Quotes about look
page 15
1790s, Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)
Live NBC’s “A Concert for Hurricane Relief“ on September. 2, 2005
“Television is for appearing on, not looking at.”
Interview http://books.google.com/books?id=nxwE_NdDW_QC&q=%22Television+is+for+appearing+on+not+looking+at%22&pg=PA585#v=onepage with Edward R. Murrow on Person to Person ( 27 April 1956 http://www.tv.com/shows/person-to-person/april-27-1956-1042583)
2007
The Letters of Noël Coward
Noël Coward
Barry Day
illustrated
Alfred A. Knopf
9780375423031
585
http://books.google.com/books?id=yAxmAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Time+has+convinced+me+of+one+thing.+Television+is+for+appearing+on,+not+looking+at%22&pgis=1
Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 1 “Between Timid and Timbuktu” (p. 7)
San Francisco Chronicle, September 24, 2012 http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Lawrence-Ferlinghetti-s-indelible-image-3886925.php#page-2
as quoted by Edwin E. Salpeter in My Sixty Years with Hans Bethe, in an edition by [Gerald Edward Brown, Chang-Hwan Lee, Hans Bethe and his physics, World Scientific, 2006, 9812566090, 119–120]
Aphorism 146 from Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil) an 1886 book by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Translated from: Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.
Source: Gutenberg-DE
Translation source: Hollingdale
Misattributed
Quote from his writings Thoughts on Art, Caspar David Friedrich; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 33
undated
Fuzzy Memories (1996), Andrews McMeel Publishing, ISBN 0-8362-1040-9
Source: Sylvie and Bruno (1889), Chapter 25 : Looking Eastward
II, st. 4
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), A Dialogue of Self and Soul http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1397/
Pt II, p. 217
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
III. 108–110 (tr. Richmond Lattimore).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)
“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them.”
On Mac OS X's Aqua user interface, as quoted in Fortune magazine (24 January 2000)
2000s
written after 1908
in The Mad Poet's Diary, T 2734
1896 - 1930
Interview on The David Frost Show (14 June 1969) http://web.archive.org/web/20010719003543/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/carousel/pob07.html
The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)
Charles Eames in a 1952 speech to a national assembly of the AIA; As cited in: Ray Eames http://eamesdesigns.com/library-entry/ray-eames/ at eamesdesigns.com, Accessed April 8, 2014; Charles Eames talks about Ray Eames
XXXIX, 17, p. 170
‘The Second Part’, Chapters IV-XLI
"Francis Biddle's Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech" (1984), p. 188
Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987)
Obama speaking about his grandmother Madelyn Dunham at a campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina (3 November 2008)
2008
A Summer Evening’s Tale
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)
“It is impossible to look young unless one is young.”
Unsourced
Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010)
Letter to Judge Lance Ito, requesting clemency for Charles Keating (January 18 1992), as quoted by Christopher Hitchens in The Missionary Position http://books.google.com/books?id=PTgJIjK67rEC&pg=PA11&dq=%22I+think+it+is+very+beautiful+for+the+poor+to+accept+their+lot%22, (Verso, 1995), page 67
1990s
An obituary for Adolf Hitler, Aftenposten (7 May 1945)
"Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik" ("Churchill's Lie Factory"), 12 January 1941, Die Zeit ohne Beispiel (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1941), pp. 364-369
This and similar lines in Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf about what he claimed to be a strategem of Jewish lies using "the principle & which is quite true in itself & that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily," are often misquoted or paraphrased as: "The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed."
