did the I Ching suggest? Well, I took this also for dance.”

Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) American dancer

Merce Cunningham, A Lifetime of Dance, 2000

Way , Idea , Thinking , Sense

“It now only remains for us to set our teeth and to enter upon this struggle, which we ourselves earnestly endeavoured to avoid, with determination to see it through to the end. We shall enter it with a clear conscience, with the support of the Dominions and the British Empire, and the moral approval of the greater part of the world. We have no quarrel with the German people, except that they allow themselves to be governed by a Nazi Government. As long as that Government exists and pursues the methods it has so persistently followed during the last two years, there will be no peace in Europe. We shall merely pass from one crisis to another, and see one country after another attacked by methods which have now become familiar to us in their sickening technique. We are resolved that these methods must come to an end. If out of the struggle we again re-establish in the world the rules of good faith and the renunciation of force, why, then even the sacrifices that will be entailed upon us will find their fullest justification.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1939/sep/01/british-note-to-germany in the House of Commons (1 September 1939) on the British ultimatum to Germany
Prime Minister

People , World , Peace , Faith

“But I'm different now than i was then. Just like I was different at the end of the trip than I'd been at the beginning. And I'll be different tomorrow than I am today. And what that means is that I can never replicate that trip. Even if I went to the same places and met the same people, it wouldn't be the same. My experience wouldn't be the same. To me, that's what traveling should be about. Meeting people, learning to not only appreciate a different culture, but really enjoy it like a local, following whatever impulse strikes you.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Travis Parker, Chapter 8, p. 102-103
2000s, The Choice (2007)

People , Travel , Learning

“Ye that follow the vision
Of the world's weal afar,
Have ye met with derision
And the red laugh of war;
Yet the thunder shall not hurt you,
Nor the battle-storms dismay;
Tho' the sun in heaven desert you,
"Love will find out the way."”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Song, Book VIII, p. 146
Drake, an English Epic (1908)

Love , War , World , Way

“Signac, definitively won over and who had just modified the paintings 'The Milliner', [1885] and 'Appreteuse et garnisseuse Modes' [exhibited in May 1886], Rue de Caire, p. 174J, following my technique at the same time as I was finishing the 'Jatte'... You'll agree that there's a nuance here and that if I was unknown in [18]85 [ Félix Fénéon did not mention Seurat in his article as leader / initiator of Neo-Impressionism I nonetheless existed, I and my vision that you have described in an impersonal fashion so superbly, aside from one or two insignificant details.”

Georges Seurat (1859–1891) French painter

version B of the 'Letter to Félix Fénéon', June 1890
Quotes from version B of his letter to Félix Fénéon, Seurat provided more important information
Quotes, 1881 - 1890, Letter to Félix Fénéon', June 1890

Fashion , Time , Painting

“There is a positive force, meaning constructive, and a negative force, meaning negative and destructive. They create and complement the entire reality in general and particular through their harsh and perpetual war with one another. As we have said above, the negative force appears at the end of every political phase, elevating it to a better state, and thus the phases follow one another until they reach their ultimate perfection (…) In addition, being a social creature, the individual development is not enough. Rather, one’s ultimate perfection depends on the development of all the members of society.”

Yehuda Ashlag (1886–1954) Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Kabbalist

Assorted Themes, On Human Development

War , Reality , Appearance , Dependency

“Tennyson follows his feelings in creating each line. He follows the music in his head. If you had asked him, at the end of the day, to describe the prosody of the poem to you, he would no doubt have had to think for a moment before he could answer you, not because he was ignorant of the terms, but because he had been writing a poem, not a metrical exercise. At every point, he was exerting his free will. And the outcome of that exertion was the form.”

James Fenton (1949) poet

Source: An Introduction to English Poetry (2002), Ch. 4: The Sense of Form (pp. 24-25)

Music , Feeling , Exercises , Thinking

“We have entered an age of insecurity—economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity. The fact that we are largely unaware of this is small comfort: few in 1914 predicted the utter collapse of their world and the economic and political catastrophes that followed. Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, fear of decline, fear of strangers and an unfamiliar world—is corroding the trust and interdependence on which civil societies rest.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Ill Fares the Land (2010), Introduction

Age , World , Fear , Change

“I take my title from the name the Jews have traditionally given the Roman Empire. You may expect to meet all manner of wickedness in what follows - pork-eating, lechery, adultery, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, the most ingenious varieties of cruelty, assassination, the worship of false gods and the sin of being uncircumcised.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985)

God , Falseness

“It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths. It is often complained that demagogues can be more plausible in putting forward economic nonsense from the platform than the honest men who try to show what is wrong with it. But the basic reason for this ought not to be mysterious. The reason is that the demagogues and bad economists are presenting half-truths. They are speaking only of the immediate effect of a proposed policy or its effect upon a single group. As far as they go they may often be right. In these cases the answer consists in showing that the proposed policy would also have longer and less desirable effects, or that it could benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The answer consists in supplementing and correcting the half-truth with the other half. But to consider all the chief effects of a proposed course on everybody often requires a long, complicated, and dull chain of reasoning. Most of the audience finds this chain of reasoning difficult to follow and soon becomes bored and inattentive. The bad economists rationalize this intellectual debility and laziness by assuring the audience that it need not even attempt to follow the reasoning or judge it on its merits because it is only “classicism” or “laissez-faire,” or “capitalist apologetics” or whatever other term of abuse may happen to strike them as effective.”

