Quotes about look
page 97

“To know what it is to look at things, life as a prayer, a mass, a celebration.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

Notebooks

“The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time; and while we listened with earnestness and admiration to the philosopher who was now unfolding to us the order and series of these wonderful events, we became sensible how much farther reason may sometimes go than imagination can venture to follow.”

Stephen Baxter (1957) author

Source: Ages in Chaos (2003), Chapter 15, “The world was tired out with geological theories” (p. 160)

Imagination, Time

“They climb the clouds/ To come through with airmail/ The dancing crowds/ Look up to some rare male/ Like that Astaire male.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

from Lorenz Hart's title number to On Your Toes.

Dance

“Last night me and Kate we laid in bed talking about getting out.
Packing up our bags maybe heading south.
I'm thirty-five, we got a boy of our own now.
Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said son take a good look around.
This is your hometown.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"My Hometown"
Song lyrics, Born in the U.S.A. (1984)

Boy, Night

“Then looking at him darkly resourceful Odysseus spoke to him:
"What is this word that broke through the fence of your teeth, Atreides?"”

Homér Iliad

IV. 350–351 (tr. R. Lattimore).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)

“For an author Jerry Vail was rather nice-looking, most authors, as is widely known, resembling in appearance the more degraded types of fish, unless they look like birds, when they could pass as vultures and no questions asked.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Pigs Have Wings

Pigs Have Wings (1952)

Question, Bird, Fish, Appearance

“(17.2. 1914) Beyond some bars, out of arm's reach, lies an objective [a banana]; on this side, in the background of the experiment room, is placed a sawn-off castor-oil bush, whose branches can be easily broken off. It is impossible to squeeze the tree through the railings, on account of its awkward shape; besides, only one of the bigger apes could drag it as far as the bars. Sultan is let in, does not immediately see the objective, and, looking about him indifferently, sucks one of the branches of the tree. But, his attention having been drawn to the objective, he approaches the bars, glances outside, the next moment turns round, goes straight to the tree, seizes a thin slender branch, breaks it off with a sharp jerk, runs back to the bars, and attains the objective. From the turning round upon the tree up to the grasping of the fruit with the broken-off branch, is one single quick chain of action, without the least 'hiatus', and without the slightest movement that does not, objectively considered, fit into the solution described.”

Wolfgang Köhler book The Mentality of Apes

Source: The Mentality of Apes, 1925, p. 94; As cited in: Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, 1964, p. 103

Jerk, Tree, Indifference

“We've been looking for the enemy for some time now. We've finally found him. We're surrounded. That simplifies things.”

Chesty Puller (1898–1971) United States Marine Corps general

Breakout: The Chosin Reservoir Campaign Korea 1950, Martin Russ, 1998

Time

“We're going to make history together. You're going to look back at this election on November 8th, and say it is by far the most important vote that you have ever cast. Once again, we're going to have a government of, by, and for the people. We will make America wealthy again, we will make America powerful again, we will make America strong again, we will Make America Great Again! Thank you all, thank you very much. God bless you, everybody, thank you.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

At a rally in Bangor, Maine https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/787430717387055105 (October 15, 2016) 2010s, 2016, October

God, People, History, Strong

“We planted our crops in the spring, and they came up, and were looking nicely, and we were cheered with the hopes of having a very abundant harvest. But alas! it very soon appeared as if our crops were going to be swallowed up by a vast horde of crickets, that came down from these mountains-crickets very different to what I used to be acquainted with in the State of New York. They were crickets nearly as large as a man's thumb. They came in immense droves, so that men and women with brush could make no headway against them; but we cried unto the Lord in our afflictions, and the Lord heard us, and sent thousands and tens of thousands of a small white bird. I have not seen any of them lately. Many called them gulls, although they were different from the seagulls that live on the Atlantic coast. And what did they do for us? They went to work, and by thousands and tens of thousands, began to devour them up, and still we thought that even they could not prevail against so large and mighty an army. But we noticed, that when they had apparently filled themselves with these crickets, they would go and vomit them up, and again go to work and fill themselves, and so they continued to do, until the land was cleared of crickets, and our crops were saved. There are those who will say that this was one of the natural courses of events, that there was no miracle in it. Let that be as it may, we esteemed it as a blessing from the hand of God; miracle or no miracle, we believe that God had a hand in it, and it does not matter particularly whether strangers believe or not.”

Orson Pratt (1811–1881) Apostle of the LDS Church

Journal of Discourses 21:276-277 (June 20,1880)
Pratt describes the event in which seagulls disposed of swarms of crickets that were destroying their crops.
Miracle of the seagulls and crickets

Women, Men, God, Hope

“196. Hee that lookes not before finds himself behind.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

“The Prophet is thus a primal force. His action affects the character of the general harmony, while he him self does not become a part of that harmony, but remains always a man apart, a narrow-minded extremist, zealous for his own ideal, and intolerant of every other. And since he cannot have all that he would, he is in a perpetual state of anger and grief; he remains all his life "a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth." [Jeremiah 15:10] Not only this: the other members of society, those many-sided dwarfs, creatures of the general harmony, cry out after him, "The Prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad" [Hosea 9:7]; and they look with lofty contempt on his narrowness and extremeness.”

Ahad Ha'am (1856–1927) Hebrew essayist and thinker

Source: Selected Essays (1904), "Priest and Prophet" (1893), pp. 130-131

Life, Fools, Parting, Cry

“Janeway Smithson was a little, insane, grey-haired bantam rooster of a man. He loaded five or six of us in one cab, and we rolled down to the bed of the L. A. River. Now in those days the L. A. River was a fake - there was no water, just a wide, flat, dry cement runway. The bums lived down there by the hundreds in little cement alcoves under the bridges and overpasses. Some of them even had potted plants in front of their places. All they needed to live like kings was canned heat (Sterno) and what they picked out of the nearby garbage dump. They were tan and relaxed and most of them looked a hell of a lot healthier than the average Los Angeles business man. Those guys down there had no problems with women, income tax, landlords, burial expenses, dentists, time payments, car repairs, or with climbing into a voting booth and pulling the curtain closed.”

