Quotes about form
page 28

“Politicians are further eroding the 'American Dream' by passing laws which are supposed to be a 'quick fix', when all they are really designed for is to get the official re-elected. These laws tend to "dilute" a problem for a while, until the problem comes roaring back in a worsened form much like a strain of bacteria will alter itself to defeat a known medication.”

Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001) American army soldier, security guard, terrorist

1990s, Letter to the Union-Sun & Journal (1992)

Law, Dreams, Problem

“You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and Son, Allen and Louis Ginsberg (1944-1976), Michael Schumacher (ed.) (2001), Bloomsbury Publishing NY, ISBN 1582341079, p. 21.
Family Business

People, Way

“He fixed his definition thus: reflection is the possibility of the relation, consciousness is the relation, the first form of which is contradiction. He soon noted that, as a result, the categories of reflection are always dichotomous. For example ideality and reality, soul and body, to recognize – the true, to will – the good, to love – the beautiful, God and the world, and so on, these are categories of reflection. In reflection, these touch each other in such a way that a relation becomes possible. The categories of consciousness, on the other hand, are trichotomous, as language itself indicates, for when I say I am conscious of this, I mention a trinity. Consciousness is mind and spirit, and the remarkable thing is that when in the world of mind or spirit one is divided, it always becomes three and never two. Consciousness, therefore, presupposes reflection. If this were not true it would be impossible to explain doubt. True, language seems to contest this, since in most languages, as far as he knew, the word ‘doubt’ is etymologically related to the word ‘two’. Yet in his opinion this only indicated the presupposition of doubt, especially because it was clear to him that as soon as I, as spirit, become two, I am eo ipso three. If there were nothing but dichotomies, doubt would not exist, for the possibility of doubt lies precisely in that third which places the two in relation to each other. One cannot therefore say that reflection produces doubt, unless one expressed oneself backwards; one must say that doubt presupposes reflection, though not in a temporal sense. Doubt arises through a relation between two, but for this to take place the two must exist, although doubt, as a higher expression, comes before rather than afterwards.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Johannes Climacus (1841) p. 80-81
1840s, Johannes Climacus (1841)

Love, God, World, Beauty

“We venture to say a few words in explanation of the plan of this work. Its object is not to force upon the public the personal views or theories of its author; nor has it the pretensions of a scientific work, which aims at creating a revolution in some department of thought. It is rather a brief summary of the religions, philosophies, and universal traditions of human kind, and the exegesis of the same, in the spirit of those secret doctrines, of which none — thanks to prejudice and bigotry — have reached Christendom in so unmutilated a form, as to secure it a fair judgment. Since the days of the unlucky mediaeval philosophers, the last to write upon these secret doctrines of which they were the depositories, few men have dared to brave persecution and prejudice by placing their knowledge upon record. And these few have never, as a rule, written for the public, but only for those of their own and succeeding times who possessed the key to their jargon. The multitude, not understanding them or their doctrines, have been accustomed to regard them en masse as either charlatans or dreamers. Hence the unmerited contempt into which the study of the noblest of sciences — that of the spiritual man — has gradually fallen.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Introduction
Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I

Men, Secret, Religion, Understanding

“There is a world of visual beauty open to the one willing to undergo the practice and striving necessary to the understanding of its language.
This world is a important as culturally as is the world of words or of music. My ideal is to form and to paint as Schubert sings his songs and as Beethoven creates his world in sounds. That is to say, creation of one’s own inner world through the same human and artistic discipline.
An inner sensation can find external expression only through spiritual realization.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Painting and Culture' p. 58
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

World, Beauty, Music, Understanding

“Societies such as ours that once had democratic traditions or periods when relative openness was possible are often the most easily seduced into totalitarian systems because those who rule and build totalitarian structures continue to pay outward fealty to the ideals, practices and forms of the old system.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

40:35 “ Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOlg_2qAbUA” (2014)

“The song cycle is the most original musical form created in the first half of the nineteenth century. It most clearly embodies the Romantic conception of experience as a gradual unfolding and illumination of reality in place of the Classical insistence on an initial clarity. The form of Schubert's song cycle is not less precise than that of a Classical sonata, but its precision is only gradually comprehended as it unfolds.”

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

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 3 : Mountains and Song Cycles

Music, Reality

“From the end of World War I until the middle of the middle of the 1970s, French public life was shaped and misshaped by three overlapping and intersecting forms of collective and individual irresponsibility. The first of these was political. Reading the history of interwar France, one is struck again and again by the incompetence, the insouciance and the culpable negligence of the men who governed the country and represented its citizens. This is not a political observation, in the partisan sense, but rather a cultural one.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Introduction: The Misjudgment of Paris
The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (1998)

Life, Men, War, World

“When you are very young, you tend to accept standards for such momentous judgments as to whether a girl is beautiful; when you reach the age of experience you come to know beauty in the sense that “knowing” is to possess. Beauty does more than reflect light, it is the action of energy on form, glowing as a total function. This is singularly true of a grouse dog in his consecration to his bird.”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

An Affair with Grouse (1982)

Age, Beauty, Dogs, Girl

“Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don't have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen — or indeed a citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), Ch. 25 : Real Patriots Ask Questions

Children, World, Education, Exercises

“I have always known what I wanted, and that was beauty… in every form.”

Joan Crawford (1904–1977) American actress

Interview, Hollywood Reporter (1949)

Beauty

“Sonata form could not be defined until it was dead. Czerny claimed with pride around 1840 that he was the first to describe it, but then it was already part of history.”

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

Part I. Introduction. 2. Theories of Form
Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Expanded edition, 1997)

History, Parting, Dead

“Thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.”

H. Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer

Source: The Dance of Life http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300671.txt (1923), Ch. 3

Money, Thinking

“There are clouds, wind, smoke and dust and noise, over head and around, and there always will be; but no genuine thunder, with destructive bolt, menaces from any quarter of the sky. The real trouble with us was never our system or form of government, or the principles underlying it, but the peculiar composition of our people; the relations existing between them and the compromising spirit which controlled the ruling power of the country.”

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

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

People, Country

“Don't lose sight of the essential objectives of painting, which are expression, emotion, delectation; to understand the means, to paint decoratively, to exalt form and color.”

Maurice Denis (1870–1943) French painter

Quote from Denis' Journal, 1930; as cited on Wikipedia: Maurice Denis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Denis - reference [43] 1921 and later

Color, Understanding, Painting

“It is difficult to say when algebra as a science began in China. Problems which we should solve by equations appear in works as early as the Nine Sections (K'iu-ch'ang Suan-shu) and so may have been known by the year 1000 B. C. In Liu Hui's commentary on this work (c. 250) there are problems of pursuit, the Rule of False Position… and an arrangement of terms in a kind of determinant notation. The rules given by Liu Hui form a kind of rhetorical algebra.
The work of Sun-tzï contains various problems which would today be considered algebraic. These include questions involving indeterminate equations. …Sun-tzï solved such problems by analysis and was content with a single result…
The Chinese certainly knew how to solve quadratics as early as the 1st century B. C., and rules given even as early as the K'iu-ch'ang Suan-shu… involve the solution of such equations.
Liu Hui (c. 250) gave various rules which would now be stated as algebraic formulas and seems to have deduced these from other rules in much the same way as we should…
By the 7th century the cubic equation had begun to attract attention, as is evident from the Ch'i-ku Suan-king of Wang Hs'iao-t'ung (c. 625).
The culmination of Chinese is found in the 13th century. …numerical higher equations attracted the special attention of scholars like Ch'in Kiu-shao (c.1250), Li Yeh (c. 1250), and Chu-Shï-kié (c. 1300), the result being the perfecting of an ancient method which resembles the one later developed by W. G. Horner”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

1819
Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, Ch. 6: Algebra

Way, Question, Problem, Appearance

“As far as patriots and nationalists are concerned, I believe that the Homicide Pact system has many of the same drawbacks as the Doomsday Machine, though not in so extreme a form. The major advantage of the Homicide Pact is that one is not in the bizarre situation of being killed with his own equipment; while intellectuals may not so distinguish, the policy makers and practical men prefer being killed by the other side. It is just because this view no longer strikes some people as bizarre that it is so dangerous.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

ex.:The Star Trek Episode A Taste of Armageddon
The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

Men, People

“Mankind have infinite difficulty in reaching new creations, and therefore cherish the once developed forms as sacred heirlooms.”

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

Vol. 4. Part 2. Translated by W.P. Dickson
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

“The social sciences, ultimately, are about patterns, rules, and phenomena available to certain objective forms of explanation; the humanities, especially the study of literature, are about exceptional cases, singular works, and individuals that require subjective understanding.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 23.

Literature, Understanding, Study, Science

“The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

The Study of Poetry
Essays in Criticism, second series (1888)

“The Muslim whose legs are being reduced to pulp by his American tormentor doesn't care if he's being murdered because he is despised by Christians or because he is an impediment to economic rationality. … For all the inevitability that surrounds the Christian/Enlightenment divide, it should not be so difficult for us to find a third option in our intellectual traditions, even if this tradition seems mostly defeated and lost. It is a tradition that is spiritual and yet hostile to the orthodoxies of institutional Christianity. It is the creation of the Enlightenment and yet it is suspicious of the claims of Reason, especially that form of Reason, economic rationalism, that defines capitalism. This tradition began in Europe with Romanticism and in America with the Concord Transcendentalists.”

Curtis White (1951) American academic

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

Hostility

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”

Charlton Ogburn (1911–1998) American journalist and author

From "Merrill's Marauders: The truth about an incredible adventure" http://www.harpers.org/archive/1957/01/0007289 in the January 1957 issue of Harper's Magazine Usually misattributed to Petronius See Brown, David S. "Petronius or Ogburn?", Public Administration Review, Vol. 38, No. 3 (May - Jun., 1978), p. 296 http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0033-3352(197805%2F06)38%3A3%3C296%3APOO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z alternate version:As a result, I suppose, of high-level changes of mind about how we were to be used, we went though several reorganizations. Perhaps because Americans as a nation have a gift for organizing, we tend to meet any new situation by reorganization, and a wonderful method it is for creating the illusion of progress at the mere cost of confusion, inefficiency and demoralization. The Maurauders (1959) chapter 2, page 60

Life, Learning, Change, Time

“Normally, when one passes someone on the street who is in pain, one either tries to help him, or one simply looks the other way. With a photo there's no human decision; you're not there; you can't turn away; you simply gape. It's a form of voyeurism.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Source: Paris Review interview (1972), p. 247

Pain, Way, Photo, Decision

“A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.”

Tom Stoppard Night and Day

Wagner, Act I
Night and Day (1978)

Thinking, Parting

“Forget the 18th century, the 19th century, even at the birth of the 20th century. Here's my favorite example, here: 1928, my hero, Walt Disney, created this extraordinary work, the birth of Mickey Mouse in the form of Steamboat Willie. But what you probably don't recognize about Steamboat Willie and his emergence into Mickey Mouse is that in 1928, Walt Disney, to use the language of the Disney Corporation today, "stole" Willie from Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill."
It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928 — no 14 years — just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did to produce the Disney empire.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

OSCON 2002

Birth, Forgetting

“The idea of Islamic renewal, which understands Islam as capable not only of educating human beings but also of ordering the world, will always have two types of people as its opponents: conservatives who want the old forms, and modernists who want someone else's forms.”

