Quotes about kindness (7466 quotes, page 28)

“With good behavior I'll be out in seven years
Don't worry over me or shed any tears
I've learned a lot in here and I know what a chance I blew
The next time I won't make the same mistake
I'll shoot the camera out too
I'm learning all kinds of things you can do
When you're broke”

Todd Snider (1966) American singer

Broke.
Near Truths and Hotel Rooms (2003)

Behavior , Tear , Learning , Chance

“The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'objects' (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions, - that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 38-39

Feeling , Sleep , Passion

“It is far from easy to determine whether she [Nature] has proved to man a kind parent or a merciless stepmother.”

Pliny the Elder book Natural History

Book VII, sec. 1.
Naturalis Historia

Nature , Parent

“If there's a locked door, I start to make up all kinds of stories about what might be behind it. I feel like it's some kind of secret, and it leads to me making up lies. But if all the doors are open, physically and metaphorically, there's only the one truth.”

Dave Eggers book The Circle

Mae, to Bailey; p. 299
The Circle (2013)

Truth , Secret , Feeling

“To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation — above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself — here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful. There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Across the Plains

Source: Across the Plains (1892), Ch. XII, A Christmas Sermon.

Fate , Family , Hope , Soul

““Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding.” A dry chuckle: “I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal’s wager was right—exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.””

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 9 (“Survivor”), pp. 396-397

Life , Death , Religion , Fashion

“There are many kinds of love, as many kinds of light,
And every kind of love makes a glory in the night.
There is love that stirs the heart, and love that gives it rest,
But the love that leads life upward is the noblest and the best.”

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) American diplomat

Love and Light.

Love , Life , Light , Heart

“The government has to be proactive and prepare for the worst-case scenario. Our farmers have to be given all kinds of assistance to make up for the projected crop losses because of the drying up of farmlands. Our farmers are going to need all the help they can get in the coming months, and national agencies should be ready to work with local governments to pull our farmers through this difficult season.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

The Philippine Star http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2015/08/17/1488983/government-urged-help-farmers-affected-el-nino
2015

Loss , Help , Season

“For this is our central human problem: that we are almost constantly the victims of our emotions, always being swept up and down on a kind of inner-switchback. We possess a certain control over them; we can 'direct our thoughts' -- or feelings -- in such a way as to intensify them. This is certainly our most remarkable human characteristic: imagination. Animals require actual physical stimuli to trigger their experience. A man can retreat into a book -- or a daydream -- and live through certain experiences quite independent of the physical world. He can even, for example, imagine a sexual encounter, and not only experience all the appropriate physical responses, but even the sexual climax. Such a curious ability is far beyond the power of any animal.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: G. I. Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep (1980), p. 23

Books , World , Way , Feeling

“The Land is neither of the Dark nor the Light, nor ever was. Its enchantment was of a separate kind, the magic of the mind and the hand and the eye, that owes no allegiance because it is neither good nor bad. It has no more to do with the behaviour of men, or the great absolutes of the Light and the Dark, than does the blossom of a rose or the curving leap of a fish.”

Susan Cooper (1935) English fantasy writer

Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), Silver on the Tree (1977), Chapter 12 “The Journey” (p. 164)

Men , Fish , Light

“Very often, unfortunately the wrong kind of publicity appears in the press…That happens. Is God free from it? Was Mahatma Gandhi free from it? It’s due to ignorance also. Some of these people deliberately misquote.”

Morarji Desai (1896–1995) Former Indian Finance Minister, Freedom Fighters, Former prime minister

Morarji Desai speaks about life and celibacy

God , People , Appearance

“When I play, it is not for the audience. I play for that superior Power in between the audience and me. There are different kinds of people in the audience, and it is difficult for me to satisfy everyone. I perform for "that Power."”

Hariprasad Chaurasia (1938) Indian bansuri player

If He is satisfied and happy, I feel blessed.
Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia in Hinduism Today

People , Feeling

“Anyone who loves nature, as I do, cries out at the havoc being spread by humans, all over the globe. The pressures of city life can be appalling, as are the moral ambiguities that plague us, both at home and via yammering media. The temptation to seek uncomplicated certainty sends some rushing off to ashrams and crystal therapy, while many dive into the shelter of fundamentalism, and other folk yearn for better, “simpler” times. Certain popular writers urgently prescribe returning to ancient, nobler ways.
Ancient, nobler ways. It is a lovely image... and pretty much a lie. John Perlin, in his book A Forest Journey, tells how each prior culture, from tribal to pastoral to urban, wreaked calamities upon its own people and environment. I have been to Easter Island and seen the desert its native peoples wrought there. The greater harm we do today is due to our vast power and numbers, not something intrinsically vile about modern humankind.
Technology produces more food and comfort and lets fewer babies die. “Returning to older ways” would restore some balance all right, but entail a holocaust of untold proportion, followed by resumption of a kind of grinding misery never experienced by those who now wistfully toss off medieval fantasies and neolithic romances. A way of life that was nasty, brutish, and nearly always catastrophic for women.
That is not to say the pastoral image doesn’t offer hope. By extolling nature and a lifestyle closer to the Earth, some writers may be helping to create the very sort of wisdom they imagine to have existed in the past. Someday, truly idyllic pastoral cultures may be deliberately designed with the goal of providing placid and just happiness for all, while retaining enough technology to keep existence decent.
But to get there the path lies forward, not by diving into a dark, dank, miserable past. There is but one path to the gracious, ecologically sound, serene pastoralism sought by so many. That route passes, ironically, through successful consummation of this, our first and last chance, our scientific age.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Afterword (p. 563)
Glory Season (1993)

Love , Life , Wisdom , Women

“I suppose I’ve been knocking on heaven’s door for about 11 years now, with one sort of high or another. The only kinds of drugs I use, though, are ones that keep me working for longer periods of time. I haven’t gotten involved in anything heavy since ’68. I had a silly flirtation with smack then, but it was only for the mystery and enigma of trying it. I never really enjoyed it at all. I like fast drugs. I’ve said that many times. I hate falling out, where I can’t stand up and stuff. It seems like such a waste of time. I hate downs and slow drugs like grass. I hate sleep. I would much prefer staying up, just working, all the time. It makes me so mad that we can’t do anything about sleep or the common cold.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

As quoted in this interview http://www.theuncool.com/journalism/david-bowie-playboy-magazine/ in Playboy magazine (September 1976)

Hate , Sleep , Grass , Time

“Character is the product of daily, hourly actions, and words, and thoughts; daily forgivenesses, unselfishness, kindnesses, sympathies, charities, sacrifices for the good of others, struggles against temptation, submissiveness under trial. Oh, it is these, like the blending colors in a picture, or the blending notes of music, which constitute the man.”

