Quotes about infinite
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“.. I believe, they always say to me that I'm an expressionist, I don't know why, because perhaps the technique is [not understood] and the colour is strong... But for some years, I work, I feel much more of, of the space, that is: magic is spacious if you like. Because for me man is an infinitely creative space. And because of that I am always looking to expand my work, you know, to find space.”

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

explaining his need for large sizes
Karel Appel defines his painting', interview 1968

Feeling, Strong

“And shall they rise, all these? Will there be a trumpet blast so shrill that none of them may refuse to hear it, and the soul, re-entering its shrine of eminent or common clay, pass upward to the judgment? "Many and mighty, but all hushed," shall they submit with us to the judgment of the last assize? And in that world is it true that gold is not the currency, and that rank is not hereditary, and that there is only one name that is honored? Then, if this is the end of all men, let the living lay it to heart. Solemn and thoughtful, let us search for an assured refuge; childlike and earnest, let us conf1de in the one accepted Name; let us realize the tender and infinite nearness of God our Father, through Jesus our Surety and our Friend.”

William Morley Punshon (1824–1881) English Nonconformist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 519.

Men, God, World, Soul

“In very other period of art history, the idea itself –the what – had been primary. Today the idea matters less than the way it is arrived at; it is the how that makes the work. This word brings us again face to face with the theme and its infinite variations. It is no longer a matter of knowing, of possessing the truth, but of approaching it… knowing that the road is long, knowing that the road does not end, knowing that the road is the end in itself.”

Michel Seuphor (1901–1999) designer, draughtsman, painter

Source: Abstract Painting (1964), p. 159 : About 1961

Truth, Art, Way, History

“Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

90
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

Perfection

“No, let us not make God in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a distant planet lost in infinite space. However brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light.”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

Letter to Fr. Pastells (4 April 1893)

God, Intelligence, Idea, Light

“Looking carefully, one discovers at last that this gorgeous combination of all the hues of Paradise contains or hides a Last Judgment [....]

To the Virgin and her suppliants, as to us, who though outcasts in other churches can still hope in hers, the Last Judgment was not a symbol of God's justice or man's corruption but of her own infinite mercy. The Trinity judged, through Christ;— Christ loved and pardoned, through her. She wielded the last and highest power on earth and in hell. In the glow and beauty of her nature, the light of her Son's infinite love shone as the sunlight through the glass, turning the Last Judgement itself into the highest proof of her divine and supreme authority. The rudest ruffian of the middle-ages, when he looked at this Last Judgment, laughed, for what was the Last Judgment to her! An ornament, a play-thing, a pleasure! a jewelled decoration which she wore on her breast! Her chief joy was to pardon; her eternal instinct was to love; her deepest passion was pity! On her imperial heart the flames of hell showed only the opaline colors of heaven. Christ the Trinity might judge as much as he pleased, but Christ the Mother would rescue; and her servants could look boldly into the flames.”

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

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Love, God, Pleasure, Age

“All bores me in the world of facts, I see an end, a limit to all things and my heart thirsts for the infinite and for eternity. How to speak of the feeling, so serious, that has seized me?... Human activity has its greatest efforts always fall back on broken wings. Oh, thus I close my eyes. I do not wish to see, to hear, to love, or to act. Only artistic creation, infinite, unlimited, work of god in man, appears desirable to me. It only is the truth and only it is the illusion…”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona

Love, God, Truth, World

“A sense of utter loneliness—loneliness inevitable, crushing, eternal, the loneliness of existence, encompassed by the infinite void of unconsciousness—enfolded him as a pall. Life lay like an incubus on his bosom. He shuddered at the thought that death might overlook him, and deny him its refuge.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Dr. Heidenhoff's Process http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7052/7052-h/7052-h.htm (1880), Ch. 2.

Life, Death, Sense, Loneliness

“I learnt the true meaning of what was euphemistically described as close-quarters combat. No line-of-sight particle-beam weapons now; no delayed-detonation nano-munitions. What close-quarters combat meant was something which would have been infinitely more recognisable to a soldier of a thousand years earlier: the screaming fury of human beings packed so close together that the only effective way to kill each other was with sharpened metal weapons: bayonets and daggers, or with hands around each other’s throats; fingers pressed into each other’s eye-sockets. The only way to survive was to disengage all higher brain-functions and regress to an animal state of mind.
So I did. And in doing so, I learned a deeper truth about war. She punished those who flirted with her by making them like herself. Once you opened the door to the animal, there was no shutting it.”

Alastair Reynolds book Chasm City

Source: Chasm City (2001), Chapter 7 (p. 108).

War, Truth, Way, Learning

“Infinite God, age after age, throughout all cycles, wills through His Infinite Mercy to effect His presence amidst mankind by stooping down to human level in the human form, but His physical presence amidst mankind not being apprehended, He is looked upon as an ordinary man of the world. When He asserts, however, His Divinity on earth by proclaiming Himself the Avatar of the Age, He is worshipped by some who accept Him as God; and glorified by a few who know him as God on Earth. But it invariably falls to the lot of the rest of humanity to condemn Him, while He is physically in their midst.
Thus it is that God as man, proclaiming Himself as the Avatar, suffers Himself to be persecuted and tortured, to be humiliated and condemned by humanity for whose sake His Infinite Love has made him stoop so low, in order that humanity, by its very act of condemning God's manifestation in the form of Avatar should, however, indirectly, assert the existence of God in His Infinite Eternal state.”

Meher Baba (1894–1969) Indian mystic

The Highest of the High (1953)

Love, God, Age, World

“The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds.”

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

As quoted in Infinity and the Mind (1995) by Rudy Rucker.

Fear

“I am the guru of greatness, the shaman of sexy, the ECW champion John Morrison. I am beyond good and evil, a portal to the infinite. Punk, you are temporary, fleeting, a footnote to an average reality. You want me to embarrass you at SummerSlam? Is that it? Then go ahead, sign it, but the fact is you can't handle the pressure, Punk. You couldn't handle being the ECW champion.”

John Hennigan (1979) American professional wrestler

CM Punk/John Morrison contract signing http://youtube.com/watch?v=6EUO__hwKvE

Reality, Evil

“Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source -- next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.”

