Quotes about form (6850 quotes, page 16)

“To those who doubt and deny the preponderance of good over evil in human nature; who think the few are made to rule, and the many to serve; who put rank above brotherhood, and race above humanity; who attach more importance to ancient forms than to the living realities of the present; who worship power in whatever hands it may be lodged and by whatever means it may have been obtained; our government is a mountain of sin, and, what is worse, it seems confirmed in its transgressions. One of the latest and most potent European prophets, one who felt himself called upon for a special deliverance concerning us and our destiny as a nation, was the late Thomas Carlyle. He described us as rushing to ruin, and when we may expect to reach the terrible end, our gloomy prophet, enveloped in the fogs of London, has not been pleased to tell us. Warning and advice from any quarter are not to be despised, and especially not from one so eminent as Mr. Carlyle; and yet Americans will find it hard to heed even men like him, while the animus is so apparent, bitter and perverse.”

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

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Men , Mountain , Nature , Thinking

“I never have restricted myself into a frame of a particular technique. My techniques are determined simultaneously along with the subjects of my works. It is similar to the works of a poet, the form of a poem is determined at the same time as its content.”

Guity Novin (1944) artist

Etelaat (1973), no. 14119, Thursday, June 7th, p. 7

Time

“Do the identifications with fictions, the inner, tidal motions of pathos and libido which the novel, the film, the painting, the symphony unleash within us somehow immunize us against the humbler, less formed, but actual claims of suffering and of need in our surroundings? Does the cry in the tragic play muffle, even blot out, the cry in the street?”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 1 (p. 144).

Suffering , Painting , Cry

“…I do not say any form which you construct this way is a good form, or must lead to a good solution; but there are forms which can lead to good solutions, and of course that is only the first link in a whole chain of investigations, and the other links in the investigation, model tests, measuring of the first structure, or a model test in scale 1:1 as we have it out here, these are of primary importance. So the engineer[‘s] problem is remaining all the same, but it is the first link, here, the shaping which has been lacking up to now, and this method can lead to a very nice solution.”

Heinz Isler (1926–2009) engineer

First Congress of the International Association of Shell Structures (now IASS), Madrid (1959) discussion following presentation of his paper paper ‘New Shapes for Shells’, as quoted by John Chilton, "39 etc… : Heinz Isler’s infinite spectrum of new shapes for shells" (2009) Proceedings of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS) Symposium 2009, Valencia, Evolution and Trends in Design, Analysis and Construction of Shell and Spatial Structures, 28 September – 2 October 2009, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain, eds. Alberto Domingo, Carlos Lazaro.

Way , Problem

“Reverence is the highest quality of man’s nature; and that individual, or nation, which has it slightly developed, is so far unfortunate. It is a strong spiritual instinct, and seeks to form channels for itself where none exists; thus Americans, in the dearth of other objects to worship, fall to worshipping themselves.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

1840s, Letters from New York (1843)
Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/63/12263.html, vol. 1, letter 18

Nature , Strong

“Civilization has done little for labor except to modify the forms of its exploitation.”

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

The Socialist Party and the Working Class (1904)

“The new plastic idea cannot, therefore, take the form of a natural or concrete representation, although the latter does always indicate the universal to a degree, or at least conceals it within.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

1910's, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality', 1919

Idea , Nature , Universe

“So long as the figures 'now superseded' and the academic projections based upon them held sway, it was possible for politicians to shrug their shoulders. With so much of immediate and indisputable importance on their hands, why should they attend to what was forecast for the end of the century, when most of them would be not only out of office but dead and gone? … It was not for them to heed the cries of anguish from those of their own people who already saw their towns being changed, their native places turned into foreign lands, and themselves displaced as if by a systematic colonisation. For these the much vaunted compassion of the parties and politicians was not available: the parties and the politicians preferred to be busy making speeches on race relations; and if any of their number dared to tell them the truth, even less than the whole truth, about what was happening and what would happen here in England, they denounced them as racialist and turned them out of doors. They could feel safe; for they said in their hearts: 'If trouble comes, it will not be in our time; let the next generation see to it!' … The explosive which will blow us asunder is there and the fuse is burning, but the fuse is shorter than had been supposed. The transformation which I referred to earlier as being without even a remote parallel in our history, the occupation of the hearts of this metropolis and of towns and cities across England by a coloured population amounting to millions, this before long will be past denying. It is possible that the people of this country will, with good or ill grace, accept what they did not ask for, did not want and were not told of. My own judgment— it is a judgment which the politician has a duty to form to the best of his ability— I have not feared to give: it is— to use words I used two years and a half ago— that 'the people of England will not endure it'.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Carshalton and Banstead Young Conservatives at Carshalton Hall (15 February 1971), from Still to Decide (Eliot Right Way Books, 1972), pp. 202-203.
1970s

People , Truth , Fear , Feeling

“My troubles started there. It blighted my personality permanently. I have spent all my emotional life searching for my grandfather and in my formative years no one was there to take his place.
It is the custom up there in Fraserburgh that when there is a death in a household they draw the blinds and curtains. When my grandfather died it seemed that these blinds had been drawn across my life… Relatives would pretend that he had gone to a 'better place'. 'Why', I thought, 'should he go to a better place and not take me with him?”

Dennis Nilsen (1945–2018) British serial killer

'So death was a nice thing,' I thought. 'Then why does it make me miserable?'
As quoted by Brian Masters (2011), Killing for Company, Random House, p. 46, ISBN 1446428737

Life , Death , Search , Drawing

“In conceptual art the idea or the concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive; it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman.”

Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) American artist

Source: Quotes of Sol Lewitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," 1967, p. 80. Cited in: Diane Waldman. Carl Andre https://archive.org/stream/carlandre00wald#page/7/mode/1up. Published 1970 by Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. p. 7

Art , Idea , Decision , Dependency

“Do we really have to look these chords up in Forte's catalog in order to find a name for them? Another theorist [Christopher Hasty] assures us that, 'Allen Forte's perceptive interpretation…accounts for an essential quality of this mysteriously pulsating music. The eighth-note chords of the flute and clarinets form alternately, with the sustaining oboes and horns, the six-tone sonorities labeled A and B. The sonorities A and B are both representatives of the same set class (6-Z19) and are thus made up of precisely the same intervals. As Forte points out, "There is a flucuation of pitch-class content while interval content remains constant."' 'A fluctuation of pitch-class content while interval content remains constant' is what the rest of us have always known as 'a transposition.'”

George Perle (1915–2009) American composer

Page 42
The Listening Composer

Music

“In the Vienna of the First Republic a tendency to anti-semtism was particularly marked in the years of economic upheaval, between 1921 and 1923... At the time organized anti-semitism was definitely led by the newly-formed National-Socialist movement, which stressed the racial and "völkisch" aspects and linked the problem with the Anschluss movement.”

Kurt Schuschnigg (1897–1977) Chancellor of Austria

Source: The Brutal Takeover: The Austrian ex-Chancellor’s account of the Anschluss of Austria by Hitler, 1971, p. 63

Problem , Time

“A verse translation should be faithful to the original, less in form than in sense. Or in other words, a poetic translation should be as beautiful as the original in sense, in sound and, if possible, in form.”

Xu Yuanchong (1921) Translator of Chinese poetry

Source: 300 Tang Poems: A New Translation (1987), p. xxii

Faith , Beauty , Sense

“I am about to take a rapid review of the history of the French Revolution, which began the era of new societies in Europe, as the English Revolution had begun the era of new governments. This revolution not only modified the political power, but it entirely changed the internal existence of the nation. The forms of the society of the Middle Ages still remained. The land was divided into hostile provinces, the population into rival classes. The nobility had lost all their powers, but still retained all their distinctions: the people had no rights, royalty no limits; France was in an utter confusion of arbitrary administration, of class legislation and special privileges to special bodies. For these abuses the revolution substituted a system more conformable with justice, and better suited to our times. It substituted law in the place of arbitrary will, equality in that of privilege; delivered men from the distinctions of classes, the land from the barriers of provinces, trade from the shackles of corporations and fellowships, agriculture from feudal subjection and the oppression of tithes, property from the impediment of entails, and brought everything to the condition of one state, one system of law, one people.”

François Mignet (1796–1884) French historian and journalist

History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 http://clc-library-org-docs.angelfire.com/hfrr.html, Introduction

Men , Hostility , People , Age

“Just as a telegram is composed of symbols called words, so the personagram is made of Aspect-prints that together combine to form the message. Only this message is written "on" a psychological structure by psychologically animate symbols. A telegram is inert itself; the information appears upon it, but it can't send a message or interpret its own. A personagram can.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Adventures In Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology (1975), p. 127

Appearance , Animals

“They [the true instructors of the people] will accustom children to the vegetable régime. The peoples living on vegetable foods, are, of all men, the handsomest, the most vigorous, the least exposed to diseases and to passions, and they whose lives last longest. Such, in Europe, are a large proportion of the Swiss. The greater part of the peasantry who, in every country, form the most vigorous portion of the people, eat very little flesh-meat. The Russians have multiplied periods of fasting and days of abstinence, from which even the soldiers are not exempt; and yet they resist all kinds of fatigues. The negroes, who undergo so many hard blows in our colonies, live upon manioc, potatoes, and maize alone. The Brahmins of India, who frequently reach the age of one hundred years, eat only vegetable foods. It was from the Pythagorean sect that issued Epaminondas, so celebrated by for his virtues, Archytas, by his genius for mathematics and mechanics; Milo of Crotona, by his strength of body. Pythagoras himself was the finest man of his time, and, without dispute, the most enlightened, since he was the father of philosophy amongst the Greeks. Inasmuch as the non-flesh diet introduces with many virtues and excludes none, it will be well to bring up the young upon it, since it has so happy an influence upon the beauty of the body and upon the tranquillity of the mind. This regimen prolongs childhood, and, by consequence, human life.”

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814) writer and botanist from France

Vœux d'un solitaire, pour servir de suite aux "Études de la nature", as quoted in The Ethics of Diet by Howard Williams (University of Illinois Press, 2003, p. 175 https://books.google.it/books?id=o9ugCcZ13BMC&pg=PA175)

Life , Men , Children , People

“Fascism is the result of the collapse of Europe's spiritual and social order… catastrophes broke through the everyday routine which makes men accept existing forms, institutions and tenets as unalterable natural laws. They suddenly exposed the vacuum behind the facade of society.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The End of Economic Man (1939), p. 24

Men , Law , Nature

“We are in agreement with him in his conviction that the laborer must be protected 'against the burdens of the good-for-nothing'. We want no such additions to our population as those who prey upon our institutions or our property. America has, in the popular mind, been an asylum for those who have been driven from their homes in foreign countries because of various forms of political and religious oppression. But America can not afford to remain an asylum after such people have passed the portals and begun to share the privileges of our institutions.”

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

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

People , Home , Country

“The only secondary cause… which has, as yet, been even conjecturally brought forward, to explain how, in the ordinary course of nature, a new specific form may be generated is, as Lamarck declared, 'variation,' and this has been rendered a far more probable hypothesis by the way in which Natural Selection is shown to give intensity and permanency to certain varieties.”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.21, p. 422

Way , Nature

“The man of half-grown intelligence, when he observes an object which is bathed in the glow of a seeming beauty, thinks that that object is in its essence beautiful, no matter what it is that so prepossesses him with the pleasure of the eye. He will not go deeper into the subject. But the other, whose mind's eye is clear, and who can inspect such appearances, will neglect those elements which are the material only upon which the Form of Beauty works; to him they will be but the ladder by which he climbs to the prospect of that Intellectual Beauty, in accordance with their share in which all other beauties get their existence and their name.”

