Quotes about form
page 54

“Myriads of individuals, each one unique, live out their lives in rapt intercourse with one another, contribute their heart’s pulses to the universal music, and presently vanish, giving place to others. All this age-long sequence of private living, which is the actual tissue of humanity’s flesh, I cannot describe. I can only trace, as it were, the disembodied form of its growth.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter XIV: Neptune; Section 3, “Slow Conquest” (p. 211)

Age, Music, Universe, Heart

“If one assumes, as I do, that battery is caused by the belief permeating this culture that hierarchical rule and coercive authority are natural, then all our relationships tend to be based on power and domination, and thus all forms of battery are linked.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

(1984)

Nature

“I am working again on my painting 'Moscow' ['Moscow I' ('Mockba I'), 1916]. It is slowly taking shape in my imagination. And what was in the realm of wishing is now assuming real forms. What I have been lacking with this idea was depth and richness of sound, very earnest, complex, and easy at the same time.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote in his letter to Gabriele Münter, September 4, 1916; as cited in Hans K. Rothel and Jean K. Benjamin, Kandinsky: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Volume Two, 1916–1944; Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y, 1984, p. 580
1916 -1920

Imagination, Idea, Time, Painting

“Notwithstanding their attacks on the basic conception of rationalism, on synthetic a priori judgments, that is, material propositions that cannot be contradicted by any experience, the empiricist posits the forms of being as constant.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 146.

“Punk: "The WWE Championship, in its physical form, was stolen from me and is currently held by someone who doesn't deserve it. Someone who doesn't pay the price. Someone who doesn't understand what it means... to be champion."”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

February 04, 2013
WWE Raw

Understanding

“A happy coincidence brought together [in Die Brücke ]the really talented men whose characters and gifts, even in human terms, left them with no other choice than the profession of artist. This form of living, of dwelling and working, though peculiar for a regular human being, was not a deliberate 'epater le bourgeois', but simply a very naive and pure necessity to harmonize art and life. And it was precisely this more than anything else that so tremendously influenced the forms of present-day art. Of course, it was mostly misunderstood and totally distorted, for there [the will] fashioned the form and gave it meaning, whereas here the unfamiliar form is affixed to habit, like a top hat on a cow.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

from Kirchner's Diary, 1923; as quoted in Expressionism, a German intuition, 1905-1920, Neugroschel, Joachim; Vogt, Paul; Keller, Horst; Urban, Martin; Dube, Wolf Dieter; (transl. Joachim Neugroschel); publisher: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1980, p. 93
1920's

Life, Men, Happiness, Art

“I'm especially interested in the music of John Cage... I would like to do some experimenting with the relationship between his freeform sound and free-form art.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Quote of Johns, from: John Adds Plaster Casts To Focus Target Paintings, Donald Key, Milwaukee Journal, 19 June 1960, pt. 5, p. 6
1960s

Art, Music

“Liberal democracy has been one of the sturdiest political systems in the history of the modern West. As the dominant modern form of democracy, it has informed and guided several of the most successful and enduring governments the world has known, not least among them that of the United States.”

Benjamin R. Barber (1939–2017) US political scientist

Source: Strong democracy: Participatory politics for a new age (2003), p. 3

World, Democracy, History, Success

“Protocols:
Number 1, paras. 16, 18, and 20
Let us, however, in our plans, direct our attention not so much to what is good and moral as to what is necessary and useful.
In order to elaborate satisfactory forms of action it is necessary to have regard to the rascalist, the slackness, the instability of the mob, its lack of capacity to understand and respect the conditions of its own life, or its own welfare. It must be understood that the might of a mob is a blind, senseless and unreasoning force ever the mercy of a suggestion from any side….
A people left to itself, i. e., to starts from its midst, bring itself ro ruin by party dissensions excited by the pursuit of power and honors and the disorders arising therefrom. Is it possible for the masses of the people calmly and without petty jealousies to form judgement, to deal with the affairs of the country which cannot be mixed up with personal interest? Can they defend themselves from an external foe?
Raslovlev: Do you mean to go through all the 23 protocols, Graves?
Graves: Yes, I do!”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.76

Life, People, Jealousy, Understanding

“[B]ureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.”

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer

"The Vita Activa", pp. 161–162
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

“With second-form Cell as well, I liked him well enough. Actually, I had wanted him to play a more active role. But since I was told he looked stupid, I had no choice but to change him. (laughs) So I made him into his cool-looking perfect form, which was to Kondō-san's liking.”

Akira Toriyama (1955) manga artist and video game character designer

Akira Toriyama ( mangaka http://mangakaotaku.com/akira-toriyama-2.html/) Daizenshuu 2, 1995 <br class="br">Interview with Shōnen Jump

Stupidity, Change, Perfection

“In a nonspecific sense, one might say that almost all the other antiliberal, reactive nationalist and developmental revolutions in our century were deviant forms of paradigmatic Fascism—the more deviant, the more destructive.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 184

Sense

“The huge human brain, approximately 1,350 cubic centimeters, is the most complex organic structure in the known world. Understanding the human mind/brain mechanisms in evolutionary perspective is the goal of the new scientific discipline called evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology focuses on four key questions: (1) Why is the mind designed the way it is—that is, what causal processes created, fashioned, or shaped the human mind into its current form? (2) How is the human mind designed—what are its mechanisms or component parts, and how are they organized? (3) What are the functions of the component parts and their organized structure—that is, what is the mind designed to do? (4) How does input from the current environment interact with the design of the human mind to produce observable behavior?”