Friedrich Engels The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man

The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man (1876) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/quotes/index.htm

Nature, Sense, Wealth

“For a man who is sensitive to nature, happiness consists in expressing nature. How infinitely happy, then, is the man who reflects nature like a mirror without being aware of it, who does the thing for love of it and not from any pretensions to take first place. This noble unself-consciousness is what we find in all truly great men, in the founders of the arts. I picture the great Poussin, in his retreat, delighting in the study of the human heart.... I picture Raphael in the arms of his mistress, turning from La Fornarina to paint his Saint Cecilia.... I am only too well aware that I am far not only from their divine spirit, but even from their modest simplicity…”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote in a letter to Delacroix' friend J. B. Pierret, 23 October 1818, from the Forest of Boixe; as quoted in Eugene Delacroix – selected letters 1813 – 1863, ed. and transl. Jean Stewart, art Works MFA publications, Museum of Fine Art Boston, 2001, p. 43
1815 - 1830

Love, Men, Art, Nature

“How much more infinite a sea is Man? Be not so childish as to measure him from head to foot and think that you have found his borders.”

Mikha'il Na'ima book The Book of Mirdad

The Book of Mirdad (1948)

Thinking, Sea

“Religion is faith in an infinite Creator, who delights in and enjoins that rectitude which conscience commands us to seek. This conviction gives a Divine sanction to duty.”

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

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 493

Faith, Religion

“In the Protestant doctrine of the infinite value of the individual soul, on the one hand, and in the assembling together of the brethren in the church congregation, on the other, you have the seed-bed of modern democracy.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The John Clifford Lecture at Coventry (14 July 1930), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 38.
1930

Democracy, Soul

“The auspices for philosophy are bad if, when proceeding ostensibly on the investigation of truth, we start saying farewell to all uprightness, honesty and sincerity, and are intent only on passing ourselves off for what we are not. We then assume, like those three sophists [Fichte, Schelling and Hegel], first a false pathos, then an affected and lofty earnestness, then an air of infinite superiority, in order to impose where we despair of ever being able to convince.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 22
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Sketch of a History of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real

Truth, Falseness, Sincerity, Despair

“All things… appear to be made up and produced by the coming together of these elements, so that they have been distributed by nature among an infinite number of kinds of things. Hence I believed it right to treat of the diversity and practical peculiarities of these things as well as of the qualities which they exhibit in buildings, so that persons who are intending to build may understand them and so make no mistake, but may gather materials which are suitable to use in their buildings.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter II, Sec. 2

Understanding, Nature, Appearance, Personality

“Albert Gleizes did not know Montmartre, had never seen anything of Picasso or Juan Gris, never heard Maurice Princet construct an infinite number of different spaces for the use of painters, but he described to me the absurdity of the museums in which mournful, extravagantly three dimensional crowds threaten to crush the visitor by jumping out of their frames.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

“In his home-life Turgot remained most frugal and laborious, treating his servants with a benevolence then accounted contemptible, and working out his quiet schemes with an infinite patience and thoroughness. When he was offered the richer Intendancy of Lyons, he would not take it. Here, as he said of himself, though he was 'the compulsory instrument of great evil,' he was doing a little good. Only a little, it might be. But if every man did the little he could — what a different world!”

Evelyn Beatrice Hall book The Friends of Voltaire

Source: The Friends of Voltaire (1906), Ch. 8 : Turgot: The Statesman, p. 221

Life, World, Home, Evil

“Draw all kind of everyday object placed, in such a way that they have in them the life of the man or woman – corsets that have just been removed, for example, and which retain the form of the body. Do a series in aquatint on mourning, different blacks – black veils of deep mourning floating on the face – black gloves – mourning carriages, undertaker’s vehicles – carriages like Venetian gondolas. On smoke – smoker’s smoke, pipes, cigarettes, cigars – smoke from locomotives, from tall factory chimneys, from steam boats, etc. On evening – infinite variety of subjects in cafes, different tones of glass robes reflected in the mirrors. On bakery, bread. Series of baker's boys, seen in the cellar itself or through the basement windows from the street – backs the colour of the pink flour – beautiful curves of dough – still-life's of different breads, large, oval, long, round, etc. Studies in color of the yellows, pinks, grays, whites of bread…… Neither monuments nor houses have ever been done from below, close up as they appear when you walk down the street. [a working note in which Degas planned series of views of modern Paris, the same time when he sketched the backstreet brothels, making graphic unflinching and even his realistic 'pornographic' sketches he called his 'glimpses through the keyhole', in which he also experimented with perspectives]”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

Quote from Degas' Notebooks; Clarendon Press, Oxford 1976, nos 30 & 34 circa 1877; as quoted in The private lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe, Harpen Collins Publishers, New York 2006, p. 182
quotes, undated

Life, Beauty, Color, Way

“Soon she saw the dining room light shining through the parted curtains. Its humble glow provoked a goodness in her heart that was no longer calculating or defiant, nor a kind of currency with which to barter and exchange; what she felt was an infinite, poignant affinity for this life that was her family’s. No longer did it seem harassed and restricting, but rather made beautiful from start to finish like a lighthouse beam before her. Home would take her in, home would cure her. Her hand on the doorknob, she paused for one long, ineffable moment. Then she pushed open the door. And it was as if an arctic wind chilled her frail efforts to make a fresh beginning.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P. 257

Life, Family, Beauty, Home

“The second part of the book… contains an exposition of the first principles of the theory of complex quantities; hitherto, the very elements of this theory have not been easily accessible to the English student, except recently in Prof. Chrystal's excellent treatise on Algebra. The subject of Analytical Trigonometry has been too frequently presented to the student in the state in which it was left by Euler, before the researches of Cauchy, Abel, Gauss, and others, had placed the use of imaginary quantities, and especially the theory of infinite series and products, where real or complex quantities are involved, on a firm scientific basis. In the Chapter on the exponential theorem and logarithms, I have ventured to introduce the term "generalized logarithm" for the doubly infinite series of values of the logarithm of a quantity.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

A Treatise on Plane Trigonometry https://books.google.com/books?id=_ktLAAAAMAAJ (1891) Preface

Books, Parting

“Now, maybe you thought you could get clever by adding an "-ing" to your favorite curse word. Well, the bill also prohibits "compound use, including hyphenated compounds … and other grammatical forms including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms." Fortunately for me, they didn't include the pluperfect subjunctive. So all you stuffed shirts can just have been having had to bite me.”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

The Daily Show (2004-3-24), "Back in Black," regarding H.R. 3687 http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h108-3687, intended to expand the definition of "profane broadcasts."