Henry Hazlitt book Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson (1946), The Lesson (ch. 1)

Men , Truth , Error

“The dilemma posed by a choice between rules and men largely begs the question. There are, to be sure, times when rules, constraints, commitments, contract or treaty provisions stand in the way and should be transcended because of force majeure, acts of God, some deus ex machina that makes clear that all bets are off. …
If one relies on men of responsibility to make the right choice in crisis among conflicting rules, or to follow an altogether different course for which no precedent exists, there is a danger of creating new precedents and new rules, which may be applied mistakenly under different circumstances. …
The alternative to rules—men, which of course includes women—begs another question. Men have different responsibilities, principles, understandings, interests.”

Charles P. Kindleberger (1910–2003) American economic historian

"Rules vs Men: Lessons from a Century of Monetary Policy", Originally published in Christoph Buchheim, Michael Hutter, and Harold James, eds., Zerrissene Zwischenkriegszeit Beiträge (1994), republished in Comparative Political Economy: A Retrospective (2003)

Women , Men , God , Way

“I watched him tiptoe toward the barn door. I cursed him and waited tensely. In a little while I heard the mooing of a cow. It was a piteous cry. Then I heard a thud and a scuffle of hoofs. Out of the barn door came Hellfrick. Across his shoulder lay a dark mass, weighing him down. Behind him, mooing continually, a cow followed…It was a calf, blood spurting from a gash between the ears…I was sick, very sick. It was plain murder.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Waiting , Cry

“• New Special Provision under the Department of Health on the National Health Insurance Program, allocating the sum of P37.060 billion to cover the full premium subsidy of the health insurance premium for the following: a) Indigent Families under the NHTS-PR of the DSWD; b) Existing 2014 Poor and Low Income Enrolees, other than the Indigent Families under the NHTS-PR of DSWD, enrolled under the National Health Insurance Program (NHIP) whose enrolment have been validated and renewed for 2015; c) Indigent Elected and Appointed Barangay Officials, which shall include the Punong Barangay, Members of the Sangguniang Barangay, Barangay Secretary, Barangay Treasurer, Barangay Health Workers and Barangay Tanod; and d) Senior Citizens, again, in accordance with law;”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

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

Health , Family , Law

“It has been a continuing theme of this book that our commitment to any approach to the problems of existence (the overcoming of the world, the humanization of the world, and the struggle with the world first among them) can enjoy no definitive justification. Its demands always exceed, immeasurably, its grounds for making them. It says, “Follow me.” It can never give a conclusive reason to do so. All that it can do is to make an incomplete argument and a defeasible appeal. It cannot escape the circularity in all our large-scale transformative projects: for better or worse, each of them is a partly self-fulfilling prophecy. If it is embraced and it works, it remakes part of experience in its image.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger The Religion of the Future

Source: The Religion of the Future (2014), p. 298-9

Books , World , Problem , Parting

“We must be careful to discriminate between our own incapacity to test truth and the necessary improbability of an event. It is plain that from our ignorance of the remote spheres of God's action we cannot judge of His works removed from our experience; but a fact is not necessarily doubtful because it cannot be reached by our ordinary senses. To recapitulate, we may lay down the following propositions:
1. That there is no real physical distinction between miracles and any other operations of the Divine energy : that we regard them differently is because we are familiar with one order of events and not the other.
2. There is nothing incredible in a miracle, and the credibility of a miraculous event is to be measured only by the evidence which sustains it. And although the extraordinary character of a phenomenon may render the event itself improbable, it does not, therefore, necessarily render it either incredible or untrue.”

Charles Babbage Passages from the life of a philosopher

"Passages from the life of a philosopher", Appendix, p. 489
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864)

God , Truth , Sense

“Contradistinctively from this, the Hindus' sense of gratitude knows no bounds to Muslim rulers like Zayn al-‘Abidin (1420-70) of Kashmir, ‘Alau d-Din Husayn Shah (1493-1519) of Bengal, and Akbar the Great Mughal, who behaved towards Indians as Indians and at whose hands they could heave a sigh of relief from religious persecution. The three rulers tried their utmost to Indianize their rule and restore the dignity of Hindu community and culture, the latter essaying the uphill task of integrating Islam therewith, followed in this behalf by Prince Dara Shukoh. Who that has even the faintest sense of history can dispute the point that they were all intensely Indian, putting many a Hindu to shame in their patriotic fervour.”