John Ross Macduff (1818–1895) Scottish religious writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 46.

Music , Color , Forgiveness

“Such promises are only for the gulls that accept the ordinary. One who has touched excellence in his learning has no need of that kind of promise.”

Richard Bach book Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)

Learning

“The reciprocal relationship of epistemology and science is of noteworthy kind. They are dependent on each other. Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is — insofar as it is thinkable at all — primitive and muddled. However, no sooner has the epistemologist, who is seeking a clear system, fought his way through to such a system, than he is inclined to interpret the thought-content of science in the sense of his system and to reject whatever does not fit into his system. The scientist, however, cannot afford to carry his striving for epistemological systematic that far. He accepts gratefully the epistemological conceptual analysis; but the external conditions, which are set for him by the facts of experience, do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted in the construction of his conceptual world by the adherence to an epistemological system. He therefore must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist: he appears as realist insofar as he seeks to describe a world independent of the acts of perception; as idealist insofar as he looks upon the concepts and theories as free inventions of the human spirit (not logically derivable from what is empirically given); as positivist insofar as he considers his concepts and theories justified only to the extent to which they furnish a logical representation of relations among sensory experiences. He may even appear as Platonist or Pythagorean insofar as he considers the viewpoint of logical simplicity as an indispensible and effective tool of his research.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Contribution in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, p. A. Schilpp, ed. (The Library of Living Philosophers, Evanston, IL (1949), p. 684). Quoted in Einstein's Philosophy of Science http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/
1940s

World , Way , Sense , Appearance

“Early in life, most of us probably observe an unhappy relationship between labor and wealth — to wit, the heavier the labor, the less the wealth.
The man doing heavy manual work makes less than the man who makes a machine work for him, and this man makes less than the man sitting at a desk. The really rich people, the kind who go around on yachts and collect old books and new wives, do no labor at all.
The economic reasons for dividing the money this way are clear enough. One, it has always been done that way; and two, it's too hard to change at this late date. But the puzzling question is why, since the money is parceled out on this principle, young people are constantly being pummeled to take up a life of labor.
In any sensible world, the young would be told they could labor if they wanted to, but warned that if they did so it would cost them.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"Lost Labor Love" (p.170)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

Life , Money , People , Books

“Haiku can be the antidote against the kind of poetry dominated by egos and battling personalities.”

William J. Higginson (1938–2008) American writer

Personality

“All told, kindness is not fashionable”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, There’s Probably No God - The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (2009)

Fashion

“Nationality is not the only kind of social membership, nor is it an exclusive tie. However, it is the only form of membership that has so far shown itself able to sustain a democratic process and a liberal rule of law.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

England and the Need for Nations (2006)

Law

“.. I think the thing that hit me most of all [at the Pollock-show, 1951] was that while I knew it was a fact, it became a physical necessity to get pictures off the easel, and therefore for me not even on a wall but the reach or fluidity of working from above down into a field [so: on the floor].... But it really registered [later] when I saw his [Pollock's] studio and he unrolled his paintings on the floor that he had painted them on. Now I was never drawn to the idea of a stick dipped in a huge can. One thing I have never liked is a drip, I mean.. it's a kind of boring accident to me, a drip. There are many accidents that are very rich that you use, but if you exploit a drip it's very boring and familiar to begin with. Drips are drips. Whereas blocks have never been drips, and haven't been, but, people don't know blocks the way they know drips. And blocks can become lines, and drips become lines in a very facile, easy way.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

quote about Pollock's drip-painting, 1951
1960s, Interview with Barbara Rose', Archives - American Art, 1968

People , Way , Idea , Thinking

“Be to her virtues very kind;
Be to her faults a little blind;
Let all her ways be unconfined;
And clap your padlock — on her mind!”

Matthew Prior (1664–1721) British diplomat, poet

An English Padlock (1707).

Way

“I usually do field work before I sit down to play with somebody; in other words I go listen to them play in a concert, listen to their music, tapes, whatever, so that when I sit down with them, I have a vague idea what their temperament is about and what kind of musical patterns they enjoy playing. Solo, I am the captain of the ship, and I decide what I will play and dictate the pace of the show.”

Zakir Hussain (musician) (1951) Indian tabla player, musical producer, film actor and composer

in The ring from Lata was like a blessing from Saraswati, 12 December 2013, Rediff.com http://www.rediff.com/chat/trans/0111zaki.htm,
Quote

Music , Idea

“Spirituality is a way of life. It is our total inward quest for growth, meaning and authenticity. And it is manifested in the quality of one’s life. In the last analysis, to be spiritual is to be touched and transformed by the Spirit of God. In a person who has been touched and transformed by God’s Spirit the fruits of the Spirit will be seen: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gal 5:22-23). Besides, “where the Spirit of Lord is, there is freedom””

Kurien Kunnumpuram (1931–2018) Indian theologian

2 Cor 3:17
Kunnumpuram, K. (ed) (2006) Life in Abundance: Indian Christian Reflections on Spirituality. Mumbai: St Pauls
On Spirituality

Love , Life , God , Peace

“When you are into mathematics, you have been so high on the scale of complexity of reasoning that you are living in some kind of altered reality. You think everybody on the street is able to understand complicated reasoning […]. And you get very frustrated, when you discover that's not the case.”

Cédric Villani (1973) French mathematician

"Mathematics: Beauty vs Utility - Numberphile". youtube.com. January 19, 2017. Retrieved September 16, 2018.

Mathematics , Understanding , Thinking , Reality

“Corporate strategy is the pattern of major objectives, purposes, or goals and essential policies and plans for achieving those goals stated in such a way as to define what business the company is in or is to be in and the kind of company it is or is to be. In a changing world it is a way of expressing a persistent concept of the business so as to exclude some possible new activities and suggest entry into others.”

Kenneth R. Andrews (1916–2005) Business scholar

Source: Quote, The Concept of Strategy, 1971, p. 28

World , Way , Business , Change

“I guess the other thing I find a little bit on the downside is that all the papers can now be downloaded off the web. That bothers me a little because I think in the old days, when you picked up the journal, you kind of looked at everything on the back of it, the titles, and there were things you didn’t know that much about or that you had a faint connection with, and maybe you looked at the paper; maybe you read the abstract at least. Nowadays, you just dial up what you’re interested in; you don’t see any of the rest of the literature. I do worry over this kind of compartmentalization of astronomy, which I think has gotten to be a bit out of hand…”

Robert Kraft (astronomer) (1927–2015) American astronomer

Interview of Robert Kraft by Patrick McCray on August 1-2, 2002, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics.

