Quotes about man (10000 quotes, page 83)

“If any young man is about to commence the world, we say to him, publicly and privately, Go to the West.”

Horace Greeley (1811–1872) American politician and publisher

As quoted in New Yorker (25 August 1838); often paraphrased as "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country", sometimes misattributed to John L. Soule https://books.google.com/books?id=UaTQAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA361&lpg=PA361&dq=+Go+to+the+West.&source=bl&ots=3ys4effVfR&sig=Jq3JDde6ZjCDefVWimZOReHOTlE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_xPaVNOLJIS7ggS47YPQCw&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22%20publicly%20and%20privately%2C%20Go%20to%20the%20West.&f=false

World

“The idea has grown up that the scientific approach can alone properly be said to be intellectual, whereas the approach of religion cannot, and that therefore the tendency of religion is to impede intellectuality. This is not to be wondered at in people for whom the word "intellectuality" implies no more than conformity to the scientific approach; but if the goal of intellectuality is not a better understanding of the origin, nature and end of man and of the universe, what is it? It is just such an understanding that religion claims to offer, and in so far as that claim is justified, religion, very far from impeding intellectuality, is an essential part of it.”

Walter James, 4th Baron Northbourne (1896–1982) British rower, agriculturalist and translater

Intellectual Freedom (1971)

People , Religion , Idea , Understanding

“I thank you sir for your generous sympathy, but I die the death I always prayed for, the death of a soldier fighting for the rights of man.”

Johann de Kalb (1721–1780) American general

To a British military officer (August 1780), as quoted in Washington and the Generals of the American Revolution (1856), by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, William Gilmore Simms, and Edward Duncan Ingraham. J.B. Lippincott, p. 271. Also quoted in "Death of Baron De Kalb" https://books.google.com/books?id=k2QAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA234&lpg=PA234&dq=%22I+thank+you+sir+for+your+generous+sympathy,+but+I+die+the+death+I+always+prayed+for:+the+death+of+a+soldier+fighting+for+the+rights+of+man%22&source=bl&ots=-93hJzoCYU&sig=tAag8ObQI-ZjiII56viczov02wM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=VlYVVcuJI4KmNsazgYgL&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22I%20thank%20you%20sir%20for%20your%20generous%20sympathy%2C%20but%20I%20die%20the%20death%20I%20always%20prayed%20for%3A%20the%20death%20of%20a%20soldier%20fighting%20for%20the%20rights%20of%20man%22&f=false (1849), by Benjamin Franklin Ells, The Western Miscellany, Volume 1, p. 233. These were reportedly his last words.
1780s

Death , Fight

“Hope lies to mortals
And most believe her,
But man's deceiver
Was never mine.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

No. 6, st. 1.
More Poems http://www.kalliope.org/vaerktoc.pl?vid=housman/1936 (1936)

Hope

“As to the origin of life, any life, I thought, we remain ignorant. Our science theorizes about the beginning of the cosmos or the birth of life. Our religions postulate endless versions of a man-God, hardly more rational than we are, as the Creator. In the past I have sometimes thought that maybe life is meaningless after all. Then I'd think that maybe the Seth material is a kind of cosmic poppycock -- the chemical composition of my mind somehow intelligent enough to understand the irony of its own meaninglessness, then spinning desperate yarns, as many psychologists would say; futile fantasies leading nowhere. But then I'd think that a brain that could conceive or order somehow had to emerge from a greater order. Besides that, earlier I hadn't realized (I thought, feeling better) that science and religion had spun some pretty weird yarns themselves, and if poppycock was being measured on a scale of one to ten, in my book anyhow they'd each get a twelve and a gold star.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 51

Life , God , Books , Religion

“We either must jump in this mess strongly regardless of the risk or refuse to take our rightful place in the world. More than at any time since the Napoleonic period Western Civilization and Christianity are at stake. That puts it strongly but is no exaggeration just the same. Lincoln was a moral and upright man. He was a pacifist at heart. But when there was no other alternative he did not equivocate nor cravenly talk of peace when there was no peace. He grabbed the bull by the horns; realizing that the nation could not endure half slave and half free, he threw down the gauntlet and eradicated the evil. We are faced with the same thing and the longer we wait the worse it becomes.”

Nile Kinnick (1918–1943) College football player

Letter to his parents regarding World War II (April 25, 1941)

World , Peace , Evil , Time

“It is realized that if there is to be peace in the world, it must be attained through men and with man, in his nature and mores, just about as he now is. Intensive effort is exerted to reach the hearts and minds of men with the vital pleas for peace and human understanding, to the end that human attitudes and relations may be steadily improved. But this is a process of international education, or better, education for international living, and it is at best gradual. Men change their attitudes and habits slowly, and but grudgingly divorce their minds from fears, suspicions, and prejudices.”

Ralph Bunche (1904–1971) American diplomat

Some Reflections on Peace in Our Time (1950)

Men , World , Education , Fear

“Scientific Management is not a new "system," something "invented" by a man called F. W. Taylor, a passing novelty." It is something much deeper, an attitude towards the control of human systems of co-operation of all kinds rendered essential by the immense accretion of power over material things ushered in by the industrial revolution…
What Taylor did was not to invent something quite new, but to synthesise and present as a reasonably coherent whole ideas which had been germinating and gathering force in Great Britain and the United States throughout the nineteenth century. He gave to a disconnected series of initiatives and experiments a philosophy and a title; complete unity was not within his scope… It was left to others to extend his philosophy to other functions and especially to Henri Fayol, a Frenchman, to develop logical principles for the administration of a large-scale undertaking as a whole.
It detracts nothing from Taylor's greatness to see him thus as a man who focussed his thought of the preceding age, carried that thought forward with a group of friends and colleagues whose united contribution was so outstanding as to constitute a "golden age" of management in the United States and laid the intellectual foundations on which all subsequent work in Great Britain and many other countries has been based. But it is impossible to understand Taylor's achievement or the significance of Scientific Management for our society, unless his individual work is seen against the background of this larger whole of which it is only a part.”