Gregory of Nyssa (335–395) bishop of Nyssa

On Virginity, Chapter 11

Pleasure , Beauty , Intelligence , Thinking

“Most professional women can recount ‘horror stories’ about discrimination they have suffered during their careers. My stories include social trivia as well as grand trauma. But some less common forms of discrimination came my way when, in mid-career, I married a colleague and we joined our professional lives just as fame (though not fortune) hit him. I watched as he was manufactured into an architectural guru before my eyes and, to some extent, on the basis of our joint work and the work of our firm.”

Denise Scott Brown (1931) American architect

"Sexism and the star system in architecture"

Women , Way , Suffering

“Air power is an unusually seductive form of military strength, in part because, like modern courtship, it appears to offer gratification without commitment.”

Eliot A. Cohen (1956) American neoconservative military historian

Source: [Eliot A., Cohen, http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19940101faessay8554/eliot-a-cohen/the-mystique-of-u-s-air-power.html, The Mystique of U.S. Air Power, Foreign Affairs, January/February 1994, 2007-06-07]

Appearance , Parting

“I was brought up knowing you can't do anything truly by yourself. It's God blessing you in some way, shape or form. I have a religious family, and that's just how I was raised. Being a running back, it's also very obvious to me. Any running back that's ever played football, all of the success comes from the people up front. There's no way a running back can be good if nobody is blocking for him.”

Javon Ringer (1987) All-American college football player, professional football player, running back

Quoted here http://www.ncaa.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/092108acj.html

God , People , Family , Way

“As I admired it [a red pencil and chalk drawing by Degas of a young mother, nursing her child] he showed me a whole series done from the same model and with the same sort of rhythm. He is a draughtsman of the first order; it would be interesting to show all these preparatory studies for a painting to the public, which generally imagines that the impressionists work in a very casual way. I do not think it possible to go further in the rendering of form.”

Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) painter from France

note in Berthe's Journal, Jan. 1886; as quoted in The Private Lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe; Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2006, pp. 262-263
Berthe visited Degas in his studio
1881 - 1895

Way , Imagination , Thinking , Study

“Later, every form of religious belief seemed absurd to me, and death was as if disfigured. […] Today I would never say: he has gone away. I’ve lost the sense of the crossing over: nothing goes up to heaven, we don’t move to another world, we don’t return, we aren’t reborn. We remain definitively immobile; death is the last point on the segment of life that has chanced to be ours.”

Elena Ferrante (1943) Italian writer

"Elena Ferrante: ‘My belief in some kind of beyond, acquired during childhood, has faded’" https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/feb/10/elena-ferrante-life-after-death, The Guardian, 10 February 2018.

Life , Death , World , Sense

“I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.”

Will Self (1961) English writer and journalist

Quoted by The Guardian http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,5917,-164,00.html

Thinking

“Anti-intellectualism … has been present in some form and degree in most societies; in one it takes the form of the administering of hemlock, in another of town-and-gown riots, in another of censorship and regimentation, in still another of Congressional investigations.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 20

“The form of my painting is the content.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

as quoted in "Abstract Art", Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson 1990, p. 173
1969 - 1980

Painting

“Every law-order is in a state of war against the enemies of that order, and all law is a form of warfare.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Source: Writings, The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), p. 93

War , Law

“A few decades ago there was much talk of the English officer and the Hindu in the ranks being of the same Aryan blood, because they both spoke widely diverse forms of the great group of Aryan languages. This, of course, did not imply the slightest trace of blood relationship — the Aryan speech of the Hindu had been imposed upon him by his conquerors from the north. Such fallacies were common a generation ago.”

Madison Grant (1865–1937) American lawyer, eugenicist, and conservationist

The Conquest of a Continent (1933)

“When it was first perceived, in early times, that no middle course for America remained between unlimited submission to a foreign legislature and a total independence of its claims, men of reflection were less apprehensive of danger from the formidable power of fleets and armies they must determine to resist than from those contests and dissensions which would certainly arise concerning the forms of government to be instituted over the whole and over the parts of this extensive country.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

1790s, Inaugural Address (Saturday, March 4, 1797)

Men , Time , Parting , Country

“Lines formed at Ruby Pier - just as a line formed someplace else: Five people, waiting, in five chosen memories, for a little girl named Amy or Annie to grow and to love and to age and to die, and to finally have her questions answered - why she lived and what she lived for. And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: That each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

Love , People , Secret , Age

“But it is unnecessary for me to do more than mention a few of the representative forms of recreation. We all know that their name is legion, and that different tastes require different activities. I am not trying to recommend one above another, but I am trying to point out the national value which would accrue if there were an organized, instructed, and persistent effort to bring these benefits to the people at large. It can not be that our country is making a great outlay for playgrounds in our schools, for athletic fields in our colleges, for baseball fields in our cities, for recreation parks in our metropolitan districts, for State and national forest reservations, unless these all represent an opportunity for a real betterment of the life of the people. These are typically American in all their aspects. They minister directly to the welfare of all our inhabitants.”

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

1920s, The Democracy of Sports (1924)

Life , People , School , Effort

“The disconnected impressions which we derive from life form a kind of knowledge ‘in growth,’ as Bacon called it; an over-early and peremptory attempt to digest this knowledge into a system tends, as he suggests, to falsify and distort it.”