1940s
The Cosmos as a Poem (2010)
Pupils at Sais (1799)
Context: The waking man looks without fear at this offspring of his lawless Imagination; for he knows that they are but vain Spectres of his weakness. He feels himself lord of the world: his me hovers victorious over the Abyss; and will through Eternities hover aloft above that endless Vicissitude. Harmony is what his spirit strives to promulgate, to extend. He will even to infinitude grow more and more harmonious with himself and with his Creation; and at every step behold the all-efficiency of a high moral Order in the Universe, and what is purest of his Me come forth into brighter and brighter clearness. This significance of the World is Reason; for her sake is the World here; and when it is grown to be the arena of a childlike, expanding Reason, it will one day become the divine Image of her Activity, the scene of a genuine Church. Till then let man honour Nature as the Emblem of his own Spirit; the Emblem ennobling itself, along with him, to unlimited degrees. Let him, therefore, who would arrive at knowledge of Nature, train his moral sense, let him act and conceive in accordance with the noble Essence of his Soul; and as if of herself Nature will become open to him. Moral Action is that great and only Experiment, in which all riddles of the most manifold appearances explain themselves. Whoso understands it, and in rigid sequence of Thought can lay it open, is forever master of Nature.
Interview on Zerkalo http://web.archive.org/web/20021117080050/http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/6011-5.cfm (RTR) (29 December 2001)
2000s
Context: It looks as if some people either have a short memory and are forgetting about that time and the events that occurred then … Let us recall the putsch of August 19, 1991. It was after the putsch that the republics began, one after another, to declare their independence.
Russia also declared its independence. This was approved by the Supreme Soviet, and you know and remember that there was the Declaration on the Independence of Russia. So, the entire course of history was leading to a point when the regime, the political regime in the country had to be changed. It demonstrated that the Union was not as strong as this was loudly preached by mass media and the propaganda in general. The republics wished to become independent. This must only be welcomed... We have good peaceful relations and there were no military clashes. None of these countries had revolutions with bloody casualties and there was no civil war in any of the republics... Russia had to change and it did change.
2016, DNC Address (July 2016)
Context: America is already great. America is already strong. And I promise you, our strength, our greatness, does not depend on Donald Trump. In fact, it doesn’t depend on any one person. And that, in the end, may be the biggest difference in this election — the meaning of our democracy.
Ronald Reagan called America “a shining city on a hill.” Donald Trump calls it “a divided crime scene” that only he can fix. It doesn’t matter to him that illegal immigration and the crime rate are as low as they’ve been in decades — (applause) — because he’s not actually offering any real solutions to those issues. He’s just offering slogans, and he’s offering fear. He’s betting that if he scares enough people, he might score just enough votes to win this election.
And that's another bet that Donald Trump will lose. And the reason he'll lose it is because he’s selling the American people short. We're not a fragile people. We're not a frightful people. Our power doesn’t come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order as long as we do things his way. We don’t look to be ruled. Our power comes from those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that We the People, can form a more perfect union.
That's who we are. That’s our birthright — the capacity to shape our own destiny.
Referring to the lack of established culture and the established institution of slavery in the United States, in "Review of Seybert’s Annals of the United States", published in The Edinburgh Review (1820)
Context: In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? Or what old ones have they advanced? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? Who drinks out of American glasses? Or eats from American plates? Or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy and sell and torture?
2016, DNC Address (July 2016)
Context: America has changed over the years. But these values that my grandparents taught me — they haven’t gone anywhere. They’re as strong as ever, still cherished by people of every party, every race, every faith. They live on in each of us. What makes us American, what makes us patriots is what’s in here. That’s what matters. … And that’s why we can take the food and music and holidays and styles of other countries, and blend it into something uniquely our own. That’s why we can attract strivers and entrepreneurs from around the globe to build new factories and create new industries here. That’s why our military can look the way it does — every shade of humanity, forged into common service. That’s why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end.
That is America. That is America. Those bonds of affection; that common creed. We don’t fear the future; we shape it. We embrace it, as one people, stronger together than we are on our own.
2016, Memorial Service for Fallen Dallas Police Officers (July 2016)
Context: [S]o much of the tensions between police departments and minority communities that they serve is because we ask the police to do too much and we ask too little of ourselves. As a society, we choose to underinvest in decent schools. We allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment. We refuse to fund drug treatment and mental health programs. We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book and then we tell the police “you’re a social worker, you’re the parent, you’re the teacher, you’re the drug counselor.” We tell them to keep those neighborhoods in check at all costs, and do so without causing any political blowback or inconvenience. Don’t make a mistake that might disturb our own peace of mind. And then we feign surprise when, periodically, the tensions boil over. We know these things to be true. They’ve been true for a long time. [... ] And if we cannot even talk about these things -- if we cannot talk honestly and openly not just in the comfort of our own circles, but with those who look different than us or bring a different perspective, then we will never break this dangerous cycle.
