Quotes about intensity (951 quotes, page 5)

“When I talk to people about how to design a carbon price, I think the model is British Columbia. You raise electricity prices by $100 a year, but then the government gives back a dividend that lowers internet prices by $100 year. In real terms, you’re raising the price of carbon goods but lowering the prices of non-carbon-intensive goods.”

William D. Nordhaus (1941) American economist

"After Nobel in Economics, William Nordhaus Talks About Who’s Getting His Pollution-Tax Ideas Right: A few governments — notably, parts of Canada and South Korea — have adapted his ideas in ways that frame them as a financial windfall for taxpayers." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/climate/nordhaus-carbon-tax-interview.html The New York Times. Oct. 13, 2018.

People , Thinking

“I'm not quite sure that I know how they complement each other, because I use them for the opposite reason. I find music to be an intensely personal kind of thing, perhaps it's because I write a lot of the stuff. I use acting to escape from being me, and I use music to explore being me. I think that's the best way to put it.”

Colleen Fitzpatrick (1972) American singer and actress

Asked how dancing & music complement each other
Attributed

Music , Way , Thinking , Personality

“The intensity of my feelings was reinforced by other events of the late '60s: the riots, the marches, the sense that something had to be done, done quickly to resolve the issue of race. In college there was an air of excitement, apprehension and anger. We started the Black Students Union. We protested. We worked in the Free Breakfast Program. We would walk out of school in the winter of 1969 in protest.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

School , Feeling , Sense , Winter

“We dig up what is left of life crushed to carbon beneath us, and we burn it: to make important things, really—hospital intensive care units, synthetically derived insulin and steel beams for the new high school library. But we burn it for nothing, too, really, for vanity and emptiness.”

Laurie Zoloth (1950) American ethicist

"Interrupting Your Life: An Ethics for the Coming Storm" (2014)

Life , School

“When every worldly thought is utterly forsaken,
Comes the starry midnight, felt by life's gifted few;
Then will the spirit from its earthly sleep awaken
To a being more intense, more spiritual and true.
So doth the soul awaken,
Like that youth to night's fair queen!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1837-1) (Vol. 49) Subjects for Pictures. Third Series. I. The Awakening of Endymion
The Monthly Magazine

Life , Youth , Soul , Sleep

“A more structured connection with the mass is needed, and we must improve it in the course of the coming years. But as far as initiatives originating in the upper strata of the government are concerned, we are currently utilizing the almost intuitive method of sounding out general reactions to the great problems we confront.
In this Fidel is a master. His own special way of fusing himself with the people can be appreciated only by seeing him in action. At the great public mass meetings one can observe something like the dialogue of two tuning forks whose vibrations interact, producing new sounds. Fidel and the mass begin to vibrate together in a dialogue of growing intensity until they reach the climax in an abrupt conclusion crowned by our cry of struggle and victory.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

People , Way , Problem , Victory

“In my eighteenth year, my father sent me to the University of Gottingen. The first winter I did not leave the Anatomical School, and although I gave myself up to the most intense study, I willingly entered into all the gaities and amusements so much sought by German students, but avoided carefully debaucheries of any kind; they gave me the cognomen, Half Benommist, owing to my puerile look and feeble and weak voice. Unzer and Ebeling, two students in physic, took me under their powerful protection, and extricated me out of many scrapes.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

School , Study , Winter

“The Gay International and its activities are largely responsible for the intensity of this repressive campaign.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Ibid., on the "Queen Boat Affair", p.184.
Desiring Arabs

“I went vegetarian after watching Earthlings. I had no idea how intense and how horrible factory farms are. I have such a love for animals that I can’t justify having their heads cut off for me. And the slavery of the dairy industry motivates me to go more vegan. I can’t justify animal slavery for my enjoyment. … I feel stronger than I’ve ever been, mentally, physically, and emotionally. My plant-based diet has opened up more doors to being an athlete. It’s a whole other level that I’m elevating to. I stopped eating animals about a year ago, and it’s a new life. I feel like a new person, a new athlete.”

Hannah Teter (1987) snowboarder

"Hannah Teter, Gold-Medal Snowboarder, Carves a Meaningful Life", interview with the HuffPost (21 April 2010) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/avital-binshtock/hannah-teter-gold-medal-s_b_468137.html.

Love , Life , Feeling , Motivation

“I’ve always chosen all my own material; no one ever told me what to sing or how to sing it, but I’ve always been pressured intensely to use musicians outside of my band.”

Jane Monheit (1977) American singer

Toronto Star (11/11/2010) commenting on her first seven studio albums.

Singing

“For 40 years, I didn't miss a single deadline, but since July, I have missed every one. I also, to my intense disappointment, missed the Telluride and Toronto film festivals. Having just written my first review since June (The Queen), I think an update is in order.”

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

"Roger writes to readers" Chicago Sun Times (11 October 2006) http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/roger-writes-to-readers

Disappointment , Thinking

“We need to fully feel and express our emotions without worrying that they are likely to cause harm to another. But intensely and obsessively brooding on one's anger or resentment is not a good thing to do.”

Starhawk (1951) American author, activist and Neopagan

The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979)

Feeling , Anger

“It's hard to explain but I have a need to play intensely every day, to fight every match hard. And this desire never to stop fighting is something else I learnt in the place where I grew up.”

Zinedine Zidane (1972) French association football player and manager

Interview, 2004 http://www.theguardian.com/football/2004/apr/04/sport.features

Fight

“The less democratic a country is, the move intense its foreign violence.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 109

Country

“Analytical philosophy was very interesting. It always struck me as being very interesting and full of tremendous intellectual curiosities. It is wonderful to see the mind at work in such an intense manner, but, for me, it was still too far removed from my own issues.”

Cornel West (1953) African-American philosopher and political/civil rights activist

Interview in African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations (1998) edited by George Yancy, p. 35

“It is claimed that the Russian stove is seldom plagued with creosote build-up. If this is so, the reason may have more to do with the stove's operation than with its large ducts. Any masonry stove operates best when its fire is hot, and when fuel burns rapidly in a single, intense conflagration.”

Ken Kern American writer

p, 125
Ken Kern's Masonry Stove (1983)

“His poor marksmanship must be taken into account. We have just won the most terrible war in history, yet here is a Frenchman who misses his target 6 out of 7 times at point-blank range. Of course, this fellow must be punished for the careless use of a dangerous weapon and for poor marksmanship. I suggest that he be locked up for eight years, with intensive training in a shooting gallery.”

Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) French politician

Arguing against seeking the death penalty for the anarchist who had attempted to assassinate him on 19 February 1919, shooting at him seven times and hitting him only once in the chest, as quoted in A Time for Angels : The Tragicomic History of the League of Nations (1975) by Elmer Bendine, p. 106
Prime Minister

War , History , Time , Training

“The alphabet, when pushed to a high degree of abstract visual intensity, became typography. The printed word with its specialist intensity burst the bonds of medieval corporate guilds and monasteries, created extreme individualist patterns of enterprise and monopoly.”

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

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 23

“The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts…Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"The Secular Scripture" and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991, p. 164
"Quotes"

People , Art

“A plan of large size can be made a reality either by an intensely capitalistic method of development or by a genuinely socialistic approach. The Capitalistic way is ruled out by the fact that the political conditions are wholly incompatible with it, and a pursuit of this method may lead to a political breakdown.”

Gulzarilal Nanda (1898–1998) Prime Minister of India

Source: Gulzarilal Nanda: A Life in the Service of the People, p.32.

Way , Reality

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

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

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

Music , Appearance , Time , Success

“The Greek world cherished no such national religious hope as the prophets had ingrained in Jewish thought; on the other hand it was intensely interested in the future life for the individual, and in the ascetic triumph over flesh and matter. Thus the idea which had been the centre of Christ's thought was not at all the centre of the Church's thought, and even the comprehension of his meaning was lost and overlaid.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.2 The Social Aims of Jesus, p. 55

Life , World , Hope , Idea

“Southern slave owners constantly agitated in the 1850s for state centralization of economic activities that would promote slave agriculture: state-sponsored agricultural surveys, state-subsidized agricultural periodicals, and state investment in railroads (at more than twice the rate of Northern state assistance) which would unite the South and the West and encourage more intensive cotton cultivation. They were, as historian John Majewski remarks, the forerunners of the "southern Progressives of the early twentieth century."”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Bullwhip Feudalism (2018)

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

Aberjhani (1957) author

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

Love , Music , Nature , Suffering

“You can see the roughness of structure and the spots like wounds from battles on the canvas. The tops of skyscrapers with windows like eyes constantly remind you that there are laws surrounding the wastelands, and so you hide in the deep grass when you make love to a girl in dirty clothes, and experience how your nerves of seeing become stronger and stronger and every little sound more and more intense. That's what Pasolini's poetry is partly about; he was a street guy and therefore I avoided beautiful new wood or metal for his sculpture... The wasteland was Pasolini's other side; the boys, the knives, the nights, the tensions.”

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

Appel is referring to the Italian movie-maker Pasolini
Source: Karel Appel – the complete sculptures,' (1990), pp. 75-77 'Quotes', K. Appel (1989)

Love , Making love , Law , Beauty

“The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity; of Spenser, remoteness; of Milton, elevation; of Shakespeare, every thing.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

Lectures on the English Poets http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16209/16209.txt (1818), Lecture III, "On Shakespeare and Milton"

“A painter who loves his art must be careful not to see too much of critics and men of letters. These gentlemen, however unconsciously, distort everything, thinking that they are explaining it—the artist's thought, sensibility, and intensions. They take away his strength, just as Delilah took away Samson's. They have no gift for nuances, and they have an instinctive aversion for everything that is beyond their reach and baffles them.”

Georges Rouault (1871–1958) French painter

Soliloques. (1944)
Quotes, 1940-1950

Love , Men , Art , Thinking

“It remains true that Michelangelo's intensely personal use of the nude greatly altered its character. He changed it from a means of embodying ideas to a means of expressing emotions; he transformed it from the world of living to the world of becoming. And he projected his world of the imagination with such unequaled artistic power that its shadow fell on every male nude in art for three hundred and fifty years. Painters either imitated his heroic poses and proportions or they reacted against them self-consciously and sought a new repertoire of attitudes in the art of fifth-century Greece. In the nineteenth century the ghost of Michelangelo was still posing the models in art schools.”

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

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. V: Energy

World , School , Art , Imagination

“The long-range trend toward federal regulation, which found its beginnings in the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Sherman Act of 1890, which was quickened by a large number of measures in the Progressive era, and which has found its consummation in our time, was thus at first the response of a predominantly individualistic public to the uncontrolled and starkly original collectivism of big business. In America the growth of the national state and its regulative power has never been accepted with complacency by any large part of the middle-class public, which has not relaxed its suspicion of authority, and which even now gives repeated evidence of its intense dislike of statism. In our time this growth has been possible only under the stress of great national emergencies, domestic or military, and even then only in the face of continuous resistance from a substantial part of the public. In the Progressive era it was possible only because of widespread and urgent fear of business consolidation and private business authority. Since it has become common in recent years for ideologists of the extreme right to portray the growth of statism as the result of a sinister conspiracy of collectivists inspired by foreign ideologies, it is perhaps worth emphasizing that the first important steps toward the modern organization of society were taken by arch-individualists — the tycoons of the Gilded Age — and that the primitive beginning of modern statism was largely the work of men who were trying to save what they could of the eminently native Yankee values of individualism and enterprise.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955), Chapter VI, part II, p. 233

Men , Age , Fear , Business

“The most powerful figure in French politics after the retirement of Clemenceau was ex-President Poincaré. He disliked the Treaty [of Versailles] intensely. For several years after the withdrawal of Clemenceau, the policy of France was dominated by this rather sinister little man. He represented the vindictive and arrogant mood of the governing classes in France immediately after her terrible sacrifices and her astounding victory. He directly and indirectly governed France for years. All the Premiers who followed after Clemenceau feared Poincaré. Millerand was his creature. Briand, who was all for the League and a policy of appeasement, was thwarted at every turn by the intrigues of Poincaré. Under his influence, which continued for years after his death, the League became not an instrument of peace and goodwill amongst all men, including Germans; it was converted into an organisation for establishing on a permanent footing the military and thereby the diplomatic supremacy of France. That policy completely discredited the League as a body whose decisions on disputes between nations might be trusted to be as impartial as those of any ordinary tribunal in any civilised country. The obligations entered into by the Allies as to disarmament were not fulfilled. British Ministers put up no fight against the betrayal of the League and the pledges as to disarmament. Hence the Nazi Revolution, which has for the time—maybe for a long time—destroyed the hopes of a new era of peaceful co-operation amongst free nations.”