“It was a bright September afternoon, and the streets of New York were brilliant with moving men…. He was pushed toward the ticket-office with the others, and felt in his pocket for the new five-dollar bill he had hoarded…. When at last he realized that he had paid five dollars to enter he knew not what, he stood stock-still amazed…. John… sat in a half-maze minding the scene about him; the delicate beauty of the hall, the faint perfume, the moving myriad of men, the rich clothing and low hum of talking seemed all a part of a world so different from his, so strangely more beautiful than anything he had known, that he sat in dreamland, and started when, after a hush, rose high and clear the music of Lohengrin's swan. The infinite beauty of the wail lingered and swept through every muscle of his frame, and put it all a-tune. He closed his eyes and grasped the elbows of the chair, touching unwittingly the lady's arm. And the lady drew away. A deep longing swelled in all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of that low life that held him prisoned and befouled. If he could only live up in the free air where birds sang and setting suns had no touch of blood! Who had called him to be the slave and butt of all?… If he but had some master-work, some life-service, hard, aye, bitter hard, but without the cringing and sickening servility…. When at last a soft sorrow crept across the violins, there came to him the vision of a far-off home — the great eyes of his sister, and the dark drawn face of his mother…. It left John sitting so silent and rapt that he did not for some time notice the usher tapping him lightly on the shoulder and saying politely, 'will you step this way please sir?'… The manager was sorry, very very sorry — but he explained that some mistake had been made in selling the gentleman a seat already disposed of; he would refund the money, of course… before he had finished John was gone, walking hurriedly across the square… and as he passed the park he buttoned his coat and said, 'John Jones you're a natural-born fool.”

W.E.B. Du Bois book The Souls of Black Folk

Then he went to his lodgings and wrote a letter, and tore it up; he wrote another, and threw it in the fire....
Source: The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. XIII: Of the Coming of John

Life, Men, Money, World

“And in an infinite regress:
Tell me, why is the pain of birth
lighter borne than the pain of death?”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Divers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divers_(Joanna_Newsom_album) (2015)

Death, Pain, Birth

“God's transcending nature must be understood as oneness and simplicity,
unscalable height and unfathomable depth,
incomprehensible breadth and infinite length,
dark silence and ferocious energy.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Sparkling Gem, complete works, vol. 3, pp. 6-7

God, Nature, Silence

“In the universe there is room for an infinite series of beginnings.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

Advice to Clever Children (1981)

Universe

“There are many possible realities, infinitely many. Yet most of them are not... alive. Most of them are like books that no one ever actually wrote. A group-mind, like humanity's, lights up one given world. What makes this world different from some ghostly alternative universe is that we actually live here.”

Rudy Rucker (1946) American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 171

Books, World, Reality, Light

“Western intellectuals fail to understand and appreciate the form of society that has given us the ability to alter those defaults. They believe both that the most productive human cultures are almost totally dysfunctional, and that evolved, successful societies may be re-drawn at will by intellectuals with political and cultural power. They write as if relative pockets of Western poverty should occasion our astonishment, when in fact the term, until recently, for almost infinitely worse levels of poverty, was simply "human life."”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

Life, Understanding, Success

“An old oriental saying tells us, ‘when our willpower is concentrated upon a stone, it can pass through it. When our willpower is focused and in harmony with the universe, it can command the wind, rain and thunder’. But from where does our willpower come? Those who understand and answer this question are those who accomplish important tasks. When we coordinate mind and body by stilling the waves of our mind to imperceptible, infinitely decreasing ripples, we can send forth our great willpower that moves the universe.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

19 : Willpower
Ki Sayings (2003)

Understanding, Question, Universe

“The King is the symbol of the union, not only of an Empire, but of a society which is held together by a common view of the fundamental nature of man. It is neither the worship of a tribe nor a class. It is a faith, a value placed upon the individual, derived from the Christian religion. The Christian State proclaims human personality to be supreme; the servile State denies this. Every compromise with the infinite value of the human soul leads straight back to savagery and the jungle. Expel this truth of our religion, and what follows? The insolence of dominion, and the cruelty of despotism. Denounce religion as the opium of the people, and you swiftly proceed to denounce political liberty and civil liberty as opium. Freedom of speech goes, tolerance follows, and justice is no more.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Empire Rally of Youth at the Royal Albert Hall (18 May 1937), quoted in Service of Our Lives (1937), p. 165.
1937

People, Truth, Faith, Religion

“The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity.”

Gene Roddenberry (1921–1991) American television screenwriter and producer

As quoted in Draper's Book of Quotations for the Christian World (1992) by Edythe Draper

“Some gloomy autumn day, when the dreary north wind is howling, read Ossian to the accompaniment of the weird moans of an Æolian harp hung in the leafless branches of a tree, and you will experience a feeling of intense sadness, an infinite yearning for another state of existence, an intense disgust with the present.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

Par une de ces journées sombres qui attristent la fin de l'année, et que rend encore plus mélancoliques le souffle glacé du vent du Nord, écoutez, en lisant Ossian, la fantastique harmonie d'une harpe éolienne balancée au sommet d'un arbre dépouillé de verdure, et vous pourrez éprouver un sentiment profond de tristesse, un désir vague et infini d'une autre existence, un dégoût immense de celle-ci. <br class="br">Hector Berlioz, Mémoires, ch. 39 http://www.hberlioz.com/Writings/HBM39.htm; Eleanor Holmes, Rachel Holmes and Ernest Newman (trans.) Memoirs of Hector Berlioz from 1803 to 1865 (New York: Dover, 1966) pp. 156-7. <br class="br">Criticism

Sadness, Feeling, Autumn, Tree

“Was it possible that Napoleon should win the battle of Waterloo? We answer, No! Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No! Because of God! For Bonaparte to conquer at Waterloo was not the law of the nineteenth century. It was time that this vast man should fall. He had been impeached before the Infinite! He had vexed God! Waterloo was not a battle. It was the change of front of the Universe!”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