“If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man”
1890s, The Path of the Law (1897)
Context: If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: With clarity and quiet, I look upon the world and say: All that I see, hear, taste, smell, and touch are the creations of my mind.
The sun comes up and the sun goes down in my skull. Out of one of my temples the sun rises, and into the other the sun sets.
The stars shine in my brain; ideas, men, animals browse in my temporal head; songs and weeping fill the twisted shells of my ears and storm the air for a moment.
2016, Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative Town Hall (March 2016)
Context: I believe that under the surface all people are the same. […] people are all essentially the same. Similar hopes, similar dreams, similar strengths, similar weaknesses. But we're also all bound by history and culture and habits. And so conflicts arise, in part, because of some weaknesses in human nature. When we feel threatened, then we like to strike out against people who are not like us. When change is happening too quickly, and we try to hang on to those things that we think could give us a solid foundation. And sometimes the organizing principles are around issues like race, or religion. When there are times of scarcity, then people can turn on each other. And so I don't underestimate the very real challenges that we continue to face, and I don't think it is inevitable that the world comes together in a common culture and common understanding. But overall, I am hopeful. And the reason I'm hopeful is, if you look at the trajectory of history, humanity has slowly improved.
Academy of Achievement interview (1991)
Context: I do believe that everyone growing up faces differential opportunities. With me, it was books and travel and some good teachers. With somebody else, it may be a boy scout master. With somebody else, it will be a clergyman. Somebody else, an uncle who was wiser than the father. I think young people ought to seek that differential experience that is going to knock them off dead center. I was a typical American school boy. I happened to get straight A's and be pretty good in sports. But I had no great vision of what I could be. And I never had any yearning.
My job was to live through Friday afternoon, get through the week, and eat something. And then along came these differential experiences that you don't look for, that you don't plan for, but, boy, you better not miss them. The things that make you bigger than you are. The things that give you a vision. The things that give you a challenge.
Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XXXII : Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret, p. 841
Context: All hypotheses scientifically probable are the last gleams of the twilight of knowledge, or its last shadows. Faith begins where Reason sinks exhausted. Beyond the human Reason is the Divine Reason, to our feebleness the great Absurdity, the Infinite Absurd, which confounds us and which we believe. For the Master, the Compass of Faith is above the Square of Reason; but both rest upon the Holy Scriptures and combine to form the Blazing Star of Truth.
All eyes do not see alike. Even the visible creation is not, for all who look upon it, of one form and one color. Our brain is a book printed within and without, and the two writings are, with all men, more or less confused.
1910s, Address to the Knights of Columbus (1915)
Context: Even in the matter of national defense there is such a labyrinth of committees and counsels and advisors that there is a tendency on the part of the average citizen to become confused and do nothing. I ask you to help strike the note that shall unite our people. As a people we must be united. If we are not united we shall slip into the gulf of measureless disaster. We must be strong in purpose for our own defense and bent on securing justice within our borders. If as a nation we are split into warring camps, if we teach our citizens not to look upon one another as brothers but as enemies divided by the hatred of creed for creed or of those of one race against those of another race, surely we shall fail and our great democratic experiment on this continent will go down in crushing overthrow. I ask you here tonight and those like you to take a foremost part in the movement a young men's movement for a greater and better America in the future.
"The World": Love (1943), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz
Rescue (1945)
Context: Love means to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills —
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
The Ragged Wood http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1673/
In The Seven Woods (1904)
Context: p>O hurry where by water among the trees
The delicate-stepping stag and his lady sigh,
When they have but looked upon their images--
Would none had ever loved but you and I!Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed
Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky,
When the sun looked out of his golden hood?--
O that none ever loved but you and I!O hurry to the ragged wood, for there
I will drive all those lovers out and cry—
O my share of the world, O yellow hair!