Raymond Poincaré (1860–1934) 10th President of the French Republic

David Lloyd George, The Truth about the Peace Treaties. Volume II (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), p. 1410.
About

Death , Men , Fear , Peace

“I do not think that any sorrow of youth or manhood equalled in intensity or duration the black and hopeless misery which followed the wrench of transference from a happy home to a school.”

Henry George Liddell (1811–1898) Headmaster, lexicographer, classical scholar, and dean

Source: Colin Gordon, Beyond the Looking Glass (1982), P.29.

Youth , School , Home , Thinking

““Murder is born in love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder.” (Garden of Tortures)”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

Love

“The Tungans, more than the Han, are the enemy of our people. Today our people are already free from the oppression of the Han, but still continue under Tungan subjugation. We must still fear the Han, but cannot not fear the Tungans also. The reason we must be careful to guard against the Tungans, we must intensely oppose, cannot afford to be polite. Since the Tungans have compelled us, we must be this way. Yellow Han people have not the slightest thing to do with Eastern Turkestan. Black Tungans also do not have this connection. Eastern Turkestan belongs to the people of Eastern Turkestan. There is no need for foreigners to come be our fathers and mothers…From now on we do not need to use foreigners language, or their names, their customs, habits, attitudes, written language, etc. We must also overthrow and drive foreigners from our boundaries forever. The colors yellow and black are foul. They have dirtied our land for too long. So now it is absolutely necessary to clean out this filth. Take down the yellow and black barbarians! Long live Eastern Turkestan!”

Sabit Damulla Abdulbaki (1883–1934) First Prime Minister of the Turkish Islamic Republic of Eastern Turkistan, Uyghur statesman, politician,phi…

Zhang, Xinjiang Fengbao Qishinian [Xinjiang in Tumult for Seventy Years], 3393-4.

People , Fear , Color , Way

“It is difficult to describe how it feels to gaze at living human beings whom you’ve seen perform in hard-core porn. To shake the hand of a man whose precise erectile size, angle, and vasculature are known to you. That strange I-think-we’ve-met-before sensation one feels upon seeing any celebrity in the flesh is here both intensified and twisted. It feels intensely twisted to see reigning industry queen Jenna Jameson chilling out at the Vivid booth in Jordaches and a latex bustier and to know already that she has a tattoo of a sundered valentine with the tagline HEART BREAKER on her right buttock and a tiny hairless mole just left of her anus.”

David Foster Wallace book Consider the Lobster

Big Red Son, p. 16
Consider the Lobster (2007)

Feeling , Thinking , Heart , Tattoo

“Intensive research in recent years into the sources of economic growth among both developing and developed nations generally point to a number of important factors: the state of knowledge and skill of a population; the degree of control over indigenous natural resources; the quality of a country's legal system, particularly a strong commitment to a rule of law and protection of property rights; and yes, the extent of a country's openness to trade with the rest of the world. For the United States, arguably the most important factor is the type of rule of law under which economic activity takes place. When asked abroad why the United States has become the most prosperous large economy in the world, I respond, with only mild exaggeration, that our forefathers wrote a constitution and set in motion a system of laws that protects individual rights, especially the right to own property. Nonetheless, the degree of state protection is sometimes in dispute. But by and large, secure property rights are almost universally accepted by Americans as a critical pillar of our economy. While the right of property in the abstract is generally uncontested in all societies embracing democratic market capitalism, different degrees of property protection do apparently foster different economic incentives and outcomes.”

Alan Greenspan (1926) 13th Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States

Alan Greenspan (2004) The critical role of education in the nation's economy.
2000s

World , Law , Nature , Knowledge

“Opinion is steadily inclining towards making the division of labor an imperative rule of conduct, to present it as a duty. Those who shun it are not punished precise penalty fixed by law, it is true; but they are blamed. The time has passed when the perfect man was he who appeared interested in everything without attaching himself exclusively to anything, capable of tasting and understanding everything finding means to unite and condense in himself all that was most exquisite in civilization. … We want activity, instead of spreading itself over a large area, to concentrate and gain in intensity what it loses in extent. We distrust those excessively mobile talents that lend themselves equally to all uses, refusing to choose a special role and keep to it. We disapprove of those men whose unique care is to organize and develop all their faculties, but without making any definite use of them, and without sacrificing any of them, as if each man were sufficient unto himself, and constituted an independent world. It seems to us that this state of detachment and indetermination has something anti-social about it. The praiseworthy man of former times is only a dilettante to us, and we refuse to give dilettantism any moral value; we rather see perfection in the man seeking, not to be complete, but to produce; who has a restricted task, and devotes himself to it; who does his duty, accomplishes his work. “To perfect oneself,” said Secrétan, “is to learn one's role, to become capable of fulfilling one's function... The measure of our perfection is no longer found in our complacence with ourselves, in the applause of a crowd, or in the approving smile of an affected dilettantism, but in the sum of given services and in our capacity to give more.””

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) French sociologist (1858-1917)

[Le principe de la morale, p. 189] … We no longer think that the exclusive duty of man is to realize in himself the qualities of man in general; but we believe he must have those pertaining to his function. … The categorical imperative of the moral conscience is assuming the following form: Make yourself usefully fulfill a determinate function.
Source: The Division of Labor in Society (1893), pp. 42-43.