Charles Bukowski book Factotum

Source: Factotum (1975), Ch. 71

Women, Angels, Cars, Guy

“When Heracles was quite a young man and was nearly of the age at which you yourselves are now, while he was deliberating which of the two roads he should take, the one leading through toils to virtue, or the easiest, two women approached him, and these were Virtue and Vice. Now at once, although they were silent, the difference between them was evident from their appearance. For the one had been decked out for beauty through the art of toiletry, and was overflowing with voluptuousness, and she was leading a whole swarm of pleasures in her train; now these things she displayed, and promising still more than these she tried to draw Heracles to her. But the other was withered and squalid, and had an intense look, and spoke quite differently; for she promised nothing dissolute or pleasant, but countless sweating toils and labours and dangers through every land and sea. But the prize to be won by these was to become a god, as the narrative of Prodicus expressed it; and it was this second woman that Heracles in the end followed.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

Source: On Greek Literature, p. 399

Women, God, Pleasure, Age

“One reason, perhaps, why the politician today is slow to take up methods which are a commonplace in business life is that he has such ready entry to the media of communication on which his power depends.
The newspaperman looks to him for news. And by his power of giving or withholding information the politician can often effectively censor political news. But being dependent, every day of the year and for year after year, upon certain politicians for news, the newspaper reporters are obliged to work in harmony with their news sources.”

Edward Bernays book Propaganda

Page 120
Propaganda (1928)

Life, Communication, Business, Dependency

“Be glad you're fifty — and
That you got there while things were nice,
In a world worth looking at twice.
So here's wishing you many more years,
But not all that many. Cheers!”

Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) English novelist, poet, critic, teacher

"Ode to Me", (p. 134)
Collected Poems, 1944-1979 (1979)

World

“Until Abstract Expressionism you had to have something to paint about, some kind of subject matter. Even though Kandinsky and w:Arthur Dove were improvising earlier, it didn't take. They had to have symbols, suggested natural images or geometry, which was something real structurally. That gave them something to paint about. What was new was the idea that something you looked at could be like something you heard.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Kenneth Noland, p. 8
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Idea, Nature, Painting

“Hey Nikita is it cold
In your little corner of the world?
You could roll around the globe
And never find a warmer soul to know.Oh I saw you by the wall,
Ten of your tin soldiers in a row.
With eyes that looked like ice on fire,
The human heart a captive in the snow.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Nikita
Song lyrics, Ice on Fire (1985)

World, Soul, Heart

“When we were first told the extent of Ivan's disability I thought that we would suffer having to care for him but at least he would benefit from our care. Now as I look back I see that it was all the other way round. It was only him that ever really suffered and it was us — Sam, me, Nancy and Elwen — who gained more than I ever believed possible from having and loving such a wonderfully special and beautiful boy.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

In a letter to activists after the death of his son http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tory-leader-david-camerons-moving-379874 (28 February 2009) 2000s, 2009

Love, Beauty, Way, Boy

“[about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army] Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Sense, Past

“Looking back today over the years, we may well be proud of the work which our fellow citizens have done in India. There have, of course, been mistakes, there have been failures, but we can assert that our rule in India will stand comparison with that of any other nation which has been charged with the ruling of a people so different from themselves.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1947-07-10/debates/584499a6-8830-4426-be23-7215df06d57e/IndianIndependenceBill#2442 in the House of Commons (10 July 1947). 1940s

People, Failure

“My own lab has two Chinese, a Malaysian, a Canadian, an American, a German, it has had all sorts of people. And it’s actually fun because people from different countries come together, they have cultural exchanges, they learn more about each others’ countries and way of life. Science is a great international mixer, so the idea that it is a sort of cricket match where our team won — that simply is a wrong way of looking at scientific discovery.”

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952) Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologist

Commenting on the adulation he received in India as an Indian.
Venki’ makes light of India link- Winner says not to treat science like cricket; league of misses grows

Life, People, Way, Idea

“I’m honored today to get the opportunity to serve Missourians, in fact, to be sworn in as Missouri’s 45th United States Senator. I look forward to continuing to work for Missourians as I’ve had an opportunity to do in the past. The moment we face is a moment where people really want to know: Where are the private sector jobs? Why is the government spending so much money? And are we going to live in a country where the government is bigger than the people, or where the people are bigger than the government? I am going to do everything I can to ensure that we live in a country where the people are bigger than the government, and I will continue my conversation with Missourians to be sure that we continue to fight for jobs and commonsense solutions to the problems we face.”

Roy Blunt (1950) American politician

Statement Following Official Swearing-In Ceremony https://www.blunt.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2011/1/u-s-senator-roy-blunt-releases-statement-following-official-swearing-in-ceremony (January 4, 2011)

Money, People, Problem, Past

“But when he let loose that great voice from his chest
and the words came piling on like a driving winter blizzard —
then no man alive could rival Odysseus! Odysseus…
we no longer gazed in wonder at his looks.”

Homér Iliad

III. 221–224 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)

Winter

“Live, and with Hope such happy Dayes expect.
This said, although opprest with weighty Care,
He shews glad Looks, and hides his deep Despair.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Æneis

Happiness, Hope, Despair

“Art will never get its own, nor do its proper work in the discipline of life, until the sense of its sacred character comes once more into the general judgment, and masses of men look upon it as the few great spirits have looked who have been its true masters and interpreters”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.200

Life, Men, Art, Sense

“For the first time, I wasn't embarrassed by the look of beauty, of elegance, because when you see someone who has only one rag as their property, but it happens to be beautiful and pink and silk, beauty doesn't have to be separated... I have always said that you shouldn't have biases, you shouldn't have prejudices. But before that [before his trip to India, c. 1975] I'd never been able to use purple, because it was too beautiful.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

Source: 1990's, Rauschenberg, Art and Live, 1990, p. 206

Beauty, Time

“The dead don't die. They look on and help.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Letter to John Middleton Murry (2 February 1923)

Help, Dead

“When you look at nations today like England, in which great revivals occurred generations ago, there's very little vestige of Christianity left in public life. The Church, by and large, is dead, with only pockets of small Bible-believing churches struggling to make an impact on what's now a very pagan culture.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Did Eve really have an Extra Rib?: And other tough questions about the Bible (2002)

Life, Dead

“You know, it's a sad day when your child looks at you and asks: "Daddy, is this organic?" "Organic? I grew up on Angel Delight! We didn't have anything in the house if it wasn't neon!"”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

Monster (2004)

Sadness, Angels, Housing

“George: Gracie, those are beautiful flowers. Where did they come from?
Gracie: Don't you remember, George? You said that if I went to visit Clara Bagley in the hospital I should be sure to take her flowers. So, when she wasn't looking, I did.”