David M. Buss (1953) American psychologist

Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (6th ed., 2019), Chap. 1: The Scientific Movements Leading to Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary Psychology, 2005

World, Way, Behavior, Fashion

“the place [Dogtown, in Gloucester, Massachusetts] is forsaken and majestically lovely as if nature had at last formed one spot where she can live for herself alone.... [it] looked like a cross between Easter Island and Stonehenge – essentially druidic in it appearance, it gives the feeling that an ancient race might turn up at any moment and renew an ageless rite there.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

Somehow a Past, 1933-c, 1939, unpublished manuscript, Hartley Archive, Yale University; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 90
1931 - 1943

Love, Feeling, Nature, Appearance

“Revelation can be supplemented by reason. Christ Himself gave reasons for His belief, and put in modern form, these reasons are, to my mind, conclusive. You remember the passage in the earliest Gospel: "But as touching the dead, that they are raised; have ye not read in the book of Moses, in the place concerning the bush, how God spake unto him, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living: ye do greatly err" (Mark xii, 26 R. V.) Herein, in a form adapted to Jewish thought is "the one great argument which has made most sincere believers in God believers in Immortality also.”

Ernest Barnes (1874–1953) English mathematician and clergyman

citing H. Rashdall: Doctrine and Development, Methuen, 1898 p. 177.
Spiritualism and the Christian Faith (1918)

God, Books, Reading, Christ

“The particles of this cosmos rock and roll to their own self-generated beat. They defy the rules of arithmetic. Protons plus neutrons… equals music. Is this harmony… entropy? …No. …it's social behavior …riddled with form. And it's so antientropic that those in the scientific world who are trying desparately to rescue entropy… call it "negentropy."”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

…Entropy is a very big assumption.
Heresy Number Three
The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates (2012)

World, Music, Behavior

“My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.”

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

Source: 1840s, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Ch. 10

“In 1000 Muslim numbers in India were microscopic. In 1200 they were perhaps about three to four hundred thousand. By 1400 their number had risen probably to 3.2 million and they formed about 1.85 percent of the total population. In 1600 they were probably 15 million. And from the 1:9 to 1:10 Muslim-Hindu ratio in 1600 the proportion of Muslims to Hindus had gone up to about 1:7 by the year 1800…Thus at about the middle of the ninteenth century, the Muslim-Hindu ratio stood approximately at 1:6…. By the end of the nineteenth century, the ratio had changed to 1:5, and Stanely Lanepoole, whose Medieval India was first published in 1903, rightly observes: “The population of India in the present day is over three hundred millions, and every sixth man is a Muslim.””

K. S. Lal book Indian Muslims: Who Are They

Indian Muslims: Who Are They (1990)

Change

“The different pieces of evidence did not constitute so many neutral elements, until such time as they could be gathered together into a single body of evidence that would bring the final certainty of guilt. Each piece of evidence aroused a particular degree of abomination. Guilt did not begin when all the evidence was gathered together; piece by piece, it was constituted by each of the elements that made it possible to recognize a guilty person. Thus a semi-proof did not leave the suspect innocent until such time as it was completed; it made him semi-guilty; slight evidence of a serious crime marked someone as slightly criminal. In short, penal demonstration did not obey a dualistic system: true or false; but a principle of continuous gradation; a degree reached in the demonstration already formed a degree of guilt and consequently involved a degree of punishment.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One, The body of the condemned, pp.23

Time, Personality, Falseness

“The absurdity of monetary system which robs people first of their fair share in the "free market economy" and then - through some of the most inefficient procedures imaginable - returns some of this money in the form of welfare payments to the same people, has rarely been exposed by the "experts" nor been discussed in public.”

Margrit Kennedy (1939–2013) German architect

Source: Interest and Inflation Free Money (1995), Chapter Three, Who Would Profit From a New Monetary System?, p. 71

Money, People, Imagination

“The scientist addresses an infinitesimal audience of fellow composers. His message is not devoid of universality but it's universality is disembodied and anonymous. While the artist's communication is linked forever with it's original form, that of the scientist is modified, amplified, fused with the ideas and results of others, and melts into the stream of knowledge and ideas which forms our culture. The scientist has in common with the artist only this: that he can find no better retreat from the world than his work and also no stronger link with his world than his work.”

Max Delbrück (1906–1981) biophysicist

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1969) http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1969/delbruck-lecture.html

World, Communication, Idea, Knowledge

“Next to him will come Thomas Jefferson, whose wisdom insured that the Government which Washington had formed should be entrusted to the administration of the people. He emphasized the element of self-government which had been enshrined in American institutions in such a way as to demonstrate that it was practical and would be permanent. In him was likewise embodied the spirit of expansion. Recognizing the destiny of this Country, he added to its territory. By removing the possibility of any powerful opposition from a neighboring state, he gave new guaranties to the rule of the people.”

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

1920s, Address at the Black Hills (1927)

Wisdom, People, Way, Country

“Class struggle does not take place within the constituted forms of capitalist social relations: rather the constitution of those forms is itself class struggle.”

John Holloway book Change the World Without Taking Power

Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)

“Legendre's Law of Quadratic Reciprocity' … is …the most important general truth in the science of integral numbers which has been discovered since the time of Fermat. It has been called by Gauss 'the gem of the higher arithmetic,' and is equally remarkable whether we consider the simplicity of its enunciation, the difficulties which for a long time attended its demonstration, or the number and variety of the results which have been obtained by its means. …[W]e find in the 'Opuscula Analytica' of Euler… a memoir… which contains a general and very elegant theorem from which the Law of Reciprocity is immediately deducible, and which is, vice versâ, deducible from that law. But Euler… expressly observes that the theorem is undemonstrated; and this would seem to be the only place in which he mentions it in connexion with the theory of the Residues of Powers; though in other researches he has frequently developed results which are consequences of the theorem, and which relate to the linear forms of the divisors of quadratic formulae. But here also his conclusions repose on induction only; though in one memoir he seems to have imagined… that he had obtained a satisfactory demonstration.”

Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician

Report on the Theory of Numbers (1859) Part I, pp. 56-57.
The Collected Mathematical Papers of Henry John Stephen Smith (1894) Vol. 1

Truth, Law, Imagination, Science

“Space expands or contracts in the tensions and functions through which it exists. Space is not a static, inert thing. Space is alive; space is dynamic; space is imbued with movement expressed by forces and counterforces; space vibrates and resounds with color, light and form in the rhythm of life.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Excerpts from the Teaching of Hans Hofmann', p. 66
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Life, Color, Light

“Films and filmmakers and actors are part of a strange art form, which is only measured by the yardstick of commerce. So it's a dichotomy; it'll always be so.”