Men , World , Law , Penalty

“For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad of tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves…. I would like to hold them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stopping one, there would only remain in my hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Nausea (1938)

Death , Birth , Chance

“The idea of a terrorist attack that assaults innocent human beings in a building or a mall or a restaurant is bad enough. Yet the terrorist mind that looks at a passenger plane and sees the fuel and the intensity of the blast, and sees the rocket engines that will carry it into the heart of destruction like a cruise missile, but who does not see the humanity of one single soul on that airplane, is the chilling truth of what we're up against.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Black America's Political Action Committee (BAMPAC), September 25, 2001. http://renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/01_09_25bampac.htm.
2009

Truth , Soul , Idea , Heart

“There is an inconvenience which attends all abstruse reasoning. That it may silence, without convincing an antagonist, and requires the same intense study to make us sensible of its force, that was at first requisite for its invention. When we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, its conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning; and 'tis difficult for us to retain even that conviction, which we had attain'd with difficulty.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 1, Section 1
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 3: Of morals

Life , Study , Silence , Appearance

“I intensely dislike the job of butchering a farm animal. The pig we butchered today squealed unmercifully when it was shot. It thought we were going to feed it but instead it received a bullet to its brain. Eating animals is so uncivilized, I am beginning to understand why GB Shaw, Tolstoy and Albert Einstein are vegetarians…”

Virgil John Tangborn (1920–1944)

March 4, 1942

Understanding , Animals

“"Is it agreeable?" somebody asked.
"Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "it just is." Istigkeit - wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy - except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were - a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

page 4-5
The Doors of Perception (1954)

Life , Flowers , Mathematics , Idea

“The modern world inherits the Christian view in which salvation is played out in history. In Christian myth human events follow a design known only to God; the history of humankind is an ongoing story of redemption. This is an idea that informs virtually all of western thought – not least when it is intensely hostile to religion. From Christianity onwards, human salvation would be understood (at least in the west) as involving movement through time. All modern philosophies in which history is seen as a process of human emancipation – whether through revolutionary change or incremental improvement – are garbled versions of this Christian narrative, itself a garbled version of the original message of Jesus.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Faith of Puppets: The Revelation of Philip K. Dick (p. 60)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

God , Hostility , World , Religion

“As I was painting today, some thoughts came to me and I want to write them down for the people I love. I know that I shall not live very long. But I wonder, is that sad? Is a celebration more beautiful because it lasts longer? And my life is a celebration, a short, intense celebration.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In her Journal-entry, 26 July 1900; as quoted in Tromp M, Ravelli AC, Reitsma JB, Bonsel GJ, Mol BW: Increasing maternal age at first pregnancy planning: health outcomes and associated costs, in: 'J Epidemiol Community Health', Dec. 2010, p. 4
1900 - 1905

Love , Life , People , Sadness

“That blind attitude of the Society of Knowledge is similar in all to the proud consideration that "our language is better because it’s understood."
Just that with a completely tragic intensity, that could be translated like this: "our dead are true because they hurt."”

Jorge Majfud (1969) Uruguayan-American writer

"Collateral Effects" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HvdjRCajZU, from the book Words Can (2007) United Nations Children Fund, UNICEF]

Knowledge , Hurt , Dead

“Mysticism is the realisation of God, of the Universal Self. It is attained either as a realisation of God outside the Mystic, or within himself. In the first case, it is usually reached from within a religion, by exceptionally intense love and devotion, accompanied by purity of life, for only "the pure in heart shall see God."”

Annie Besant (1847–1933) British socialist, theosophist, women's rights activist, writer and orator

Annie Besant Quotes

Love , Life , God , Religion

“…"all these criticisms fade like morning mist before Howard’s headlong rush of action, his rainbow-tinted prose, the intensity with which he wrote his own feelings into his stories, and, above all, his Hyborian world – that splendid creation – which ranks with Burroughs' Barsoom and Tolkien's Middle Earth as a major fictional achievement."”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

~ L. Sprague de Camp, Dark Valley Destiny, p. 295, 1983, ISBN 0312940742
About

World , Feeling

“On Friday, April 27th, he took a walk in the afternoon. That night he fell violently ill. He remained conscious and when informed by the doctor that he could ‘live only a few days, he exclaimed ‘Good!’ Before losing consciousness he said to Mrs. Bevan (who was with him throughout the night) ‘Tell them I've had a wonderful life!’ By ‘them’ he undoubtedly meant his close friends. When I think of his profound pessimism, the intensity of his mental and moral suffering, the relentless way in which he drove his intellect, his need for love together with the harshness that repelled love, I am inclined to believe that his life was fiercely unhappy. Yet at the end he himself exclaimed that it had been ‘wonderful’! To me this seems a mysterious and strangely moving utterance.”

Norman Malcolm (1911–1990) American philosopher

Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 1958

Love , Life , Way , Thinking

“To many Americans, whose only knowledge of the North Star State is that it is intensely cold and populated by Swedes and Holsteins, it will come as a surprise to wake up one morning in 2004 and read in the newspaper, "Half of U. S. Economy Now in Hands of Minnesota."”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

"Minnesota's Sensible Plan, TIME (11 September 1995) http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/features/deskofgk/950911_time.shtml

Star , Knowledge , Reading

“To my mind, the great strength of your Society lies in its recognition of the necessity of discipline. We live in an impatient age. We demand results, and demand them at once. We find a long and laborious process very irksome, and are constantly seeking for a short cut. But there is no easy method of securing discipline. It is axiomatic that there is no royal road to learning. The effort for discipline must be intensive, and to a considerable degree it must be lifelong. But it is absolutely necessary, if there is to be any self-direction or any self-control. The worst evil that could be inflicted upon the youth of the land would be to leave them without restraint and completely at the mercy of their own uncontrolled inclinations. Under such conditions education would be impossible, and all orderly development intellectually or morally would be hopeless. I do not need to picture the result. We know too well what weakness and depravity follow when the ordinary processes of discipline are neglected.”

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

1920s, Authority and Religious Liberty (1924)

Youth , Age , Education , Effort

“Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological anesthesia as regards Jill's magical importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs are among the wonders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles toward a union with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he also is afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way of taking it - so importantly - is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again! Where would any of us be, were there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay us for our insight by making recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

"What Makes a Life Significant?"
1910s, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals (1911)

Life , Truth , Way , Feeling

“Now one of the interesting facts here with respect to intermarriage, and our time is just about up and we will conclude in a moment, is this; that historically, whenever you have had two peoples close together, and one in a position of power and the other in a position of either slavery or inferiority, it takes only a very short time for the two races to merge, no matter how great the hatred between them. Thus, when the Normans took England, there was nothing more hateful to the Anglo Saxon peoples of England than a Norman. And yet, because they were of comparable ability, in spite of that intense hatred, they did merge, ultimately. But when you find two peoples of very different intellectual and cultural levels close together, they can be together generation after generation, and the amount of merging is very slight. So that there is no disappearing of one as against the other. This is why the Negro did not disappear in the South. Had the slaves been, say of another racial group, it would not have taken more than a hundred years of slavery for the two groups to have merged. But you had a couple of hundred years of slavery in the south, and the Negro did not disappear. So this is the remarkable fact. As a result, when you hear stories told about how the Negro women were exploited and so on, these stories tend to be exaggerations. As a matter of fact, the truth was usually the other way, it was very difficult to raise children in the south, or to rear children in the south, because one way of promotion was to capture the interest of a white boy or a white man. Now this goes counter to the Marxist thesis, but when you study the history of the west you discover that one of the best things that ever happened incidentally to the morality of the upper classes was modern inventions which abolished the need for servants in the home. Because one of the major problems that existed was the seduction of the boys and the men in a household by servant girls.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, The Law of Divorce (n.d.)