Gracie Allen (1902–1964) American actress and comedienne

Comedic routine, quoted in American Radio Networks : A History (2009) by Jim Cox, p. 144

Beauty, Flowers

“Political equality is not merely a folly – it is a chimera. It is idle to discuss whether it ought to exist; for, as a matter of fact, it never does. Whatever may be the written text of a Constitution, the multitude always will have leaders among them, and those leaders not selected by themselves. They may set up the pretence of political equality, if they will, and delude themselves with a belief of its existence. But the only consequences will be, that they will have bad leaders instead of good. Every community has natural leaders, to whom, if they are not misled by the insane passion for equality, they will instinctively defer. Always wealth, in some countries by birth, in all intellectual power and culture, mark out the men whom, in a healthy state of feeling, a community looks to undertake its government. They have the leisure for the task, and can give it the close attention and the preparatory study which it needs. Fortune enables them to do it for the most part gratuitously, so that the struggles of ambition are not defiled by the taint of sordid greed. They occupy a position of sufficient prominence among their neighbours to feel that their course is closely watched, and they belong to a class brought up apart from temptations to the meaner kinds of crime, and therefore it is no praise to them if, in such matters, their moral code stands high. But even if they be at bottom no better than others who have passed though greater vicissitudes of fortune, they have at least this inestimable advantage – that, when higher motives fail, their virtue has all the support which human respect can give. They are the aristocracy of a country in the original and best sense of the word. Whether a few of them are decorated by honorary titles or enjoy hereditary privileges, is a matter of secondary moment. The important point is, that the rulers of the country should be taken from among them, and that with them should be the political preponderance to which they have every right that superior fitness can confer. Unlimited power would be as ill-bestowed upon them as upon any other set of men. They must be checked by constitutional forms and watched by an active public opinion, lest their rightful pre-eminence should degenerate into the domination of a class. But woe to the community that deposes them altogether!”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Quarterly Review, 112, 1862, pp. 547-548
1860s

Men, Feeling, Communication, Motivation

“Now what are we looking at right here? What’s bang in the middle? Some people think that’s mathematics there. Fine. But if maths is the study that best allows you to think your way to the centre, what’re the forces you’re investigating? Maths is totally abstract, at one level, square roots of minus one and the like, but the world is nothing if not rigorously mathematical. So this is a way of looking at the world which unifies all the forces: mental, social, physical.”

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), pp. 145-146

People, World, Way, Mathematics

“I am not one to advocate the reducing of our navy in any degree below that proportion to the French navy which the exigencies of our service require; and, mind what I say, here is just what the French Government would admit as freely as you would. England has four times, at least, the amount of mercantile tonnage to protect at sea that France has, and that surely gives us a legitimate pretension to have a larger navy than France. Besides, this country is an island; we cannot communicate with any part of the world except by sea. France, on the other hand, has a frontier upon land, by which she can communicate with the whole world. We have, I think, unfortunately for ourselves, about a hundred times the amount of territory beyond the seas to protect, as colonies and dependencies, that France has. France has also twice or three times as large an army as England had. All these things give us a right to have a navy somewhat in the proportion to the French navy which we find to have existed if we look back over the past century. Nobody has disputed it. I would be the last person who would ever advocate any undue change in this proportion. On the contrary—I have said it in the House of Commons, and I repeat it to you—if the French Government showed a sinister design to increase their navy to an equality with ours; then, after every explanation to prevent such an absurd waste, I should vote 100 millions sterling rather than allow that navy to be increased to a level with ours—because I should say that any attempt of that sort without any legitimate grounds, would argue some sinister design upon this country.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in Rochdale (26 June 1861), quoted in John Bright and J. E. Thorold Rogers (eds.), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden, M.P. Volume II (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), pp. 433-4.
1860s

World, Communication, Thinking, Change

“Donald Trump I really truly believe is a very dangerous man. If you listen to the things he said this weekend… '. He has joked about killing reporters — and 'not' killing reporters like Putin does… We don't change with the mood of the country. That is the problem with our country right now. The Constitution is to anchor us in principles that help temper the mood of the country… The mood of the country is very angry, but you never make a good decision when you are angry… The worst thing we can do is to now start looking at, who is going to get revenge? One of the things that Donald Trump does, when you have a guy who is angry and then has an enemies list and starts to just take people down over and over and over again — if you disagree with him, he destroys you. If that is the mood of the country, we are in more trouble than I thought.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

interview on New Day http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/25/politics/glenn-beck-donald-trump-dangerous/index.html (January 2016), CNN. 2010s, 2016

People, Guy, Mood, Revenge

“in the lost luggage office in Buffalo
Lost luggage employee: Can I help you?
Engvall: Yes, you lost my luggage.
Employee: [looking directly at Bill] Has your plane landed yet?
Engvall: No, princess. I'm having an out of body experience. I'm just checkin' on it.”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Blue Collar Comedy Tour: The Movie (2003)
Here's Your Sign

Help, Princess

“I do have a relationship and I can tell you that he's very interested in what we're doing here today, he's probably very interested in what you and I are saying today, and I'm sure he is going to be seeing it in some form. But I do have a relationship with him, and I think, er, it's very interesting to see what's happened. I mean, look, he's done a very brilliant job in terms of what he represents and who he's representing, if you look at what he's done with Syria, if you look at so many of the different things, he has really eaten our president's lunch, let's not kid ourselves.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Trump responding to a question about whether he had a relationship with Vladimir Putin during an interview with MSNBC's Thomas Roberts while visiting Moscow for the Miss Universe competition http://www.msnbc.com/thomas-roberts/watch/trump-discusses-putin-in-2013-734124099973 (November 2013) 2010s, 2013

Thinking

“He is walking up an incline. There are tracks below him and the slow clatter of a freight, the hiss of an engine. At the top of a hill he stops to look back. He can see nothing but fog spaced with a file of blurred archlights. Then he walks on, taking pleasure in breathing, in the beat of his blood, in the tread of his feet on the pavement, between rows of otherworldly frame houses. Gradually the fog thins, a morning pearliness is seeping in from somewhere. Sunrise finds him walking along a cement road between dumping grounds full of smoking rubbishpiles. The sun shines redly through the mist on rusty donkey-engines, skeleton trucks, wishbones of Fords, shapeless masses of corroding metal. Jimmy walks fast to get out of the smell. He is hungry; his shoes are beginning to raise blisters on his big toes. At a cross-road where the warning light still winks and winks, is a gasoline station, opposite it the Lightning Bug lunchwagon. Carefully he spends his last quarter on breakfast. That leaves him three cents for good luck, or bad luck for that matter. A huge furniture truck, shiny and yellow, has drawn up outside.
"Say will you give me a lift?" he asks the redhaired man at the wheel.
"How fur ye goin?"
"I dunno.... Pretty far."”