Literature , Thinking , Reading

“Our anti-Communism came to us neither as the fruit of a special wisdom nor as a humiliating awakening from a prolonged deception, but as a natural event, the product of chance and propinquity. One thing followed another, and the will had little to say about it. For my part, during that year, I realized, with a certain wistfulness, that it was too late for me to become any kind of Marxist. Marxism, I saw, from the learned young man I listened to at Committee meetings, was something you had to take up young, like ballet dancing.”

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer

"My Confession", p. 102
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Wisdom , Communication , Nature , Learning

“There are two dominant mindsets in the world of business or any kind of organization.One is a productive mindset, and it says it's a good idea to seek valid knowledge, it's a good idea to craft your conversations so you make explicit what you are thinking and trying to examine. You craft them in such a way that you can test, as clearly as you can, the validity of your claims. Truth is a good idea. All the managerial functions—accounting, all of them—have a fundamental notion that the productive mindset is what ought to be used to manage human beings.Then there's another mindset I call the defensive mindset. The idea is that even if you are seeking valid knowledge, you are seeking only that kind of valid knowledge that protects yourself or your organization or your department—it is defensive. From a defensive mindset point of view, truth is a good idea when it isn't threatening or upsetting. If it is, massage it, spin it. But if you massage it and spin it, you're violating the espoused theory of good management. When you spin, you have to cover up the fact that you're spinning. And in order for a cover up to work, it too has to be covered up.”

Chris Argyris (1923–2013) American business theorist/Professor Emeritus/Harvard Business School/Thought Leader at Monitor Group

Chris Argyris (2004) in: " Surfacing Your Underground Organization http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/4456.html" on hbswk.hbs.edu by Mallory Stark, 11/1/2004

Truth , World , Way , Idea

“Not that we would detract one iota from the benevolence which does exist in humanity; there is both more gratitude and more cause for gratitude than it is the fashion now-a-days to admit: but this we do say, that the obligation is never from those on whom we have a claim. Kindness is always unexpected; and “overcomes us like a summer cloud," exciting our "special wonder" as well as thankfulness.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Fashion , Summer , Gratitude

“Susan Brooks was one of those girls who never say anything unless called upon, the ones the teachers always have to ask to speak up, please. A very studious, very serious girl. A rather pretty but not terribly bright girl -- the kind who isn't allowed to give up and take the general or the commercial courses, because she had a terribly bright older brother or older sister, and the teachers expect comparable things from her. In fine, one of those girls who are holding the dirty end of the stick with as much good grace and manners as they can muster. Usually they marry truck drivers and move to the West Coast, where they have kitchen nooks with Formica counters -- and they write letters to the Folks Back East as seldom as they can get away with. They make quiet, successful lives for themselves and grow prettier as the shadow of the bright older brother or sister falls away from them.”

Stephen King book Rage

Rage (1977)

Girl , Sister , Teachers , Success

“Entertainment has to come hand in hand with a little bit of medicine. Some people go to the movies to be reminded that everything's okay. I don't make those kinds of movies. That, to me, is a lie. Everything's not okay.”

David Fincher (1962) American film director

The Curious Case of David Fincher (2007)

People , Lie

“Roughing it builds a boy's character, but only certain kinds of roughing it.”

Margaret Atwood book Wilderness Tips

Wilderness Tips (1991)

Boy

“Men glibly turn to an infallible Bible, or an infallible church, or an infallible Pope, or an infallible conscience, or an infallible Christ, and say that that authority is sufficient for them and enables them to accept truth. I believe all that kind of talk is false. It is false psychology or a failure of insight, and it is the fruit of mental laziness; a refusal to think things through. The most important convictions in religion cannot really be reached on the word of another. We can assent to propositions out of laziness of thought, or a desire to please, or an inability to argue, but one of the reasons why, in a crisis, men often feel let down by their religion is that they glibly assented to this or that, and falsely called their assent ‘belief.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.50

Men , Truth , Religion , Feeling

“Careful listening to current country and western and rock music with the help of an interpreter for coded phrases shows that young people are hearing a constant stream of messages about getting high, feeling good, going on trips, and using drugs of all kinds with all methods.”

Virgil Miller Newton (1938) American priest

Miller Newton (1983). The Teenage Drug Epidemic, El Paso Physician, vol 6, pp. 5-6.
On Teenage Drug Use

People , Music , Feeling , Help

“It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to π, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out — without putting it in secretly!”

Richard Feynman book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

On the numerical value of α, the fine-structure constant, p. 129
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985)

God , Understanding , Nature , Dance

“"The Lucky One" is at its heart a romance novel, elevated however by Nicholas Sparks' persuasive storytelling. Readers don't read his books because they're true, but because they ought to be true. You can easily imagine how many ways this story would probably go wrong in real life, but who wants to see a movie where a Marine leans over to pick up a photo and is blown up? And a mom trying to raise her son and feed lots of hungry dogs while her abusive ex-husband gets drunk and hangs around? That kind of stuff is too close to life.”

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

Review https://web.archive.org/web/20120505180249/http://rogerebert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120418/REVIEWS/120419985/1001 of The Lucky One (18 April 2012)
Reviews, Two-and-a-half star reviews

Life , Books , Dogs , Way

“The man's become inhuman, I tell you," said Kemp. "I am as sure he will establish a reign of terror—so soon as he has got over the emotions of this escape—as I am sure I am talking to you. Our only chance is to be ahead. He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head.”

H. G. Wells book The Invisible Man

Source: The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter 25: The Hunting of the Invisible Man

Chance

“I am saying cult. It is a cult of abomination. It is clear that it is abomination. The Torah punishes it with death. This is in the first line of serious sins. They say 'tendency,' 'perversion' -- nonsense. There is lust, and a person can overcome it if he wants, as with any other kind of lust. This is one of the most forbidden types of lust. The most grave.”