Alija Izetbegović (1925–2003) Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Source: The Islamic Declaration (1970), p. 8.

People, World, Education, Idea

“Miro came of age as an artist just at the time World War 1. ended. With the end of the war came the end of all the new pre-war art conceptions. A young painter could not start as a Cubist or a Futurist, and Dada was the only manifestation at the moment. Miro began by painting farm scenes from the countryside of Barcelona, his native land... A few years later he came to Paris [circa 1914] and found himself among the Dadaists who were, at that time, transmuting into Surrealism. In spite of this contact Miró kept aloof from any direct influence and showed a series of canvases in which form submitted to strong colouring expressed a new two-dimensional cosmogony, in no way related to abstraction.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote in: 'Appreciations of other artists': Joan Miro (painter, sculptor author) 1946, by Marcel Duchamp; as cited in Catalog, Collection of the Societé Anonyme, eds. Michel Sanouillet / Elmer Peterson, London 1975, pp. 143- 159
1921 - 1950

War, Age, World, Art

“Step by step, He had raised their conceptions of Him nearer the unspeakable grandeur of His true nature and work. At first the Teacher, He had, after a time, by gradual disclosures, revealed Himself as the Son of God veiled in the form of man; and, now, since His crucifixion and resurrection, He had taught them to see in Him the Messiah, exalted to immortal and Divine majesty, as the conqueror of Death and the Lord of all.”

John Cunningham Geikie (1824–1906) Scottish Presbyterian minister and author

The Life and Words of Christ (1886), p. 607.

Death, God, Nature, Teachers

“Another important point which you so very accurately sensed concerns the idea that the glass in actual fact is not meant to be looked at (with 'aesthetic' eyes). It should be accompanied by a 'literary' text, as amorphous as possible, which never took shape. And the two elements, glass for the eyes, text for the ears and understanding, should complement each other and above all prevent one or the other from taking on an aesthetic-plastic or literary form. All in all, I am hugely indebted to you for having stripped bare my Bride stripped bare”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

the complete title is: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), c. 1915 – 1923
Quote from a letter to fr:Jean Suquet (art historian), New York 25 December 1949; as quoted in The Duchamp Book, ed. Gavin Parkinson, Tate Publishing, London 2008 p. 163
1921 - 1950

Idea, Understanding, Sense

“Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them, have their mental capacities not strengthened, but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions and phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own. And thus, the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 1: Childhood and Early Education (pp. 21-22)

Pain, People, Youth, Education

“My soul, so far as I understand it, has very kindly taken colour and form from the many various modes of life that self-will and an impetuous temperament have forced me to indulge in. Therefore I may say that I am free from original qualities, defects, tastes, etc. What is mine I have acquired, or, to speak more exactly, chance bestowed, and still bestows, upon me. I came into the world apparently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no impress, but capable of receiving any; of being moulded into all shapes.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

Source: Confessions of a Young Man http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12278/12278-h/12278-h.htm (1886), Ch. 1.

Life, World, Soul, Understanding

“The state sometimes makes mistakes. When one of these mistakes occurs, a decline in collective enthusiasm is reflected by a resulting quantitative decrease of the contribution of each individual, each of the elements forming the whole of the masses. Work is so paralysed that insignificant quantities are produced. It is time to make a correction.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Time

“What is at issue here is not: What are the facts? but rather: How are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another? Some historians will insist that history cannot become a science until it finds the technical terminology adequate to the correct characterization of its objects of study, in the way that physics did in the calculus and chemistry did in the periodic tables. Such is the recommendation of Marxists, Positivists, Cliometricians, and so on. Others will continue to insist that the integrity of historiography depends on its use of ordinary language, its avoidance of jargon. These latter suppose that ordinary language is a safeguard against ideological deformations of the ‘facts.’ What they fail to recognize is that ordinary language itself has its own forms of terminological determinism, represented by the figures of speech without which discourse itself is impossible.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

Way, History, Study, Science

“We have a massive system to regulate creativity. A massive system of lawyers regulating creativity as copyright law has expanded in unrecognizable forms, going from a regulation of publishing to a regulation of copying.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

OSCON 2002

Law

“Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Source: Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998) Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 355

Behavior, Nature, Change

“If Kumble was born in Australia or England, he would have got much more prominence in world cricket considering his superb record in both forms of the game. Kumble is definitely the best role model for any youngster entering the game.”

Anil Kumble (1970) Former Indian cricketer

By Arjuna Ranatunga in "Kumble Calls it a Day: Quotes... For and By Kumble..."

World, Game

“The tradition in Hinduism is that it is not open to any Hindu, whatever be the name and mental image of the Supreme Being he uses for his devotional exercises, to deny the existence of God that others worship. He can raise the name of his choice to that of the highest, but he can not deny the divinity or the truth of the God of other denominations. The fervor of his own piety just gives predominance to the name and form he gives for his own worship and contemplation, and he treats the other gods as deriving the divinity therefrom. This reduces all controversy to a devotional technique of concentration on a peculiar name and mental form or concrete symbol as representing the supreme being. It makes no difference in the contents of Vedanta to which all devotees equally subscribe… ‘just as all water raining from the skies goes to the ocean, worship of all gods go to Keshava.”