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

“English Aphorists,” p. 103
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Life , Knowledge

“I know that there are a lot of areas inside me which I need to analyse. But I need time. I can't be rushed into it. Even if it keeps lingering in the back of my mind always. I keep joking, fooling around on the sets, trying to push everything away for a later day scrutiny. I don't even want to acknowledge those dark corners of my insides as yet. And if at all I do it, I'll do it for no one else but myself. Not my wife, not my parents. Maybe my children - maybe just my son. Nobody else. Of course, there is also another way of looking at things. Supposing I did not have this pressure of talking to the media, maybe people like you and others would have always thought of me as somebody else. I don't know what opinion of me you have now. I don't know what you felt before you met me, how you felt while you were interviewing me and how you feel today and how you'll feel tomorrow. But I'm sure there will be a difference. Because forming an opinion without meeting a person and judging your instincts and impressions after meeting him are two different things. Most people I've met of late have gone back thinking exactly the contrary of what they thought earlier. I've tried to be as honest as I can with you. I can tell you that I've never spoken like this to anyone before. I wonder if you're convinced. You don't look it. Maybe I will convince you someday.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

Children , People , Fools , Way

“I’m your apprentice!” Simon protested. “When are you going to teach me something?”
“Idiot boy! What do you think I’m doing? I’m trying to teach you to read and to write. That’s the most important thing. What do you want to learn?”
“Magic!” Simon said immediately. Morgenes stared at him.
“And what about reading…?” the doctor asked ominously.
Simon was cross. As usual, people seemed determined to balk him at every turn. “I don’t know,” he said. What’s so important about reading and letters, anyway? Books are just stories about things. Why should I want to read books?”
Morgenes grinned, an old stoat finding a hole in the henyard fence. “Ah, boy, how can I be mad at you…what a wonderful, charming, perfectly stupid thing to say!” The doctor chuckled appreciatively, deep in his throat.
“What do you mean?” Simon’s eyebrows moved together as he frowned. “Why is it wonderful and stupid?”
“Wonderful because I have such a wonderful answer,” Morgenes laughed. Stupid because…because young people are made stupid, I suppose—as tortoises are made with shells, and wasps with stings—it is their protection against life’s unkindnesses.”
“Begging your pardon?” Simon was totally flummoxed now.
“Books,” Morgenes said grandly, leaning back on his precarious stool, “—books are magic. That is the simple answer. And books are traps as well.”
“Magic? Traps?”
“Books are a form of magic—” the doctor lifted the volume he had just laid on the stack, “—because they span time and distance more surely than any spell or charm. What did so-and-so think about such-and-such two hundred years agone? Can you fly back through the ages and ask him? No—or at least, probably not.
But, ah! If he wrote down his thoughts, if somewhere there exists a scroll, or a book of his logical discourses…he speaks to you! Across centuries! And if you wish to visit far Nascadu or lost Khandia, you have also but to open a book….”
“Yes, yes, I suppose I understand all that.” Simon did not try to hide his disappointment. This was not what he had meant by the word “magic.” “What about traps, then? Why ‘traps’?”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Morgenes leaned forward, waggling the leather-bound volume under Simon’s nose. “A piece of writing is a trap,” he said cheerily, “and the best kind. A book, you see, is the only kind of trap that keeps its captive—which is knowledge—alive forever. The more books you have,” the doctor waved an all-encompassing hand about the room, “the more traps, then the better chance of capturing some particular, elusive, shining beast—one that might otherwise die unseen.”
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 7, “The Conqueror Star” (pp. 92-93).

Life , People , Books , Age

“For to pass by those Ancients, the wonderful Pythagoras, the sagacious Democritus, the divine Plato, the most subtle and very learned Aristotle, Men whom every Age has hitherto acknowledged as deservedly honored, as the greatest Philosophers, the Ring-leaders of Arts; in whose Judgments how much these Studies [mathematics] were esteemed, is abundantly proclaimed in History and confirmed by their famous Monuments, which are everywhere interspersed and bespangled with Mathematical Reasonings and Examples, as with so many Stars; and consequently anyone not in some Degree conversant in these Studies will in vain expect to understand, or unlock their hidden Meanings, without the Help of a Mathematical Key: For who can play well on Aristotle’s Instrument but with a Mathematical Quill; or not be altogether deaf to the Lessons of natural Philosophy, while ignorant of Geometry? Who void of (Geometry shall I say, or) Arithmetic can comprehend Plato’s 218 Socrates lisping with Children concerning Square Numbers; or can conceive Plato himself treating not only of the Universe, but the Polity of Commonwealths regulated by the Laws of Geometry, and formed according to a Mathematical Plan?”

Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician

Source: Mathematical Lectures (1734), pp. 26-27

Men , Children , Age , Law

“And, I beg of you do not think of colonialism only in the classic form which we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew. Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth..”

Sukarno (1901–1970) first President of the Republic of Indonesia

Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference

Communication , Thinking , Appearance , Evil

“If language is a virus from space, even people could be disguised aliens on our planet, because language is inextricably bound to human mental processes, in the forms of our intelligence, to the extent that symbolic language is what makes us different from other living beings.”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

Source: Virtual Mercury House. Planetary & Interplanetary Events, p. 48

People , Intelligence

“The extraordinary stylistic changes of late eighteenth-century music may have provided much of the inspiration for the literature of the turn of the century, but the literary forms that resulted were deeply eccentric. It was these works—paradoxical, anticlassical, often with startlingly unbalanced proportions—which in turn influenced the music of the generation of composers that followed. The most clearly affected by literature and art were Schumann, Berlioz, and Liszt, but neither Mendelssohn nor Chopin remained untouched by literary developments, like the revival of Celtic and medieval poetry, as the overtures of Mendelssohn and the Ballades of Chopin explicitly demonstrate.”

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

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 2 : Fragments

Art , Music , Literature , Change

“I have already mentioned that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto. I, and the others who started the organization, did so for two reasons. Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalize and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the Government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence…”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

1960s, I am Prepared to Die (1964)

Hostility , War , People , Law

“All form is a process of notation.”