Shlomo Amar (1948) Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem

About the LGBT community in an interview with Israel Hayom http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=38063 (November 17, 2016)

Death , Personality

“What are you -- some kind of addict? Is this where you come to…”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

The Pillow Book

“The emergence of this high-tech scientific medicine may be a prime example of what William Blake denounced as 'single vision', the kind of myopia which (literally and metaphorically) comes from looking doggedly down a microscope. Single vision has its limitations in explaining the human condition; this is why Coleridge called doctors 'shallow animals', who 'imagine that in the whole system of things there is nothing but Gut and Body'. Hence the ability of medicine to understand and counter pathology has always engendered paradox. Medicine has offered the promise of 'the greatest benefit to mankind', but not always on terms palatable to and compatible with cherished ideals. Nor has it always delivered the goods. The particular powers of medicine, and the paradoxes its rationales generate, are what this book is about.”

Roy Porter (1946–2002) British historian

Source: The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (1997), Chapter 1; as cited nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/p/porter-benefit.html 1998

Books , Imagination , Understanding , Animals

“What does leadership malpractice add to the elements visible in betrayal of what's right by the self in a high-stakes situation? Primarily, it destroys the capacity for social trust in the mental and social worlds of the service member or veteran. I regard this as a kind of wound contamination in the mind, preventing healing and leaking toxins. When the capacity for trust is destroyed, its place is filled by the active expectancy of harm, exploitation, or humiliation.”

Jonathan Shay (1941) American psychiatrist

Source: "Casualties" (2011), p. 184

World , Betrayal

“About the accident itself I can say very little. Almost nothing. It involved something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits. That's it, really: all I can divulge. Not much, I know.
It's not that I'm being shy. It's just that—well, for one, I don't even remember the event. It's a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been—or, more precisely, being about to be—hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who's to say my traumatized mind didn't just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap—the crater—that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers.”

Tom McCarthy (writer) book Déjà vu

Source: Remainder (2005), Ch. 1.

Light , Parting

“Man’s being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

“Man has no nature”
History as a System (1962)

Nature

“It seems well past time to reconsider our sweeping UPL [Unauthorized Practice of Law] prohibitions. The fact is nonlawyers already perform — and have long performed — many kinds of work traditionally and simultaneously performed by lawyers. Nonlawyers prepare tax returns and give tax advice. They regularly negotiate with and argue cases before the Internal Revenue Service. They prepare patent applications and otherwise advocate on behalf of inventors before the Patent & Trademark Office. And it is entirely unclear why exceptions should exist to help these sort of niche (and some might say, financially capable) populations but not be expanded in ways more consciously aimed at serving larger numbers of lower- and middle-class clients.... Consistent with the law of supply and demand, increasing the supply of legal services can be expected to lower prices, drive efficiency, and improve consumer satisfaction.”

Neil Gorsuch (1967) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

"Access to Affordable Justice: A challenge to the bench, bar, and academy" https://law.duke.edu/sites/default/files/centers/judicialstudies/judicature/judicature_100-3_gorsuch.pdf Judicature ("The Scholarly Journal for Judges"), Autumn 2016, Volume 100, Issue Number 3, page 49.

Law , Way , Time , Past

“We should not, perhaps, take it for granted that a description in terms of a formalised model, which has certain properties lacking in those derived from models of another kind, will necessarily be the best description for all of the very diverse purposes for which the descriptions of languages are needed. In assessing the value of a description, it is reasonable to ask whether it has proved useful for the purposes for which it was intended.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Source: 1950s–1960s, The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching, 1964, p. 13. cited in: David Brazil (1995) A Grammar of Speech. p. 9.

“Science has made great progress in this world. Where we used to engage a thousand men to work, now a bulldozer does the work in seconds. But that makes a thousand people useless and unemployed. While unemployment is increasing in the world, people have lost their peace of mind. The reason for this is because man has ceased to work. Due to this inaction, all kind of pains and sicknesses are increasing in the world. I want you to take the energy of the machines into yourself and work like machines!”

Haidakhan Babaji teacher in northern India

Karma yoga
Source: The Teachings of Babaji, 20 November 1983.

Men , Pain , People , World

“Every monumental work of the State is measured by cubits. Every cubit is measured by the length of the Aspect-Emperor’s arm. And the Aspect-Emperor’s arm, they say, stands beyond measure. But I say the Aspect-Emperor’s arm is measured by the length of a cubit, and that all cubits are measured by the works of the State. Not even the All stands beyond measure, for it is more than what lies within it, and “more” is a kind of measure. Even the God has His cubits.”

R. Scott Bakker book The Warrior Prophet

IMPARRHAS, PSÜKALOGUES
The Warrior Prophet (2005)

God

“There is a reward for kindness to every living animal or human.”

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

Muhammad narrated in Saheeh Muslim, #2244, and Saheeh Al-Bukhari, #2466.
Sunni Hadith

Animals

“Undoubtedly Wittgenstein did greatly need human warmth and affection and he was enormously appreciative of any simple kindness. But a friendly relationship with him was very exacting. He could rebuke a friend with extreme harshness. He had a tendency to be suspicious of motives and character.”

Norman Malcolm (1911–1990) American philosopher

Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 1958

Motivation

“You were there all day long, 12 hours a day. So there was none of this, "I'm going back to my trailer, my trailer's bigger than your trailer," that kind of Hollywood nonsense.”

John C. Reilly (1965) American actor

“"All this beauty makes a person realize how insignificant they are," Paul says.
"How insignificant I am. You're the insignificant one"
He grins real big as he realizes how his words sounded. "I didn't mean it like that," he chuckles.
"No, I know what you meant, bud. I was just thinking kind of the same thing. I was looking at all this depth and it came to me how very shallow you are."
"Ha, ha," Paul chortles. He takes a few steps down the trail and turns. "You know, Don, I was just looking at this little flowery cactus here and thinking how nice it looks and it made me realize how ugly you are."
"Is that right," I say. "Well, I was just considering how smart these rocks look and it made me realize how dumb you are." With that I give him a little kick in the backside.
"How smart these rocks are?" he heckles. "Well, I was just looking at that cloud up there, reflecting on its beauty and stuff, and it hit me how much you smell."
"Is that right," I say. "The cloud made you realize that, huh?"
Paul distances himself a little and keeps turning to see if I am going to kick him again. He's got this grin going like he got the last laugh.
"You know, Paul, I was just looking at this pebble and it made me realize that I'm going to tackle you and throw you off the ledge."
"I see. That's real deep, Don. The pebble; you got that from a pebble?"”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

Beauty , Thinking , Personality

“Tomorrow's some kind of Strangerland where all the news is good.”