C. Rajagopalachari (1878–1972) Political leader

C. Rajagopalachari (1900) Hinduism, doctrine and way of life https://archive.org/stream/cu31924091600688#page/n37/mode/2up, p. 31; As quoted in [Rao, K.L. Seshagiri, Mahatma Gandhi And Comparative Religion, http://books.google.com/books?id=HSGWZ9mpNl4C&pg=PA110, 1 January 1990, Motilal Banarsidass Publ., 978-81-208-0767-9, 110–]

God, Truth, Exercises, Water

“Although some dinosaurs may have spent some time feeding in the water like moose or fishing cats, at most a few became strongly amphibious in the manner of hippos, much less marine as per seals and whales. The only strongly aquatic dinosaurs are some birds. The occasional statement that there were marine dinosaurs is therefore incorrect - these creatures of Mesozoic seas were various forms of reptiles that had evolved over the eons.”

Gregory Scott Paul book The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs

Gregory S. Paul (2010) The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs, Princeton University Press, p. 14
The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs

Cats, Bird, Fish, Water

“From now on whatever the hour represented on the canvas, a supreme accord will be wrought amongst all the parts of the subject: the water, the sky, the clouds, the foliage, reunified by the atmosphere, will form a whole of an irreproachable homogeneity, a grandiose and charming image of natural harmony.”

Gustave Geffroy (1855–1926) French writer

1898 in: Steven Z. Levine, ‎Claude Monet (1994), Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection: The Modernist Myth of the Self. p. 93: presented as "account at the time of the reexhibition of the seven Cathedrals in 1898."

Nature, Water, Parting

“Left to its own devices the market is capable of the most miraculous of inventions and the silliest of self-delusions. It is an extreme romantic. It also has a real purpose — the same one it has always had. That is to organize the supply and exchange of goods or to finance the production of goods — thus facilitating and financing the economy. But the market cannot achieve in a regular and lasting manner its own purpose because it is only an unconscious and abstract mechanism. The factor which must be added in order to create the restraint, balance, and consciousness necessary for long-term prosperity is human leadership. That leadership takes the form of effective regulation.”

John Ralston Saul The Doubter's Companion

"Marketplace"
The Doubter's Companion (1994)

“For all human beings, love is a constant preoccupation—a never-ending central theme. Indeed, the ultimate motivation behind interactions among people is often the desire to experience some form of love. The fact that love is so important has major implications for leadership. In particular, the degree to which leaders acknowledge the value of love in their own lives and in the lives of others can determine the success or failure of their undertakings. Far from being irrelevant or impractical, the intention to express love is fundamental for effective leadership. This is so because in the final analysis, a leader’s motivation is communicated to others in countless subtle ways. Leaders whose actions are perceived as self-serving often create disharmony, resentment, and disloyalty. On the other hand, those who base their behavior upon a genuine empathy and concern for others can gain loyalty and support that make the attainment of even difficult goals possible.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Leadership For An Age of Higher Consciousness, Volume 1: Administration from a Metaphysical Perspective (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: The Phenomenon of Love

Love, People, Way, Behavior

“The search continues for the absolute model-form which shall do justice to every dimension without loss of inner force.”

Fritz Wotruba (1907–1975) Austrian sculptor (23 April 1907, Vienna – 28 August 1975, Vienna)

Source: The Human Form: Sculpture, Prints, and Drawings, 1977, p. 8.

Justice, Search, Loss

“The principle assumption made in Artificial Life is that the 'logical form' of an organism can be separated from its material basis of construction, and that 'aliveness' will be found to be a property of the former, not of the latter.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Source: Artificial Life (1989), p.11

Life

“Conflict may be personal, interpersonal, or between rival groups or coalitions. It may be built into organizational structures, roles, attitudes, and stereotypes or arise over a scarcity of resources. It may be explicit or covert. Whatever the reason, and whatever the form it takes, its source rests in some perceived or real divergence of interests.”

Gareth Morgan book Images of Organization

Source: Images of Organization (1986), p. 155 as cited in: As cited in: R. van den Nieuwenhof (2003) 2 strategie: omgaan met de omgeving. p. 43-44

Personality

“Happiness in it's uncut form
Is the feeling that I get, you're warm, warm
Happy's what I get when we do what we do
Happiness, mama, is being with u
Good lord.”

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

Girls & Boys
Song lyrics, Parade Under the Cherry Moon (1986)

Happiness, Feeling

“[In] the definition of international system… There is some "form of control" that regulates behavior and may range from informal rules of the system to formal institutions. …A view prevalent among many scholars of political science is that the essence of international relations is precisely the absence of control… a condition of anarchy…”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

War and Change in World Politics (1981)

Behavior, Science

“Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly, engaged the whole of human personality. His insistence on the sanctity of nature was part of an attempt to develop Goethe's intuition that form cannot be put together in the mind by an additive process, but is to be deduced from the laws of growth in living organisms, and their resistance to the elements.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Section 3: A Note on Ruskin's Writings on Art and Architecture
Ruskin Today (1964)

Law, Art, Nature, Parting

“No mind, no form, I only exist; now ceased all will and thought; the final end of [Nature]]'s dance, I am it whom I have sought.”

Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) Indian writer and guru

"The Absolute", p. 1
My Flute (1972)

Nature, Dance

“Collectivists would have you believe that individualism is merely another word for selfishness, because individualists oppose welfare and other forms of coercive redistribution of wealth, but just the opposite is true. Individualists advocate true charity, which is the voluntary giving of their own money, while collectivists advocate the coercive giving of other people's money; which, of course, is why it is so popular.”