"The Battle of Waterloo", reported in Oliver Ernesto Branch, ed., The Hamilton Speaker (1878), p. 53

God, Law, Universe, Change

“The number of books is infinite.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Books

“Questions of convergence under an infinite time horizon will depend so much on epsilontic refinements in the system of assumptions — and on the infinite constancy of these refinements — that we are humanly speaking absolutely certain of getting infinite time horizon results which have no relevance to concrete reality. And in particular we are absolutely certain of getting irrelevant results if such epsilontic exercises are made under the assumption of a constant technology. 'In the long run we are all dead.' These words by Keynes ought to be engraved in marble and put on the desk of all epsilontologists, in growth theory under an infinite horizon.”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Ragnar Frisch (1970) "Econometrics in the World of Today." University of Oslo, Institute of Economics, 1971; As quoted in Robert Johnston, Graham Clark. Service Operations Management: Improving Service Delivery. Pearson Education, 2005. p. 347
1970s and later

Exercises, Question, Reality, Time

“Hitherto there had been frequent changes in the tyranny under which, for some four hundred years back, they had lived; and this alternation of masters had kept hope alive. Now there was a sense of permanency in the despotism which, from Antioch as its land base, was bearing down upon them in the trail of the Roman legions. There was an imperious note in the commands of the tribute gatherers, as though an infinite arm of power was now behind the fist which lay at their throat, demanding their goods. Furthermore, all of the tyrannies hitherto had been of the East, Eastern. And though exacting the uttermost farthing of tribute, these despotisms had been gilded with a respect for Asiatic ideals, religion, reverence, a hold-fast in the Unseen. But this new despotism was characterized by a hard materiality, untempered by sentiment of any kind, a race of conquerors self-indulging, heavy-fisted, cynical.”

Bouck White (1874–1951) American author and novelist

Source: The Call of the Carpenter (1914), p. 18

Religion, Hope, Sense, Change

“As he lay on Wenlock Edge, with the sheep nibbling the grass close about him as they or their betters had nibbled the grass — or whatever there was to nibble — in the Silurian kingdom of Pteraspis, he seemed to have fallen on an evolution far more wonderful than that of fishes. He did not like it; he could not account for it; and he determined to stop it. Never since the days of his Limulus ancestry had any of his ascendants thought thus. Their modes of thought might be many, but their thought was one. Out of his millions of millions of ancestors, back to the Cambrian mollusks, every one had probably lived and died in the illusion of Truths which did not amuse him, and which had never changed. Henry Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth was, or was not, true. He did not even care that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun.

From the beginning of history, this attitude had been branded as criminal — worse than crime — sacrilege! Society punished it ferociously and justly, in self-defence.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Truth, History, Fish, Grass

“Earthly joy can take but a bat-like flight, always checked, always limited, in dusk and darkness. But the love of Christ breaks through the vaulting, and leads us up into the free sky above, expanding to the very throne of Jehovah, and drawing us still upward to the infinite heights of glory.”

Frances Ridley Havergal (1836–1879) British poet and hymn-writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 399.

Love, Joy, Christ, Drawing

“The infinite and uncreated spirit that we usually call GOD, a substance of the highest virtue and excellency, produced everything else by emanative causality. God thus is the primary substance, the rest, the secondary; if the former created matter with a power of moving itself, he, the primary substance, is still the cause of that motion as well as of the matter, and yet we rightly say that it is matter which moves itself. "We may define this kind of spirit we speak of to be a substance indiscernible, that can move itself, that can penetrate, contract, and dilate itself, and can also penetrate, move, and alter matter," which is the third emanation.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter VII

God

“My eyes close and uncomprehendingly see the dream in the infinite space that stretches away, elusive, before me.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Original: Mes yeux se ferment pour voir sans comprendre le rêve dans l'espace infini qui fuit devant moi.
Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), pp. 184-185: Letter to André Fontainas, March 1899

Dreams

“We have time travel," she said, "and none of us, I am sure, really understands it. We stole it from the Infinites. To steal time travel was the one way we could fight back, the one way we could flee. The human race had far space travel before the Infinites showed up. I think it was our far travel that aroused the interest of the Infinites in us. I've often wondered if some of the very primitive principles of time might not have made our many-times-faster-than-light travel possible. Time is somehow tied into space, but I have never known quite how.”

Clifford D. Simak Highway of Eternity

Highway of Eternity (1986)

Way, Travel, Understanding, Thinking

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

Love, Pain, Hate, People

“Thus absolute truth is indestructible. Being indestructible, it is eternal. Being eternal, it is self-existent. Being self-existent, it is infinite. Being infinite, it is vast and deep. Being vast and deep, it is transcendental and intelligent. It is because it is vast and deep that it contains all existence. It is because it is transcendental and intelligent that it embraces all existence. It is because it is infinite and eternal that it fulfils or perfects all existence. In vastness and depth it is like the Earth. In transcendental intelligence it is like Heaven. Infinite and eternal, it is the Infinite itself.”

Zisi (-481–-402 BC) Chinese philosopher

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean, pp. 124–125

Truth, Intelligence, Perfection

“Pantheism makes God into a present, real, and material being; empiricism – to which rationalism also belongs – makes God into an absent, remote, unreal, and negative being. Empiricism does not deny God existence, but denies him all positive determinations, because their content is supposed to be only finite and empirical; the infinite cannot, therefore, be an object for man. But the more determinations I deny to a being, the more do I cut it of[ from myself, and the less power and influence do I concede to it over me, the freer do I make myself of it. The more qualities I possess, the more I am for others, and the greater is the extent of my influence and effects. And the more one is, the more one is known to others. Hence, each negation of an attribute of God is a partial atheism, a sphere of godlessness.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Part I, Section 16 <br class="br"> Principles of Philosophy of the Future http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/index.htm (1843)

God

“Love, when it fits inside a flower, is infinite.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Voces (1943)

Love, Flowers

“[The account of a man who sells his shadow is] in actual fact the life story of a persecution complex, that is to say, the paranoid narration of a man who through one event or another is suddenly made aware of his infinite smallness and at the same time finds the means by which to deceive the world in general, concerning this discovery.”