John Dos Passos book Manhattan Transfer

Source: Manhattan Transfer (1925), pp. 403-404

Bad luck, Pleasure, Shoe, Light

“The prisoners who saved themselves were not the best, the predestined to good, the bearers of a message: what I had seen and experienced showed the exact opposite. Survived the worst of preference, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators of the 'gray area', the spies. It was not a certain rule (there were, nor are there in human affairs, certain rules), but was also a rule. I felt so innocent, but trooped among the saved, and therefore constantly looking for an excuse, before me and the others. Survived the worst, that is the most suitable; the best are all dead.”

Primo Levi book The Drowned and the Saved

The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

Selfishness, Dead

“Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate domination. This includes not only such obvious forms as the nation-state, with its routine use of violence and the force of law, and the corporation, with its institutionalized irresponsibility, but also such internalized forms as patriarchy, racism, homophobia. Also it is the attempt to expose the ways our philosophy, religion, economics, and other ideological constructions perform their primary function, which is to rationalize or naturalize — make seem natural — the domination that pervades our way of life: the destruction of the natural world or of indigenous peoples, for example, comes not from the result of decisions actively made and actions pursued, but instead, so we convince ourselves, as a manifestation of Darwinian selection, or God's will, or economic exigency. Beyond that, Anarchism is the attempt to look even into those parts of our everyday lives we accept as givens, as part of the universe, to see how they, too, dominate us or facilitate our domination over others… Most fundamentally, I would see Anarchism as a synonym for anti-authoritarianism.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)

Life, God, People, World

““When you’re on the chariot this time, no waving, no smiling. I just want you to look straight ahead, as if the entire audience is beneath your notice.”
“Finally something I’ll be good at,” I say.”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

Cinna and Katniss, p. 207
The Hunger Games trilogy, Catching Fire (2009)

Smile, Time

“You ask about Queen Victoria's visit to Brussels. I saw her for an instant flashing through the Rue Royale in a carriage and six, surrounded by soldiers. She was laughing and talking very gaily. She looked a little stout, vivacious lady, very plainly dressed, not much dignity or pretension about her. The Belgians liked her very well on the whole. They said she enlivened the sombre court of King Leopold, which is usually as gloomy as a conventicle.”

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) English novelist and poet

Letter to Emily Brontë, (1 December 1843) The life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) by Elizabeth Gaskell.

“The human heart is a deep still pool; in it are fishes of gold and silver, darting playfully, and slow-heaving slimy monsters, and tarnished treasure hoards, the infinite animalcular life; but when you look down at it you see but your own reflected face.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Life, Fish, Heart

“Although he was completely illiterate, if he looked at a book which was incorrect, which contained some false statement, or which aimed at deceiving the reader, he immediately put his finger on the offending passage. If you asked him how he knew this, he said that a devil first pointed out the place with its finger…When he was harried beyond endurance by these unclean spirits, Saint John’s Gospel was placed on his lap, and then they all vanished immediately, flying away like so many birds. If the Gospel were afterwards removed and the History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth put there in its place, just to see what would happen, the demons would alight all over his body, and on the book, too, staying there longer than usual and being even more demanding.”
Librum quoque mendosum, et vel falso scriptum, vel falsum etiam in se continentem inspiciens, statim, licet illiteratus omnino fuisset, ad locum mendacii digitum ponebat. Interrogatus autem, qualiter hoc nosset, dicebat daemonem ad locum eundem digitum suum primo porrigere…Contigit aliquando, spiritibus immundis nimis eidem insultantibus, ut Evangelium Johannis ejus in gremio poneretur: qui statim tanquam aves evolantes, omnes penitus evanuerunt. Quo sublato postmodum, et Historia Britonum a galfrido Arthuro tractata, experiendi causa, loco ejusdem subrogata, non solum corpori ipsius toti, sed etiam libro superposito, longe solito crebrius et taediosius insederunt.

Gerald of Wales (1146) Medieval clergyman and historian

Book 1, chapter 5, pp. 117-18.
Itinerarium Cambriae (The Journey Through Wales) (1191)

Books, History, Bird, Falseness

“I bid him look into the lives of men as though into a mirror, and from others to take an example for himself.”

Terence Adelphoe

Act III, scene 3, line 61 (415).
Adelphoe (The Brothers)

Men

“That is why he took so many hundreds of years to be known.
In reply to a comment that Jesus Christ didn't have a public relations team.
Quoted in "Looking back" Juan Rodriguez, The Gazette.”

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1917–2008) Inventor of Transcendental Meditation, musician

Montreal, Que.: February 19, 2011

Quotes, Christ

“She gave me a wide-eyed, innocent smile that looked as out of place on her as it would have on a desert scorpion.”

George Alec Effinger book A Fire in the Sun

Source: A Fire in the Sun (1989), Chapter 7 (p. 95).

Smile

“I never ask my wife about my flaws. Instead I try to get her to ignore them and concentrate on my sense of humor. You don't want any woman to look under the carpet because there's lots of flaws underneath. Joanne believes my character in a film we did together, "Mr. and Mrs. Bridge" comes closest to who I really am. I personally don't think there's one character who comes close… but I learned a long time ago not to disagree on things that I don't have a solid opinion about.”

Paul Newman (1925–2008) American actor and film director

Quoted in Craig Modderno, "Newman remains animated at 81," Reuters (2006-06-12)

Thinking, Sense, Learning, Time

“In the middle of the floor lay a skeleton, every vestige of flesh gone from the bones to which still clung the mildewed and moldered remnants of what had once been clothing. Upon the bed lay a similar gruesome thing, but smaller, while in a tiny cradle near-by was a third, a wee mite of a skeleton.
To none of these evidences of a fearful tragedy of a long dead day did little Tarzan give but passing heed. His wild jungle life had inured him to the sight of dead and dying animals, and had he known that he was looking upon the remains of his own father and mother he would have been no more greatly moved.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 6 : Jungle Battles

Life, Fear, Animals, Clothes

“You know my eyes are not very strong. So every day to make them stronger I force myself to look at the sun. I find it very hard. But do you know what I find harder? That is to look into the blue of your eyes.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Early in 1976, speaking to Margaret Trudeau, according to page 317 of Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968-2000 https://books.google.ca/books?id=ACC_G_kiR4cC&pg=PA317&lpg=PA317 by John English.

Strong, Sun

“(…) The problem is not yours – it is your mind’s only. Begin by disassociating yourself from your mind. Resolutely remind yourself that you are not the mind and that its problems are not yours. (…) Be conscious of yourself, watch your mind, give it your full attention. Don’t look for quick results; there may be none within your noticing. Unknown to you, your psyche will undergo a change, there will be more clarity in your thinking, charity in your feeling, purity in your behavior. You need not aim at these –you will witness the change all the same. For, what you are now is the result of inattention and what you become will be the fruit of attention.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Mind
Source: I am That, P.125.