Shahrukh Khan (1965) Indian actor, producer and television personality

From interview with Anshul Chaturvedi

Art, Parting

“She was a form of life and light
That seen, became a part of sight,
And rose, where'er I turn'd mine eye,
The morning-star of memory!
Yes, love indeed is light from heaven;
A spark of that immortal fire
With angels shared, by Alla given,
To lift from earth our low desire.”

George Gordon Byron The Giaour

Source: The Giaour (1813), Line 1127.

Love, Life, Angels, Star

“Natural science is the attempt to comprehend nature by precise concepts.
According to the concepts by which we comprehend nature not only are observations completed at every instant but also future observations are pre-determined as necessary, or, in so far as the concept-system is not quite adequate therefor, they are predetermined as probable; these concepts determine what is "possible" (accordingly also what is "necessary," or the opposite of which is impossible), and the degree of the possibility (the "probability") of every separate event that is possible according to them, can be mathematically determined, if the event is sufficiently precise.
If what is necessary or probable according to these concepts occurs, then the latter are thereby confirmed and upon this confirmation by experience rests our confidence in them. If, however, something happens which according to them is not expected and which is therefore according to them impossible or improbable, then arises the problem so to complete them, or if necessary, to transform them, that according to the completed or ameliorated concept-system, what is observed ceases to be impossible or improbable. The completion or amelioration of the concept-system forms the "explanation" of the unexpected observation. By this process our comprehension of nature becomes gradually always more complete and assured, but at the same time recedes even farther behind the surface of phenomena.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Theory of Knowledge
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Confidence, Mathematics, Nature, Problem

“[T]hey and the Catholics had but one common interest and one common enemy; that the depression and slavery of Ireland was produced and perpetuated by the divisions existing between them; and that consequently to assert the independence of their country, and their own individual liberties it was necessary to forget all former feuds, to consolidate the entire strength of the whole nation, and form for the first time but one people.”

Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763–1798) Irish politician

His objective was to convince the Dissenters to join with their fellow countrymen.
Attributed, An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland by a Northern Whig. (September, 1791)

People, Time, Country, Forgetting

“While our view of the world is filtered through our senses, evolution has, by and large, molded those senses to perceive the world accurately, for there’s a severe penalty to be paid for seeing things wrongly. That holds not only for the external environment, but also for the character of others. Without accurate perceptions, we couldn’t find food, avoid predators and other dangers, or form harmonious social groups. And following those perceptions is indeed the pursuit of “true beliefs”: beliefs based on evidence. Natural selection doesn’t mold true beliefs; it molds the sensory and neural apparatus that, in general, promotes the formation of true beliefs.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 182

World, Food, Penalty, Nature

“What is it but a low form of prayer when he or Les or anybody else God-damns everything? I can't believe God recognizes any form of blasphemy. It's a prissy word invented by the clergy.”

Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

God

“I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book.”

William Styron (1925–2006) American novelist and essayist

"A note to the reader" - This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982)

Books, Past

“But we are not just witnessing a relativisation of time according to social contexts or alternatively the return to time reversibility as if reality could become entirely captured in cyclical myths. The transformation is more profound: it is the mixing of tenses to create a forever universe, not self-expanding but self-maintaining, not cyclical but random, not recursive but incursive: timeless time, using technology to escape the contexts of its existence, and to appropriate selectively any value each context could offer to the ever-present. I argue that this is happening now not only because capitalism strives to free itself from all constraints, since this has been the capitalist system’s tendency all along, without being able fully to materialize it. Neither is it sufficient to refer to the cultural and social revolts against clock time, since they have characterized the history of the last century without actually reversing its domination, indeed furthering its logic by including clock time distribution of life in the social contract. Capital’s freedom from time and culture’s escape from the clock are decisively facilitated by new information technologies, and embedded in the structure of the network society.
The transformation of time as surveyed in this chapter does not concern all processes, social groupings, and territories in our societies, although it does affect the entire planet. What I call timeless time is only the emerging, dominant form of social time in the network society, as the space of flows does not negate the existence of places. It is precisely my argument that social domination is exercised through the selective inclusion and exclusion of functions and people in different temporal and spatial frames.”

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

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 433–434 as quoted in: Wayne Hope (2006) Global Capitalism and the Critique of Real Time http://www.sagepub.com/dicken6/Sociology%20Online%20readings/CH%202%20-%20HOPE.pdf. Sage publications. p. 289

Life, People, Exercises, History

“Until the People have, by some solemn and authoritative act, annulled or changed the established form, it is binding upon themselves collectively, as well as individually; and no presumption, or even knowledge of their sentiments, can warrant their Representatives in a departure from it, prior to such an act. But it is easy to see, that it would require an uncommon portion of fortitude in the Judges to do their duty as faithful guardians of the Constitution, where Legislative invasions of it had been instigated by the major voice of the community. But it is not with a view to infractions of the Constitution only, that the independence of the Judges may be an essential safeguard against the effects of occasional ill humors in the society. These sometimes extend no farther than to the injury of the private rights of particular classes of citizens, by unjust and partial laws. Here also the firmness of the Judicial magistracy is of vast importance in mitigating the severity, and confining the operation of such laws. It not only serves to moderate the immediate mischiefs of those which may have been passed, but it operates as a check upon the Legislative body in passing them; who, perceiving that obstacles to the success of iniquitous intention are to be expected from the scruples of the Courts, are in a manner compelled, by the very motives of the injustice they meditate, to qualify their attempts.”

Alexander Hamilton Federalist Papers

No. 78
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

People, Faith, Law, Communication

“Beggening their voyage with salty deep, By sweet water they returned, Big merchants trade not with Gold but with Pearls and Gemstones…such wealth, these Sailors form distant lands had brought.”

Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai book Shah Jo Risalo

-Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, Shah Jo Risalo
Shah Jo Risalo

Water, Distant, Wealth

“The body of the mother is the physical planet. The physical planet therefore symbolizes the mother. The body of the father is the sun. The sun symbolizes the father. Neither the sun nor the earth are the father and the mother, but they are forms representing them.”