Dick Higgins (1938–1998) English composer and poet

An Exemplativist Manifesto (1976)

“One of the fruitful sources, as I hold it, of the errors which prevail in our country, is the theory that this is a government of one people; that the government of the United States was formed by a mass; and therefore it is taken that all are responsible for the institutions and policies of each. The government of the United States is a compact between the sovereign members who formed it; and if there be one feature common to all the colonies planted upon the shores of America, it was the steady assertion of, and uncompromising desire for, community independence.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Senate speech (7 May 1860)
1860s

People , Error , Communication , Country

“In terms of composition the new plasticism is dualistic. Through the exact reconstruction of cosmic relations it is a direct expression of the universal; by its rhythm, by the material reality of its plastic form, it expresses the artist's individual subjectivity. It thus unfolds before us a whole world of universal beauty without thereby renouncing the human element.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

1910's, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality', 1919

World , Beauty , Reality , Universe

“Ikenobo Sen'o, a master of flower arranging, once said (the remark is to be found in his Sayings): "With a spray of flowers, a bit of water, one evokes the vastness of rivers and mountains." The Japanese garden too, of course symbolizes the vastness of nature. The Western garden tends to be symmetrical, the Japanese garden asymmetrical, and this is because the asymmetrical has the greater power to symbolize multiplicity and vastness. The asymmetry, of course, rests upon a balance imposed by delicate sensibilities. Nothing is more complicated, varied, attentive to detail, than the Japanese art of landscape gardening. Thus there is the form called the dry landscape, composed entirely of rocks, in which the arrangement of stones gives expression to mountains and rivers that are not present, and even suggests the waves of the great ocean breaking in upon cliffs.”

Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner

Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)

Art , Mountain , Flowers , Nature

“Madam, don't bring up your sons to detest the United States government. Recollect that we form one country now. Abandon all these local animosities, and make your sons Americans.”

Robert E. Lee (1807–1870) Confederate general in the Civil War

Advice to a Confederate widow who expressed animosity towards the northern U.S. after the end of the American Civil War, as quoted in The Life and Campaigns of General Lee https://archive.org/stream/lifeandcampaign00chilgoog/lifeandcampaign00chilgoog_djvu.txt (1875) by Edward Lee Childe, p. 331. Also quoted in "Will Confederate Heritage Advocates Take Robert E. Lee’s Advice?" https://web.archive.org/web/20140918064605/http://cwcrossroads.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/will-confederate-heritage-advocates-take-robert-e-lees-advice/ (July 2014), by Brooks D. Simpson, Crossroads, WordPress. This quote is sometimes paraphrased as: "Madam, do not train up your children in hostility to the government of the United States. Remember, we are all one country now. Dismiss from your mind all sectional feeling, and bring them up to be Americans."

Country

“The image titled “The Homeless, Psalm 85:10,” featured on the cover of ELEMENTAL, can evoke multiple levels of response. They may include the spiritual in the form of a studied meditation upon the multidimensional qualities of the painting itself; or an extended contemplation of the scripture in the title, which in the King James Bible reads as follows: “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The painting can also inspire a physical response in the form of tears as it calls to mind its more earth-bound aspects; namely, the very serious plight of those who truly are homeless in this world, whether born into such a condition, or forced into it by poverty or war.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(The Homeless, Psalm 85:10, p. 111).
Book Sources, ELEMENTAL, The Power of Illuminated Love (2008)

War , Truth , World , Peace

“The best poetry of WW2, the most truthful and penetrating, poetry which is rooted in the ground of physical experience, suspicious of the abstract and conforming to the discipline of provenly effective forms.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

Not Without Glory, 1976

Truth

“Whether by the House or by the People, if an Abolitionist be chosen President of the United States, you will have presented to you the question of whether you will permit the government to pass into the hands of your avowed and implacable enemies… such a result would be a species of revolution by which the purposes of the Government would be destroyed and the observance of its mere forms entitled to no respect. In that event, in such manner as should be most expedient, I should deem it your duty to provide for your safely outside the Union of those who have shown the will, and would have acquired the power, to deprive you of your birthright and reduce you to worse than the Colonial dependence of your fathers.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Speech of Jefferson Davis before the Mississippi Legislature http://www.confederatepastpresent.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=117:speech-of-jefferson-davis-before-the-mississippi-legislature-nov-16-1858q-where-he-advocates-secession-if-an-abolitionist-is-elected-president-&catid=41:the-gathering-storm (16 November 1858)
1850s

People , Question , Housing , Dependency

“Grief like anything else – like a stone – is content only; God gives us the form, that serenity, purity and self-possession with which to surround and live grief.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

God

“Generally speaking, if we look at sports we find that their strong point is that because they are competitive they are interesting, and young people are likely to be attracted to them. No matter how valuable the method of physical education, if it is not put into practice, it will serve no purpose — therein lies the advantage of sports. But, in this regard there are matters to which we must also give a great deal of consideration. First, so-called sports were not created for the purpose of physical education; one competes for another purpose, namely, to win. Accordingly, the muscles are not necessarily developed in a balanced way, and in some cases the body is pushed too far or even injured. For that reason, while there is no doubt that sports are a good thing, serious consideration must be given to the selection of the sport and the training method. Sports must not be undertaken carelessly, over-zealously, or without restraint. However, it is safe to say that competitive sports are a form of physical education that should be promoted with this advice in mind. The reason I have worked to popularize sports for more than twenty years and that I have strived to bring the Olympic Games to Japan is entirely because I recognize these merits. However, in times like these, when many people are enthusiastic about sports, I would like to remind them of the adverse effects of sports as well. I also urge them to keep in mind the goals of physical education—to develop a sound body that is useful to you in your daily life — and be sure to consider whether or not the method of training is in keeping with the concept of”

Kanō Jigorō (1860–1938) Japanese educator and judoka

http://www.judoinfo.com/seiryoku2.htm seiryoku zenyo
"Judo and Physical Training" in Mind Over Muscle : Writings from the Founder of Judo (2006) edited by Naoki Murata, p. 57

Life , People , Education , Way

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Limits of Evolution, p.17-8

Intelligence , Nature , Knowledge , Dependency

“The work of the sculptors of my age & somewhat older – Brancusi – Arp – Lipschitz – Laurens – Giacometti – has gradually approached a freedom & moved into space, compared with the sculptors of earlier period – Rodin – Maillol [. And] & the young sculptors of today all have the tendency to work with space – to model rather than carve – but it is very necessary in my opinion to have been able to get the refinement & completeness of a single form before going on to space form with no body”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote in 'Unpublished notes' 1951, HMF Archive; as cited in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, p. 121
1940 - 1955

Age , Freedom

“The parallels that form the core of this book fit into a historical framework in the wake of the Armana Age during the closing centuries of the second millenium. Prior to the Armana Age (i. e., before 1400 B. C.) Egyptian, Canaanite, Mesopotamian, Anatolian, Aegean and other influences met around the East Mediterranean to form an international order, by which each was in turn affected.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Introduction
The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962])

Books , Age

“CIMOSA provides a Reference Architecture (known as the CIMOSA cube) from which particular enterprise architectures can be derived. This Reference Architecture and the associated enterprise modelling framework are based on a set of modelling constructs, or generic building blocks, which altogether form the CIMOSA modelling languages.”