Behavior, Feeling, Problem, Thinking

“What the Big Bang theory tells us, is that at least our region of the universe 13.82 years ago, was an extremely hot, dense uniform soup of particles which in the conventional standard Big Bang model filled literally all of space—and now we certainly believe that it filled essentially all of the space that we have access to—uniformly. …This is contrary to a popular cartoon image of the Big Bang, which is just plain wrong. The cartoon image of the Big Bang is the image of a small egg of highly dense matter that then exploded and spewed out into empty space. That is not the scientific picture of the Big Bang. …If there was a small egg that exploded into empty space, you would certainly expect that today you would see something different if you were looking towards where the egg was, versus looking the opposite direction, but we don't see any effect like that. When we look around the sky the universe looks completely uniform, on average, in all directions, to a very high degree of accuracy… So we don't see a sign of an egg having happened anywhere. Rather, the Big Bang seems to have happened everywhere, uniformly.”

Alan Guth (1947) American theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Lecture 1: Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse? Part I.
The Early Universe (2012)

Universe

“And I think that my whole life, looking back at it, I was so rooted in worldly things, in worldly values, fame, fashion and fortune and all the things that are just transient.”

Jani Allan (1952) South African columnist and broadcaster

Speaking in 1995 in an SABC interview about a change of philosophy following her libel case against Channel 4. http://70.84.171.10/~etools/newsbrief/1995/news0103 Other

Life, Fashion, Thinking

“For gay men this force of history has been made to come clean; it’s been stripped of its natural look. The very rapidity of change has laid bare the clanking machinery of history. To have been oppressed in the 1950s, freed in the 1960s, exalted in the 1970s and wiped out in the 1980s is a quick itinerary for a whole culture to follow. For we are witnessing not just the death of individuals but a menace to an entire culture. All the more reason to bear witness to the cultural moment.”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

Esthetics and Loss, Artforum (1987), printed in in The Burning Library: Writings on Art, Literature and Sexuality 1969-1993, (Picador, London, 1995)
Articles and Interviews

Death, Men, History, Nature

“And the eyes of all look upward seeing sign-word drawing nigh,
The stony wings of Egypt coming back across the sky;

We hear the clinking tamborine of Miriam anew;
We believe in every miracle since Lindbergh flew the blue —

The wonder of the long draw when the bowstring is a thread —
The beauty of a courage that can raise the wings of lead.”

Nathalia Crane (1913–1998) American writer

Venus Invisible and Other Poems (1928), The Wings of Lead

Beauty, Courage, Drawing

“In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens, and therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers. For, though during its term of office the government be practically as independent of the popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the people are called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

The Election in November 1860 (1860)

People, History, Question, Box

“People, I am actually fairly smart. Why has this not occurred to anyone? The information is all out there, if you go looking for it, and the classified stuff just comes from analyzing the unclassified stuff and connecting the dots…”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

"Clancy Speaks Again, Briefly" (12 February 2000)
2000s

People

“A real writer […] doesn't look up to any other writer but himself.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

I protagonisti, Rizzoli, 1976, p. 207.
1950s - 1990s

“It has to look democratic, but we must have everything in [our] hand.”

Walter Ulbricht (1893–1973) German politician

Es muss demokratisch aussehen, aber wir müssen alles in der Hand haben. 1945, in: Wolfgang Leonhard: Child of the revolution. Transl. by C. M. Woodhouse. London (Collins) 1957. Brandenburgische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung (archiviert bei archive.org) https://web.archive.org/web/20110111220208/http://www.politische-bildung-brandenburg.de/demokratie/themen/spielregeln/realpolitik.htm (Brandenburg State Institution for Political Education)

“DoJ [Department of Justice] is not supposed to be used to send messages. It’s supposed to be used to specifically target actual criminality, not to be this theoretical law creation machine where they want to push and twist the law so far to the point where it’s unrecognizable and use that to chill dissent. That’s when our country looks its most evil, and it really does. It’s an ugly picture of the US government”

Jay Leiderman (1971) lawyer

As stated in The Sabu Effect: An Interview with Jay Leiderman BY RAINCOASTER on AUGUST 22, 2014 http://thecryptosphere.com/2014/08/22/the-sabu-effect-an-interview-with-jay-leiderman/

Justice, Law, Evil, Country

“The lads are on top of the ground at the moment and they look as though they're looking forward to tomorrow.”

Phil Brown (footballer) (1959) English association football player and manager

24-Aug-2007, Hull City OWS
As opposed to under the ground?

“With peace has come prosperity. Burdens have been great, but the strength to bear them has been greater. The condition of those who toil is higher, better, more secure than in all the ages past. Out of the darkness of a great conflict has appeared the vision of a nearer, clearer than ever before, the life on earth and less under the deadening restraint of course more and more under the vitalizing influence of reason. Moral power has been triumphing over physical power. Education will tend to bring reason and experience of the past into the solution of the problems of the future. We must look to service and not selfishness, for service is the foundation of progress. The greatest lesson that we have to learn is to seek ever the public welfare, to build up, to maintain our American heritage.”

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

1920s, America and the War (1920)

Life, Age, Education, Peace

“But no line of ferocious, lean-faced, swarthy Spaniards appeared. Shouts and cries and the harsh snarl of gunfire suggested the dons were busy, desperately busy, elsewhere in London. When chance swept Shakespeare and Richard Burbage together for a moment, the player said, "Belike they'll make a stand at the tower." "Likely so," Shakespeare agreed unhappily. Those frowning walls had been made to hold back an army, and this… thing he was a part of was anything but. Up Tower Hill, where he'd watched the auto de fe almost a year before. A great roar, a roar full of triumph, rose from the men in front of him as they passed the crest of the hill and swept on towards the Tower Ditch and the walls beyond. And when Shakespeare crested the hill himself, he looked ahead and roared too, in joy and amazement and suddenly flaring hope. Will Kemp had been right, right and more than right. All the gates to the Tower of London stood open.”

Harry Turtledove book Ruled Britannia

Source: Ruled Britannia (2002), p. 379

Men, Hope, Business, Appearance

“Gurdjieff said, “Change depends on you, and it will not come about through study. You can know everything and yet remain where you are. It is like a man who knows all about money and the laws of banking, but has no money of his own in the bank. What does all his knowledge do for him?”