G. Edward Griffin (1931) American conspiracy theorist, film producer, author, and political lecturer

The Chasm: The Future Is Calling (Part One) (2003–2009)

Money, People, Selfishness, Wealth

“Other sages have spoken to me of God. But from whom could I have learned the essence of Divine perfection, as from Him, who was in a peculiar sense the Son, representative, and image of God — who was especially an incarnation of the unbounded love of the Father? And from what other teacher could I have learned to approach the Supreme Being with that filial spirit, which forms the happiness of my fellowship with Him? From other seers I might have heard of heaven; but when I behold in Jesus the spirit of heaven, dwelling actually on earth, what a new comprehension have I of that better world!”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 62

Love, God, Happiness, World

“When closed societies collapse but fail to make the transition to openness the reason need not be that they languish in anarchy or suffer a return to dictatorship. It may be that they adopt an illiberal form of democracy. Along with the liberal democratic tradition that goes back to Locke and the English civil war there is a tradition, originating in the French Revolution and formulated theoretically by Rousseau, which understands democracy as the expression of popular will. The elective theocracy that is emerging in much of post-Saddam Iraq is a democratic polity in the latter sense, as is the current regime in Iran; so is the Hamas government in Palestine… To be sure, these regimes often lack freedom of information and expression and legal limitations on government power, which are essential features of democracy in the liberal tradition. In these respects they are closed societies, but they are not dictatorships. It is often forgotten that democracy, defined chiefly by elections and the exercise of power in the name of the majority, can be as repressive of individual freedom and minority rights as dictatorship - sometimes more so.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

'George Soros and the Open Society' (p.116-7)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

War, Exercises, Democracy, Understanding

“Today there are no trees at the South Pole. 70% of the earth today is underwater. Do you know that only 3% of this earth is habitable for mankind! A lot of it is under desert, ice caps, tundra, mountain ranges nobody can live on. Three percent is habitable. What we're seeing today is not what Adam and Eve saw. The Bible says that He formed it to be inhabited. That's why He did it! Probably the pre-Flood world was (I would be just picking a number) and say probably 80% land, and only 20% water. The oceans weren't there! The water was in the crust of the earth or in the canopy overhead. But there were trees from pole to pole before the Flood came. This layer of water above the earth would act as a barrier that would block out UV light and X-rays and other harmful things that come from the sun. You see, the sun produces a lot of stuff besides light. It produces X-rays and gamma rays and beta rays; and all them "ray-boys" come down here! And they're pretty hard on your carcass.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Garden of Eden

World, Mountain, Boy, Tree

“Is it responsible to camouflage one of America's most remarkable machines as a piece of gaudy merchandise? Form, which should be the clean- cut expression of mechanical excellence has become sensuous and organic.”

Raymond Loewy (1893–1986) industrial designer

Raymond Loewy 1950s, cited in: Karal Ann Marling, ‎Donald J. Bush, ‎Walker Art Center (1989) Autoeroticism. p. 16
Loewy commented on the new generation automobiles, after having designed the Studebaker of 1953, which according to Loewy looked like "jukeboxes on wheels."

“I am never in a hurry to reach details. First and above all I am interested in the large masses and the general character of a picture; when these are well established, then I try for subtleties of form and color. I rework the painting constantly and freely, and without any systematic method.”

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

Quote from Corot's 'Notebooks', ca. 1850, as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 240-241
1850s

Color, Painting

“An Irishman hears that the banks are failing. He runs into the bank where he keeps his money and demands every cent of it. 'Yes sir,' the teller says politely. 'Do you want it in cash or in the form of a check?' The Irishman replies: 'Well, if you have it, I don't want it. But if you haven't got it, I must have it immediately.”

Philip K. Dick book The World Jones Made

The World Jones Made (1956)

Money

“It is essential to stress that information science is not solely concerned with science information, nor indeed only with the provision of information to academic and professional workers, but with all forms of information transfer in society.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. 11.

Science

“Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival.”

Harold Innis book Empire and Communications

2007 edition, p. 31.
Empire and Communications (1950)

Way, Memory

“If the dangers of racism are apparent, even in a non-violent form, then it was the same for Islamism. Communalist identity politics, self-segregation and group-think are far more damaging to societies in the long run than the odd bomb going off here or there, because it is such a milieu that keeps breeding bomb-makers.”

Maajid Nawaz book Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism

Source: Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism (2012), p. 211

Thinking

“There is another form of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange. You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays attention only to a class given by a first digit, and so on; and thus proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

“Although the formulations of science now offer the most advanced knowledge of nature, men continue to use obsolete forms of thought long discarded by scientific theory. In so far as these obsolete forms are superfluous for science, the fact that they persist violated the principle of the economy of thought, that characteristic trait of the bourgeois temper.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 133.

Men, Nature, Knowledge, Science

“[few of Sancho's letters were actually intended for publication, but here is one sample, written during a military recruiting crisis] The vast bounties offered for able-bodied men sheweth the zeal and liberality of our wise lawgivers- yet indicateth a scarcity of men. Now, they seem to me to have overlooked one resource (which appears obvious); a resource which would greatly benefit the people at large (by being more usefully employed), and which are happily half-trained already for the service of their country, by being- powder proof- light, active, young fellows: I dare say you have anticipated my scheme, which is to form ten companies at least, out of the very numerous body of hair-dressers…”

Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780) British composer, writer and grocer

(from vol 2, letter 65: 29 Apr 1780, to the General Advertiser newspaper)

Men, People, Light, Appearance

“It was exciting. The idea of having this character, who had been so much to so many people. And none of that was based on his sexual orientation,
And just to reveal that he is a gay man, and that in no way changes his relationships with any of these people, anything that he’s done. Sometimes it’s amazing to have the stories where the character is finding themselves, but then it’s also incredibly important to have the stories where this character is fully formed, and he’s a gay man, and he’s doing amazing things. And he’s flawed, and he has his own problems. That was why I loved the idea of having Shiro be our representation.”

Lauren Montgomery (1980) artist

21 July 2018 article on Hypable https://www.hypable.com/sdcc-voltron-interviews-lgbt-representation/

Love, People, Way, Idea

“The working-class woman shows me much more than the ladies who are totally limited by conventional behavior. The working-class woman shows me her hands, her feet, and her hair. She lets me see the shape and form of her body through her clothes. She presents herself and the expression of her feelings openly, without disguises.”

Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) German artist

Quoted in Käthe Kollwitz: Woman and Artist (1976) by Martha Kearns The Feminist Press, ISBN 0-912-67015-0, p. 82.
Other Quotes

Behavior, Feeling, Clothes

“A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe book Elective Affinities

Bk. II, Ch. 7
Elective Affinities (1809)

Feeling, Nature, Teachers, Memory

“If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government, and which against the usurpations of the national rulers may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success than against those of the rulers of an individual State. In a single State, if the persons entrusted with supreme power become usurpers, the different parcels, subdivisions, or districts of which it consists, having no distinct government in each, can take no regular measures for defense. The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without resource; except in their courage and despair.”

Alexander Hamilton Federalist Papers

No. 28
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

People, Courage, Success, Personality

“We're not alone. There are life forms out there, which while they are not hostile, have clearly shown that they're not pleased with our tendency to put weapons in space. (May 9, 2001)”

Steven M. Greer (1955) American ufologist

2001
Source: [Watson, Rob, UFO spotters slam 'US cover-up', BBC News, May 10, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1322432.stm, 2007-02-21]

Life, Hostility

“New knowledge is only useful in so far as it opens up new vistas for the imagination, and no more so than the old forms which the artist must understand only in order to reject.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

Nano Reid (1950)

Imagination, Understanding, Knowledge

“No one is a solitary agent. We all have various types of guides who assist us. Most important, there is a form of God in everyone’s heart, and when you put the physical body to rest, you make closer contact with the Lord in the heart and with your higher self.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 24

God, Heart

“True realism, materialist realism lies in the search for the expression of forms faithful to their content. But there is no content detached from human interest.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

As quoted in Aftermath France, 1945-54: New Images of Man: An Exhibition (1982), p. 107
1959 - 1973, Various sources

Faith, Search

“Sound is defined as the result of a succession of regular and periodic vibrations. Noise is instead caused by motions that are irregular, as much in time as in intensity. 'A musical sensation,' says Helmholtz 'appears to the ear as a perfectly stable, uniform, and invariable sound.' But the quality of continuity that sound has with respect to noise, which seems instead fragmentary and irregular, is not an element sufficient to make a sharp distinction between sound and noise. We know that the production of sound requires not only that a body vibrate regularly but also that these vibrations persist in the auditory nerve until the following vibration has arrived, so that the periodic vibrations blend to form a continuous musical sound. At least sixteen vibrations per second are needed for this. Now, if I succeed in producing a noise with this speed. I will get a sound made up of the totality of so many noises--or better, noise whose successive repetitions will be sufficiently rapid to give a sensation of continuity like that of sound.”

Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) Electronic music pioneer and Futurist painter

Russolo. English trans. Barclay Brown (1986: 37).
undated quotes

Music, Appearance, Time, Success

“God appears and god is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Source: 1800s, Auguries of Innocence (1803), Line 129

God, Soul, Light, Appearance

“Painting has nothing to do with thinking, because in painting thinking is painting. Thinking is language – record-keeping – and has to take place before and after. Einstein did not think when he was calculating: he calculated – producing the next equation in reaction to the one that went before – just as in painting one form is a response to another and so on.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

Thinking, Painting

“I reject the notion that technology is a neutral thing, so I see it as creating new capabilities for humanity. But then, these capabilities can be an object of conflict. And if you analyse p2p technology, it can take different forms. These different forms are the function of the forces which control the technology. For example, in what I call “netarchical capitalism,” that is where you have proprietory platforms, business-owned entities creating p2p front-ends, because they want people to communicate with each other, but they combine it with controlled and hierarchical back-ends, where they control the design and your personal data, so that they are able to sell your attention. So, when we talk about peer-to-peer technology, we have to be very careful, not just look at the structure: computers organised in a peer network, humans organised in a peer network etc., but you have to look at governance and ownership as well.”

Michel Bauwens

Greens and Pirates: in Search of a New Majority for the Commons? https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/greens-and-pirates-in-search-of-a-new-majority-for-the-commons/, interview with Michel Bauwens by Adam Ostolski, Green European Journal, January 2014

People, Communication, Business, Personality

“I feel an inner relationship which leads from the antique tot the Gothic, especially from the early ancient art, and from the Gothic to my own feeling for form. A great simplicity of form is something marvelous. As far back as I can remember, I have tried to put the simplicity of nature into the heads that I was painting or drawing. Now I have a real sense of being able to learn from the heads of ancient sculpture..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

excerpt of her Journal, 1899; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 198
1899

Art, Feeling, Nature, Sense

“I had the feeling that another kind of life -- perhaps in a transcendental area -- would give me a better possibility to influence, or to work, or to act within this contradiction. So, this was my general feeling: on the one side, this beautiful undamaged nature form which I took a lot and had a lot of possibilities for contemplation, meditation, research, collecting things, making a kind of system; and on the other side, this social debacle that I felt already as a coming dilemma.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Source: 1980's, Interview with Kate Horsefield, 1980, p. 62; also quoted in: Video Data Bank, School/Art Institute Chicago, (1981) Profile, Volume 1

Life, Beauty, Feeling, Nature

“The plastic expression of space is inconceivable without light. Light and space complete one another. In architecture light represents an element of plastic expression – in fact, the most important one. An organic relationship between 'space' and 'material' is possible only with the aid of light. The highest achievements in architecture can be accomplished only if light also is treated as plastic form.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote in van Doesburg's article: 'Space – time and colour' in 'De Stijl', Aubette Issue, series xv, 87-9, 1928, pp. 26–27
1926 – 1931

Light

“The most important form of incremental change is the decision by the individual to become vegan. Veganism, or the eschewing of all animal products, is more than a matter of diet or lifestyle; it is a political and moral statement in which the individual accepts the principle of abolition in her own life. Veganism is the one truly abolitionist goal that we can all achieve—and we can achieve it immediately, starting with our next meal.”