Women , Men , Hate , Children

“Like an adventure who was asked why he climbed the mountain and answered, “Because it's there!” I think our culture has developed this intense love-hate relationship with risk, in part because it's always there.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 48

Love , Hate , Mountain , Thinking

“Stevens’s poetry makes one understand how valuable it can be for a poet to write a great deal. Not too much of that great deal, ever, is good poetry; but out of quantity can come practice, naturalness, accustomed mastery, adaptations and elaborations and reversals of old ways, new ways, even—so that the poet can put into the poems, at the end of a lifetime, what the end of a lifetime brings him. Stevens has learned to write at will, for pleasure; his methods of writing, his ways of imagining, have made this possible for him as it is impossible for many living poets—Eliot, for instance. Anything can be looked at, felt about, meditated upon, so Stevens can write about anything; he does not demand of his poems the greatest concentration, intensity, dramatic immediacy, the shattering and inexplicable rightness the poet calls inspiration.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 65
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Pleasure , Way , Imagination , Understanding

“M: If you cannot impress people simply by being part of the great fat human race, then you really do have to develop other skills. And if you don't impress people by the way you look, then you really do have to develop other skills. And if you are now going to ask is everything I did just a way to gain some form of attention, well that's not entirely true. It is in a small way, but that's in the very nature of being alive.
PM: Wanting to be loved?
M: To be seen, above all else. I wanted to be noticed, and the way I lived and do live has a desperate neurosis about it because of that. All humans need a degree of attention. Some people get it at the right time, when they are 13 or 14, people get loved at the right stages. If this doesn't happen, if the love isn't there, you can quite easily just fade away. … In a sense I always felt that being troubled as a teenager was par for the course. I wasn't sure that I was dramatically unique. I knew other people who were at the time desperate and suicidal. They despised life and detested all other living people. In a way that made me feel a little bit secure. Because I thought, well, maybe I'm not so intense after all. Of course, I was. I despised practically everything about human life, which does limit one's weekend activities”

Morrissey (1959) English singer

From "Wilde child", interview by Paul Morley, Blitz (April 1988).
In interviews etc., About himself and his work

Love , Life , People , Way

“I do love gymnastics, but it's such an intense sport and you have to be so committed. It's such a commitment that it's really hard to do anything else other than gymnastics as people progress.”

AnnaSophia Robb (1993) American actress, singer, and model

Radio Free Entertainment interview (2007)

Love , People , Sport

“It was an axiom of "containment" that no part of the known world could be considered neutral. "Neutralism" was among the Cold Warriors' gravest curse words, applied with caustic hostility to India and even France. Those who were not with were against, subjected to intense economic and ideological — and sometimes military — pressure to fall into line.”

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

"How Neo-Conservatives Perish" (1990).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

Hostility , World , Parting

“There's an ideological fervor about this prosecution that's almost religious in its intensity, because let's be clear, this is a heresy trial by any other name. They can't refute Mr. Wilders' statements, so instead they've resorted to the kind of cheap legal stunt we'd expect from the likes of Mugabe to shut their opponent up. They've accused him of being divisive and inflammatory, and yes, sometimes the truth can be divisive and inflammatory if it has been suppressed for long enough and has become sufficiently taboo, as it clearly has in the Netherlands, because according to the prosecution it doesn't even matter that what he says is true; what matters is that it's illegal. Well, when the truth is against the law, then there's something seriously wrong with the law, because when the truth is no defence, there is no defence, and the law has no anchor, so it will drift wherever the wind of political expedience blows, and this week it blew straight into a crooked courtroom in Amsterdam, where justice will now be made to fight for its life, starved of the oxygen of truth that gives it life.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

On the trial of Geert Wilders, "The crooked judges of Amsterdam" (5 February 2010) http://youtube.com/watch?v=96ZUZ9CPZII
2010

Life , Truth , Justice , Law

“The only difference between an artist and a lunatic is, perhaps, that the artist has the restraint or courtesy…to conceal the intensity of his obsession from all except those similarly afflicted.”

Osbert Sitwell (1892–1969) British baronet

Noble Essences, Bk. IX, ch. 7 (1950).

Affliction

“It excites world wonder in the Parliamentary countries that we should build a Chamber, starting afresh, which can only seat two-thirds of its Members. It is difficult to explain this to those who do not know our ways. They cannot easily be made to understand why we consider that the intensity, passion, intimacy, informality and spontaneity of our Debates constitute the personality of the House of Commons and endow it at once with its focus and its strength.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the House of Commons, October 24, 1950 "Motion for Address in Reply" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1950/oct/24/motion-for-address-in-reply#column_2707.
Post-war years (1945–1955)

World , Way , Understanding , Passion

“Ask spiritual questions with intense integrity, and inspiring answers will surely arrive.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

Esoteric Encyclopedia of Eternal Knowledge

Question

“Present at the lunch with Hitler were Hannekan, Best, Pancke, Jodl, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, and Himmler. Ribbentrop was ill at the time. The lunch took three hours and not because it was an elaborate meal. Hitler explained his plans for Denmark and said it could only be made peaceful through intensive countersabotage. In other words, murder and explosion. It shouldn't be kept at all secret. If a Dane who worked for the Nazis was murdered or a Danish factory working for Germany damaged, on the very same day a Danish factory or prominent person should be murdered, and the papers should carry the story prominently the next day. A prominent Danish scientist was murdered by unknown men, or a factory blown up, the papers should read, with satire and irony. In other words, it was not to be made secret anymore. The Danes were to know.”