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

in a letter to Gustav Schiefler, 27 June, 1919; as quoted by Paul Rabe, in Illustrated Books and Periodicals in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings; The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, Vol. 1.: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1989, p. 119
for Kirchner the Schlemihl illustrations he made for Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte ('The wondrous story of Peter Schlemihl') were a release from his existential anxieties
1916 - 1919

Life, World, Time

“I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From an interview in Art and Design, no. 49
Interviews

Art, Way, Thinking, Time

“O it is a happy thing to feel ourselves helpless and naught, for then the presence of God is felt to wrap us about so lovingly! Everlasting, infinite, almighty, — these are the words that strengthen us with speaking them.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 332.

God, Feeling, Happiness

“The doctrine of eternal pain is my trouble with this Christian religion. I reject it on account of its infinite heartlessness. I cannot tell them too often, that during our last war Christians, who knew that if they were shot they would go right to heaven, went and hired wicked men to take their places, perfectly willing that these men should go to hell provided they could stay at home.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Orthodoxy (1884)

Men, Pain, War, Religion

“Only through blind Instinct, in which the only possible guidance of the Imperative is awanting, does the Power in Intuition remain undetermined; where it is schematised as absolute it becomes infinite; and where it is presented in a determinate form, as a principle, it becomes at least manifold. By the above-mentioned act of Intelligising, the Power liberates itself from Instinct, to direct itself towards Unity.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

XI.
Outline of the Doctrine of Knowledge (1810)

“As knowledge of the alphabet and its permutations and combinations is to traditional literacy, and as a knowledge of numbers and their permutations and combinations is to mathematics, so a knowledge of the biological and conceptual alphabets of the brain and its apparently infinite permutations and combinations is to mental literacy.”

Tony Buzan (1942–2019) British psychologist

The Mind Map Book, Buzan and Buzan (1991)

Mathematics, Knowledge

“Alas! So there is no escape from the question. Not for me, not for anyone! Then life is just breathing or running behind infinite number of questions? And then, what question is really? And what answer is too? This too a question. I observe the question mark carefully. And Eureka! I didn't know that my answer was encrypted and hidden in that symbol of a question mark. The dot below the curved stroke in a question mark symbolizes Zero as the question's answer itself, I never knew. Punctuation marks are so carefully crafted, I never knew!”

P. L. Deshpande (1919–2000) Marathi writer, humourist, actor, dramatist

citation needed
From his various literature

Life, Question

“There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

Book II, ch. 3 (trans. Constance Garnett)
The Elder Zossima, speaking to a devout widow afraid of death
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

Love, God, Forgiveness

“My beloved friend, keep your hand in that of the Master, walk daily by His side, so that you may lead others into the realms of true happiness, where a religion of hate, (which poisons both body and soul) will be unknown, having in its place the "Golden Rule" way, which is the "Jesus Way" of life, will reign supreme. Then, we can walk and talk with Jesus momentarily, because we will be attuned to His will and wishes, thus making the Creation story of the world non-debatable as to its reality. God, my beloved friend is infinite the highest embodiment of love. We are finite, surrounded and often filled with hate. We can only understand the infinite as we loose the finite and take on the infinite.”

George Washington Carver (1864–1943) botanist

George Washington Carver: In His Own Words http://books.google.es/books?id=JcncXGNSJQQC&hl=es&source=gbs_navlinks_s (1991), edited by Gary R. Kremer, University of Missouri Press, p. 135

Love, Life, God, Hate

“Our ethics and our politics assume, largely without question or serious discussion, that the division between human and 'animal' is absolute. 'Pro-life', to take just one example, is a potent political badge, associated with a gamut of ethical issues such as opposition to abortion and euthanasia.
What it really means is pro-human-life. Abortion clinic bombers are not known for their veganism, nor do Roman Catholics show any particular reluctance to have their suffering pets 'put to sleep'. In the minds of many confused people, a single-celled human zygote, which has no nerves and cannot suffer, is infinitely sacred, simply because it is 'human'. No other cells enjoy this exalted status.
But such 'essentialism' is deeply un-evolutionary. If there were a heaven in which all the animals who ever lived could frolic, we would find an interbreeding continuum between every species and every other. For example I could interbreed with a female who could interbreed with a male who could… fill in a few gaps, probably not very many in this case… who could interbreed with a chimpanzee.
We could construct longer, but still unbroken chains of interbreeding individuals to connect a human with a warthog, a kangaroo, a catfish. This is not a matter of speculative conjecture; it necessarily follows from the fact of evolution.
A successful hybridisation between a human and a chimpanzee. Even if the hybrid were infertile like a mule, the shock waves that would be sent through society would be salutary. This is why a distinguished biologist described this possibility as the most immoral scientific experiment he could imagine: it would change everything! It cannot be ruled out as impossible, but it would be surprising.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Richard Dawkins Chimpanzee Hybrid? The Guardian, Jan 2009 https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2009/jan/02/richard-dawkins-chimpanzee-hybrid?commentpage=2

Life, People, Imagination, Question

“The magic of drama is infinitely more powerful than the magic of trickery. It is as available to the conjurer as it is to the actor. The only difference is that actors take it for granted, whereas few conjurers are even aware that it exists.”

Milbourne Christopher (1914–1984) American magician

Milbourne Christopher (Magic: A Picture History)

“I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated, and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In other words, it forbids wholesome doubt. […]
This false certainty comes out in Professor Haldane's article. […] It is breaking Aristotle's canon—to demand in every enquiry that the degree of certainty which the subject matter allows. And not on your life to pretend that you see further than you do.
Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes of society (in whatever direction) because they never in fact take place except by a particular technique. That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think any group good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions with ourselves. The secrecy and discipline of their organisation will have already inflamed in them that passion for the inner ring which I think at least as corrupting as avarice; and their high ideological pretensions will have lent all their passions the dangerous prestige of the Cause. Hence, in whatever direction the change is made, it is for me damned by its modus operandi.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety.
"A Reply to Professor Haldane" (1946), published posthumously in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966)
Some of these ideas were included in the essay "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment" (1949) (see below).

