Quotes about grasp

page 7

"Flight", pp. 141
Native Son (1940)

pg. xvii
Native Son (1940)

"A Note To The Reader".
The Way of Chuang-Tzŭ (1965)
Context: I simply like Chuang Tzu because he is what he is and I feel no need to justify this liking to myself or to anyone else. He is far too great to need any apologies from me. … His philosophical temper is, I believe, profoundly original and sane. It can of course be misunderstood. But it is basically simple and direct. It seeks, as does all the greatest philosoph­ical thought, to go immediately to the heart of things.
Chuang Tzu is not concerned with words and formulas about reality, but with the direct existential grasp of reality in itself. Such a grasp is necessarily obscure and does not lend itself to abstract analysis. It can be presented in a parable, a fable, or a funny story about a conversation between two philosophers.

"Energy and Equity" (1974).
Context: The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that reside in man's feet. The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost confidence in his power to admit others into his presence and to share space consciously with them. He can no longer face the remote by himself. Left on his own, he feels immobile.
The habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world where both liaisons and loneliness are products of conveyance. To "gather" for him means to be brought together by vehicles. He comes to believe that political power grows out of the capacity of a transportation system, and in its absence is the result of access to the television screen. He takes freedom of movement to be the same as one's claim on propulsion. He believes that the level of democratic process correlates to the power of transportation and communications systems. He has lost faith in the political power of the feet and of the tongue. As a result, what he wants is not more liberty as a citizen but better service as a client. He does not insist on his freedom to move and to speak to people but on his claim to be shipped and to be informed by media. He wants a better product rather than freedom from servitude to it. It is vital that he come to see that the acceleration he demands is self-defeating, and that it must result in a further decline of equity, leisure, and autonomy.

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5<!-- The sense of the ineffable, p. 88 -->
Context: Our concern with environment cannot be reduced to what can be used, to what can be grasped. Environment includes not only the inkstand and the blotting paper, but also the impenetrable stillness in the air, the stars, the clouds, the quiet passing of time, the wonder of my own being. I am an end as well as a means, and so is the world: an end as well as a means. My view of the world and my understanding of the self determine each other. The complete manipulation of the world results in the complete instrumentalization of the self.

Ch 10 : Across South Georgia; in this extract, Shackleton was paraphrasing the poem "The Call of the Wild" by Robert Service, published in 1907.
South (1920)
Context: At the bottom of the fall we were able to stand again on dry land. The rope could not be recovered. We had flung down the adze from the top of the fall and also the logbook and the cooker wrapped in one of our blouses. That was all, except our wet clothes, that we brought out of the Antarctic, which we had entered a year and a half before with well-found ship, full equipment, and high hopes. That was all of tangible things; but in memories we were rich. We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had "suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole. We had seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders." We had reached the naked soul of man.

Holidays in Hell (1989)

Nobel lecture (2005)
Context: Imagine what would happen if the nations of the world spent as much on development as on building the machines of war. Imagine a world where every human being would live in freedom and dignity. Imagine a world in which we would shed the same tears when a child dies in Darfur or Vancouver. Imagine a world where we would settle our differences through diplomacy and dialogue and not through bombs or bullets. Imagine if the only nuclear weapons remaining were the relics in our museums. Imagine the legacy we could leave to our children.
Imagine that such a world is within our grasp.

"Letter From Washington," http://www.panarchy.org/hess/libertarianism.html The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 http://web.archive.org/web/20071201123614/http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.pdf (15 June 1969), p. 2

Flowering Judas, Introduction to Modern Library edition (1940)
Context: For myself, and I was not alone, all the conscious and recollected years of my life have been lived to this day under the heavy threat of world catastrophe, and most of the energies of my mind and spirit have been spent in the effort to grasp the meaning of those threats, to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world.
In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.

As We May Think (1945)
Context: If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability. The abacus, with its beads strung on parallel wires, led the Arabs to positional numeration and the concept of zero many centuries before the rest of the world; and it was a useful tool — so useful that it still exists.

Book 1, Ch. 4 (as translated by LJ Walker and B Crick)
Discourses on Livy (1517)
Context: The demands of a free populace, too, are very seldom harmful to liberty, for they are due either to the populace being oppressed or to the suspicious that it is going to be oppressed... and, should these impressions be false, a remedy is provided in the public platform on which some man of standing can get up, appeal to the crowd, and show that it is mistaken. And though, as Tully remarks, the populace may be ignorant, it is capable of grasping the truth and readily yields when a man, worthy of confidence, lays the truth before it.