Rudolf Mildner (1902) Chief of the Gestapo at Katowice

To Leon Goldensohn (12 February 1946). Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Men , Secret , Peace , Time

“You are the special creation of a good and all-powerful God. You are created in His image; with capacities to think, feel, and worship that set you above all other life forms. You differ from the animals not simply in degree but in kind. Not only is your kind unique, but you are unique among you kind. Your Creator loves you so much and so intensely desires you companionship and affection that he has a perfect plan for you life. In addition God gave the life of His only son that you might spend eternity with Him. If you are willing to accept his gift of salvation, you can become a child of God.”

Randy Alcorn (1954) American Protestant author

Quoted in Dinesh D'Souza, What's so Great About Christianity (Regnery, 2007), pp. 15-16

Love , Life , God , Feeling

“His formidable originality within the picture-book convention may not have been altogether apparent to Keeping himself, which is both a strength and a weakness: the strength that he could communicate with unrivalled emotional intensity — but possibly only with one child in twenty; the concomitant weakness is that there was not a lot he could do to broaden this minority appeal and ensure that his books remained in print over longer periods. ~ Douglas Martin in Charles Keeping: an illustrator's life (1993) he is a good auther”

Charles Keeping (1924–1988) British illustrator and children's writer

Life , Books , Communication

“My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know they had.”

Edwin H. Land (1909–1991) American scientist and inventor

"A Talk with Polaroid's Dr. Edwin Land" in Forbes Vol. 115, No. 7 (1 April 1975), p. 49

Life , People

“It is difficult for Britons to realise what Verdun means to France. The world can show no battlefield to correspond to it. On those heights Gaul and Teuton had, from the blizzards of February [1916] to the snows of the following December, been fighting out a racial feud which had existed for thousands of years. The concentrated fury of ages raged and tore, shattered and killed for ten months in one intensive struggle which has no parallel in the history of human savagery. The very road that carried the reinforcements, the guns and the shells that redeemed Verdun, is to this hour for Frenchmen the Via Sacra of their country.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

On the Battle of Verdun, War Memoirs: Volume I (London: Odhams, 1938), p. 875.
War Memoirs

Age , World , History , Rage

“There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

Pain , Art , Suffering , Learning

“Starting from Einstein's theory of general relativity, Oppenheimer and Snyder found solutions… that described what happens to a massive star when it has exhausted its supplies of nuclear energy. The star collapses gravitationally and disappears from the visible universe, leaving behind only an intense gravitational field to mark its presence. The star remains in a state of permanent free fall, collapsing endlessly inward into the gravitational pit without ever reaching the bottom. … In my opinion, the black hole is incomparably the most exciting and the most important consequence of general relativity. But Einstein … was actively hostile to the idea of black holes. … Oddly enough, Oppenheimer too in later life was uninterested in black holes, although… they were his most important contribution to science. … Oppenheimer in his later years believed that the only problem worthy of attention of a serious theoretical physicist was the discovery of fundamental equations of physics. Einstein certainly felt the same way.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Life , Hostility , Way , Star

“… one morning, when it was barely light, I woke up because of a golden light that filled the whole wall above my bed, and I saw something like a picture of the Holy Virgin, surrounded by several other personages … and several angels, some of whom were as big as she, while others were like little children. It was like a tableau, and yet the Holy Virgin was alive, in heaven, and the angels were changing position. I believe this lasted for a very long time. I looked, as if praying without words, and I was struck with amazement; I had never seen anything so beautiful. At the beginning, all of the light was like very vibrant gold; it faded little by little, and, as it faded, the face and the hands of the Holy Virgin became more alive and clearer. I was not frightened in the least but filled with a new joy that was both intense and very sweet.”

Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967) Swiss doctor and mystic

The vision of Mary, p. 166
My Early Years (1968)

Children , Beauty , Angels , Light

“God is all love, and the more we are like Him the more we shall love; the trouble is not in the quantity but the quality of our love. If it were wholly pure, wholly unselfish, it could not be too deep or intense; for all true loving lifts us to a higher plane, bringing us nearer to God and the eternal goodness.”

Arthur Kenney (1776–1855) Irish dean

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 395.

Love , God

“Let the gym be a sanctuary for you to be at peace. Let it calm you and ground you and allow you to appreciate everything around you. Let it also be a place for you to unload and explode with intensity through your training.”

Robert Cheeke (1980) American bodybuilder

Source: Vegan Bodybuilding and Fitness (2010), Ch. 2

Peace , Training

“As with emotionally drawn-out religious initiations, neurobiological studies of stress disorders indicate that subjects become intensely absorbed by sensory displays. The mystical experiences of schizophrenics and temporal lobe epileptics, which may be at the extreme end of the "normal" distribution of religious experience, also exhibit intense sensory activity. These may help to inspire new religions. There is no evidence, however, that more "routine" religious experiences that commit the bulk of humanity to the supernatural have any characteristic pattern of brain activity.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 16
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

Religion , Study , Help

“Rightly or wrongly, football is very definitely tied up with the status of a university. The majority of people who go to college…they don’t get that wider horizon or that better mental equilibrium. But they do get the opportunity. I think the same thing is true about football. While possibly the majority of boys don’t get those subjective values that I mentioned, certainly the opportunity is there, and I think the values they do get are perhaps more intensely brought out than they are in an educational system itself. As far as any activities I have been connected with are concerned, football has given me the opportunity to round out my philosophy and to change my thinking process more than any other activity with which I have been connected.”

Nile Kinnick (1918–1943) College football player

Audio interview (1942)

People , Education , Boy , Thinking

“There are two Americas. One is the America of Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson; the other is the America of Teddy Roosevelt and the modern superpatriots. One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good-humored, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power.”

J. William Fulbright (1905–1995) American politician

Source: The Arrogance of Power (1966), p. 245

Passion

“One should not label a firm as knowledge-intensive unless exceptional and valuable expertise dominates commonplace knowledge.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

Source: Learning by knowledge‐intensive firms," 1992, p. 716
Context: In deciding whether a firm is knowledge-intensive, one ought to weigh its emphasis on esoteric expertise instead of widely shared knowledge. Everybody has knowledge, most of it widely shared, but some idiosyncratic and personal. If one defines knowledge broadly to encompass what everybody knows, every firm can appear knowledge-intensive. One loses the value of focusing on a special category of firms. Similarly, every firm has some unusual expertise. To make the knowledge-intensive firm a useful category, one has to require that exceptional expertise make important contributions. One should not label a firm as knowledge-intensive unless exceptional and valuable expertise dominates commonplace knowledge.