No one has ever loved but you and I.</p
"Assorted Landmines", p. 148
Awareness (1992)
Context: As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to the mind. Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made. Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.
2005-09, Address at Stanford University (2005)
Context: When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
2015, Address to the Nation by the President on San Bernardino (December 2015)
Context: My fellow Americans, I am confident we will succeed in this mission because we are on the right side of history. We were founded upon a belief in human dignity -- that no matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like, or what religion you practice, you are equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law. Even in this political season, even as we properly debate what steps I and future Presidents must take to keep our country safe, let’s make sure we never forget what makes us exceptional. Let’s not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear; that we have always met challenges -- whether war or depression, natural disasters or terrorist attacks -- by coming together around our common ideals as one nation, as one people. So long as we stay true to that tradition, I have no doubt America will prevail.
Source: Invisible Man (1952), Chapter 1.
Context: All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.
Salon interview (1997)
Context: I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it. Because in actual fact, men and women have much more in common than they are separated.
Lincoln was alluding to Jesus' words in in Matthew 7:1 "Judge not, that ye be not judged." (KJV)
1860s, Second Inaugural Address (1865)
Context: Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.
1860s, Allow the humblest man an equal chance (1860)
Context: One of the reasons why I am opposed to Slavery is just here. What is the true condition of the laborer? I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else. When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor, for his whole life. I am not ashamed to confess that twenty five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat — just what might happen to any poor man's son! I want every man to have the chance — and I believe a black man is entitled to it — in which he can better his condition — when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system.
David D. Porter, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War https://ia802604.us.archive.org/9/items/incidentsanecdot00port/incidentsanecdot00port.pdf (1885), p. 274.
Context: It looked queer to me to see boxes labeled 'His Excellency, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America'. The packages so labeled contained Bass ale or Cognac brandy, which cost 'His Excellency' less than we Yankees had to pay for it. Think of the President drinking imported liquors while his soldiers were living on pop-corn and water!
Invitation to the Journey
Journey Within (1947)
Context: Never do I hesitate to look squarely at the unexpected face that every passing hour unveils to us, and to sacrifice the false images of it formed in advance, however dear they may be. In me, the love of life in general predominates over love of my own life (that, indeed, would never have sufficed to bear me up). May life herself speak! However inadequate I may be in listening to her, and in repeating her words, I shall try to record them, even if they contradict my most secret desires. In all that I write, may her will, not mine, be done!
No. 225.
The Tatler (1711–1714)
Context: At the same time that I think discretion the most useful talent a man can be master of, I look upon cunning to be the accomplishment of little, mean, ungenerous minds. Discretion points out the noblest ends to us, and pursues the most proper and laudable methods of attaining them: cunning has only private selfish aims, and sticks at nothing which may make them succeed. Discretion has large and extended views, and, like a well-formed eye, commands a whole horizon: cunning is a kind of short-sightedness, that discovers the minutest objects which are near at hand, but is not able to discern things at a distance. Discretion the more it is discovered, gives a greater authority to the person who possesses it: cunning, when it is once detected, loses its force, and makes a man incapable of bringing about even those events which he might have done had he passed only for a plain man. Discretion is the perfection of reason, and a guide to us in all the duties of life: cunning is a kind of instinct, that only looks out after our immediate interest and welfare. Discretion is only found in men of strong sense and good understandings, cunning is often to be met with in brutes themselves, and in persons who are but the fewest removes from them.