Martin Cecil, 7th Marquess of Exeter (1909–1988) Marquess of Exeter

Thus It Is, 1989, p. 6
As of a Trumpet, On Eagle's Wings, Thus It Is

Sun

“For the most part similarities of various degrees will occur in one perceptual situation; and then specific perceptual units will be formed not simply because their members resemble each other, but because their mutual resemblance is greater than is that of such members and any other parts of the situation.”

Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) German-American psychologist and phenomenologist

Source: Dynamics in Psychology, 1940, p. 135

Parting

“Suicide is a form of murder—premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted (1994)

Motivation, Thinking, Suicide, Time

“The fourth model of mind, closely related to the previous one, is the structuralist model, as represented by Piaget, Chomsky, Levi-Strauss, and the structural-developmental version of the psychoanalytical theory. This model assumes the presence of innate structures or potentialities to develop such structures. These structures are not directly experienced or observed; rather, they are inferred from the organization of cognitive processes and behaviour and also from the regularity and orderliness of development. The development proceeds through The development proceeds through well defined stages. There are two versions of the structuralist development model. In the preformist version, the structures exist in potential form at birth and only actualize themselves in the maturation-development process. In the epigenetic version, the structures develop in a dialectic interaction with the environment. The final outcome us not completely determined at births but also depends on the environmental factors.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: Models of Mental Illness (1984), p. 102-103

Birth, Dependency

“Once we become conscious of a feeling and attempt to make a corresponding form, we are engaged in an activity which, far from being sincere, is prepared (as any artist if he is sincere will tell you) to moderate feelings to fit the form. The artist’s feeling for form is stronger than a formless feeling.”

Herbert Read (1893–1968) English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art

Source: Collected Poems (1966), p. 18

Feeling, Sincerity

“PROUN alters the conventional forms of the arts and leaves behind the image of the petty individualist, who locked himself in his office and hid seated before a drawing easel, starting one picture and finishing another.
The future life — this is the reinforced concrete slab for the communist foundation of the nations of the entire world. With the aid of the PROUN one can build a unified city-commune on that foundation, intended for the life of all mankind.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1915 - 1925, Theses on the 'PROUN': from painting to architecture' (1920)

Life, World, Art, Communication

“These dimensions impinge on one another. They touch. They interpenetrate. And where one dimension touches or passes through another, it forms a line of force on the landscape.”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Source: The Skin Map (2010), p. 22

“Indeed, the PLO's submission to Israel's rewriting of the conflict had begun even before Oslo: part of the price for the Madrid Conference was the repeal, in December 1991, of the 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 (XXX) characterizing Zionism as "a form of racism and racial discrimination."”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid.
On the PLO

Parting

“No one will contend that negroes, for instance, should roam at large in puris naturalibus, with the apes and tigers of Africa, and ‘worry and devour each other.’ Nor are they fitted for an Athenian democracy. What form of government short of domestic slavery will suit their wants and capacities?”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of A Free Society (1854), p. 171

Democracy

“Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe. It's a very archaic form. Same things can be said with words, writing poetry, making sounds, music. It is a unique thing.... I think that the original revolutionary impulse behind the New York School, as I felt it anyway, and as I think my colleagues felt and the way we talked all the time, was a kind of a.... you felt as if you were driven into a corner against the wall, with no place to stand, just the place you occupied as if the act of painting was not making a picture.... it was as if you had to prove to yourself that truly the act of creation was still possible.... I felt as if I was talking to myself, having a dialectical monologue with myself to see if I could create.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, p. 66

School, Music, Way, Imagination

“A person who circumambulates this House (the Ka’bah) seven times and performs the two Rak’at Salat (of Tawaaf) in the best form possible will have his sins forgiven.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Biharul Anwar, Volume 96, Page 49
Shi'ite Hadith

Time, Housing, Personality

“The United States is engaged today in a great mission to spread democracy to the Middle East, beginning with Afghanistan, and continuing with Iraq. The inhabitants of Iraq are divided into many groups and factions that hate and distrust each other. The attitude of Sunni and Shia Muslims toward each other resembles that of Catholic and Protestant Christians in the sixteenth century, which persist today in northern Ireland, each regarding the other as heretics. Under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, the minority of Sunnis persecuted the majority Shias. It is understandable that the minority Sunnis are today resisting majority rule, while the majority Shia favor it. The Sunnis clearly believe that majority rule by Shia will be used as a means of retribution and revenge. The Sunnis look upon majority rule by the Shia the way the South looked upon the election of Lincoln in 1860. It is inconceivable to the Sunnis that the rule of the Shia majority will be anything other than tyranny. Indeed, it is inconceivable to them that any political power, whether of a minority or a majority, would be non-tyrannical. The idea of non-tyrannical government is alien to their history and their experience. They regard our assertions of Jeffersonian or Lincolnian principles as mere hypocrisy, as they see no other form of rule other than that of force. Our government assumes that the people of the Middle East, like people elsewhere, seek freedom for others no less than for themselves. But that is an assumption that has not yet been confirmed by experience.”

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

2000s, The Central Idea (2006)

Hate, People, Way, Democracy

“Those who are guilty of the argumentum ad ignorantiam profess belief in something because its opposite cannot be proved … In the realm where “prejudice” is now most an issue, it normally takes a form like this: you cannot prove—by the method of statistics and quantitative measurement—that men are not equal. Therefore all men are equal. … You cannot prove—again by the methods of science—that one culture is higher than another. Therefore the culture of the Digger Indians is just a good as that of Muncie, Indiana, or thirteenth-century France.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Life without prejudice,” p. 6.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Men, Science

“Animation in itself is an art form, and that's the point I think always needs clarification. True animation exists without any background, or any color, or any sound, or anything else; it exists in your hand. And you can take it and flip it. […] What makes animation is the fact that you have a series of drawings that move. You don't even have to have a camera, you see; animation exists without it. If you want to broaden your audience, or make it more colorful or add music, then you put it under a camera one frame at a time, and then you run it at the same speed as you flip it, and then you have animation. If it depends basically upon soundtrack, or basically upon music, or color, graphic design, or anything else to sustain itself, then it is not unique to animation.”