Here Gurdjieff suddenly changed his manner of speaking, and looking at me very directly he said: “You have the possibility of changing, but I must warn you that it will not be easy. You are still full of the idea that you can do what you like. In spite of all your study of free will and determinism, you have not yet understood that so long as you remain in this place, you can do nothing at all. Within this sphere there is no freedom. Neither your knowledge nor all your activity will give you freedom. This is because you have no …” Gurdjieff found it difficult to express what he wanted in Turkish. He used the word varlik, which means roughly the quality of being present. I thought he was referring to the experience of being separated from one’s body.

Neither I nor the Prince [Sabaheddin] could understand what Gurdjieff wished to convey. I felt sad, because his manner of speaking left me in no doubt that he was telling me something of great importance. I answered, rather lamely, that I knew that knowledge was not enough, but what else was there to do but study?…”

John G. Bennett (1897–1974) British mathematician and author

Source: Witness: the Story of a Search (1962), p. 46–48 cited in: "Gurdjieff’s Temple Dances by John G. Bennett", Gurdjieff International Review, on gurdjieff.org; About Constantinople 1920

Money, Sadness, Law, Idea

“Let us look for a moment at the erroneous interpretations given to the Gospel story. The symbolism of that Gospel story — an ancient story-presentation often presented down the ages, prior to the coming of the Christ in Palestine — has been twisted and distorted by theologians until the crystalline purity of the early teaching and the unique simplicity of the Christ have disappeared in a travesty of errors and in a mummery of ritual, money and human ambitions. Christ is pictured today as having been born in an unnatural manner, as having taught and preached for three years and then as having been crucified and eventually resurrected, leaving humanity in order to "sit on the right hand of God," in austere and distant pomp. Likewise, all the other approaches to God by any other people, at any time and in any country, are regarded by the orthodox Christian as wrong approaches […] Every possible effort has been made to force orthodox Christianity on those who accept the inspiration and the teachings of the Buddha or of others who have been responsible for preserving the divine continuity of revelation. The emphasis has been, as we all well know, upon the "blood sacrifice of the Christ" upon the Cross and upon a salvation dependent upon the recognition and acceptance of that sacrifice. The vicarious at-one-ment has been substituted for the reliance which Christ Himself enjoined us to place upon our own divinity; the Church of Christ has made itself famous and futile (as the world war proved) for its narrow creed, its wrong emphases, its clerical pomp, its spurious authority, its material riches and its presentation of a dead Christ. His resurrection is accepted, but the major appeal of the churches has been upon His death.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Reappearance of the Christ (1948), Chapter IV: The Work of the Christ Today and in the Future, p. 64

Death, Money, God, War

“The soul looks to God under two aspects or forms: First as the object of all its affections, or as an infinitely good and lovable being, and this imagine robs the heart; and insofar as he is good, infinitely beautiful, this is, infinitely perfect, he captures our intellectual vision, our thoughts and meditations.
In this regard, the theological virtues and their gifts cause God and the soul to become on single thing through love and purity of thoughts. While this divine union takes place primarily and mainly in the soul, all the other virtues are like aids, attendants and armies of that guard, assist and protect this work. This is the love of God for the soul and the love of the soul for God.”

Francisco Palau (1811–1872) Beatified Spanish Discalced Carmelite friar and priest

Letter to Juana Gratia (1857)

Love, God, Beauty, Soul

“I saw the 'Popstars' programme and to me it looked more like 'Opportunity Knocks' than the kind of cutting-edge postmoderism that The Guardian would like to have us believe it was. I think what it's more about is the public and the music industry's bloodlust. It's just like someone itching to say 'Oh, confound it all, let's bring back hanging, that was good entertainment.”

Luke Haines (1967) English musician and songwriter

http://uk.news.launch.yahoo.com/dyna/article.html?a=dotmusic_news/20674.html&e=l_news_dm

Music, Thinking

“The kid makes you sick. He looks the part, he walks the part, he is the part. He's six-foot something, fit as a flea, good-looking - he's got to have something wrong with him…. Hopefully he's hung like a hamster! That would make us all feel better!”

Ian Holloway (1963) English association football player and manager

On Cristiano Ronaldo "Holloway column" , BBC SPORTS(4 april 2008) http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/7329117.stm Sourced quotes

Feeling, Parting

“The band broke up because I couldn't bear Rotten anymore because he was an embarrassment with his silly hats and his, like, shabby, dirty, nasty looking appearance.”

Sid Vicious (1957–1979) English bassist and vocalist

On leaving the Sex Pistols; reported in Julien Temple, The Filth and the Fury: The Sex Pistols (2000), p. 207.

Appearance

““Promise me,” he said, “that you’ll say nothing, and if something happens to me, you’ll always honor our parents.” I swallowed. He was scaring me. “Look,” he continued, “I’ve met a lot of rich kids and their parents at the Academy, and I’ll tell you, there are no parents that I’m prouder to have as my father and mother than ours. They rose up with nothing, Mundo, except guts and faith and love. Do you understand?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t,” I said. He licked his lips. He seemed to be licking his lips all the time now. “You will,” he said. “You just pay close attention, and you will.””

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Love, Faith, Understanding, Parent

“The UN is worse than disaster. The UN creates conflicts. Look at the disgraceful UN Human Rights Council. It transmits norms which are harmful, anti-liberty, and anti-Semitic among other things. The world would be better off in its absence.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

Interview with Der Spiegel http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-656501.html published on October 26, 2009. 2000s, 2009

World

“No man ever looked more like a President than Harding; it was his only qualification for the job, but it was enough to get him there.”

Robert Silverberg book The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 12 (p. 55)

“If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity — every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.”

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

“Three Books”, p. 230
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Law

“Just as the human population was starting its unprecedented growth spurt in the late eighteenth century, this was published. It's a first edition of an essay on population by the English clergyman Thomas Malthus. Malthus made a very simple observation about the relationship between humans and resources and used it to look into the future. He pointed out that "the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man." Food production can't increase as rapidly as human reproduction. Demand will eventually outstrip supply. Malthus goes on to say, if we don't control human reproduction voluntarily, life could end in misery, which earned him a reputation as a bit of a pessimist. But Malthus' principle remains true. The productive capacity or the Earth has physical limits and those limits will ultimately determine how many human beings it can support. m10s58-m12s18”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

Life, Food, Support, Future

“You for whom I have looked so hard without ever finding. You whom I have longed for, called after, without ever seeing you come, you who are always present without ever existing – I am writing to you now. You who are basically only myself, but a much bigger and more noble self, an ingenious self, a self far from me, as real as the whole distance between the dream and the reality.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

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

Dreams, Reality

“It may seem that the only way to make a necessary connexion between 'injury' and the things that are to be avoided, is to say that it is only used in an 'action-guiding sense' when applied to something the speaker intends to avoid. But we should look carefully at the crucial move in that argument, and query the suggestion that someone might happen not to want anything for which he would need the use of hands or eyes. Hands and eyes, like ears and legs, play a part in so many operations that a man could only be said not to need them if he had no wants at all.”