St. Vincent (musician) (1982) American singer-songwriter

"The Neighbors"
Actor (2009)

“Old age is far more than white hair, wrinkles, the feeling that it is too late and the game finished, that the stage belongs to the rising generations. The true evil is not the weakening of the body, but the indifference of the soul. Upon crossing the shadow line, it is more the desire to act than the power to do so that is lost. Is it possible, after fifty years of experiences and disappointments, to retain the ardent curiosity of youth, the desire to know and understand, the power to love wholeheartedly, the certainty that beauty, intelligence, and kindness unite naturally, and to preserve faith in the efficacy of reason? Beyond the shadow line lies the realm of even, tempered light where the eyes, not being dazzled any more by the blinding sun of desire, can see things and people as they are. How is it possible to believe in the moral perfection of pretty women if you have loved one of them? How is it possible to believe in progress when you have discovered throughout a long and difficult life that no violent change can triumph over human nature and that it is only the most ancient customs and ceremonies that can provide people with the flimsy shelter of civilization? "What's the use?" says the old man to himself. This is perhaps the most dangerous phrase he can utter, for after having said: "What's the use of struggling?" he will say one day: "What's the use of going out?" then: "What's the use of leaving my room?" then: "What's the use of leaving my bed?" and at last comes "What's the use of living?"”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

which opens the portals of death.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old

Love , Life , Death , Women

“A bug! A bug! Isn’t it just so satisfying to discover bugs in other people’s programs? Especially people from Microsoft. I don’t know why, it’s probably some kind of Freudian code-envy thing.”

Paul DiLascia (1959–2008) American software developer

1995/6
About Microsoft

People , Envy

“It belongs to journalism — and to the millennial complex from which so many journalists and journalist intellectuals suffer in our day — that each new phase of Modernist art should be hailed as the start of a whole new epoch in art, marking a decisive break with all the customs and conventions of the past. Each time, a kind of art is expected so unlike all previous kinds of art, and so free from norms of practice or taste, that everybody, regardless of how informed or uninformed he happens to be, can have his say about it. And each time, this expectation has been disappointed, as the phase of Modernist art in question finally takes its place in the intelligible continuity of taste and tradition.Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is — among other things — continuity, and unthinkable without it. Lacking the past of art, and the need and compulsion to maintain its standards of excellence, Modernist art would lack both substance and justification.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

1960s, Modernist Painting (1960)

Art , Disappointment , Intelligence , Idea

“Renaissance Italy became a kind of Hollywood collection of sets of antiquity, and the new visual antiquarianism of the Renaissance provided an avenue to power for men of any class.”

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

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 136

Men

“There’s a part of you that insists reality follow the same parameters it always has, even here. That attachment to the way things work in the living world precludes this kind of manipulation. I, on the other hand, had the privilege of spending a good portion of time, when I was alive, in the paroxysms of my own insanity. Rather liberating, in its own way.”

Lawrence M. Schoen (1959) American writer and klingonist

Source: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard (2015), Chapter 8, “Venue and Vision” (p. 98)

World , Way , Reality , Time

“Science is rooted in the will to truth. With the will to truth it stands or falls. Lower the standard even slightly and science becomes diseased at the core. Not only science, but man. The will to truth, pure and unadulterated, is among the essential conditions of his existence; if the standard is compromised he easily becomes a kind of tragic caricature of himself.”

Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) Co-founder of Gestalt psychology

Source: "On Truth," 1934, p. 19 (1961 edition)

Truth , Disease , Science

“I wasn't into glam-rock. I was just into him. I never really saw him as glam-rock. Actually, I liked T-Rex too. Electric Warrior was great. But Bowie made me think. I just got lost in it—Man Who Sold the World, Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust—that era. I thought it was just magical, although I was dead impressionable then. But I though he looked brilliant—I still do. I hated the following he had though, especially around the Aladdin Sane era—it just destroyed his mystique. He doesn't hold that mystique for me now—he's just a normal bloke, I suppose. But I remember in 1972 when he was on the telly doing "Starman"—I couldn't believe it! It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. It's meant to be a bit of an embarrassing admission now to have liked that kind of thing, but I really did. And I remember when I grew out of it and I couldn't get into Ziggy Stardust the way I used to. I felt really sad about it. I played it and nothing happened.”

Ian McCulloch (1959) singer, musician

Describing how he feels about David Bowie
NME (1980)

Hate , World , Sadness , Way

“The summer of 2000 was a real turning point for me, and I kind of got my act together and laid the bottle down and got to work, and really last five years have been the greatest five years of my life, personally and then -- as a result of that, I guess -- professionally. Six months after that, I met Amy [Poehler]. We had sort of met before, but we started dating. From the moment we met, it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It was great. We didn't know what we were doing, and all of a sudden she got SNL, so we kind of decided that I guess I had to move to New York; otherwise it wasn't going to work out. So I moved back to New York and it was the greatest. It was great. Probably the best thing that's ever happened to me is Amy.”

Will Arnett (1970) Canadian actor

"The Will Arnett Interview," Television Without Pity (2005) http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/articles/content/a1005/index-4.html
2005

Life , Summer , Personality

“I think there's a time to work, and everyone has to kind of adjust. And then there's a time to relax, and be the mom or take the kids on vacation when you need to wind down. So it's a matter of planning, and being able to map out your year or your week or let's start with the day. It is just being multi-tasking and being available.”

Vanessa L. Williams (1963) American actress, singer and former Miss America

Vanessa Williams: 'Vacation' http://www.cbsnews.com/news/vanessa-williams-vacation/ (April 6, 2004)

Moms , Thinking , Time

“When taken as a way of modeling cognitive architecture, connectionism really does represent an approach that is quite different from that of the classical cognitive science that it seeks to replace. Classical models of the mind were derived from the structure of Turing and Von Neumann machines. They are not, of course, committed to the details of these machines as exemplified in Turing's original formulation or in typical commercial computers—only to the basic idea that the kind of computing that is relevant to understanding cognition involves operations on symbols.. In contrast, connectionists propose to design systems that can exhibit intelligent behavior without storing, retrieving, or otherwise operating on structured symbolic expressions. The style of processing carried out in such models is thus strikingly unlike what goes on when conventional machines are computing some function.”

Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) American philosopher

Jerry A. Fodor, and Zenon W. Pylyshyn. "Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis." Cognition 28.1-2 (1988): 3-71.