Knowledge

“Religious ritual survives cultural transmission by embedding episodes of intense, life-defining personal experiences in public performances. These performances involve sequential, socially interactive movement and gesture (chant, dance, murmur, sway) and formulaic utterances that rhythmically synchronize affective states among group members in displays of cooperative commitment. This is often accompanied by sensory pageantry, which further helps to emotionally validate and sustain the moral consensus.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 16
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

Life , Help , Dance , Personality

“Making Donkey Punch was all about energy, speed and intense work.”

Olly Blackburn Film director and screenwriter

[Edinburgh International Film Festival, www.edfilmfest.org.uk, http://www.edfilmfest.org.uk/news/2008/06/self-portrait-olly-blackburn, Olly Blackburn, News - Self portrait: Olly Blackburn, 20 June 2008, 23 February 2012]

Speed

“From the earliest days of my pupilage to art I had been instinctively drawn towards the paintings of Turner, Corot, Constable, Bonington, and Watts, with an intense admiration for their manner in viewing, and methods of re-creating, nature upon their canvases; and in later years I had been fascinated by the works of more modern artists, such as La Thangue, George Clausen, Edward Stott, and Robert Meyerheim.”

Wynford Dewhurst (1864–1941) British artist

Source: Impressionist Painting: its genesis and development. (1904), p. vii; Preface.

Art , Nature , Painting

“Its (the Left’s) intensity derives from the fact that it’s a family largely composed of, in a manner of speaking, orphans of bhadralok history (for we hardly hear of the mothers and fathers of party members), brought together not by accident but by idealism and its cousin, ideology. Bonds of orphanhood and kinship are particularly charged (as Kipling showed us in The Jungle Book) when they are self-created, and each party member is probably a bit of everything – mother, father, sibling, friend – to every other member.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

Books , Family , History , Siblings

“I hate race discrimination most intensely and in all its manifestations. I have fought it all during my life; I fight it now, and will do so until the end of my days. Even although I now happen to be tried by one whose opinion I hold in high esteem, I detest most violently the set-up that surrounds me here. It makes me feel that I am a black man in a white man's court. This should not be.”

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

1960s, First court statement (1962)

Life , Hate , Feeling , Fight

“The whole history of lamentation, and mourning, and woe, from the beginning of the world—the funeral ceremonies in which the living symbolize the intensity of their grief—the monuments they rear to tell the world for centuries to come of the calamity they have suffered from the stroke of death—are enduring attestations that it is not so much in the removal of one sentient and living being off the earth, as in the change—the calamitous change to the survivors—that death is truly the King of Terrors.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) (1802–1871) Scottish publisher and writer

Source: Sanitary Economy (1850), p. 13

Death , World , History , Suffering

“Any casual observer of humankind will have been struck by the incongruity with which we may lavish great passion upon the trivial, the frivolous, and the ephemeral or upon collective crusades to which, suddenly and with little reason or reflection, we sacrifice everything. When ordinary men and women, living in the ordinary situations society offers them, move beyond the domain of their most intimate personal relations, they often find little to deserve their surviving intensity—little other than the great historical storms that occasionally sweep them up or fanciful individual escapes that remain disconnected from their daily lives…. A program like the one outlined here remains united to the cause of progressive thought by its emphasis upon the liberation of ordinary people from drudgery and humiliation.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Democracy Realizedː The Progressive Alternative (1998), p. 250-1

Women , Men , People , Passion

“I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about.”

Flann O'Brien book The Third Policeman

The Third Policeman (1967)

Life , Pain , Health , Sadness

“Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

"For a People's Culture." Political Affairs, March 1995.

People , Art , Learning

“The 'dominion of capital' is an accomplished teleological catastrophe, robot rebellion, or shoggothic insurgency, through which intensively escalating instrumentality has inverted all natural purposes into a monstrous reign of the tool.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration" (2014), in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, p. 513

Nature

“It is commonly said that seeing is believing, but feeling is the very truth. I shall, therefore, give the result of my experience of hypnotism in my own person. In the middle of September, 1844, I suffered from a most severe attack of rheumatism, implicating the left side of the neck and chest, and the left arm. At first the pain was moderately severe, and I took some medicine to remove it; but, instead of this, it became more and more violent, and had tormented me for three days, and was so excruciating, that it entirely deprived me of sleep for three nights successively, and on the last of the three nights I could not remain in any one posture for five minutes, from the severity of the pain. On the forenoon of the next day, whilst visiting my patients, every jolt of the carriage I could only compare to several sharp instruments being thrust through my shoulder, neck, and chest. A full inspiration was attended with stabbing pain, such as is experienced in pleurisy. When I returned home for dinner I could neither turn my head, lift my arm, nor draw a breath, without suffering extreme pain. In this condition I resolved to try the effects of hypnotism. I requested two friends, who were present, and who both understood the system, to watch the effects, and arouse me when I had passed sufficiently into the condition; and, with their assurance that they would give strict attention to their charge, I sat down and hypnotised myself, extending the extremities. At the expiration of nine minutes they aroused me, and, to my agreeable surprise, I was quite free from pain, being able to move in any way with perfect ease. I say agreeably surprised, on this account; I had seen like results with many patients; but it is one thing to hear of pain, and another to feel it. My suffering was so exquisite that I could not imagine anyone else ever suffered so intensely as myself on that occasion; and, therefore, I merely expected a mitigation, so that I was truly agreeably surprised to find myself quite free from pain. I continued quite easy all the afternoon, slept comfortably all night, and the following morning felt a little stiffness, but no pain. A week thereafter I had a slight return, which I removed by hypnotising myself once more; and I have remained quite free from rheumatism ever since, now nearly six years.”

James Braid (1795–1860) Scottish surgeon, hypnotist, and hypnotherapist

In “The First Account of Self-Hypnosis Quoted in “The Original Philosophy of Hypnotherapy (from The Discovery of Hypnosis)”.

Pain , Truth , Way , Feeling

“Blessed is the almost insensitive tree,
more blessed is the hard stone that doesn't feel,
for no pain is greater than the pain of being alive,
and no sorrow more intense than conscious life.”

Rubén Darío book Cantos de vida y esperanza

Dichoso el árbol, que es apenas sensitivo,
y más la piedra dura porque esa ya no siente,
pues no hay dolor más grande que el dolor de ser vivo,
ni mayor pesadumbre que la vida consciente.
Cantos de vida y esperanza (1901), "Lo fatal" ("Fatalism")
Quoted in Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1997), p. 305.