Criterion Collection essay on Rashamon, excerpted from Something Like an Autobiography as translated by Audie E. Bock (1982) http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/196-akira-kurosawa-on-rashomon
Context: Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings — the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave — even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.

Preface
The History and Present State of Electricity (1767)
Context: The history of philosophy enjoys, in some measure, the advantages both of civil and natural history, whereby it is relieved from what is most tedious and disgusting in both. Philosophy exhibits the powers of nature, discovered and directed by human art. It has, therefore, in some measure, the boundless variety with the amazing uniformity of the one, and likewise every thing that is pleasing and interesting in the other. And the idea of continual rise and improvement is conspicuous in the whole study, whether we be attentive to the part which nature, or that which men are acting in the great scene.
It is here that we see the human understanding to its greatest advantage, grasping at the noblest objects, and increasing its own powers, by acquiring to itself the powers of nature, and directing them to the accomplishment of its own views; whereby the security, and happiness of mankind are daily improved. Human abilities are chiefly conspicuous in adapting means to ends, and in deducing one thing from another by the method of analogy; and where may we find instances of greater sagacity, than in philosophers diversifying the situations of things, in order to give them an opportunity of showing their mutual relations, affections, and influences; deducing one truth and one discovery from another, and applying them all to the useful purposes of human life.
If the exertion of human abilities, which cannot but form a delightful spectacle for the human imagination, give us pleasure, we enjoy it here in a higher degree than while we are contemplating the schemes of warriors, and the stratagems of their bloody art.

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 1"<!-- p. 59 -->
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means toward it.

The Marshall Plan Speech (1947)
Context: An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America of the character of the problem and the remedies to be applied. Political passion and prejudice should have no part. With foresight, and a willingness on the part of our people to face up to the vast responsibility which history has clearly placed upon our country, the difficulties I have outlined can and will be overcome.... to my mind, it is of vast importance that our people reach some general understanding of what the complications really are, rather than react from a passion or a prejudice or an emotion of the moment. As I said more formally a moment ago, we are remote from the scene of these troubles. It is virtually impossible at this distance merely by reading, or listening, or even seeing photographs or motion pictures, to grasp at all the real significance of the situation. And yet the whole world of the future hangs on a proper judgment.

1900s, The Moral Equivalent of War (1906)
Context: The war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form. Men are now proud of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off subjection. But who can be sure that other aspects of one's country may not, with time and education and suggestion enough, come to be regarded with similarly effective feelings of pride and shame? Why should men not some day feel that is it worth a blood-tax to belong to a collectivity superior in any respect? Why should they not blush with indignant shame if the community that owns them is vile in any way whatsoever? Individuals, daily more numerous, now feel this civic passion. It is only a question of blowing on the spark until the whole population gets incandescent, and on the ruins of the old morals of military honor, a stable system of morals of civic honor builds itself up. What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. The war-function has grasped us so far; but the constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden.

Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Context: Is dogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact for claiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable? And if not, what command over truth would this kind of theology really lose if, instead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable probability for her conclusions? If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err.

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus
Context: You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.

Sermons, Sermon 3
Context: Children, to be truly in this stage is the deepest ground of genuine humility and annihilation. This, in truth, cannot be grasped by the senses. For here he receives the most If we had here with us a human being in his primal nobility, pure as Adam in paradise... his simple nature unadorned — that person would be so luminous and pure, so ravishing and richly favoured by God that no one would be able to comprehend his purity nor with his reason conceive of it profound insight possible into his nothingness. Here he sinks as deep as it is possible into the ground of humility; the deeper, the higher, because here high and deep are one and the same... In this state one achieves true unity of prayer spoken of in the epistle that truly brings it about that a person becomes one with God

Eat, Pray, Love (2006)
Context: I walk up the stairs to my fourth-floor apartment, all alone. I let myself into my tiny little studio, all alone. I shut the door behind me. Another early bedtime in Rome. Another long night's sleep ahead of me, with nobody and nothing in my bed except a pile of Italian phrase books and dictionaries.
I am alone, I am all alone, I am completely alone.
Grasping this reality, I let go of my bag, drop to my knees, and press my forehead against the floor. There I offer up to the universe a fervent prayer of thanks.
First in English.
Then in Italian.
And then — just to get the point across — in Sanskrit. 
And since I am already down there in supplication on the floor, let me hold that position as I reach back in time three years earlier to the moment where this entire story began — a moment that also found me in this exact same posture: on my knees, on a floor, praying.