Life, Men, People, Truth

“Thesis. Finite, Representable. Antithesis. Infinite, System of Notions lying at the limit of the representable.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

Antimonies
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Lying

“Hitherto we have considered the apparent motion of the star about its true place, as made only in a plane parallel to the ecliptic, in which case it appears to describe a circle in that plane; but since, when we judge of the place and motion of a star, we conceive it to be in the surface of a sphere, whose centre is our eye, 'twill be necessary to reduce the motion in that plane to what it would really appear on the surface of such a sphere, or (which will be equivalent) to what it would appear on a plane touching such a sphere in the star's true place. Now in the present case, where we conceive the eye at an indefinite distance, this will be done by letting fall perpendiculars from each point of the circle on such a plane, which from the nature of the orthographic projection will form an ellipsis, whose greater axis will be equal to the diameter of that circle, and the lesser axis to the greater as the sine of the star's latitude to the radius, for this latter plane being perpendicular to a line drawn from the centre of the sphere through the star's true place, which line is inclined to the ecliptic in an angle equal to the star's latitude; the touching plane will be inclined to the plane of the ecliptic in an angle equal to the complement of the latitude. But it is a known proposition in the orthographic projection of the sphere, that any circle inclined to the plane of the projection, to which lines drawn from the eye, supposed at an infinite distance, are at right angles, is projected into an ellipsis, having its longer axis equal to its diameter, and its shorter to twice the cosine of the inclination to the plane of the projection, half the longer axis or diameter being the radius.
Such an ellipse will be formed in our present case…”

James Bradley (1693–1762) English astronomer; Astronomer Royal

Miscellaneous Works and Correspondence (1832), Demonstration of the Rules relating to the Apparent Motion of the Fixed Stars upon account of the Motion of Light.

Star, Nature, Appearance

“A bureaucrat is one who has the power to say “no” but none to say “yes”. Bureaucrats can find an infinite number of reasons for rejecting any proposed change, but can find none for accepting it.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff (2006) A little book of f-laws: 13 common sins of management. p. 12.
2000s

Change

“Spiritual Intelligence represents our drive for meaning and connection with the infinite.”

Stephen R. Covey book The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness

Source: The 8th Habit : From Effectiveness to Greatness‎ (2004), p. 53

Intelligence

“The potential infinite means nothing other than an undetermined, variable quantity, always remaining finite, which has to assume values that either become smaller than any finite limit no matter how small, or greater than any finite limit no matter how great.”

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

"Mitteilungen" (1887-8)

“If a person is unwilling to make a decisive resolution, if he wants to cheat God of the heart’s daring venture in which a person ventures way out and loses sight of all shrewdness and probability, indeed, takes leave of his senses or at least all his worldly mode of thinking, if instead of beginning with one step he almost craftily seeks to find out something, to have the infinite certainty changed into a finite certainty, then this discourse will not be able to benefit him. There is an upside-downness that wants to reap before it sows; there is a cowardliness that wants to have certainty before it begins. There is a hypersensitivity so copious in words that it continually shrinks from acting; but what would it avail a person if, double-minded and fork-tongued he wanted to dupe God, trap him in probability, but refused to understand the improbable, that one must lose everything in order to gain everything, and understand it so honestly that, in the most crucial moment, when his soul is already shuddering at the risk, he does not again leap to his own aid with the explanation that he has not yet fully made a resolution but merely wanted to feel his way. Therefore, all discussion of struggling with God in prayer, of the actual loss (since if pain of annihilation is not actually suffered, then the sufferer is not yet out upon the deep, and his scream is not the scream of danger but in the face of danger) and the figurative victory cannot have the purpose of persuading anyone or of converting the situation into a task for secular appraisal and changing God’s gift of grace to the venture into temporal small change for the timorous. It really would not help a person if the speaker, by his oratorical artistry, led him to jump into a half hour’s resolution, by the ardor of conviction started a fire in him so that he would blaze in a momentary good intention without being able to sustain a resolution or to nourish an intention as soon as the speaker stopped talking.”

Sören Kierkegaard book Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong, One Who Prays Aright Struggles In Prayer and is Victorious-In That God is Victorious p. 380-381
1840s, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

God, Pain, Way, Feeling

“True religion, sprung from God above,
Is, like her fountain, full of charity,
Embracing all things with a tender love,
Full of good will and meek expectancy,
Full of true justice and sure verity,
In heart and voice; free, large, even infinite,
Not wedged in straight peculiarity,
But grasping all in her vast active spright:
Bright lamp of God! that men would joy in thy pure light!”

Henry More (1614–1687) British philosopher

The Immortality of the Soul (1662), Book 2, Canto 3

Love, Men, God, Religion

“Want the best. The highest happiness, the greatest freedom. Desirelessness is the highest bliss. (…) Only God’s energy is infinite – because he wants nothing for Himself. Be like Him and all your desires will be fulfilled. The higher your aims and vaster desires, the more energy you will have for their fulfillment. Desire the good of all and the universe will work for you. But if you want your own pleasure, you must earn it the hard way. (…).”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Desire and fear
Source: "I am That." P.49-50.

God, Pleasure, Way, Freedom

“I always felt that there had to be much more [than] just… shaking it, you know, eternally. Or just making music. Or more even than the pure enjoyment of entertaining someone – being on stage, which is a tremendous rush of adrenaline. But there had to be something else to my life. And I feel that with this work that I do, that’s how my life gets fulfilled. And how I find a purpose to my own existence. And I do feel that music is the platform. It’s become the vehicle that allows me to use my voice to speak about those issues that need urgent attention. I can take the spotlight that shines on me and shift it towards those issues that are infinitely more important than my own issues.”

Shakira (1977) Colombian singer

Life, Music, Feeling

“The Philosopher of this age is not a Socrates, a Plato, a Hooker, or Taylor, who inculcates on men the necessity and infinite worth of moral goodness, the great truth that our happiness depends on the mind which is within us, and not on the circumstances which are without us; but a Smith, a De Lolme, a Bentham, who chiefly inculcates the reverse of this,—that our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances; nay, that the strength and dignity of the mind within us is itself the creature and consequence of these. Were the laws, the government, in good order, all were well with us; the rest would care for itself! Dissentients from this opinion, expressed or implied, are now rarely to be met with; widely and angrily as men differ in its application, the principle is admitted by all.”