Chuck Jones (1912–2002) American animator, cartoon artist, screenwriter, producer, and director of animated films

Joe Adamson, "Witty Birds and Well-Drawn Cats: An Interview with Chuck Jones [1971]", in Chuck Jones: conversations, ed. Chuck Jones and Maureen Furniss (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2005), 63.

Art, Music, Color, Thinking

“With what philosophical point of view did I begin my career as teacher? Looking back to that period, I see that it was a rather inchoate form of idealism, reflecting the liberal Protestant orientation I had then adopted. This idealism was gradually revised to make room for major aspects of Deweyan instrumentalism. In my years at Columbia, Dewey had impressed me as a person, and during my decade in Chicago, in close contact with colleagues whom he had deeply influenced, I came to accept what appeared to be the core of his contribution to philosophy. But continued sensitivity to insights from various quarters prevented me from becoming a disciple of any one philosopher or philosophical school.”

Edwin Arthur Burtt (1892–1989) American philosopher

Burtt (1972), cited in: D. Villemaire, (2002), E.A. Burtt, Historian and Philosopher: : A Study of the Author of The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science. p. 20

School, Teachers, Appearance, Personality

“Right after the Flood, as all of the water went down, all of the decayed plant matter would have made the water very high in minerals and decayed plant and animal life would have been high in nutrients to make anything to grow. Food would have been readily available with all of the rotting carcasses of the vegetation and the animals. The coral could have grown much faster under these conditions, then it would have slowed down to its current rate. People who have studied coral reefs say that they could have been formed in four to five thousand years with no problem. If the earth is older than that, why aren’t the the coral reefs much larger? Their rate of growth indicates a young age for the earth.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Dissertation for doctor of philosophy in christian education (May 25, 1991)

Life, People, Age, Food

“Let us consider first the view that it is always wrong to take an innocent human life. We may call this the “sanctity of life” view. People who take this view oppose abortion and euthanasia. They do not usually, however, oppose the killing of nonhuman animals—so perhaps it would be more accurate to describe this view as the “sanctity of human life” view. The belief that human life, and only human life, is sacrosanct is a form of speciesism.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 1: All Animals Are Equal

Life, People, Animals

“But, in the late twentieth century, it became more important to many leftists to save “Third World” culture, no matter how barbaric, from “neo-colonialism,” than to support equality and democracy. People on the left would defend brutal dictators (Castro, Mao, Pol Pot, Khomeini, et al.) simply because they opposed “Western imperialism.” As a result, all politics that were derived, no matter how loosely, from Marxism, lost credibility, and finally died in 1989. This was naturally a disaster for communists and socialists, but also for social democrats, for they had lost an ideological basis for their idealism. And, without idealism, politics becomes a form of accounting, a management of purely material interests.”

Ian Buruma (1951) Dutch writer and academic

Ian Buruma What’s Left After 1989? http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/buruma31

People, World, Democracy, Support

“Smiles come naturally to me, but I started thinking of them as an art form at my command. I studied all the time. I looked at magazines, I'd practice in front of the mirror and I'd ask photographers about the best angles. I can now pull out a smile at will.”

Tyra Banks (1973) American model, author and television personality

Lynn Hirschberg (June 1, 2008) "Banksable" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/magazine/01tyra-t.html?ei=5124&en=6a5e98a9634a54f6&ex=1369972800&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink&pagewanted=all, The New York Times, The New York Times Company.

Smile, Art, Nature, Thinking

“These three activities, then, intelligence, love and creative action, which are so closely involved in one another, I cannot but feel to be intrinsically good. In their outstanding expressions they are good in an outstanding degree. Together they form the distinctively human kind of behaviour.”

Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) British novelist and philosopher

Other texts

Love, Feeling, Intelligence

“There was also a real Dayton out there, a charming small Ohio city, famous as the birthplace of the Wright Brothers. Its citizens energized us from the outset. Unlike the population of, say, Noew York, Geneva or Washington, which would scarcely notice another conference, Daytonians were proud to be part of history. Large signs at the commercial airport hailed Dayton as the "temporary center of international peace". The local newspapers and television stations covered the story from every angle, drawing the people deeper into the proceedings. When we ventured into a restaurant or a shopping center downtown, people crowded around, aying that they were praying for us. Warren Christopher was given at least one standing ovation in a restaurant. Families on the air base placed "candles of peace" in their front windows, and people gathered in peace vigils outside the base. One day they formed a "peace chain", although it was not large enough to surround the sprawling eight-thousand-acre base. Ohio's famous ethnic diversity was only on display. We did everything possible to emphasize the fact that in the American heartland people from every part of southeastern Europe lived together in peace, their competition restricted to softball games, church rivalries, and the occasional barroom fight. (…)”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 234

People, Family, Peace, History

“The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms — hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

New York Times Magazine (7 December 1958).
Letters and interviews

Tear, Laughter

“You are not necessarily depriving him of his liberty, for territory is a form of natural cage and the word "liberty" does not have the same connotation for an animal as it does for a chest-beating liberal homo sapiens, who can afford the luxury of abstract ideas. What you are, in fact, doing is much more important, you are taking away his territory, so you must take great care to provide him with an adequate substitute, or you will get a bored, sick or dead animal on your hands.
The thing that turns a cage into a territory may be something quite slight, but it need not be size. It might be the shape of the cage, the number of branches or the lack of them, the absence or presence of a pond, a patch of sand, a chunk of log, which could make all the difference. Such a detail, trivial to the uninformed visitor, can help the animal consider this area his territory, rather than simply a place where he ekes out his existence. As I say it is not necessarily size which is of prime importance. This is where people who criticise zoos go wrong, for they generally have little idea what circumscribed lives most animals lead.”