Harsh Narain (1921–1995) Indian writer

Myths of Composite Culture and Equality of Religions (1990)

History , Communication , Sense , Gratitude

“Don't follow any advice, no matter how good, until you feel as deeply in your spirit as you think in your mind that the counsel is wise.”

Joan Rivers (1933–2014) American comedian, actress, and television host

David Seabury, as quoted in The Forbes Scrapbook of Thoughts on the Business of Life (1950), p. 248
Misattributed

Feeling , Thinking , Motivational

“Iran took dozens of Americans hostage in Tehran, murdered hundreds of American soldiers, Marines, in Beirut, and was responsible for killing and maiming thousands of American service men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. Beyond the Middle East, Iran attacks America and its allies through its global terror network. It blew up the Jewish community center and the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. It helped al-Qaeda bomb U. S. embassies in Africa. It even attempted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, right here in Washington, D. C. In the Middle East, Iran now dominates four Arab capitals, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sanaa. And if Iran's aggression is left unchecked, more will surely follow. So, at a time when many hope that Iran will join the community of nations, Iran is busy gobbling up the nations. We must all stand together to stop Iran's march of conquest, subjugation and terror.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

2010s, 2015, Address to the United States Congress (March 2015)

Women , Men , Hope , Communication

“I then follow up with four major aspects of economic research in the last 60 years, the period of my scholarly activity. One, econometric methodology and practice, is of such fundamental importance that it cannotgo unnoticed, although I played no role in it. With the other three, general equilibrium, dynamic processes, and uncertainty and information, I was more intimately involved.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Kenneth Arrow, "Some Developments in Economic Theory Since 1940: An Eyewitness Account" Annu. Rev. Econ. 2009
New millennium

“Next we have Obama's murderous use of America's military young for his and his party’s partisan political purposes. He kept U. S. soldiers in Iraq, a war which should never have been started, long after he had announced the war was un-winnable but just long enough to pile up heaps of dead and maimed American youngsters in order to make their withdrawal timely and useful for electoral purposes. Now we see Obama and his team keeping U. S. troops in Afghanistan long after he decided to surrender to the Islamists in that that war, and thereby knowingly enhance the strength, lethality, self-confidence, and ambitions of America’s most dangerous enemies by returning to them their key safe haven. Our troops are the cream of America's young and they ought not to be used by any president as if he was their owner. Obama, however, seems to regard them, as he does the unborn, as chattel to be disposed of as he and his advisers see fit to advance Democratic Party political prospects. Finally, we have Obama and his advisers seeking to financially enslave this generation of young Americans, and each generation that follows it, in order to pay for his health care program. Obama and his lieutenants are starting slow in this area, but the evidence of coming coercion, beyond the mandatory fine young people pay if they prove not to be servile, can be seen in West Virginia, where university students reportedly will not be allowed to matriculate unless they enroll in Obama Care This amounts to a 4-year term of indentured service for the privilege of paying extortionate tuition for a mediocre education offered by anti-American ideologues of Obama’s stripe. And make no mistake, these young people are not being threatened and ultimately coerced to forfeit their salary, savings, and future for the elderly and sick. They are being used to fund health care for the core groups, dare I say 'plantations', of the Democratic Party.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

As quoted in "Obama and his party offer America's young … death, misery, and slavery" http://non-intervention.com/1143/obama-and-his-party-offer-america%E2%80%99s-young-%E2%80%A6-death-misery-and-slavery/ (2013), by M. Scheuer, Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention.
2010s

War , People , Health , Education

“Techniques are performed upon raw materials. The state of art of analyzing the characteristics of the raw materials is likely to determine what kind of technology will be used. (Tools are also necessary, of course, but by and large, the construction of tools is a simpler problem than the analysis of the nature of the material and generally follows the analysis.) To understand the nature of the material means to be able to control it better and achieve predictability and efficiency in transformation. We are not referring here to the 'essence of the material, only the way the organization perceives it to be … The other relevant characteristic of the raw material, besides the understandability of Its nature, is Its stability and variability; that is, whether the material can be treated in a standardized fashion or whether continual adjustment to it is necessary. Organizations uniformly seek to standardize their raw material In order to minimize exceptional situations. This is the point of de-individualizing processes found in military academies, monasteries and prisons, and the superiority of the synthetic shoe material Corfam over leather.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1960s, "A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Organizations", 1967, p. 195

Art , Shoe , Way , Fashion