Philippa Foot (1920–2010) British philosopher

"Moral Beliefs"

Way, Sense, Parting

“It's pleasing to realize that quite a few people enjoy this sort of playfulness and that they are not afraid to look at the relative nature of rock-hard reality.”

M. C. Escher (1898–1972) Dutch graphic artist

1950's, On Being a Graphic Artist', 1953

People, Nature, Reality

“Boom! That's the house, right there, Robert. That's house I'm doing a B&E (breaking and entering)." He looked to me and he said: [shakes head and makes hissing noise through nose. Moment of silence. ] "I don't know what that means, but I'm doing it.”

Dane Cook (1972) American actor and comedian

Vicious Circle (2006)

Silence, Housing

“Bit of Toto as Hoffmann makes his way to the middle - "I bless the rains down in Africa!" - smashing. My favourite Toto number is Rosanna. I used to go out with someone called Rosanna. Her mum looked like Cher.”

Ben Dirs journalist

Way

“This second time round, she’d discovered that to be happy was not so much a self-sufficient, spontaneous emotion, such as you might feel in relation to a dream or a secret, but a way of reacting to the rest of the world; that to be happy this time, she must curb the natural human instinct to look up at the sky, with its all-encompassing definition, and gaze towards the immediate ground and horizon, with its lack of shape, or abode, or clear ending.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Real Time (2002)

Happiness, Secret, World, Dreams

“Obama’s NASA budget perfectly captures the difference between Kennedy's liberalism and Obama's. Kennedy's was an expansive, bold, outward-looking summons, Obama's is a constricted inward-looking call to retreat. Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

Column, February 12, 2010, "Closing the New Frontier" http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer021210.php3#.U4HLMMJOWUl at jewishworldreview.com. 2010s, 2010

“I keep forgetting to put focus on my to-do list. I keep forgetting to wander and have fun. I know I’m transparent but my insecurities are in all the right places, so go ahead, have a look.”

Buddy Wakefield (1974) American poet

"Gahndi’s Autobiography"
Poetry

Forgetting

“Miles cursed himself silently, then out loud. He really had to try to cultivate a more normal attitude toward senior officers…. When a normal ensign looked at his commander, he ought to see a god-like being, not a, a… future subordinate.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, The Vor Game (1990)

God, Future

“We go about the world, fighting to spread democracy and tell them how to live, but we really don't have a democratic system… The laws have been made to make it very difficult, because the Republicans and the Democrats aren't looking for the competition, they want to monopolize it. So in many ways, we are less democratic than some other systems, where they have multiple parties, and more people represented than they're able to be represented here.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Interview by Laura Knoy on NHPR, June 5, 2007 http://info.nhpr.org/node/13016 2000s, 2006-2009

People, World, Law, Way

“What is government? From the outside it looks like a security system based on the marriage of land and people, From the inside, it looks like and attempts to create a community. A government is like an oyster, hard on the outside and soft on the inside, and the outside and inside are utterly dependent on each other.”

Elmer Eric Schattschneider (1892–1971) American political scientist

Source: Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government (1969), p. 24

Marriage, People, Communication, Dependency

“Sita, stay here in my hermitage, you have found here your father's house in a foreign land, we will care for you as our daughter. Looking at Sita he thought :What a fair woman, how beautiful!”

Vālmīki Ramayana

In p. 6.
Valmiki to Sita
Ramayana

Beauty, Housing, Daughters

“Abu Hurayra said, "The Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, kissed al-Hasan ibn 'Ali while al-Aqra' ibn Habis was with him. Al-Aqra' said, 'I have ten children and have never kissed any of them.' The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, looked at him and said, 'Anyone who does not show mercy will not be shown mercy."”

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

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 2, hadith number 225
Sunni Hadith

Children, Peace, Kiss

“My happy disposition completely changed after Mamma's death. I, once so full of life, became timid and retiring, sensitive to an excessive degree. One look was enough to reduce me to tears, and the only way I was content was to be left completely alone. I could not bear the company of strangers and found my joy only within the intimacy of the family.”

Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) French Discalced Carmelite nun

Source: Story of a Soul (1897), Ch. II: Les Buissonnets, 1877–1881. As translated by Fr. John Clarke (1976), pp. 34–35.

Life, Death, Happiness, Family

“Man is an alchemist in his own domain. He can change the basest metals of his life into the finest gold. He can transform every element within his' own existence and make it what he may wish it to be. And though it is true that we shall meet many things that we do not look for, many adversities that we did not create, still we should count it all joy because we can make good use of everything^ and turn all things to good account.”

Christian D. Larson (1874–1962) Prolific author of metaphysical and New Thought books

What is Truth (1912)

Life, Change, Joy

“I'm looking forward to being old, to be able to accept what I am and become self-sufficient. Mid-forties is a good age and it's not too far away.”

Stella Vine (1969) English artist

Mansfield, Karl. "The 5-Minute Interview: Stella Vine: 'There have been a few times" http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_/ai_n15873617, The Independent, (2005-11-28) On age.

Age

“to show that [the success of my portray-] photographs was not due to subject matter – not to special trees or faces, or interiors, to special privileges – clouds were there for everyone... I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in forty years about photography. Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life... My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs that unless one has eyes and sees, they won't be seen – and still everyone will never forget them having once looked at them.”