Book III, 3.46-[4]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book III
Playboy interview (May 1995)
Context: It took most of my life to realize that men are not tyrants or egomaniacs. I had an epiphany in a shopping mall recently that put it all in perspective. I was having a piece of pizza and I saw all these teenage boys running around in the mall. They were wild. I looked at them and saw this desperation. When I was their age I hated those kinds of boys because they were so obnoxious. They are so involved in their status, gaining it, afraid of losing it. I'm glad I don't have to be that age again. So they sat down near me and they didn't notice me. I didn't exist on their radar map. I was thinking, This is great. I was watching. They were full of energy and life. And I suddenly realized, My God, the reason they are so loud, the reason they are so uncontrolled, the reason I hated them at that age is that they bond with each other against women. It was the first time they were able to be away from the control of a woman — their mothers. They were on their own and for this period they're very dangerous. Women have to watch out when they go to fraternity parties, because the men are all trying to up their status among one another and there is all this testosterone. And then some girl will snag them. And that's it. It's over for them. They get married and they're under the control of their wives forever. You hear these women all the time, on, like, Ricki Lake, saying, "You know, I have two children, but actually I have three children" about the husband, and it's true: The husband becomes a child again. Even when men are doing their share, taking out the garbage, doing the mopping, whatever, women are still running the household. They are in control and the men become subordinate again. So that's what the feminists are so worried about? Men who are subordinated by their mothers and then by their wives? Men are looking for maternal solace in women, and that's the nature of heterosexuality. Now you tell me, who really has all the power?
Source: Across the Plains (1892), Ch. VII, The Lantern-Bearers.
Context: The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And, the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action.
The Duty of Owning Books (1859)
Context: Books are the windows through which the soul looks out. A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.
As quoted in Isaac Newton: Inventor, Scientist, and Teacher (1975) by John Hudson Tiner. "Atheism is so senseless" is a statement Newton made indeed in "A short Schem of the true Religion", but no source for the rest of this statement has been located prior to 1975. Part of this statement might originate as a summation of observations by Colin Maclaurin in his An Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries (1750), Book III, Ch. 5 http://books.google.com.au/books?id=yS1PAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA307#q=%22wisdom%20of%20the%20author%22: "On the quantity of watter and density of the sun and planets" : "… the earth … those planets which are nearer the sun are found to be more dense, by which they are enabled to bear the greater heat of the sun. This is the result of our most subtle enquiries into nature, that all things are in the best situations, and disposed by perfect wisdom. If our earth was carried down into the orb of Mercury, our ocean would boil and soon be dissipated into vapour, and dry land would become uninhabitable. If the earth was carried to the orb of Saturn, the ocean would freeze at so great a distance from the sun, and the cold would soon put a period to the life of plants and animals. A much less variation of the earth's distance from the sun than this would depopulate the torrid zone if the earth came nearer the sun, and the temperate zones, if it was carried from the sun. A less heat at Jupiter's distance … might be as fatal … proves on every occasion, the wisdom of the author."
Disputed
1790s, Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1798)
Context: The evil that has resulted from the error of the schools in teaching natural philosophy as an accomplishment only has been that of generating in the pupils a species of atheism. Instead of looking through the works of creation to the Creator Himself, they stop short and employ the knowledge they acquire to create doubts of His existence. They labor with studied ingenuity to ascribe everything they behold to innate properties of matter and jump over all the rest by saying that matter is eternal.
Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)
Context: Whenever in my dreams, I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then — not in dreams — but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle-tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.
“I believe in everything — I am only looking for proofs.”
Incidentals (1904); this is sometimes paraphrased: "I am an idealist. I believe in everything — I am only looking for proofs."
Context: Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen. Every blunder behind us is giving a cheer for us, and only for those who were willing to fail are the dangers and splendors of life. To be a good loser is to learn how to win. I was sure there are ten men in me and I do not know or understand one of them. I could safely declare, I am an idealist. A Parisian cynic says "I believe in nothing. I am looking for clues." My statement would be : I believe in everything — I am only looking for proofs.
“Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.”
Source: God: The Failed Hypothesis (2007), Chapter 4: 'Cosmic Evidence', p.128-129
Context: We have yet to encounter an observable astronomical phenomenon that requires a supernatural element to be added to a model in order to describe the event... Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.
Nobel lecture (11 December 1952) http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1952/purcell-lecture.html
Context: I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it. I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, looking on snow with new eyes. There the snow lay around my doorstep — great heaps of protons quietly precessing in the earth's magnetic field. To see the world for a moment as something rich and strange is the private reward of many a discovery.