Way , Behavior , Intelligence , Idea

“Lichtenberg … held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. … It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was “strange” (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) French phenomenological philosopher

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), pp. 45-46

God , World , Sense , Parting

“Counterpoint texts tend to resemble one another in the underlying principles of voice-leading they espouse and in the kinds of orderings of rules they provide, but no one could accuse the harmony texts of, let us say, Heinrich Schenker and Hugo Riemann, or of Allen Irvine McHose and Walter Piston--or for that matter, of Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, and Roger Sessions--of being mutually compatible, either in premise or in practice.”

Harold Powers (1928–2007) American academic

Harold Powers, "Is Mode Real", p.18,10.

“It's an extremely profitable thing to be 'concerned' about drugs. You don't just have treatment programs, you have law enforcement programs, you have entire industries that could not function but for drugs. Including the prison industry. I think America has gone psychotic … there are human beings—even as we speak—dying, in the kind of shrieking, tormenting pain you couldn't inflict on a P. O. W., because America doesn't want them to be drug addicts.”

Andrew Vachss (1942) American writer and lawyer

Pete Humes' interview Punchline in October 2000.

Pain , Law , Thinking

“Always, Sir, set a high value on spontaneous kindness. He whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord, will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

1781, p. 479
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol IV

Love , Pain , Friendship

“GENTLEMEN: Before the Senate adjourns, I desire to return my thanks for the very kind and complimentary resolution unanimously passed on Saturday last, and to assure the Senate that so long as I shall have the honor of continuing Presiding Officer, my highest ambition will be to retain the personal regard and confidence of my colleagues. In pursuance of the resolution adopted on Saturday last, I now declare the Senate adjourned sine die”

William R. King

The Congressional globe, 33rd United States Congress (1853-04-11)

Confidence , Personality

“I distinguish two kinds of "applied" research: problem-solving research — government or commercially initiated, centrally managed and institutionally coupled to a plan for application of the results, useful science — investigator-initiated, competitively evaluated and widely communicated. Then we have basic science — useful also, also investigator-initiated, competitively evaluated and widely communicated.”

Lewis M. Branscomb (1926) physicist and science policy advisor

Source: Confessions of a Technophile (1994), p. 31

Communication , Problem , Science

“And as far as [it's] presumptuous to say that God used twenty-four hour days, God, God coulda done it in six seconds. I think he did it in six days just to select, just to create a week for us. There's certainly no scientific reason, there's no lunar reason or solar reason why we have a seven day week. But just about every culture in the world operates on a seven day week. It's just like it's kind of built-in. And I think that's remnants, people remembering from the original creation when God established this seven day week.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Coast-to-Coast AM interview (August 2-3, 2000)

God , People , World , Thinking

“What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts—indeed, sometimes from no facts—in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody’s conscious control.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Light of Other Days

Source: The Light of Other Days (2000), Chapter 19

Study

“My Dear Mr. Pissarro; - I accept with pleasure the invitation that you and Mr. Degas were kind enough to extend to me. And naturally in that case I shall abide by all the rules that govern your Societe. Based on this decision, I also have the membership dues available. I will probably see you at Miss Latouche's and we will talk about this.”

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

Quote from a short letter of Gauguin, 3 April 1879, to French artist to Pissarro; as cited on 'Paul Gauguin Autograph Letter Signed to Camille Pissarro' - Nade D. Sanders http://natedsanders.com/paul_gauguin_autograph_letter_signed_to_camille_pi-lot13463.aspx
Gauguin accepted membership in the Societe Anonyme Cooperative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, formed in 1873 by Pissarro, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley for the purpose of exhibiting their artwork independently
1870s - 1880s

Pleasure , Nature , Decision

“I well remember, as a young teenager, seeing signs printed in large black letters at the fronts of buses: "White seat from front, colored seat from rear." One day when I was thirteen, my friends and I were riding home from school in a half-empty bus — this was at the time that the civil rights movement was just getting off the ground and some police officers were just looking for a reason to shoot a black person who "got out of line." So, counter to our real feelings, we decided to avoid trouble by moving to the back of the bus when the driver told us to.
By that time, the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides had kind of broken the ice, even though things hadn't fully changed. So we saw it every day on TV and read about it in the news. Dad always said, "Stay out of trouble," and we did.”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

p. 25 http://books.google.com/books?id=hdhWF9bVqXwC&pg=PA25
2010s, This is Herman Cain!: My Journey to the White House (2011)

School , Color , Feeling , Home

“.. you see they hung my painting here [on her show 'Wind', 2009] I did that in the early 1990s. People never really liked them so much back then, they thought they looked more like photographs. Actually, I was doing them when I was still married to Gerhard Richter [till 1993], and it was somehow in relation to what he was doing, you know, these kind of side-to-side gestural abstracts – done like this [gestures as if pulling a squeegee over a surface from one side to the other] like paintings of the 1950s. Mine were called 'Basic Research', they were rubbings of oil paint on canvas – frottages of the floor of my studio. I did quite a few of these. [Gerhard] Richter put one up in his studio for some time... But he found it too hard and then took it out after a while.”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

2001 - 2010, Out to Lunch with Isa Genzken' (2009)

People , Time , Painting

“I don’t feel powerful at all. I am still under this kind of detention, and you know, this is kind of a bail. Even yesterday I realized while trying to take care of the baby, [at] the park, [I had] been secretly followed and it’s quite fragile. Maybe being powerful means to be fragile.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Ai Weiwei Does Not Feel Powerful, 2011

Feeling , Baby

“How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind, for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

1960s, Review of Teilhard de Chardin's "The Phenomenon of Man", 1961

People , Education

“My own heart let me have more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

" My own heart let me have more have pity on http://www.bartleby.com/122/47.html", lines 1-4
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Sadness , Heart

“From the multitude of books published on the subject of cultivating the earth, one would have imagined the art to have been more studied, than it really has been; since upon the whole it continued in. a sort of declining condition from the days of Virgil and Columella, till the time of Constantine IV. and then lay in a kind of dormant state till about the middle of Henry VIIIth's reign, when it was rather revived,, than improved.
Indeed, about that time, Judge Fitzherbert, in England (better known among us, as author of another/ excellent work, called Natura Brevium) Tatti, Stefano, Agostino Gallo, Sansovino, Lauro, Tarello, &c. in Italy, published several considerable books in Agriculture; but our countryman was the first, if we except Crescenzio dell' Agricoltura, (whose fine performance was printed at Florence in 1478) and Pier Marino the translator of Palladius de Re Rustica, who made his work public in the year 1528.”