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) American photographer

'How I came to Photograph Clouds', Alfred Stieglitz, in 'Amateur Photographer and Photography', (19 September 1923): 255.
about his new subject: 'clouds' in his long series 'Equivalents' he started in 1922

Life, Tree, Learning, Success

“The country does want rest, we all want rest. Our very civilization wants it — and we mean that it shall have it. It shall have rest — repose — refreshment of soul and re-invigoration of faculty. And that rest shall be of life and not of death. It shall not be a poison that pacifies restlessness in death, nor shall it be any kind of anodyne or patting or propping or bolstering — as if a man with a cancer in his breast would be well if he only said he was so and wore a clean shirt and kept his shoes tied. We want the rest of a real Union, not of a name, not of a great transparent sham, which good old gentlemen must coddle and pat and dandle, and declare wheedlingly is the dearest Union that ever was, SO it is; and naughty, ugly old fanatics shan't frighten the pretty precious — no, they sha'n't. Are we babies or men? This is not the Union our fathers framed — and when slavery says that it will tolerate a Union on condition that freedom holds its tongue and consents that the Constitution means first slavery at all costs and then liberty, if you can get it, it speaks plainly and manfully, and says what it means. There are not wanting men enough to fall on their knees and cry: 'Certainly, certainly, stay on those terms. Don't go out of the Union — please don't go out; we'll promise to take great care in future that you have everything you want. Hold our tongues? Certainly. These people who talk about liberty are only a few fanatics — they are tolerably educated, but most of 'em are crazy; we don't speak to them in the street; we don't ask them to dinner; really, they are of no account, and if you'll really consent to stay in the Union, we'll see if we can't turn Plymouth Rock into a lump of dough'. I don't believe the Southern gentlemen want to be fed on dough. I believe they see quite as clearly as we do that this is not the sentiment of the North, because they can read the election returns as well as we. The thoughtful men among them see and feel that there is a hearty abhorrence of slavery among us, and a hearty desire to prevent its increase and expansion, and a constantly deepening conviction that the two systems of society are incompatible. When they want to know the sentiment of the North, they do not open their ears to speeches, they open their eyes, and go and look in the ballot-box, and they see there a constantly growing resolution that the Union of the United States shall no longer be a pretty name for the extension of slavery and the subversion of the Constitution. Both parties stand front to front. Each claims that the other is aggressive, that its rights have been outraged, and that the Constitution is on its side. Who shall decide? Shall it be the Supreme Court? But that is only a co-ordinate branch of the government. Its right to decide is not mutually acknowledged. There is no universally recognized official expounder of the meaning of the Constitution. Such an instrument, written or unwritten, always means in a crisis what the people choose. The people of the United States will always interpret the Constitution for themselves, because that is the nature of popular governments, and because they have learned that judges are sometimes appointed to do partisan service.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Life, Death, Men, People

“We have to be a forward-looking nation not a backward-looking nation, and I have to run the defence budget to deliver defence effect in the future, not to preserve regiments or shipyards just because they’ve been there for a long time in the past. And we move on. As a nation we move on.”

Philip Hammond (1955) British Conservative politician

Conservative Home interview (2013)

Time, Past, Future

“The people who run the show in the NBA don't know anything about Islam. I think that may also be why some people are against me personally--because I am a Muslim. It's the same way people can be against you because of the color of your skin. They don't look past these things. But it always depends on the individual.”

Hakeem Olajuwon (1963) Nigerian–American basketball player

Slam dunk - interview with basketball player Hakeem Olajuwon - Interview, Feb, 1994 by Spike Lee.
Sourced Quotes

People, Color, Way, Thinking

“I decided to look around for something else to worship. Something I could really count on. And immediately, I thought of the sun. Happened like that. Overnight I became a sun-worshiper. Well, not overnight, you can't see the sun at night. But first thing the next morning, I became a sun-worshiper. Several reasons. First of all, I can see the sun, okay? Unlike some other gods I could mention, I can actually see the sun. I'm big on that. If I can see something, I don't know, it kind of helps the credibility along, you know?…”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

You Are All Diseased (1999)

God, Sun, Help, Night

“[The title] was the last thing that I chose, after all the songs and the cover art were finished. So none of the songs directly allude to that myth. But the main themes that emerge out of that myth are really close to the themes on the record -- mortality, decadence, an excess of water, isolation, rebirth. The myth is also significant to me because of the way that I encountered it, which relates to one of the huge events the record is about.
I also liked the power of the word itself. I liked how violent and cryptic it felt; it's such a daunting word to encounter. I like how it contrasted this finely rendered, carefully composed front cover -- the painting is information-dense, formal, and stylized; it looks the way something looks when a painter spends a year on it, which is what Benjamin [Vierling] did. So it has all this detail and carefulness to it, which was really important to me and relates very closely to the record. But I also felt like it needed some sort of ballast, or balance, next to it, to reflect the other elements of the record; its innate violence. I wanted a word that was like throwing a brick at the visual on the front cover; I liked that whenever someone looked at that cover they also had to encounter this short, weird word.”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Interview with Pitchfork (2006)

Art, Way, Water, Painting

“That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say "I did look it up, and that's not true." That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

White House Correspondents' Association Dinner (2006)

Truth, Books, Time

“The most cursory look at cold-reading and suggestion tells us that Tarot cards are not evil; psychics do not ‘usher in’ the Devil or his minions; and even the creepy old Ouija board can be shown to operate via quite everyday, natural, physical forces.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Confessions of a Conjuror (2010)

Nature, Evil, Reading

“A contact sheet is so interesting, because you see how a photographer thinks. He comes closer and closer to a subject, corrects it, looks at it again, and then with tiny movements turns around until it is in exactly the right and exact relation to him. Contact sheets may be compared to the way you drive a nail into a plank. First you give several light taps to build up a rhythm and align the nail with the wood. Then, much more quickly, and with as few strokes as possible, you hit the nail forcefully on the head and drive it in.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, Conversation. Interview with Byron Dobell (1957), p. 37

Way, Thinking, Light

“The first thing I want to do is apologize: to Leeann, to everyone else who was part of that tour, to everyone who has worked for me, to everyone I represent, and to everyone who counts on me to be an ally and supporter and champion of women. There's more I want to say, but the first and most important thing—and if it's the only thing you care to hear, that's fine—is: I'm sorry.
I respect women. I don't respect men who don't. And the fact that my own actions have given people a good reason to doubt that makes me feel ashamed.
But I want to say something else, too. Over the last few months, all of us—including and especially men who respect women—have been forced to take a good, hard look at our own actions and think (perhaps, shamefully, for the first time) about how those actions have affected women.
For instance, that picture [when Franken appears to grope the breasts of a sleeping Leeann Tweeden, while simultaneously smiling towards the photographer] I don't know what was in my head when I took that picture, and it doesn't matter. There's no excuse. I look at it now and I feel disgusted with myself. It isn't funny. It's completely inappropriate. It's obvious how Leeann would feel violated by that picture. And, what's more, I can see how millions of other women would feel violated by it—women who have had similar experiences in their own lives, women who fear having those experiences, women who look up to me, women who have counted on me.”

Al Franken (1951) American comedian and politician

November 2017 statement https://www.wdio.com/news/al-franken-statement-leeann-tweeden/4672510/ in response to allegations of sexual harassment and groping made by Leeann Tweeden against Franken.

Women, Men, People, Fear

Quotes about look page 97

Quotes about look
page 97