"Look It Up! Check It Out!" (1986), p. 39
The Culture We Deserve (1989)
Context: We seem to live mainly in order to see how we live, and this habit brings on what might be called the externalizing of knowledge; with every new manual there is less need for its internal, visceral presence. The owner or user feels confident that he possesses its contents — there they are, in handy form on the handy shelf. And with their imminent transfer to a computer, that sense of possession will presumably attach itself to the hard disk or the phone number of the data bank.
To say this is also to say that the age of ready reference is one in which knowledge inevitably declines into information. The master of so much packaged stuff has less need to grasp context or meaning than his forbears: he can always look it up. His active memory is otherwise engaged anyway, full of the arbitrary names, initials, and code figures essential to carrying on daily life. He can be vague about the rest: he can always check it out.

Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1898)
Context: A formidable range of phenomena must be scientifically sifted before we effectually grasp a faculty so strange, so bewildering, and for ages so inscrutable as the direct action of mind on mind. This delicate task needs a rigorous employment of the method of exclusion — a constant setting aside of irrelevant phenomena that could be explained by known causes, including those far too familiar causes, conscious and unconscious fraud. The inquiry unites the difficulties inherent in all experimentation connected with mind, with tangled human temperaments, and with observations dependent less on automatic record than on personal testimony. But difficulties are things to be overcome even in the elusory branch of research known as experimental psychology.

74
Essays in Idleness (1967 Columbia University Press, Trns: Donald Keene)

Source: Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966), p. 112
Context: It is the fallacy of all intellectuals to believe that intellect can grasp life. It cannot, because it works in terms of symbols and language. There is another factor involved: consciousness. If the flame of consciousness is low, a symbol has no power to evoke reality, and intellect is helpless.

from On the Method of Theoretical Physics, p. 183. The Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford (10 June 1933). Quoted in Einstein's Philosophy of Science http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/
1930s
Context: Our experience hitherto justifies us in trusting that nature is the realization of the simplest that is mathematically conceivable. I am convinced that purely mathematical construction enables us to find those concepts and those lawlike connections between them that provide the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Useful mathematical concepts may well be suggested by experience, but in no way can they be derived from it. Experience naturally remains the sole criterion of the usefulness of a mathematical construction for physics. But the actual creative principle lies in mathematics. Thus, in a certain sense, I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed.

The Lesson for Today (1942)
Context: They've tried to grasp with too much social fact
Too large a situation. You and I
Would be afraid if we should comprehend
And get outside of too much bad statistics,
Our muscles never could again contract:
We never could recover human shape,
But must live lives out mentally agape
Or die of philosophical distention.
That's how we feel — and we're no special mystics.

2010s, 2016, Donald Trump and the fitness threshold (2016)
Context: Donald Trump, the man who defied every political rule and prevailed to win his party’s nomination, last week took on perhaps the most sacred political rule of all: Never attack a Gold Star family. Not just because it alienates a vital constituency but because it reveals a shocking absence of elementary decency and of natural empathy for the most profound of human sorrows — parental grief.
Why did Trump do it? It wasn’t a mistake. It was a revelation. It’s that he can’t help himself. His governing rule in life is to strike back when attacked, disrespected or even slighted. To understand Trump, you have to grasp the General Theory: He judges every action, every pronouncement, every person by a single criterion — whether or not it/he is “nice” to Trump.

Winter, § 24, p. 287; in Conducting Effective Faculty Meetings (2008) by Sue Ellen Brandenburg, p. 12 this appears paraphrased in the form: "Time is money says the proverb, but turn it around and you get a precious truth. Money is time."
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903)
Context: Time is money — says the vulgarest saw known to any age or people. Turn it round about, and you get a precious truth —money is time. I think of it on these dark, mist-blinded mornings, as I come down to find a glorious fire crackling and leaping in my study. Suppose I were so poor that I could not afford that heartsome blaze, how different the whole day would be! Have I not lost many and many a day of my life for lack of the material comfort which was necessary to put my mind in tune? Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman. Money is time, and, heaven be thanked, there needs so little of it for this sort of purchase. He who has overmuch is wont to be as badly off in regard to the true use of money, as he who has not enough. What are we doing all our lives but purchasing, or trying to purchase, time? And most of us, having grasped it with one hand, throw it away with the other.