Peter Bernus (1949) Hungarian-Australian computer scientist

Peter Bernus, Kai Mertins, Günter Schmidt (1998) Handbook on Architectures of Information Systems. p. 244

“What, by a word lacking even in grammar, is called amorality, is a thing that does not exist. If you are unwilling to submit to any norm, you have, nolens volens, to submit to the norm of denying all morality, and this is not amoral, but immoral. It is a negative morality which preserves the empty form of the other.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XV: We Arrive At The Real Question

“Sonia has achieved such terrifying power, a glance of her, a silence, just being there, is enough for her inner circle to act; she has subverted so much of the instruments of Indian democracy and she controls such huge amounts of unlisted money that sooner or later this 'karma' may come back to her under one form or the other.”

François Gautier (1959) French journalist

On Sonia Gandhi, quoted from "Why is Sonia Gandhi so scared of Narendra Modi?" http://www.dnaindia.com/india/analysis-why-is-sonia-gandhi-so-scared-of-narendra-modi-1539917, DNA India (6 May 2011)

Money , Democracy , Silence

“Of all the works of man I like best
Those which have been used.
The copper pots with their dents and flattened edges
The knives and forks whose wooden handles
Have been worn away by many hands: such forms
Seemed to me the noblest.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

"Of all the works of man" [Von allen Werken] (c. 1932) in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 192
Poems, 1913-1956 (1976)

“I shall call Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions:…
:*the religious ISA (the system of the different churches),
:*the educational ISA (the system of the different public and private ‘schools’),
:*the family ISA,
:*the legal ISA,
:*the political ISA (the political system, including the different parties),
:*the trade-union ISA,
:*the communications ISA (press, radio and television, etc.),
:*the cultural ISA (literature, the arts, sports, etc.).”

Louis Althusser book Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

Source: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968), "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", p. 96

Education , School , Family , Art

“Discontinuity, then, is the essential form in which the unconscious first appears to us as a phenomenon-discontinuity, in which something is manifested as a vacillation.”

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

The Freudian Unconscious and Ours
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)

Appearance

“Second Theory.—Whilst one part of the Universe owes its existence to Providence and is under control of a ruler and governor, another part is abandoned and left to chance. This is the view of Aristotle about Providence… He holds that God controls the spheres and what they contain; therefore the individual beings in the spheres remain permanently in the same form. …From the existence of the spheres other beings derive existence, which are constant in their species but not in their individuals.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.17

God , Universe , Chance , Parting

“In fifty words: Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain.”

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

The Evolution of A Revolt (1920)

Idea , Decision , Time , Victory

“Because our form of government is incompatible with the enforcement of values, the American People can't and mustn't welcome into their midst civilizations whose values are inimical to the survival of their own.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Beware The Values Cudgel," http://dailycaller.com/2017/02/03/beware-the-values-cudgel/ The Daily Caller, February 2, 2017
2010s, 2017

People

“The 'state' on the modern conception is a legally defined term which refers, at the level of substance, to a state power that possesses both internal and external sovereignty, at the spatial level over a clearly delimited terrain (the state territory) and at the social level over the totality of members (the body of citizens or the people). State power constitutes itself in the forms of positive law, and the people is the bearer of the legal order whose jurisdiction is restricted to the state territory. In political usage, the concepts 'nation' and 'people' have the same extension. But in addition to its legal definition, the term 'nation' has the connotation of a political community shaped by common descent, or at least by a common language, culture, and history. A people becomes a 'nation' in this historical sense only in the concrete form of a particular form of life.”

Jürgen Habermas book The Inclusion of the Other

Habermas (1998) The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff, eds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Life , People , Law , History

“Though the river's current never fails, the water passing, moment by moment, is never the same. Where the current pools, bubbles form on the surface, bursting and disappearing as others rise to replace them, none lasting long. In this world, people and their dwelling places are like that, always changing.”

Kamo no Chōmei book Hōjōki

"An Account of My Hut" (1212), opening sentence as translated by Robert N. Lawson https://washburn.edu/reference/bridge24/Hojoki.html

People , World , Water , Change

“Two things form the bedrock of any open society—freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

The Times of India, ‘Don’t allow religious hooligans to dictate terms’ http://archive.is/ecOpa (16 January 2008)

Law , Freedom , Country

“It's no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn't trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of "naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew' and 'Gypsy.' "… In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2010s, 2011

Fools , Thinking , Learning

“If I’m required to identify myself on a form, I write “teacher.” I’ve been a teacher almost as long as I’ve been writing. [Pause. ] I think of myself less as a writer than as a person who writes — or tries to. Each morning is a kind of obstacle course in which the obstacles seem to have all the advantage.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)

Thinking , Teachers , Personality

“Liberation from every form of exploitation, the possibility of a more human and dignified life, the creation of a new humankind - all pass through this struggle.”

Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928) Peruvian theologian

Conclusion, p. 174
A Theology of Liberation - 15th Anniversary Edition

Life

“It is true that advertising often gives information and is valuable for doing so, but some forms of advertising give precious little information, and even that little is wrong.”