Gary L. Francione (1954) American legal scholar

Abolition of Animal Exploitation: The Journey Will Not Begin While We Are Walking Backwards, http://www.abolitionist-online.com

Life, Decision, Change, Animals

“The excursus upon the origin of Odysseus’ scar is not basically different from the many passages in which a newly introduced character, or even a newly appearing object or implement, though it be in the thick of a battle, is described as to its nature and origin; or in which, upon the appearance of a god, we are told where he last was, what he was doing there, and by what road he reached the scene; indeed, even the Homeric epithets seem to me in the final analysis to be traceable to the same need for an externalization of phenomena in terms perceptible to the senses. Here is the scar, which comes up in the course of the narrative; and Homer’s feeling simply will not permit him to see it appear out of the darkness of an unilluminated past; it must be set in full light, and with it a portion of the hero’s boyhood. … To be sure, the aesthetic effect thus produced was soon noticed and thereafter consciously sought; but the more original cause must have lain in the basic impulse of the Homeric style: to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations. Nor do psychological processes receive any other treatment: here too nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed. With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even passion does not disturb, Homer’s personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, they speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it. Much that is terrible takes place in the Homeric poems, but it seldom takes place wordlessly: Polyphemus talks to Odysseus; Odysseus talks to the suitors when he begins to kill them; Hector and Achilles talk at length, before battle and after; and no speech is so filled with anger or scorn that the particles which express logical and grammatical connections are lacking or out of place.”

Erich Auerbach Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Source: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), p. 5

God, Feeling, Nature, Sense

“I was attracted to studies of cancer families because epidemiological studies show that virtually all cancers manifest a tendency to aggregate in families. Close relatives of a cancer patient are at increased risk of that neoplasm, and perhaps other forms of cancer. The excess site-specific cancer risk is exceptionally high for carriers of certain cancer genes, in whom the attack rate can approach 100 percent. In candidate cancer families, the possibility that clustering is on the basis of chance must be excluded through epidemiological studies that establish the presence of an excess cancer risk. Predisposed families are candidates for laboratory studies to identify the inherited susceptibility factors. These investigations have led to the identification and isolation of human cancer genes, the tumor suppressor genes. These cancer genes are among more than 200 single-gene traits associated with the development of cancer. Approximately a dozen inherited susceptibility genes have been definitively identified, and many more are being sought. From studies of retinoblastoma and other rare cancers, important new information was generated about the fundamental biology of cancers that arise in many patients. Isolation of an inherited cancer susceptibility gene provides opportunities for presymptomatic testing of at-risk relatives. However, testing of healthy individuals also raise important issues regarding informed consent, confidentiality and potential for adverse psychological, social and economic effects.”

Frederick Pei Li (1940–2015) American physician

Frederick Li - Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/frederick-li/.

Family, Study, Chance

“God has come again and again in various Forms, has spoken again and again in different words and different languages the Same One Truth — but how many are there that live up to it? Instead of making Truth the vitalbreath of his life, man compromises by making over and over againa mechanical religion of it—a handy staff to lean on in times of adversity, a soothing balm for his conscience or a tradition to be followed.”

Meher Baba (1894–1969) Indian mystic

44 : God Alone Is, p. 74.
The Everything and the Nothing (1963)

Life, God, Truth, Religion

“Because his living presence became such an uncommonly global one, that ministry [Jackson’s individual spiritual concerns] reflected universal ecumenical principles dressed up in ultra-modern dance grooves, love songs to nature, lyrical eulogies in the form of musical elegies, and sermons sung with passionate intensity and suffering eloquence.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(from Work and Soul in Michael Jackson’s This Is It).
From Articles, Essays, and Poems, On Michael Jackson

Love, Music, Nature, Suffering

“Lots of my friends have babies, but I don't have any babies. But I have lots of friends; babies don't have any friends. They all have those baby-monitors so they can hear the baby from the other room, which I consider a form of wiretapping. One day there's gonna be a really smart baby who makes a fake recording of some fake baby noises…gonna crawl out of the window and go to Italy.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

When the Leaves Blow Away (2006), I Still Have a Pony (2007)

Baby

“Another theme of the Wake that helps in the understanding of the paradoxical shift from cliché to archetype is "pastimes are past times". The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age. In the twentieth century the number of past times that are simultaneously available is so vast as to create cultural anarchy. When all the cultures of the world are simultaneously present, the work of the artist in the elucidation of form takes on new scope and new urgency. Most men are pushed into the artist role. The artist cannot dispense with the principle of doubleness and interplay since this kind of hendiadys-dialogue is essential to the very structure of consciousness, awareness, and autonomy.”

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

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.99

Men, Age, World, Game

“It's not that everything needs to have substance, but when nothing does then you know we’re living in a bankrupt society, an artistically bankrupt society, and that’s not okay. I think there’s room for forms of entertainment that are very light and frivolous and fun, but when those forms of entertainment, forms of "art" if you will, become presented as something more than that, and are believed to be something more than that, then we’ve got a lot of problems.”

Davey Havok (1975) American singer

Skinnie magazine, March 2010, p. 29

Art, Problem, Thinking, Light

“That the equality of human souls in the sight of God ought to be translated into a political structure of equal political rights has come to be regarded as the most authentic interpretation of the Gospel itself. Slavery, and the imposition of all arbitrary forms of inequality of man by man, has come to be seen as demeaning to the souls of God's creation.”