Lecture XX, "Conclusions"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Context: Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct may be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct as being the more constant elements. It is between these two elements that the short circuit exists on which she carries on her principal business, while the ideas and symbols and other institutions form loop-lines which may be perfections and improvements, and may even some day all be united into one harmonious system, but which are not to be regarded as organs with an indispensable function, necessary at all times for religious life to go on. This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to draw from the phenomena we have passed in review.

Source: A Letter to a Hindu (1908), V
Context: A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he will fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean that thirty thousand men, not athletes but rather weak and ordinary people, have subdued two hundred million vigorous, clever, capable, and freedom-loving people? Do not the figures make it clear that it is not the English who have enslaved the Indians, but the Indians who have enslaved themselves?

Source: The Time Axis (1949), Ch. 3 : The Vision Of Time
Context: I closed my eyes again, thinking of the Face. I had to force my mind to turn around in its tracks and look, for it didn't want to confront that infinite complexity again. The Face was painful to see. It was too intricate, too involved with emotions complex beyond our grasp. It was painful for the mind to think of it, straining to understand the inscrutable things that experience had etched upon those mountain-high features.
"Is it a portrait?" I asked suddenly. "Or a composite? What is the Face?"
"A city," De Kalb said. "A nation. The ultimate in human destiny — and a call for help. And much more that we'll never understand."

"Legislators of the world" in The Guardian (18 November 2006)
Context: Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, glib or visionary, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness. What's pushing the grammar and syntax, the sounds, the images — is it the constriction of literalism, fundamentalism, professionalism — a stunted language? Or is it the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference? Poetry has the capacity to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom — that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the "free" market. This on-going future, written-off over and over, is still within view. All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented.
There is always that in poetry which will not be grasped, which cannot be described, which survives our ardent attention, our critical theories, our late-night arguments. There is always (I am quoting the poet/translator Américo Ferrari|) "an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides".

The Dog and the Shadow.

Part I, 4
The Kingfishers (1950)
Context: We can be precise. The factors are
in the animal and / or the machine the factors are
communication and / or control, both involve
the message. And what is the message? The message is
a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time is the birth of the air, is
the birth of water, is
a state between
the origin and
the end, between
birth and the beginning of
another fetid nest is change, presents
no more than itself And the too strong grasping of it,
when it is pressed together and condensed,
loses it This very thing you are

American Diplomacy (1951), World War I
Context: A democracy is peace-loving. It does not like to go to war. It is slow to rise to provocation. When it has once been provoked to the point where it must grasp the sword, it does not easily forgive its adversary for having produced this situation. The fact of the provocation then becomes itself the issue. Democracy fights in anger — it fights for the very reason that it was forced to go to war. It fights to punish the power that was rash enough and hostile enough to provoke it — to teach that power a lesson it will not forget, to prevent the thing from happening again. Such a war must be carried to the bitter end.
This is true enough, and, if nations could afford to operate in the moral climate of individual ethics, it would be understandable and acceptable. But I sometimes wonder whether in this respect a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin: he lies there in his comfortable primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment; he is slow to wrath — in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but, once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat. You wonder whether it would not have been wiser for him to have taken a little more interest in what was going on at an earlier date and to have seen whether he could have prevented some of these situations from arising instead of proceeding from an undiscriminating indifference to a holy wrath equally undiscriminating.

As quoted in Cosmopolitan (December 1892).
Context: A so-called magician, more than a poet, must be born with a peculiar aptitude for the calling. He must first of all possess a mind of contrarieties, quick to grasp the possibilities of seemingly producing the most opposite effects from the most natural causes. He must be original and quick-witted, never to be taken unawares. He must possess, in no small degree, a knowledge of the exact sciences, and he must spend a lifetime in practice, for in the profession its emoluments come very slowly. All this is discouraging enough, but this is not all. The magician must expect the exposure of his tricks sooner or later, and see what it has required long months of study and time to perfect dissolved in an hour. The very best illusions of the best magicians of a few years ago are now the common property of traveling showmen at country fairs. I might instance the mirror illusions of Houdin; the cabinet trick of the Davenport Brothers, and the second sight of Heller — all the baffling puzzles of the days in which the respective magicians mentioned lived. All this is not a pleasant prospective picture for the aspirant for the honors of the magician.