Seventh and Last Joint Debate with Steven Douglas, at Alton, Illinois (15 October 1858)
1850s, Lincoln–Douglas debates (1858)
Context: Now, I have upon all occasions declared as strongly as Judge Douglas against the disposition to interfere with the existing institution of slavery. You hear me read it from the same speech from which he takes garbled extracts for the purpose of proving upon me a disposition to interfere with the institution of slavery, and establish a perfect social and political equality between negroes and white people. Allow me while upon this subject briefly to present one other extract from a speech of mine, more than a year ago, at Springfield, in discussing this very same question, soon after Judge Douglas took his ground that negroes were not included in the Declaration of Independence: I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal — equal in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere... That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.
1850s, Speech at Chicago (1858)
Context: There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men — descended by blood from our ancestors — among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe — German, Irish, French and Scandinavian — men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,' and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.
Song, To Celia, lines 1-16; this poem was inspired by "Letter XXIV" of Philostratus, which in translation reads: "Drink to me with your eyes alone…. And if you will, take the cup to your lips and fill it with kisses, and give it so to me".
The Works of Ben Jonson, First Folio (1616), The Forest
Context: Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honoring thee
As giving it a hope that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
And sent'st it back to me;
Since when it grows and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.
Morning in the Burned House (1995), The Loneliness of the Military Historian
Context: Instead of this, I tell
what I hope will pass as truth.
A blunt thing, not lovely.
The truth is seldom welcome,
especially at dinner,
though I am good at what I do.
My trade is courage and atrocities.
I look at them and do not condemn.
I write things down the way they happened,
as near as can be remembered.
I don’t ask why, because it is mostly the same.
Wars happen because the ones who start them
think they can win.
“Look here, I have succeeded at last in fetching some gold from the sun.”
after his banker questioned the value of investigating gold in the Fraunhofer lines of the sun and Kirchhoff handing him over a medal he was awarded for his investigations.
A memoir of Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, by Robert Von Helmholtz, translated by Joseph De Perott, in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Institution (1890), p. 537.
1860s, Speeches to Ohio Regiments (1864), Speech to One Hundred Forty-eighth Ohio Regiment (1864)
Context: SOLDIERS OF THE 148TH OHIO: — I am most happy to meet you on this occasion. I understand that it has been your honorable privilege to stand, for a brief period, in the defense of your country, and that now you are on your way to your homes. I congratulate you, and those who are waiting to bid you welcome home from the war; and permit me, in the name of the people, to thank you for the part you have taken in this struggle for the life of the nation. You are soldiers of the Republic, everywhere honored and respected. Whenever I appear before a body of soldiers, I feel tempted to talk to them of the nature of the struggle in which we are engaged. I look upon it as an attempt on the one hand to overwhelm and destroy the national existence, while, on our part, we are striving to maintain the government and institutions of our fathers, to enjoy them ourselves, and transmit them to our children and our children's children forever.
Letter to John Hay, American Ambassador to the Court of St. James, London, written in Washington, DC http://www.trsite.org/content/pages/speaking-loudly (June 7, 1897)
1890s
Context: Is America a weakling, to shrink from the work of the great world powers? No! The young giant of the West stands on a continent and clasps the crest of an ocean in either hand. Our nation, glorious in youth and strength, looks into the future with eager eyes and rejoices as a strong man to run a race.
1860s, Speeches to Ohio Regiments (1864), Speech to the One Hundred Sixty-sixth Ohio Regiment
Context: I almost always feel inclined, when I happen to say anything to soldiers, to impress upon them in a few brief remarks the importance of success in this contest. It is not merely for to-day, but for all time to come that we should perpetuate for our children's children this great and free government, which we have enjoyed all our lives. I beg you to remember this, not merely for my sake, but for yours. I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has.
“I am looking for the happiness which lives.”
Light (1919), Ch. VII - A Summary
Context: I am looking for the happiness which lives. And truly, when I have a sense of some new assent wavering and making ready, or when I am on the way to a first rendezvous, I feel myself gloriously uplifted, and equal to everything!