Randal Marlin (1938) Canadian academic

Source: Propaganda & The Ethics Of Persuasion (2002), Chapter Five, Advertising And Public Relations Ethics, p. 176

“If man is created by an external source, then he must belong to that source and not to himself. According to Buddhism, man is responsible for everything he does. Thus Buddhists have no reason to believe that man came into existence in the human form through any external sources. They believe that man is here today because of his own action. He is neither punished nor rewarded by anyone but himself according to his own good and bad action. In the process of evolution, the human being came into existence. However, there are no Buddha-words to support the belief that the world was created by anybody. The scientific discovery of gradual development of the world-system conforms with the Buddha's Teachings.”

K. Sri Dhammananda Maha Thera (1919–2006) Sri Lankan Buddhist monk

"The God-Idea"
What Buddhists Believe (1993)

World , Support

“The conventional model for explaining the uniqueness of American democracy is its division between executive, legislative, and judicial functions. It was the great contribution of Frank J. Goodnow to codify a less obvious, but no less profound element: the distinction between politics and policies, principles and operations. He showed how the United States went beyond a nation based on government by gentlemen and then one based on the spoils system brought about by the Jacksonian revolt against the Eastern Establishment, into a government that separated political officials from civil administrators.
Goodnow contends that the civil service reformers persuasively argued that the separation of administration from politics, far from destroying the democratic links with the people, actually served to enhance democracy. While John Rohr, in his outstanding new introduction carefully notes loopholes in the theoretical scaffold of Goodnow's argument, he is also careful to express his appreciation of the pragmatic ground for this new sense of government as needing a partnership of the elected and the appointed.
Goodnow was profoundly influenced by European currents, especially the Hegelian. As a result, the work aims at a political philosophy meant to move considerably beyond the purely pragmatic needs of government. For it was the relationships, the need for national unity in a country that was devised to account for and accommodate pluralism and diversity, that attracted Goodnow's legal background and normative impulses alike. That issues of legitimacy and power distribution were never entirely resolved by Goodnow does not alter the fact that this is perhaps the most important work, along with that of James Bryce, to emerge from this formative period to connect processes of governance with systems of democracy.”

Frank Johnson Goodnow (1859–1939) American historian

Abstract, 2009 edition:
Politics and Administration (1900)

People , Democracy , Sense , Partnership

“Because demography is concerned with human affairs and human populatlons it is possible, in principle, to consider demography as a sub-ﬁeld of many other subjects. It provided the scope of any particular subject-ﬁeld like anthropology, genetics, ecology, economics, sociology, etc., and is deﬁned in a sufﬁciently comprehensive manner. While not denying the possibility of considering demography as a sub-ﬁeld of one or another subject, at least for certain special purposes, it is suggested that demography should be logically viewed as the totality of convergent and inter-related factors and topics which (although these could be, spearately, the concern of many diﬂ'erent subjects like genetics and anthropology, sociology, education, psychology. economics, social and political affairs etc.) jointly, together with their mutual inter-actions, form the determinants as well as the consequences of growth (or decline), changes in composition, territorial movements, and social mobility of population in different geographical regions or in the world as a whole, at any given period of time, or over diﬂ'erent periods of time. Such a view would supply an aggregative, inter-related, and mutually interacting system of all those factors which have any inﬂuence over, or are inﬂuenced by, demographic or population changes over space and time.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

Quote, Professor P.C. Mahalanobis and the Development of Population Statistics in lndia

World , Education , Change , Time

“About the twelfth century the possibility of sharing contemplation by means of preaching and other forms of apostolic activity began to be considered. This point of view was exemplified in the mixed life (contemplative and active) of the mendicant orders and was expressed in the formula: contemplata aliis tradere”

Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928) Peruvian theologian

"to transmit to others the fruits of contemplation"
Source: A Theology of Liberation (1971), p. 7

Life

“It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Three Men in a Boat

Source: Three Men in a Boat (1889), Ch. 1.

Disease , Suffering , Reading

“The duty we owe to our gardens is to so use the plants that they shall form beautiful pictures; and that, while delighting our eyes.”

Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932) garden designer, artist

Colour in the Garden

Beauty

“No plan can prevent a stupid person from doing the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time - but a good plan should keep a concentration from forming.”

Charles Erwin Wilson (1890–1961) American secretary of Defence

Charles E. Wilson, quoted in: Louis E. Boone, ‎David L. Kurtz (1987), Management, p. 100

Stupidity , Time , Personality

“Sir, there was once a time when close relations of amity were established between the Governments of England and France. It was in the reign of the later Stuarts; and it marks a dark spot in our annals, because it was an union formed in a spirit of domineering ambition on the one side, and of base and vile subserviency on the other. But that, Sir, was not an union of the nations; it was an union of the Governments. This is not be an union of the Governments; it is to be an union of the nations.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1860/feb/10/customs-acts-committee-the-financial in the House of Commons (10 February 1860) on the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty
1860s

Time

“Jonathan Dimbleby: Understandably, when your marriage collapsed, you form close friendships, you re-establish close friendships, of whatever character that friendship is. Were you, did you try to be, faithful and honourable to your wife when you took on the vow of marriage?
Charles, Prince of Wales: Yes, absolutely.
Dimbleby: And you were?
Charles: Yes, until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.”