Walter Harte (1709–1774) poet and historian

Source: Essays on Husbandry (1764), p. 41-42.

Books , Art , Imagination , Study

“There is a kind of second law of cultural dynamics which states simply that when anything has been done, it cannot be done again. In other words, we start off any system with a potential for novelty which is gradually exhausted. We see this in every field of human life, in the arts as well as the sciences. Once Beethoven has written the Ninth Symphony, nobody else can do it. Consequently, we find that in any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting. The "entropy trap" is perhaps the most subtle and the most fundamental of the obstacles toward realising the developed society…”

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

Kenneth Boulding (1970) "The Science Revelation". In: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. (Sept 1970) Vol. 26, nr. 7. p. 16
1970s

Life , Law , Art , Search

“… a rather different class of applications of the idea of best allocation of scarce resources… usually referred to as the theory of optimal economic growth. In most studies of this kind made in the countries with market economies there is not an identifiable client to whom the findings are submitted as policy recommendations. Nor is there an obvious choice of objective function, such as cost minimization or profit maximization in the studies addressed to individual enterprises. The field has more of a speculative character. The models studied usually contain only a few highly aggregated variables. One considers alternative objective functions that incorporate or emphasize various strands of ethical, political, or social thought. These objectives are then tried out to see what future paths of the economy they imply under equally simplified assumptions of technology or resource availability.”

Tjalling Koopmans (1910–1985) Dutch American economist

Source: Concepts of Optimality and Their Uses, 1975, p. 244

Idea , Optimism , Study , Future

“Mills: Even the people themselves who were perpetrating that violence, did they think that was wise? Was that a wise reasoned action?
Souljah: Yeah, it was wise. I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?… White people, this government and that mayor were well aware of the fact that black people were dying every day in Los Angeles under gang violence. So if you're a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person? Do you think that somebody thinks that white people are better, are above and beyond dying, when they would kill their own kind?”

Sister Souljah (1964) American hip hop-generation author, activist, recording artist, and film producer

Regarding black-on-white violence in the Los Angeles riots, quoted in David Mills (16 June 1992) "In Her Own Disputed Words; Transcript of Interview That Spawned Souljah's Story" The Washington Post

People , Angels , Thinking , Personality

“I was sometimes brought to a standstill, and at times almost despaired of making further progress… I knew no one of whom I could ask a question or receive any kind of instruction, and the subject was therefore at times very painful.”

Francis Place (1771–1854) English social reformer

Source: The life of Francis Place, 1771-1854, 1898, p. 18, as cited in: Ernest Green, Harold Shearman. Education For A New Society (RLE Edu L Sociology of Education), 2012, p. 85

Pain , Question , Time , Despair

“Life cannot be reconciled with the idea that back of the universe is a Supreme Being, all merciful and kind, and that he takes any account of the human beings and other forms of life that exist upon the earth. Whichever way man may look upon the earth, he is oppressed with the suffering incident to life. It would almost seem as though the earth had been created with malignity and hatred. If we look at what we are pleased to call the lower animals, we behold a universal carnage. We speak of the seemingly peaceful woods, but we need only look beneath the surface to be horrified by the misery of that underworld. Hidden in the grass and watching for its prey is the crawling snake which swiftly darts upon the toad or mouse and gradually swallows it alive; the hapless animal is crushed by the jaws and covered with slime, to be slowly digested in furnishing a meal. The snake knows nothing about sin or pain inflicted upon another; he automatically grabs insects and mice and frogs to preserve his life. The spider carefully weaves his web to catch the unwary fly, winds him into the fatal net until paralyzed and helpless, then drinks his blood and leaves him an empty shell. The hawk swoops down and snatches a chicken and carries it to its nest to feed its young. The wolf pounces on the lamb and tears it to shreds. The cat watches at the hole of the mouse until the mouse cautiously comes out, then with seeming fiendish glee he plays with it until tired of the game, then crushes it to death in his jaws. The beasts of the jungle roam by day and night to find their prey; the lion is endowed with strength of limb and fang to destroy and devour almost any animal that it can surprise or overtake. There is no place in the woods or air or sea where all life is not a carnage of death in terror and agony. Each animal is a hunter, and in turn is hunted, by day and night. No landscape is beautiful or day so balmy but the cry of suffering and sacrifice rends the air. When night settles down over the earth the slaughter is not abated. Some creatures are best at night, and the outcry of the dying and terrified is always on the wind. Almost all animals meet death by violence and through the most agonizing pain. With the whole animal creation there is nothing like a peaceful death. Nowhere in nature is there the slightest evidence of kindness, of consideration, or a feeling for the suffering and the weak, except in the narrow circle of brief family life.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Source: The Story of My Life (1932), p. 383

Life , Death , Pain , Family

“My sense of humor is the raunchier, inappropriate kind. It's so much funnier than the quirky stuff.”

Katherine Heigl (1978) American actress and film producer

InStyle magazine (2009)

Sense

“Although it was only nine o'clock he had already gone once around the pharmacological wheel to which he'd strapped himself for the evening, stolen a tuba, and offended a transvestite; and now his companions were beginning, with delight and aplomb, to barf. It was definitely a Crabtree kind of night.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Night

“If we sit and talk in a dark room, words suddenly acquire new meanings and different textures…and on the radio. Given only the sound of a play, we have to fill in all of the senses, not just the sight of the action. So much do-it-yourself, or completion and “closure” of action, develops a kind of independent isolation in the young that makes them remote and inaccessible.””

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. 264

Sense

“Before you can make meaning, an odd kind of election process must occur. You must nominate yourself as the meaning-maker in your life and as the hero of your own story. Then you must consciously elect yourself to that position.”

Eric Maisel (1947) American writer

Source: The Atheist’s Way (2009), p. 65

Life

“Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens.”

Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) British author, literary critic, and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography

The Cornhill Magazine, vol. 26 (1872) p. 729

“The Southern school superintendent is a kind of remote deity who breathes the purer air of Mount Parnassus. The teachers see him only on those august occasions when they need to be reminded of the nobility of their calling. The powers of a superintendent are considerable. He hires and fires, manipulates the board of education, handles a staggering amount of money, and maintains the precarious existence of the status quo.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Source: The Water is Wide (1972), p. 11

Money , Education , School , Teachers

“I grew up during communism, when comics books were prohibited as capitalist decadent propaganda, western movies were censored, any book that could be in conflict with socialist ideology was prohibited and you went to jail for saying what you think. So I am allergic to any kind of censorship in the name of any ideology. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I would like to give all the ideologues a piece of advice – If you want something to be made, do it yourself. Everyone will be happy.”