Gerald Durrell (1925–1995) naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter

The Stationary Ark (1976)

People, Idea, Nature, Help

“The most fundamental form of integrative power is the power of love.”

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

Source: 1980s, Three Faces of Power, 1989, p. 110

Love

“Overcoming magic often takes the form of theology. From animals and ancestors the path leads to all kinds of spirits. The hypothesis (which already appeared in the magical age) of the little man alongside man, the “soul', and of the special being, 'God', more and more often seeks a parallel process 'behind' processes. Whereas in the magical age, empirically given facts were linked with each other on the basis of primitive theories without the introduction of uncontrollable elements, now their introduction becomes essential.”

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) austrian economist, philosopher and sociologist

Source: 1930s, "Empirical Sociology" (1931), p. 322

God, Age, Soul, Appearance

“Every candid eye, I think, will read the Koran far otherwise than so. It is the confused ferment of a great rude human soul; rude, untutored, that cannot even read; but fervent, earnest, struggling vehemently to utter itself in words. With a kind of breathless intensity he strives to utter himself; the thoughts crowd on him pell-mell: for very multitude of things to say, he can get nothing said. The meaning that is in him shapes itself into no form of composition, is stated in no sequence, method, or coherence;—they are not shaped at all, these thoughts of his; flung out unshaped, as they struggle and tumble there, in their chaotic inarticulate state.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Soul, Thinking, Reading

“It will be seen that I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, and for mere convenience sake.”

Charles Darwin book On the Origin of Species (1859)

Source: On the Origin of Species (1859), chapter II: "Variation Under Nature", page 52 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=67&itemID=F373&viewtype=image

“Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted.”

Ernesto Che Guevara book Guerrilla Warfare

Source: Guerrilla Warfare (1961), Ch. I: 1. Essence of Guerrilla Warfare

Peace, Appearance

“All concur that free society is a failure. We slaveholders say you must recur to domestic slavery, the oldest, the best and most common form of Socialism. The new schools of Socialism promise something better, but admit, to obtain that something, they must first destroy and eradicate man’s human nature.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of A Free Society (1854), p. 72

School, Failure, Nature

“States have a habit of forming when the rules say “line starts here for free stuff.” Whoever manages the line becomes the “state” after a while.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

Twitter post https://twitter.com/JonahNRO/status/1049835451903815680 (9 October 2018) <br class="br">2010s, 2018

“Primary causes are unknown to us; but are subject to simple and constant laws, which may be discovered by observation, the study of them being the object of natural philosophy.
Heat, like gravity, penetrates every substance of the universe, its rays occupy all parts of space. The object of our work is to set forth the mathematical laws which this element obeys. The theory of heat will hereafter form one of the most important branches of general physics.”

Joseph Fourier book The Analytical Theory of Heat

Source: The Analytical Theory of Heat (1878), Ch. 1, p. 1

Law, Mathematics, Nature, Study

“Contempt for the enemy, if illustrated, can prove to be an unwise form of falsehood. There was a time when German soldiers were popularly represented cringing, with their arms in the air and crying "Kamerad," until it occurred to Press and propaganda authorities that people were asking why, if this was the sort of material we were fighting against, had we not wiped them off the field in a few weeks.”

Arthur Ponsonby (1871–1946) British Liberal and later Labour politician and pacifist

Falsehood in Wartime (1928), Introduction

People, Time, Fight, Cry

“There are many who have lost faith in this early American ideal and believe in a form of socialistic, totalitarian rule, a sort of big brother deity to run our lives for us. They no longer believe that free men can successfully manage their own affairs. Their thesis is that a handful of men, centered in government, largely bureaucratic not elected, can utilize the proceeds of our toil and labor to greater advantage than those who create it. Nowhere in the history of the human race is there justification for this reckless faith in political power. It is the oldest, most reactionary of all forms of social organization. It was tried out in ancient Babylon, ancient Greece and ancient Rome; in Mussolini's Italy, in Hitler's Germany, and in all communist countries. Wherever and whenever it has been attempted, it has failed utterly to provide economic security, and has generally ended in national disaster. It embraces an essential idiocy, that individuals who, as private citizens, are not to manage the disposition of their own earnings, become in public office supermen who can manage the affairs of the world.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

Source: Reminiscences (1964), p. 418

Men, World, Faith, History

“By this sinister elision, this slipping from true remorse, the belief that the suffering we have precipitated ought to ennoble us, or at least make us less ignoble from then on, to disguised self-forgiveness, the belief that suffering in some way ennobles life, so that the precipitation of pain comes, by such a cockneyed algebra, to equal the ennoblement, or at any rate the enrichment, of life, by this characteristically twentieth-century retreat from content into form, from meaning into appearance, from ethics into aesthetics, from aqua into unda, I dulled the pain of that accusing death; and hardened myself, to say nothing of it at Bourani. I was still determined to tell Julie, but at the right time and place, when the exchange rate between confession and the sympathy it evoked looked very likely to be high.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Source: The Magus (1965), Ch. 52

Life, Death, Pain, Way

“[T]he human reason discovers new relations between things not by deduction, but by that unpredictable blend of speculation and insight… induction, which—like other forms of imagination—cannot be formalized.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

Imagination

“The material called iron or steel I hold in high respect. What it can do in arriving at a form economically, no other material can do... What associations it possesses are those of this century: power, structure, movement, progress, suspension, destruction, brutality.”