This fills my life. Desire wears the brain as much as thought wears it. All my being is agog for chances to shine and to be shared. When they say in my presence of some young woman that, "she is not happy," a thrill of joy tears through me.
Preface to ' (1859).
Context: In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. [Es ist nicht das Bewußtsein der Menschen, das ihr Sein, sondern umgekehrt ihr gesellschaftliches Sein, das ihr Bewusstsein bestimmt. ] At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work before. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so we can not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. In broad outlines we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois modes of production as so many progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation constitutes, therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric stage of human society.
"The American Dance", in Modern Dance, ed. Virginia Stewart (1945).
As quoted in A Rockwell Portrait : An Intimate Biography (1978) by Donald Walton, p. 251
2015, State of the Union Address (January 2015)
2013, Commencement Address at Ohio State University (May 2013)
Context: We are blessed to live in the greatest nation on Earth. But we can always be greater. We can always aspire to something more. That doesn’t depend on who you elect to office. It depends on you, as citizens, how big you want to be, and how badly you want it.
Look at all America has accomplished. Look at how big we’ve been.
I dare you to do better. I dare you to be better.
From what I have seen of your generation, I have no doubt you will. I wish you courage, and compassion, and all the strength you need for that tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.
My Day (1935–1962)
Context: What is going on in the Un-American Activities Committee worries me primarily because little people have become frightened and we find ourselves living in the atmosphere of a police state, where people close doors before they state what they think or look over their shoulders apprehensively before they express an opinion.
I have been one of those who have carried the fight for complete freedom of information in the United Nations. And while accepting the fact that some of our press, our radio commentators, our prominent citizens and our movies may at times be blamed legitimately for things they have said and done, still I feel that the fundamental right of freedom of thought and expression is essential. If you curtail what the other fellow says and does, you curtail what you yourself may say and do.
In our country we must trust the people to hear and see both the good and the bad and to choose the good. The Un-American Activities Committee seems to me to be better for a police state than for the USA. (29 October 1947)
Source: Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1960), p. 5
Context: We Shall Naturally look round in vain the macrophysical world for acausal events, for the simple reason that we cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist... The so-called "scientific view of the world" based on this can hardly be anything more than a psychologically biased partial view which misses out all those by no means unimportant aspects that cannot be grasped statistically.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1959).
Context: What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed. You may ask what good it does us. Let's put it this way — human beings possess the weapon of knowledge in order to make life bearable. For animals such things aren't necessary. Animals don't need knowledge or anything of the sort to make life bearable. But human beings do need something, and with knowledge they can make the very intolerableness of life a weapon, though at the same time that intolerableness is not reduced in the slightest. That's all there is to it.
“I don't know if I'm closer to Heaven but
It looks like Hell down there.”
Song lyrics, The Red Shoes (1993)
Context: I don't know if I'm closer to Heaven but
It looks like Hell down there.
These streets have never been paved with gold.
The monster in Ch. 13
Frankenstein (1818)
Context: What was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?
I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat!
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal' I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man.
Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn
Context: There are all those things against you. Against you and your great common interests which as you dimly saw are the same thing in effect as justice, there are not only the sword-wavers, the profiteers, and the intriguers.
There is not only the prodigious opposition of interested parties — financiers, speculators great and small, armorplated in their banks and houses, who live on war and live in peace during war, with their brows stubbornly set upon a secret doctrine and their faces shut up like safes.
There are those who admire the exchange of flashing blows, who hail like women the bright colors of uniforms; those whom military music and the martial ballads poured upon the public intoxicate as with brandy; the dizzy-brained, the feeble-minded, the superstitious, the savages.
There are those who bury themselves in the past, on whose lips are the sayings only of bygone days, the traditionalists for whom an injustice has legal force because it is perpetuated, who aspire to be guided by the dead, who strive to subordinate progress and the future and all their palpitating passion to the realm of ghosts and nursery-tales.