"Flight", pp.125, Harper Row 1966
Native Son (1940)

As quoted in Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems (2001) by Bernard Lewis, p. 119
Context: I shall grasp the soul's skirt with my hand
and stamp on the world's head with my foot.
I shall trample Matter and Space with my horse,
beyond all Being I shall utter a great shout,
and in that moment when I shall be alone with Him,
I shall whisper secrets to all mankind.
Since I have neither sign nor name
I shall speak only of things unnamed and without sign.

22 February 1908
India's Rebirth
Context: Whatever plans we may make, we shall find quite useless when the time for action comes. Revolutions are always full of surprises, and whoever thinks he can play chess with a revolution will soon find how terrible is the grasp of God and how insignificant the human reason before the whirlwind of His breath. That man only is likely to dominate the chances of a Revolution, who makes no plans but preserves his heart pure for the will of God to declare itself. The great rule of life is to have no schemes but one unalterable purpose. If the will is fixed on the purpose it sets itself to accomplish, then circumstances will suggest the right course; but the schemer finds himself always tripped up by the unexpected.

As We May Think (1945)
Context: Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month's efforts could be produced on call. Mendel's concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.

Last Talks at Saanen, 1985 (1987), p. 158
1980s
Context: The questioner says, how can the conditioned brain grasp the unlimited, which is beauty, love, and truth? What is the ground of compassion and intelligence, and can it come upon us — each one of us? Are you inviting compassion? Are you inviting intelligence? Are you inviting beauty, love, and truth? Are you trying to grasp it? I am asking you. Are you trying to grasp the quality of intelligence, compassion, the immense sense of beauty, the perfume of love and that truth which has no path to it? Is that what you are grasping — wanting to find out the ground upon which it dwells? Can the limited brain grasp this? You cannot possibly grasp it, hold it. You can do all kinds of meditation, fast, torture yourself, become terribly austere, having one suit, or one robe. All this has been done. The rich cannot come to the truth, neither the poor. Nor the people who have taken a vow of celibacy, of silence, of austerity. All that is determined by thought, put together sequentially by thought; it is all the cultivation of deliberate thought, of deliberate intent.

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10
Context: I fear, the inevitable conclusion we must all come to is, that in the world happiness is quite indefinable. We can no more grasp it than we can grasp the sun in the sky or the moon in the water. We can feel it interpenetrating our whole being with warmth and strength; we can see it in a pale reflection shining elsewhere; or in its total absence, we, walking in darkness, learn to appreciate what it is by what it is not.

Leaves Of Morya's Garden (1924 - 1925), Book I : The Call (1924)
Context: Into the New World my first message. You who gave the Ashram,
And you who gave two lives,
Proclaim.
Builders and warriors, strengthen the steps.
Reader, if you have not grasped — read again,
after a while.
The predestined is not accidental,
The leaves fall in their time.
And winter is but the harbinger of spring.
All is revealed; all is attainable.
I will cover you with My shield, if you but tend to your labors.
I have spoken.

Speech in the Euston Theatre, London (19 February 1921), quoted in Speeches by The Earl of Oxford and Asquith, K.G. (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1927), p. 289
Later life

Cheers.
Speech in Birmingham (16 May 1902), quoted in The Times (17 May 1902), p. 12
1900s

Volume I, chapter II, section 17
The Stones of Venice (1853)

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

Source: The Key to Theosophy (1889)

Armistice Day speech (11 November 1948), published in Omar Bradley's Collected Writings, Volume 1 (1967)

Sri Aurobindo,1910-1914, quoted from Sri Aurobindo, ., Nahar, S., Aurobindo, ., & Institut de recherches évolutives (Paris). India's rebirth: A selection from Sri Aurobindo's writing, talks and speeches. Paris: Institut de Recherches Evolutives. 3rd Edition (2000). https://web.archive.org/web/20170826004028/http://bharatvani.org/books/ir/IR_frontpage.htm

i
Leaves of Morya’s Garden: Book One (The Call) (1924)