Life , Pain , Feeling , Tree

“There is an emerging scientific consensus that global warming is making hurricanes more intense and more destructive. It turns out that Katrina fits into a pattern that scientists and greens have been trying to warn us about for a long time.”

Johann Hari (1979) British journalist

Hurricane Katrina - an environmental 9/11?, JohannHari.com, September 3, 2005, 2007-01-26 http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=661,

Time

“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.
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.
Criticism

Sadness , Feeling , Autumn , Tree

“... published today as a United Nations Special Report. The alleged rise of intelligence in so-called backward countries is ascribed by the scientists who conducted the three-year investigation to improved diet and sanitation, while the as-yet unconfirmed decline in advanced nations is attributed to intensified pollution. Asked to comment on the report just prior to leaving for Hollywood, where he is tonight slated to open his annual retrospective, Prexy said, quote, Well, if they’re so smart why aren’t they clever? End quote. At a press conference in Tegucigalpa the disappearance of Leonard Ross, field agent for Globe Relief, and Dr. Isaiah Williams, the British medico who’s also unaccounted for, was officially ascribed today to terrorism. Troops are searching the area intensively, but so far have reported no success. Following the shock resignation of the former president of the “Save the Med” fund, Dottore Giovanni Crespinolo, the Italian government has flatly denied his charge that the vast sums donated by corporations and individuals in forty-eight countries in the hope of saving the doomed landlocked sea have been embezzled. Reports from Rome, however...”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

January “NO BIGGER THAN A MAN’S HAND”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Hope , Quotes , Search , Intelligence

“Labeling a firm as knowledge-intensive implies that knowledge has more importance than other inputs.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

Source: Learning by knowledge‐intensive firms," 1992, p. 715

Knowledge

“Faced with unmeasurables, people steer their way by magic. Before the invention of navigational instruments, a lady was carved on the prow of the boat to help sailors cross the ocean; and architects, grappling with the intangibles of design, select a guru whose work gives them personal help in areas where there are few rules to follow. The guru, as architectural father figure, is subject to intense hate and love; either way, the relationship is personal, it can only be a one-to-one affair. This accounts for the intensely ad hominem stance of some of ‘Venturi’s’ critics. If the attribution were correct the tone would be more even, as one cannot easily wax emotional over several people. I suspect, too, that for male architects the guru must be male. There can be no Mom and Pop gurus in architecture. The architectural prima donnas are all male.”

Denise Scott Brown (1931) American architect

"Sexism and the star system in architecture"

Love , Hate , People , Way

“Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

Love , Hate , Soul , Freedom

“Our lives are the only meaningful expression of what we believe and in Whom we believe. And the only real wealth, for any of us, lies in our faith. Why do I say this? Faith in a Divine Being, in the Almighty, is the great moving power that can change our lives. With it comes the only lasting comfort and peace of mind. God is our Eternal Father, and He lives. I don't understand the wonder of His majesty; I can't comprehend His glory. But I know that He is intensely interested in our welfare and involved in our lives, that I can speak with Him in prayer, and that He will hear and listen.”

Gordon B. Hinckley book Standing for Something

Standing for Something: Ten Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes.

God , Peace , Faith , Understanding

“You looked so intense. Whatever you were saying, you seemed to mean it, and it wasn't amusing at all. Started quite a fashion. People keep looking for purpose now. Complicates everything.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Treason (1988)

People , Fashion

“However convergent it be, evolution cannot attain to fulfilment on earth except through a point of dissociation. With this we are introduced to a fantastic and inevitable event which now begins to take shape in our perspective, the event which comes nearer with every day that passes: the end of all life on our globe, the death of the planet, the ultimate phase of the phenomenon of man. …
Now when sufficient elements have sufficiently agglomerated, this essentially convergent movement will attain such intensity and such quality that mankind, taken as a whole, will be obliged—as happened to the individual forces of instinct—to reflect upon itself at a single point; that is to say, in this case, to abandon its organo-planetary foothold so as to shift its centre on to the transcendent centre of its increasing concentration. This will be the end and the fulfilment of the spirit of the earth.
The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and its centrality.
The end of the world: the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, fulfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega. …
Are we to foresee man seeking to fulfil himself collectively upon himself, or personally on a greater than himself? Refusal or acceptance of Omega? … Universal love would only vivify and detach finally a fraction of the noosphere so as to consummate it—the part which decided to "cross the threshold", to get outside itself into the other. …
The death of the materially exhausted planet; the split of the noosphere, divided on the form to be given to its unity; and simultaneously (endowing the event with all its significance and with all its value) the liberation of that percentage of the universe which, across time, space and evil, will have succeeded in laboriously synthesising itself to the very end. Not an indefinite progress, which is an hypothesis contradicted by the convergent nature of noogenesis, but an ecstasy transcending the dimensions and the framework of the visible universe.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin book The Phenomenon of Man

pp. 273, 287–289 https://archive.org/stream/ThePhenomenonOfMan/phenomenon-of-man-pierre-teilhard-de-chardin#page/n137/mode/1up/,
The Phenomenon of Man (1955)

Love , Life , Death , God

“In light of knowledge obtained, the happy achievement seems almost a matter of course, and any intelligent student can grasp it without too much trouble. But the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion, and final emergence into light—only those who have experienced it can understand that.”

Albert Einstein book The World as I See It

"Notes on the Origin of the General Theory of Relativity" (1934) Mein Weltbild, in Ideas and Opinions (1954) ed., Carl Seelig.
1930s

Confidence , Search , Intelligence , Understanding

“Leisure lives on affirmation. It […] includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation.
The highest form of affirmation is the festival; and according to Karl Kerenyi, the historian of religion, to festival belong "peace, intensity of life, and contemplation all at once." The holding of a festival means: an affirmation of the basic meaning of the world, and an agreement with it, and in fact it means to live out and fulfil one's inclusion in the world, in an extraordinary manner, different from the everyday.
The festival is the origin of leisure, its inmost and ever-central source. And this festive character is what makes leisure not only "effortless" but the very opposite of effort or toil.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), Leisure, the Basis of Culture, pp. 33–34
The Kerenyi quote is from Karl Kerenyi, Die antike Religion (Amsterdam, 1940), p. 66.

Life , World , Peace , Religion