David Smith (1906–1965) American visual artist (1906-1965)

quote, early 1950's
Source: 1950s, from 'Abstract Expressionism' (1990), p. 41

Quotes

“The era that humanity has entered is an era of industrial development and therefore the organisation of artistic elements must be applied to the design of the material elements of everyday life, i. e. to industry or to so-called production. The new industrial production, in which artistic creativity must participate, will differ radically from the traditional aesthetic approach to the object, in that primarily attention will be focused not on the artistic decoration of the object (applied art), but on the artistic organisation of the object in accordance with the principles of creating the most utilitarian object.... If any of the different types of fine art (i. e., easel painting, drawing, engraving, sculpture, etc.) can still retain some purpose, they will do so only * 1. while they remain as the laboratory phase in our search for essential new forms * 2. insofar as they serve as supportive projects and schemes for constructions and utilitarian and industrially manufactured objects that have yet to be realised”

Lyubov Popova (1889–1924) Russian artist

Liubov Popova, untitled manuscript, signed and dated December 1921, Manuscript Department, State Tretjakov Gallery, Moscow, (fond 148, op.17, l. 3–4); transl. John Bowlt; the same text is reproduced in Women Artists of the Russian Avant-Garde 1910–1930, Cologne 1979, p. 68

Life, Art, Search, Support

“I would rather quit public life at seventy, and quit it forever, than to retain public life at a sacrifice to my own self-respect. I will not vote for any law which will make fair for me and foul for another. The blacklist is the most cruel form of oppression ever devised by man for the infliction of suffering upon his weaker fellows.”

Joseph Gurney Cannon (1836–1926) American politician

Speech opposing the Pearre Injunction Bill (1906); reported in L. White Busby, Uncle Joe Cannon (1927), p. 278. Cannon noted that Samuel Gompers blacklisted him for opposing the legislation. Cannon expanded this passage in a speech in Lewiston, Maine (September 5, 1906), while successfully campaigning for Representative Charles Littlefield, to counter efforts of Gompers and his labor forces to defeat Littlefield, referring to "any law which will make fish of one and fowl of another," reported in Joseph G. Cannon papers, box 1, Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield, Illinois.

Life, Law, Suffering

“Evidence has… been adduced that schizophrenia is widespread in other kinds of human societies. …and they form a substantial fraction of the clientele of the tribal shamans and healers.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.3 Development

“Nature, exerting an unwearied power,
Forms, opens, and gives scent to every flower;
Spreads the fresh verdure of the field, and leads
The dancing Naiads through the dewy meads.”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

Source: Table Talk (1782), Line 690.

Flowers, Nature, Dance

“Once a person acknowledges that they possess some form of privilege, they are more likely to accept the reality that they are not in any way objective about the form of marginalization in question”

Julia Serano (1967) transsexual American writer, spoken-word performer, trans-bi activist, and biologist

Leftist Critiques of Identity Politics (2018)

Way, Question, Reality, Personality

“Infinity, in its first form (the improper-infinite) presents itself as a variable finite [veranderliches Endliches]; in the other form (which I call the proper infinite [Eigentlich-unendliche]) it appears as a thoroughly determinate [bestimmtes] infinite.”

Georg Cantor (1845–1918) mathematician, inventor of set theory

From Kant to Hilbert (1996)

Appearance

“Harmony…. it is all embracing and should reign throughout—harmony in purpose, harmony in dimensions, harmony in form and harmony in color. In good design discord can have no place…. all may unite to form a complete, harmonious, and well-rounded composition…”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

Color

“But would she do it differently if she could? She doubted it. Her experiences growing up ad formed her into the woman that she'd become, just as his experiences had formed him, and she didn't regret them. And yet…she knew that wasn't the question that mattered. …she realized the choice before her was this: Where do I go from here?
It is never too late to change things.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Gabby Holland, Chapter 13, p. 168
2000s, The Choice (2007)

Question, Change

“I had been trying to find a publisher who would put some of my stuff into book form, but I met with no encouragement. Every well-known publisher in the United States turned down Tarzan of the Apes, including A. C. McClurg & Co., who finally issued it, my first story in book form.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) American writer

How I Wrote the Tarzan Books (1929)

Books

“For tektology the unity of experience is not "discovered", but actively created by organizational means: "philosophers wanted to explain the world, but the main point is it change it" said the greater precursor of organizational science, Karl Marx. The explanation of organizational forms and methods by tektology is directed not to a contemplation of their unity, but to a practical mastery over them.”

Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) Physician, philosopher, writer

Source: Tektology. The Universal Organizational Science, 1922, p. 61; as cited in: Tektology http://systemspedia.org/entry.aspx?entry=3505 in: systemspedia.org, 2012.

World, Science, Change

“Either the conscious intellect is impotent, or is not sufficiently strong, or is not the factor positively connected with altruistic phenomenon generally or their sublime form particularly.”

Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968) American sociologist

Pitirim Sorokin (1948) The Reconstruction of Humanity http://books.google.nl/books?id=NNq2AAAAIAAJ. Beacon Press p. 330

Strong

“Racism does not limit itself to biology or economics or psychology or metaphysics; it attacks along many fronts and in many forms, deploying whatever is at hand, and even what is not, inventing when the need arises.”

Albert Memmi (1920) French writer

Racism (1982)

“Organizations and institutions permit stable expectations to be formed by each member of the group as to the behavior of the other members under specified conditions.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 100.

Behavior

“Marcel Duchamp's 'Nude descending the stairs' is the result of the desire for motion. Here he has also eliminated representative form. This avoids the connotation of ideas which would interfere with the success of the main issue - the sense of movement.”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

1930s - 1950s, Statement from Modern Painting and Sculpture', (1933)
Source: en.wikiquote.org - Alexander Calder / Quotes of Alexander Calder / 1930s - 1950s / Statement from Modern Painting and Sculpture', (1933)

Idea, Sense, Success

“Entities other than Brahman can be objects of such cognitions of the nature of joy only to a finite extent and for limited duration. But Brahman is such that cognizing of him is an infinite and abiding joy. It is for this reason that the shruti [scripture] says, `Brahman is bliss’ (Taittitriya Upanishad II.6.) Since the form of cognition as joy is determined by its object, Brahman itself is joy.”

Ramanuja (1017–1137) Hindu philosopher, exegete of Vishishtadvaita Vedanta school

Ramanuja. Vedarthasangraha §241, as quoted by Shyam Ranganathan " Rāmānuja (c. 1017 – c. 1137 CE) http://www.iep.utm.edu/ramanuja/," at Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Accessed May 20. 2014.

Nature, Joy

“Lots of things take time, and time was Momo's only form of wealth.”