Source: The Laundry Files, The Apocalypse Codex (2012), Chapter 14, “Appointment in Samarra” (p. 291)

"Communism and New Economic Policy",(April 1921)
1920s

Lincoln did not free the slaves. We also live with the myth that the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement freed the second-class citizens. Civil rights, of course, constitute an essential element of the freedom that was demanded at that time, but it was not the whole story.
Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities (2013)

The Ocean of Theosophy by William Q. Judge (1893), Chapter 1, Theosophy and the Masters

The Source and Value of the "Mysteries" (1888)

The Awakening of Humanity (2008)

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1980/jun/16/international-development-brandt-report#S5CV0986P0_19800616_HOC_323 in the House of Commons (16 June 1980) on the Brandt Report
1980s

"classical Greek" here refers to Greek in the classical period spanning approximately the time between 5th and 4th centuries BC, i.e., in contrast to Homeric Greek from Archaic Greece.
Source: The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought (1953), p. 1

Albert Einstein, Princeton, 26 April 1947
A - F

... “Our nation is of the blood of those who made not only Arabia, but Asia and Europe, to tremble. It is our nation which conquered with its sword the whole of India, although its peoples were all of one religion.”
Quoted from After a Century it is time to revisit Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s legacy https://www.myind.net/Home/viewArticle/after-a-century-it-is-time-to-revisit-sir-syed-ahmad-khans-legacy Avatans Kumar Jan 27, 2018. Also quoted in The Great Speeches of Modern India by Rudranghsu Mukherjee

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Down and Out, 2014

Source: Dark Age (2019), Ch. 10: The Ash Rain; Lysander

Letters and Papers from Prison (1967; 1997), The Friend

Interview with Methodik http://sthelepress.com/index.php/2019/03/04/on-that-march-first-speech-b-r-myers/ (2019)
2010s

Preface
Geometry and the Imagination (1952)

Source: Mathematics and Humor: A Study of the Logic of Humor (1980), Chapter 2, “Axioms, Levels, and Iteration” (p. 19)

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Eleven, Spiritual Adventure: Connection to the Source

Cardinal Francis Spellman in Book 1. London: Mandarin, 1993, p. 67
The Lovers (1993)

Source: House of Suns (2008), Chapter 1 (p. 3; opening words)

" Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream https://www.hedweb.com/bokowfil.htm", BLTC Research (2009)

Source: The Amazing Mr. Lutterworth (1958), p. 211

Annual presidential address to the Junior Liberal Association of Glasgow (10 February 1885), quoted in 'Mr. John Morley At Glasgow', The Times (11 February 1885), p. 10
1880s

§ 16.9
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā

"Modern world puts evolution into reverse", July 6, 1995 (reprinted in Kick-Ass: Selected Columns)
Columns and articles

Source: The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century (2014), Chapter 3 "The Paralysis of Pacifism: In Defense of Militant Direct Action" (p. 78)

They require that sorrow should find a voice ; now the most soothing sympathy is that which guesses the suffering without a question.
No.7. Rob Roy — DIANA VERNON.
Literary Remains

Source: Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead (2019), p. 42

During a May 2016 debate in the House of Commons.
Compare: A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow, 1976
2016

As quoted in Garry Davis Cult, Life (Jan 24, 1949)

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Chapter II Planning a Model World

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Chapter II Planning a Model World

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Chapter II Planning a Model World

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Chapter II Planning a Model World

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Chapter II Planning a Model World

Naked Earth: the New Geophysics (1995)

Source: Count Magnus Fredrik Ferdinand Bjornstjerna in: The Theogony of the Hindoos with Their System of Philosophy and Cosmogony by Count M. Björnstjerna https://books.google.co.in/books?id=mHNK92IkdUkC&pg=PA85, Murray, 1844 , p. 85.

Source: Life Beyond Measure (2008), twenty-third letter — The World I Leave You, p. 273

Source: The Cosmic Code (1982), p. 312-313

Source: Educated (2018), Chapter 20, “Recitals of the Fathers” (p. 180; the reference is to the Civil Rights Movement)

1930s, Wisehart interview (1930)

Verses Written on a Window in Scotland.

Original: Le persone sagge hanno la capacità di cogliere il lato positivo di ogni situazione, hanno una mente brillante, perversa ed uno spirito che ama osare e peccare: vivere appieno la vita.
Source: prevale.net