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

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Men, Truth, Age, Law

“Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Nature

Source: 1830s, Nature http://www.emersoncentral.com/nature.htm (1836), Ch. 1, Nature

God, Universe, Parting

“It is the small flock of God. "Whoever receives in my name one of those little" said Jesus, "It is myself who receives." What thinks the one that sticks, that maims, or inflicts to their pure souls more black sorrow than death? (…) The curse of a crowd of children, is a cataclysm, a horror prodigy, a chain of dark mountains in the sky, with a cavalcade of thunder and lightning in their tops. It is the infinite of the cries of all deep, is a not know what highly powerful unforgiving and extinguishing any hope of forgiveness.”

Léon Bloy (1846–1917) French writer, poet and essayist

Léon Bloy, Octavio de Faria, portuguese edition, page 101. Léon Bloy, Octavio de Faria, portuguese edition, page 101. https://books.google.com.br/books?id=wI4SAAAAYAAJ&q=%C3%89+o+rebanho+dos+pequenos+de+Deus.+%22Quem+quer+que+receba+em+meu+nome+um+desses+pequenos%22+disse+Jesus&dq=%C3%89+o+rebanho+dos+pequenos+de+Deus.+%22Quem+quer+que+receba+em+meu+nome+um+desses+pequenos%22+disse+Jesus&hl=pt-BR&sa=X&ved=0CBsQ6AEwAGoVChMI0Ovrgrn5yAIVQpGQCh3fFwGB

Death, God, Children, Hope

“In an infinite universe, all may become real sooner or later. Yet it is always up to mankind to make real what it really wishes to be real.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Source: Book 3, Chapter 7 “Project NFB” (p. 135), The Warlord of the Air (1971)

Universe

“Titian, having adorned Venice, or rather all Italy and other parts of the world, with excellent paintings, well merits to be loved and respected by artists, and is in many things to be admired and imitated also, as one who has produced, and is producing, works of infinite merit; nay, such as must endure while the memory of illustrious men shall remain.”

Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) Italian painter, architect, writer and historian

Source: Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 1852, p. 402.

Love, Men, World, Memory

“There are an infinite number of ways to lie and only one truth. Propaganda today is not a wall, not a dike holding back information from reaching the people. It is a flood, overwhelming our critical thinking. The concept is not to promote a particular narrative or agenda but to create doubt and to make people believe that the truth is unknowable. There are no Russian forces in Ukraine. Russia didn’t meddle in the U. S. election. The popular Vladimir Putin was reelected on March 18, 2018.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

2010s, The Truth About Putin (2018)

People, Truth, Lie, Way

“It may remain for us to learn … that our task is only beginning; and that there will never be given to us even the ghost of any help, save the help of unutterable unthinkable Time. We may have to learn that the infinite whirl of death and birth, out of which we cannot escape, is of our own creation, of our own seeking;—that the forces integrating worlds are the errors of the Past;—that the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire;—and that the burnt-out suns are rekindled only by the inextinguishable passions of vanished lives.”

Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) writer

Source: Out of the East, pp. 156–7.

Death, Hunger, World, Error

“Did the protection we received annul our rights as men, and lay us under an obligation of being miserable? Who among you, my countrymen, that is a father, would claim authority to make your child a slave because you had nourished him in infancy?
’Tis a strange species of generosity which requires a return infinitely more valuable than anything it could have bestowed; that demands as a reward for a defense of our property a surrender of those inestimable privileges, to the arbitrary will of vindictive tyrants, which alone give value to that very property.”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

Speech in Philadelphia (1776)

Men

“Burns's Brother Gilbert, a man of much sense and worth, has told me that Robert, in his young days, in spite of their hardship, was usually the gayest of speech; a fellow of infinite frolic, laughter, sense and heart; far pleasanter to hear there, stript cutting peats in the bog, or such like, than he ever afterwards knew him. I can well believe it. This basis of mirth, a primal element of sunshine and joyfulness, coupled with his other deep and earnest qualities, is one of the most attractive characteristics of Burns. A large fund of Hope dwells in him; spite of his tragical history, he is not a mourning man. He shakes his sorrows gallantly aside; bounds forth victorious over them.”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Man of Letters

Hope, History, Sense, Laughter

“In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Other Inquisitions

"The Flower of Coleridge" ["La flor de Coleridge"] — The title of this work makes reference to a line by Samuel Coleridge in Anima Poetæ : From the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1895), p. 282 : "If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake — Aye, what then?"
Other Inquisitions (1952)

Literature

“That from the outset they expect or even impose all the properties of finite numbers upon the numbers in question, while on the other hand the infinite numbers, if they are to be considered in any form at all, must (in their contrast to the finite numbers) constitute an entirely new kind of number, whose nature is entirely dependent upon the nature of things and is an object of research, but not of our arbitrariness or prejudices.”

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

Letter to Gustac Enestrom, as quoted in Georg Cantor : His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite (1990) by Joseph Warren Dauben ~ ISBN 0691024472

Question, Nature, Dependency

“But now here is the director's cut, which is 20 minutes shorter, lops off a couple of characters and a few of the infinite subplots, and is even more of a mess. I recommend that Kelly keep right on cutting until he whittles it down to a ukulele pick.”

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

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/southland-tales-2007 of Southland Tales (16 November 2007) <br class="br">Reviews, One-star reviews

“It is hard to understand how this infinitely dense singularity can evaporate into nothing. For matter inside the black hole leak out into the universe requires that it travel faster than the speed of light.”

John Moffat book Reinventing Gravity

Source: Reinventing Gravity (2008), Chapter 5, Conventional Black Holes, p. 85

Travel, Understanding, Light, Universe

“If it be urged that the action of the potato is chemical and mechanical only, and that it is due to the chemical and mechanical effects of light and heat, the answer would seem to lie in an inquiry whether every sensation is not chemical and mechanical in its operation? whether those things which we deem most purely spiritual are anything but disturbances of equilibrium in an infinite series of levers, beginning with those that are too small for microscopic detection, and going up to the human arm and the appliances which it makes use of? whether there be not a molecular action of thought, whence a dynamical theory of the passions shall be deducible? Whether strictly speaking we should not ask what kind of levers a man is made of rather than what is his temperament? How are they balanced? How much of such and such will it take to weigh them down so as to make him do so and so?”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 23

Lie, Light, Passion

“All foreign food is doomed to be consumed in India not so much by Indians as by a voracious Indian sensibility, which demands infinite versions of Indian food, and is unmoved by difference.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

Food

“Space and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), p. 12

“And of all the infinite universe of humanity, these people are the most guileless, the most devoid of wickedness and duplicity, the most obedient and faithful to their native masters and to the Spanish Christians whom they serve.”

Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566) Spanish Dominican friar, historian, and social reformer

History of the Indies (1561)

People, Faith, Universe

“People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.”

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

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 1: The Skin of Our Teeth

People

“The Infinite has to be a relative concept. Go any distance: an infinite space means that there is more to be explored.”

Joseph Silk (1942) British-American astronomer

The Infinite Cosmos, Page 1

“The very idea of a near-infinite array of universes made his head swim.”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Source: The Skin Map (2010), p. 212

Idea, Universe

“I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos – in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever – was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

The Fuller Memorandum (2010)
The Laundry Files

God, Truth, Waiting

“Adieu, the city's ceaseless hum,
The haunts of sensual life, adieu!
Green fields, and silent glens we come,
To spend this bright spring-day with you.Whether the hills and vales shall gleam
With beauty, is for us to choose;
For leaf and blossom, rock and stream,
Are coloured with the spirit's hues.Here, to the seeking soul, is brought
A nobler view of human fate,
And higher feeling, higher thought,
And glimpses of a higher state.Through change of time, on sea and shore,
Serenely nature smiles away;
Yon infinite blue sky bends o'er
Our world, as at the primal day.The self-renewing earth is moved
With youthful life each circling year;
And flowers that Ceres' daughter loved
At Enna, now are blooming here.Glad nature will this truth reveal,
That God is ours and we are His.
O friends, my friends! what joy to feel
That He our loving Father is!”

James Aldrich (1810–1856) American editor and minor poet

A Spring-Day Walk.

Love, Life, God, Fate

“As for myself, if I could have removed my doubts by so simple a step as that of becoming an atheist, I should have done it, no matter what scandal or punishment had followed. I studied the subject thoroughly, and found that for one doubt removed, another was raised, only to reach at last a result more inconceivable than that reached by the church, and infinitely more hopeless besides. What do you gain by getting rid of one incomprehensible only to put a greater one in its place, and throw away your only hope besides? The atheists offer no sort of bargain for one's soul. Their scheme is all loss and no gain. At last both they and I come back to a confession of ignorance; the only difference between us is that my ignorance is joined with a faith and hope.”

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

The Rev. Stephen Hazard in Ch. X
Esther: A Novel (1884)

Faith, Hope, Soul, Study

“What we, thanks to Jung, call "synchronicity" (coincidence on steroids), Buddhists have long known as "the interpenetration of realities." Whether it's a natural law of sorts or simply evidence of mathematical inevitability (an infinite number of monkeys locked up with an infinite number of typewriters eventually producing Hamlet, not to mention Tarzan of the Apes), it seems to be as real as it is eerie.”

Tom Robbins (1932) American writer

The Syntax of Sorcery (2012)

Law, Mathematics, Nature, Reality

““Violence and materialism will become so widespread that from them will come weariness and disgust: and from the execution block a passionate yearning will rise to withdraw one’s spirit from any collaboration with that error, and to at once initiate, starting with ourselves (which is the first progress), a new way to relate to life: the feeling that the world is alien to us if we have to stay in it without love, without an infinite opening of one towards the other, without a unity above so many differences and so much suffering…This is the present threshold of history.”

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

Hymn

Love, Life, World, Way

“It is enough to have been created, to have embodied for a moment the infinite and tumultuously creative spirit. It is infinitely more than enough to have been used, to have been the rough sketch for some perfected creation.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 164)

Perfection

“If stability and efficiency required that there existed markets that extended infinitely far into the future — and these markets clearly did not exist — what assurance do we have of the stability and efficiency of the capitalist system?”

Joseph E. Stiglitz (1943) American economist and professor, born 1943.

Autobiographical Essay (2001)

Future

“I very firmly believe that what unites America today is infinitely more important than those things which divide us. We are united Americans — North, East, West, and South, both parties — in our desire for peace, peace with honor, the kind of a peace that will last, and we are moving swiftly toward that great goal, not just in Vietnam, but a new era of peace in which the old relationships between the two super powers, the Soviet Union and the United States, and between the world's most populous nation, the People's Republic of China, and the United States, are changed so that we are on the eve of what could be the greatest generation of peace, true peace for the whole world, that man has ever known.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1970s, Remarks on Being Reelected (1972)

People, World, Peace, Change

“Such death makes happier end
than conquests of huge realms or infinite gold.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Felice e cotal morte e scempio,
Via più ch' acquisto di province e d'oro.
Canto VIII, stanza 44 (tr. Wickert)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Death

“And now I am obliged to tell you what it is that clearly distinguishes Futurism from anarchism.
The latter, denying the infinite principle of human evolution, brings its forward-looking viewpoint to a halt in the ideal of universal peace, a stupid paradise of people caressing in open fields or beneath billowing palm trees.
We, instead, affirm that one of Futurism’s absolute principles is the continuous development and unending progress, both bodily and intellectual, of man.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

1910's, War, the Only Hygiene of the World' (1911)
Source: Poggi, Christine, and Laura Wittman, eds. Futurism: An Anthology. Yale University Press, 2009. p. 84

People, Stupidity, Peace, Tree

“Although the loose will be more loose (yet) possibly being at more liberty they may be put upon consideration and choice of ways of life and peace, yet, however, it is infinitely better that the profane and loose be unmasked than to be muffled up under the veil and hood of traditional hypocrisy, which turns and dulls the very edge of all conscience either toward God or man.”

Roger Williams (theologian) (1603–1684) English Protestant theologian and founder of the colony of Providence Plantation

The Hireling Ministry, None of Christ's (1652)

Life, God, Peace, Way

Quotes about infinite page 8

Quotes about infinite
page 8