Charles, Prince of Wales (1948) son of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom

Alan Hamilton, "Intimate portrait of a private man in the public eye", The Times, 30 June 1994.
Interview with Jonathan Dimbleby for the television programme "Charles: The private man, the public role", transmitted 29 June 1994.
1990s

Friendship , Marriage , Faith , Understanding

“The contradictory conceptual couple, identity and difference, is not the adequate framework for understanding the organization of the multitude. Instead we are a multiplicity of singular forms of life and at the same time share a common global existence. The anthropology of the multitude is an anthropology of singularity and commonality.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

127
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Life , Understanding , Time

“The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form-knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Henry Moore, ‎Sir Herbert Edward Read, ‎David Sylvester (1957) Henry Moore: 1921-1948, p. xxxi
1955 - 1970

Life , Nature , Knowledge , Parting

“I usually let them [his drawings] lies around for a long time. I have to get to really like it. And then when I do the painting I have to get to like that too. Sometimes I stay with the sketch, sometimes I follow the original idea exactly if the idea is solved. But most of the time there have to be adjustments during the painting. Through the painting of it I find the color and I work the form and play with it and it adjusts itself.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

In an interview by Henry Geldzahler, 'Art International 1.', February 1964, p. 48
1950 - 1968

Color , Idea , Time , Drawing

“I started to see human beings as little lonesome, water based, pink meat, life forms pushing air through themselves and making noises that the other little pieces of meat seemed to understand. I was thinking to myself, 'There's five billion people here but we've never been more isolated.' The only result of the aggressive individualism we pursue is that you lose sight of your compassion and we go to bed at night thinking, 'Is this all there is?”

Devin Townsend (1972) Canadian musician

because we don't feel fulfilled.
Far Beyond Metal: Metal Hammer Interviews Devin http://www.farbeyondmetal.com/index.php?page_id=1120

Life , People , Feeling , Understanding

“The problem of ideology … has especially to do with the concepts and the languages of practical thought which stabilize a particular form of power and domination; or which reconcile and accommodate the mass of the people to their subordinate place in the social formation.”

Stuart Hall (cultural theorist) (1932–2014)

"The Problem of Ideology-Marxism without Guarantees," in Marx:100 Years On (London: 1983), p. 59

People , Problem

“As an art form, opera is a rare and remarkable creation. For me, it expresses aspects of the human drama that cannot be expressed in any other way, or certainly not as beautifully.”

Luciano Pavarotti (1935–2007) Italian operatic tenor

Pavarotti : My World (1995)

Art , Way

“Good breeding in cattle depends on physical health, but in men on a well-formed character.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Freeman (1948), p. 151
Durant (1939), Ch. XVI, §II, p. 354; citing C. Bakewell, Sourcebook in Ancient Philosophy, New York, 1909, "Fragment 57"
Variant: Strength of body is nobility only in beasts of burden, strength of character is nobility in man.
Variant: In cattle excellence is displayed in strength of body; but in men it lies in strength of character.

Men , Health , Dependency

“A critical sense of style and of poetic form is not easy to attain, nor is it of first importance for the younger, or, indeed, for any student of Virgil. Wide open to anyone who is willing to learn is the richer knowledge of Virgil as a poet who loved his country and who loved also that humanity which existed before Rome, exists today within ourselves, and will exist long after our own civilization, like that of Virgil's Rome, has become a matter of "ancient history." It is true that the longer one has lived the better one can appreciate a poem which is concerned with life. But the gain that comes to us with the years depends, partly at least, upon the riches we have been willing to extract from literature, which is the experience of other men and women written out. In youth's search for this treasure the Aeneid will be at once a fair haven and a port of departure.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Introduction to The Aeneid of Virgil (Chicago and New York: Scott Foresman and Company, 1916), p. 45; partially quoted in School and Home Education, Vol. 35 (1916), p. 172

Love , Life , Women , Men

“Man was formed for society and is neither capable of living alone, nor has the courage to do it.”

William Blackstone book Commentaries on the Laws of England

Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769)
Source: Introduction, Section II: Of the Nature of Laws in General

Courage

“It is Cézanne's feeling that determined the form of his pictorial structure. It is his pictorial structure that gives off his feeling. If all his pictorial structures were to disappear from the world, so would a certain feeling.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 38-39

World , Feeling

“There are, indeed, two forms of discontent: one laborious, the other indolent and complaining. We respect the man of laborious desire, but let us not suppose that his restlessness is peace, or his ambition meekness. It is because of the special connection of meekness with contentment that it is promised that the meek shall "inherit the earth." Neither covetous men, nor the Grave, can inherit anything; they can but consume. Only contentment can possess.”

John Ruskin book Modern Painters

Volume V, part IX, chapter XI (1860).
Modern Painters (1843-1860)

Men , Peace

“"It is my contention that if a large body of strong healthy men do not exist as a pool of hope for the race, then the race has no chance to survive. If twenty million starved neurotics manage to live through the plague, does this mean that humanity survives?" He paused, throwing the question at them and waiting until they formed their own answer. Then he shouted, "No, it does not! What is humanity, a physical form only? I say it is more. It is intellect and reason and dignity. It is these qualities that must survive, not the mere number of twisted sickly bodies."”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Rebellers (1963), p. 79

Men , Hope , Question , Strong

“I am fully assured, that no general method for the solution of questions in the theory of probabilities can be established which does not explicitly recognize, not only the special numerical bases of the science, but also those universal laws of thought which are the basis of all reasoning, and which, whatever they may be as to their essence, are at least mathematical as to their form.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

George Boole, " Solution of a Question in the Theory of Probabilities http://books.google.nl/books?id=9xtDAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA32" (30 November 1853) published in The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science‬‎ (January 1854), p. 32
1850s

Law , Mathematics , Question , Universe

“Of course, I painted before Cobra, as afterwards. Each one of us [CoBrA-artists] had his own personality. Cobra is only a very short period of my life. It was like a crossroads. We crossed paths and each continued on his way.... We [artists] are not born to form groups. A group that lasted for too long would destroy the creative activity of its members.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Quote of Appel in an interview with fr:Michel Ragon, 1963; as quoted in; Karel Appel, a gesture of colour, Jean-François Lyotard, (original French text of 1992 based upon intensive correspondence with Karel Appel), Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Herman Parret; University Press, Leuven, Belgium, 2009, p. 105
fr:Michel Ragon asked Appel: 'Without Cobra, would you have been what you are today?'

Life , Way , Painting , Personality

“.. No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris. Beginning with the market – where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber – the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism, everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Quote in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 29
1920's, My life (1922)

Money , Feeling , Sense , Painting