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

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 151

God, Soul

“[The goal of the LOT (lattice of theories) is to create a framework] which can support an open-ended number of theories (potentially infinite) organized in a lattice together with systematic metalevel techniques for moving from one to another, for testing their adequacy for any given problem, and for mixing, matching, combining, and transforming them to whatever form is appropriate for whatever problem anyone is trying to solve.”

John F. Sowa (1940) artificial intelligence researcher

Cited in: Roberto Poli, Michael Healy, Achilles Kameas (2010) Theory and Applications of Ontology: Computer Applications . p. 533
Knowledge representation, 2000

Support, Problem

“By painting colours and lines and forms seen in a quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

1896 - 1930
Source: Diary Saint Cloud, 1898; Munch, as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 105

Mood, Painting

“There are ambiguities in the art of painting but they are the ambiguities of a fine precision: the discovered fact of the image containing at the same time the reverberations of the unknown, the truly mysterious… I would take this further and add that painting is itself precise in its ideas. In the sense that the image is the idea in its purist form.* [*“The image is a principal of our knowledge. It is that from which our intellectual activity begins, not as a passing stimulus but as an enduring foundation””

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

St. Thomas Aquinas, Opus XVI]
X magazine (1959-62)

Art, Idea, Knowledge, Sense

“To say that a thing is imaginary is not to dispose of it in the realm of mind, for the imagination, or the image making faculty, is a very important part of our mental functioning. An image formed by the imagination is a reality from the point of view of psychology; it is quite true that it has no physical existence, but are we going to limit reality to that which is material? We shall be far out of our reckoning if we do, for mental images are potent things, and although they do not actually exist on the physical plane, they influence it far more than most people suspect.”

Dion Fortune (1890–1946) British occultist and author

Dion Fortune, Spiritualism and Occultism

People, Imagination, Reality, Parting

“If my painting depicts faithfully and without over-refinement the simple and true character of the place you have frequented, if I succeed.... in giving its own life to that world of vegetation, then you will hear the trees moaning under the winter wind, the birds that call their young and cry after their dispersion; you will feel the old chateau tremble; it will tell you that, as the wife you loved, it too will.... disappear and be reborn in multiple forms.. One does not copy with mathematical precision what one sees, but one feels and interprets a real world, all of whose fatalities hold you fast bound.”

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) French painter (1812-1867)

Quote in a letter to M. Guizot, c. 1839-41; as cited by Charles Sprague Smith, in Barbizon days, Millet-Corot-Rousseau-Barye publisher, A. Wessels Company, New York, July 1902, pp. 172-173
The Duke de Broglie had ordered of Rousseau a painting of the 'Chateau de Broglie', for his friend M. Guizot. Madame Guizot had died there, and The Duke de Broglie urged Rousseau to make the painting grave and sad.. The quote presents Rousseau’s responding
1830 - 1850

Love, Life, World, Feeling

“He fell behind his brothers two or three inches in height, and proportionally in bone and weight. His character and processes of mind seemed to share in this fining-down process of scale. He was not good in a fight, and his nerves were more delicate than boys' nerves ought to be. He exaggerated these weaknesses as he grew older. The habit of doubt; of distrusting his own judgment and of totally rejecting the judgment of the world; the tendency to regard every question as open; the hesitation to act except as a choice of evils; the shirking of responsibility; the love of line, form, quality; the horror of ennui; the passion for companionship and the antipathy to society — all these are well-known qualities of New England character in no way peculiar to individuals but in this instance they seemed to be stimulated by the fever, and Henry Adams could never make up his mind whether, on the whole, the change of character was morbid or healthy, good or bad for his purpose. His brothers were the type; he was the variation.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Love, World, Way, Boy

“In its most general form, confinement was explained, or at least justified, by a will to avoid scandal. It thereby signalled an important change in the consciousness of evil. The Renaissance had let unreason in all its forms come out into the light of day, as public exposure gave evil the chance to redeem itself and to serve as an exemplum.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Part One: 5. The Insane
History of Madness (1961)

Light, Evil, Change, Chance

“Worry is really just a form of atheism. Every time you worry, you’re acting like an atheist. You’re saying, “It all depends on me.””

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

That’s just not in the Bible. "Word of the Day: God’s Provision: Trust God" in Electronic Urban Report (3 August 2010) http://www.eurweb.com/?p=40621

Time, Dependency

“In spite of all the foregoing, there is a science of economics, a true, and even exact, science, which reaches laws as universal as those of mathematics and mechanics. The greatest need for the development of economics as a growing body of thought and practice is an adequate appreciation of the meaning, and the limitations, of this body of accurate premises and rigorously established conclusions. It comes about in the same general way as all science, except perhaps in a higher degree, i. e., through abstraction. There are no laws regarding the content of economic behavior, but there are laws universally valid as to its form. There is an abstract rationale of all conduct which is rational at alt, and a rationale of all social relations arising through the organization of rational activity.”

Frank Knight (1885–1972) American economist

Source: "The limitations of scientific method in economics", 1924, p. 127 (2009 edition)

Law, Way, Behavior, Mathematics

“As part of the spring ritual of National Poetry Month, poets are symbolically dragged into the public square in order to be humiliated with the claim that their product has not achieved sufficient market penetration and must be revived by the Artificial Resuscitation Foundation (ARF) lest the art form collapse from its own incompetence, irrelevance, and as a result of the general disinterest among the broad masses of the American People. The motto of ARF's National Poetry Month is: "Poetry's not so bad, really."”

Charles Bernstein (1950) American writer

" Against National Poetry Month As Such http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/044106.html", from My Way: Speeches and Poems, 1999, University Of Chicago Press, ISBN 0226044092

People, Art, Spring, Parting