With them are all the parsons, who seek to excite you and to lull you to sleep with the morphine of their Paradise, so that nothing may change. There are the lawyers, the economists, the historians — and how many more? — who befog you with the rigmarole of theory, who declare the inter-antagonism of nationalities at a time when the only unity possessed by each nation of to-day is in the arbitrary map-made lines of her frontiers, while she is inhabited by an artificial amalgam of races; there are the worm-eaten genealogists, who forge for the ambitious of conquest and plunder false certificates of philosophy and imaginary titles of nobility. The infirmity of human intelligence is short sight. In too many cases, the wiseacres are dunces of a sort, who lose sight of the simplicity of things, and stifle and obscure it with formulae and trivialities. It is the small things that one learns from books, not the great ones.
And even while they are saying that they do not wish for war they are doing all they can to perpetuate it. They nourish national vanity and the love of supremacy by force. "We alone," they say, each behind his shelter, "we alone are the guardians of courage and loyalty, of ability and good taste!" Out of the greatness and richness of a country they make something like a consuming disease. Out of patriotism — which can be respected as long as it remains in the domain of sentiment and art on exactly the same footing as the sense of family and local pride, all equally sacred — out of patriotism they make a Utopian and impracticable idea, unbalancing the world, a sort of cancer which drains all the living force, spreads everywhere and crushes life, a contagious cancer which culminates either in the crash of war or in the exhaustion and suffocation of armed peace.
They pervert the most admirable of moral principles. How many are the crimes of which they have made virtues merely by dowering them with the word "national"? They distort even truth itself. For the truth which is eternally the same they substitute each their national truth. So many nations, so many truths; and thus they falsify and twist the truth.
Those are your enemies. All those people whose childish and odiously ridiculous disputes you hear snarling above you — "It wasn't me that began, it was you!" — "No, it wasn't me, it was you!" — "Hit me then!" — "No, you hit me!" — those puerilities that perpetuate the world's huge wound, for the disputants are not the people truly concerned, but quite the contrary, nor do they desire to have done with it; all those people who cannot or will not make peace on earth; all those who for one reason or another cling to the ancient state of things and find or invent excuses for it — they are your enemies!
They are your enemies as much as those German soldiers are to-day who are prostrate here between you in the mud, who are only poor dupes hatefully deceived and brutalized, domestic beasts. They are your enemies, wherever they were born, however they pronounce their names, whatever the language in which they lie. Look at them, in the heaven and on the earth. Look at them, everywhere! Identify them once for all, and be mindful for ever!
Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn
Context: Paradis, possessed by his notion, waved his hand towards the wide unspeakable landscape. and looking steadily on it repeated his sentence, 'War is that. It is that everywhere. What are we, we chaps, and what's all this here? Nothing at all. All we can see is only a speck. You've got to remember that this morning there's three thousand kilometers of equal evils, or nearly equal, or worse."
"And then," said the comrade at our side, whom we could not recognize even by his voice, "to-morrow it begins again. It began again the day before yesterday, and all the days before that!"
Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face
Context: When you look straight on, you end by seeing the immense event — death. There is only one thing which really gives the meaning of our whole life, and that is our death. In that terrible light may they judge their hearts who will one day die. Well I know that Marie's death would be the same thing in my heart as my own, and it seems to me also that only within her of all the world does my own likeness wholly live. We are not afraid of the too great sincerity which goes the length of these things; and we talk about them, beside the bed which awaits the inevitable hour when we shall not awake in it again. We say: —
"There'll be a day when I shall begin something that I shan't finish — a walk, or a letter, or a sentence, or a dream.".
Source: Bend Sinister (1963), p. vi.
Context: The term "bend sinister" means a heraldic bar or band drawn from the left side (and popularly, but incorrectly, supposed to denote bastardy). This choice of title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinistral and sinister world. The title's drawback is that a solemn reader looking for "general ideas" or "human interest" (which is much the same thing) in a novel may be led to look for them in this one.
Source: Sylvie and Bruno (1889), Chapter 25 : Looking Eastward
“That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing.”
"Two Worlds," Nobel lecture (7 December 2001) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2001/naipaul-lecture-e.html
Context: I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly fifty years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will — with luck — come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing.
Billy writing a letter to a newspaper describing the Tralfamadorians
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Context: The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."