Michael Ende book Momo

Momo (1973)

Time, Wealth

“The phase transition paradigm: The standard model of fundamental physics incorporates, as one of its foundational principles, the idea that “empty space” or “vacuum” can exist in different phases, typically associated with different amounts of symmetry. Moreover, the laws of the standard model itself suggest that phase transitions will occur, as functions of temperature. Extensions of the standard model to build in higher symmetry (gauge unification or especially supersymmetry) can support effective vacua with radically different properties, separated by great distance or by domain walls. That would be a form of failure of universality, in our sense, whose existence is suggested by the standard model.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

"Multiversality" (2013)

Law, Idea, Failure, Support

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

Armen Alchian (1914–2013) American economist

"Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory", 1950

Art, Behavior, Optimism, Knowledge

“To the question "What is God?" he now replies, "the most elevated conception of character that can be formed in the mind. It is the individual's own soul carried out to perfection."”

Robert D. Richardson (1934) American historian

Source: Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), p. 97

God, Soul, Question, Perfection

“The inner climate stamps each individual with its character. Every life-form has its own individual anomaly point of health, which makes the orderly reproduction of the species possible. This also explains why the world of parasites increases with fever.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Implosion Magazine, No. 71, p. 12 (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

Life, Health, World

“There is an inside and an outside to every form. When they are in special accord, as for instance a nut in its shell or a child in the womb, or in the structure of shells or crystals, or when one senses the architecture of bones in the human figure, then I am most drawn to the effect of light. Every shadow cast by the sun from an ever-varying angle reveals the harmony of the inside to outside. Light gives full play to our tactile perceptions through the experience of our eyes, and the vitality of forms is revealed by the interplay between space and volume”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Extract from Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, (from Chapter 1: The excitement of discovering the nature of carving, 1903-1930), with an introduction by Herbert Read, London, 1952
1947 - 1960

Sense, Light, Sun

“Ru-h-ru-h-ru-h-h-h-h. Pooh-ooh-ooh. Tick-tick-tick-tick. Pre. R-r-r-r-r-uh-h. Huh! Bang. Su-su-su-ur. Booh-a-ah. R-r-r-r. Pooh…multitude of sounds, all mixed together. Motorcars, buses, carts, carriages, people, lamp-posts, trees.. all mixed together; in front of cafés, shops, offices, posters, shop windows: multitude of things. Motion and standstills: different movement. Movement in space and movement in time. Multitude of images and all sorts of ideas. Images are veiled truths. All different truths form what is true. What is individual does not display all in a single image.... Ru-ru-ru-u-u. Pre. Images are boundaries. Multitude of images and all sorts of boundaries. Elimination of images and boundaries through all sorts of images. Boundary clouds what is true. Rebus: where is what is true? Boundaries are just as relative as images, as time and space.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Mondrian's poem has strong connections with 'dynamism' of Futurism
Quote from his article 'The Grand Boulevards', Piet Mondriaan, in Dutch magazine 'De Groene Amsterdammer', 27 March 1920 pp. 4-5
1920's

People, Truth, Idea, Tree

“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”

Eudora Welty book One Writer's Beginnings

One Writer's Beginnings(1984)

Children, Hope, Waiting

“Rousseauist and Baconian, though often superficially at odds with one another, have co-operated in undermining, not merely religious tradition, but another tradition which in the Occident goes back finally, not to Judea, but to ancient Greece. This older tradition may be defined as humanistic. The goal of the humanist is poised and proportionate living. This he hopes to accomplish by observing the law of measure. … Decorum is supreme for the humanist even as humility takes precedence over all other virtues in the eyes of the Christian. Traditionally the idea of decorum has been associated, often with a considerable admixture of mere formalism, with the idea of the gentleman. Humanism and religion in their various forms have at times conflicted, but have more often been in alliance with one another. As Burke says in a well-known passage: "Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things that are connected with manners and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion."”

Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) American academic and literary criticism

Source: "What I Believe" (1930), pp. 6-7

Age, World, Religion, Law

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

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

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

Men, Past, Parting

“Now that the dogs of war are calling for the head of Senator Al Franken I believe it is time to speak up on behalf of all heterosexual males. As a candidate for Governor let me save my opponents some research time. In my last fifty years I was sexually intimate with approximately 50 very attractive females. It ranged form a gorgeous personal secretary to Senator Bob Taft (Senior) who was my first true love and we made passionate love in the hayloft of her parents barn in Gallipolis and ended with a drop dead gorgeous red head who was senior advisor to Peter Lewis at Progressive Insurance in Cleveland.
Now can we get back to discussing legalizing marijuana and opening the state hospital network to combat the opioid crisis. I am sooooo disappointed by this national feeding frenzy about sexual indiscretions decades ago.
Peace.”

Bill O'Neill (1947) Ohio judge

Facebook post, 11-17-2017 AM

Love, War, Peace, Dogs

“Him, who was with the charm of the Tripuṇḍra and whose favourite deity was Rāma; him, who was bearing the axle of the lustre of the ornament [in the form of the nascent moon] and who was agreeable by this joy; him, who was the protector of the bearer of the onus of Dharma with the power of his eminence; and him, who was endowed with the refuge of Rāma owing to the pleasantness of the resplendence of the bull-sign which stands for righteousness. ॥ 3.26 ॥”

Rāmabhadrācārya (1950) Hindu religious leader

lalāmamādhuryasudhābhirāmakaṃ lalāmamādhuryasudhābhirāmakam ।
lalāmamādhuryasudhābhirāmakaṃ lalāmamādhuryasudhābhirāmakam ॥
Śrībhārgavarāghavīyam

Joy

“To summarize the matter, teaching systems ought to be conversational in form and so devised that strategies are matched to individual competence.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Pask (1975) The cybernetics of Human Learning and Performance. p. 222 as cited in: Andrew Ravenscroft (2003) "From conditioning to learning communities: implications of fifty years research in E-learning design".

“The demolition derby is, pure and simple, a form of gladiatorial combat for our times.”

Tom Wolfe book The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

"Clean Fun at Riverhead"
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965)

Time

Quotes about form page 54

Quotes about form
page 54