Daniel Vávra (1975) Czech entrepreneur

An interview with Daniel Vavra: GamerGate and the gaming industry https://techraptor.net/content/interview-daniel-vavra (September 12, 2014)

Books , Communication , Hell , Thinking

“Right trusty and well beloved, we greet you well, and where, by your letters of supplication to us delivered by your servant John Brackenbury, we understand that, by reason of your great charges that ye have had and sustained, as well in the defence of this realm against the Scots as otherwise, your worshipful city remaineth greatly in poverty, for the which ye desire us to be good mean unto the King’s Grace for an ease of such charges as ye yearly bear and pay unto His Highness, we let you wit that for such great matters and businesses as we now have to do for the weal and usefulness of the realm, we as yet ne can have convenient leisure to accomplish this your business, but be assured that for your kind and loving dispositions to us at all times showed, which we ne can forget, we in goodly haste shall so endeavour us for your ease in this behalf as that ye shall verily understand we be your especial good and loving lord, as your said servant shall show you, to whom it will like you herein to give further credence; and for the diligent service which he hath done to our singular pleasure unto us at this time, we pray you to give unto him laud and thanks, and God keep you.”

Richard III of England (1452–1485) English monarch

Letter to the city fathers of York in April or early May 1483 as Lord Protector for his nephew, Edward V, reprinted in Richard the Third (1956) http://books.google.com/books?id=dNm0JgAACAAJ&dq=Paul+Murray+Kendall+Richard+the+Third&ei=TZHDR8zXKZKIiQHf2NCpCA

Love , God , Pleasure , Understanding

“The art of the theater is action. It is the study of commitment. The word is an act. To SAY the word in such a way as to make it heard and understood by all in the theater is a commitment — it is the highest art to see a human being out on a stage speaking to a thousand of his or her peers saying, 'These words which I am speaking are the TRUTH — they are not an approximation of any kind. They are the God's truth, and I support them with my life,' which is what the actor does on stage.”

David Mamet (1947) American playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and film director

Writing in Restaurants (1987)

Life , God , Truth , Art

“Every one of us knows how painful it is to be called by malicious names, to have his character undermined by false insinuations, to be overreached in a bargain, to be neglected by those who rise in life, to be thrust on one side by those who have stronger wills and stouter hearts. Every one knows, also, the pleasure of receiving a kind look, a warm greeting, a hand held out to help in distress, a difficulty solved, a higher hope revealed for this world or the next. By that pain and by that pleasure let us judge what we should do to others.”

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815–1881) English churchman, Dean of Westminster

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 363.

Life , Pain , Pleasure , World

“A psychological space is established for any set of stimuli by determining metric distances between the stimuli such that the probability that a response learned to any stimulus will generalize to any other is an invariant monotonic function of the distance between them. To a good approximation, this probability of generalization (i) decays exponentially with this distance, and (ii) does so in accordance with one of two metrics, depending on the relation between the dimensions along which the stimuli vary. These empirical regularities are mathematically derivable from universal principles of natural kinds and probabilistic geometry that may, through evolutionary internalization, tend to govern the behaviors of all sentient organisms.”

Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist

Source: "Toward a universal law of generalization for psychological science," 1987, p. 1317

Behavior , Mathematics , Nature , Learning

“We are able to speak for ourselves through our music rather than being defined and put into the spotlight in a very male kind of groomed way for an obviously predominantly male audience.”

Shingai Shoniwa (1981) British musician

On being compared to compared to Karen O and Billie Holiday. http://venuszine.com/stories/music/4102.php

Music , Way

“Preaching has become a byword for long and dull conversation of any kind; and whoever wishes to imply, in any piece of writing, the absence of everything agreeable and inviting, calls it a sermon.”

Sydney Smith (1771–1845) English writer and clergyman

Vol. I, ch. 3
Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

“Changing a rod into a serpent and the serpent back into a rod may be clever magic, but how does such a demonstration prove that Moses spoke to God? If the only thing necessary to prove the truth of an extraordinary claim were to demonstrate an ability to bewilder, there would be no more mysteries to solve.
If a person claims that he can bring the dead back to life, and in proof of that power pulls a rabbit out of a hat, that is hardly a demonstration of the truth of his claim; it is merely an example of his ability in the art of deception. If he claims that he can fly without wings and without the use of mechanical help of any kind, and in proof of his ability pulls another rabbit out of another hat, that is not proof of his ability to fly, but of his ability to lie, and he will without much hesitation be condemned as a faker. The demonstration of one thing has absolutely no bearing in proving the truth of the other, when there is no relationship between them.”

Joseph Lewis (1889–1968) American activist

The Ten Commandments

Life , God , Truth , Lie

“Ed Bradley was much honored by his peers, the best honor always to receive, from those who judge harshest and judge best. It is very appropriate that Ed Bradley would be honored here in the halls of the Congress of the United States. Perhaps he was destined to be honored in any case, because he was a pioneer, a first of his kind. We are still in an era when the first blacks are coming forward and we honor them simply for piercing the iron veil of race, but we honor Ed Bradley in this Chamber today as a leader of his profession.”

Ed Bradley (1941–2006) News correspondent

[Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, Congressional Record, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-2006-12-06/html/CREC-2006-12-06-pt2-PgH8798-3.htm, Honoring the Contributions and Life of Edward R. Bradley, H8798-H8800; Volume 152, Number 133, December 6, 2006, United States House of Representatives , printed by the United States Government Printing Office]
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“God told him to bring two of every sort, not two of every species, no, two of every sort. He said, bring them after his kind, after their kind, after his kind. The Bible is real clear on that topic. You bring all the kinds, not every species. You only have to bring those the whose nostrils have the breath of life, of those on dry land. Noah did not have to bring any fish on the ark. They had plenty of water outside. He also did not have to bring any bugs on the Ark, because bugs do not have nostrils. Bugs breathe through their skin, through spiracles. Insects were not required to be on the Ark. Insects can survive a flood just fine. Go any place where there has been a flood, after the water goes down. Walk out into the mud and tell me the first thing that you notice. Bugs by the millions and millions, right? Insects did not have to go on the ark. Some of them might have been on there but they did not have to be.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Dinosaurs and the Bible

Life , God , Fish , Water

Quotes about kindness page 28

Quotes about kindness
page 28