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Vol I. p. 16-17; as cited in: Harry Arthur Hopf. Historical perspectives in management https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009425985. Ossining, N.Y., 1947. p. 4-5
1940s, The Making Of Scientific Management, 1945

Age , Idea , Understanding , Parting

“In no particular order, I could not or would not exist without air, food, water, gravity, tides, the moon, the sun, night, civilization, the laws of physics, the laws of thermodynamics, the law of the land, ancestors having sex, DNA, viruses, bacteria, plants, animals, oceans, ice caps, the kindness of strangers, the Big Bang, familial bonds, smart people, brave people, memory, medicine, the periodic table of elements, tribal instincts, magnetic fields, weather, Earth's molten core, a rotating Earth, a tilted Earth, tectonic plates, sleep, death, heat, consciousness, evolution, teachers and the miraculous, self-regulating chemical factory that is my body. Other than that, I like to think of myself as a self-made man.”

Chuck Lorre (1952) American screenwriter

Chuck Lorre Productions, Vanity Card #469 (1st Aired: 6 Nov 2014) http://www.chucklorre.com/index-mom.php?p=469

Death , People , Family , Law

“It has been said that man lives by truth, and that the truth will make us free. Nearly the opposite seems to me to be the case. Mankind has managed to live only by means of lies, and the truth may very well destroy us.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p.15.

Truth

“He had no special hobbies, but he needed luxury in general of a kind, and especially the luxury of getting things in a hurry, his theory being that everything comes to the man who won't wait.”

Ada Leverson (1862–1933) British writer

Source: Tenterhooks (1912), Chapter vii.

Waiting

“The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else. We subject him and his family to close and constant scrutiny and denounce them for things that we ourselves do every day. A Presidential slip of the tongue, a slight error in judgment — social, political, or ethical — can raise a storm of protest. We give the President more work than a man can do, more responsibility than a man should take, more pressure than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him.”

John Steinbeck book America and Americans

America and Americans (1966)

Love , Family , Error , Exercises

“The king is not responsible for the fate of each man's soul. Every man is responsible to God, but not the king, for this. Shakespeare, while displaying unflinchingly the defects of kingly rule, does not in the English histories have on his horizon any alternative to divine right monarchy. The American Founding's Lockean republican political theory provides an answer to the defects of Christian divine right monarchy, the answer that Lincoln inherited. This supplied as well the theoretical foundation for Lincoln's assault on slavery.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, Aristotle and Locke in the American Founding (2001)

God , Fate , Soul , History

“And in the years he reigned; through all the country wide,
There was no cause for weeping, save when the good man died.”

Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857) French poet and chansonnier

Ce n'est que lorsqu'il expira
Que le peuple, qui l'enterra, pleura.
Le Roi Yvetot; rendering of Thackeray, King of Brentford; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 683.

Country

“Let us not be surprised, however, if the study of the principles of argumentation — or even Burke's much mis-taught Speech — seems dry without the prospect of actual debate. We should hardly expect a half-back to feel much enthusiasm over reading the rules of the game and tackling a dummy if he could not look forward to tackling a man. When elocution and argumentative writing have failed to stimulate interest, formal debate may succeed, for it is a kind of game. In the time limit, the order of speakers, the alternation of rides, the actual struggle of opposing forces, the give and take of rebuttal, the fixed rules and the ethics of conduct, the qualifications for success, and the final awarding of victory, debate has much in common with tennis and football.”

William Trufant Foster (1879–1950) American economist

Source: Argumentation and debating, 1908, p. viii

Feeling , Game , Study , Time

“Orwell's 1984 refers more directly to contemporary events than does Huxley's book: the narrative takes place in the near rather than the distant future and obviously sets its sights on Stalinism. When I traveled in the communist world before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I found that everyone I met who had read the book (clandestinely, of course) expressed immeasurable admiration for it and marveled that a man who had never set foot inside a communist country could not only describe the physical environment so well—the universal smell of cabbage, the grayness of the dilapidated buildings—but also its mental and moral atmosphere. It was almost as if the communist regimes had taken 1984 as a blueprint rather than as a warning.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

The Dystopian Imagination http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_oh_to_be.html (Autumn 2001).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Books , World , Travel , Universe

“Find in any country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect government for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit.”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero As King

Perfection , Country , Box

“Every set is a man's world. Even on 'The L Word,' the crew was primarily men. The whole world is a man's world, unless you're in a nunnery. And even that is colored by what you're allowed, what doctrine you're allowed to practice.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Interview at Reading Eagle (13 February 2011) http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=286772.

Men , World , Color

“Having had to encounter single-handed during his period of eclipse many physical dangers, he was well aware of the most dangerous element common to them all: of the crushing, paralyzing sense of human littleness, which is what really defeats a man struggling with natural forces, alone, far from the eyes of his fellows.”

Joseph Conrad book Nostromo

Part Third: The Lighthouse, Ch. 8
Nostromo (1904)

Nature , Sense

“Intellectual culture consists, not chiefly, as many are apt to think, in accumulating information, though this is important, but in building up a force of thought which may be turned at will on any subjects on which we are called to pass judgment. This force is manifested in the concentration of the attention, in accurate, penetrating observation, in reducing complex subjects to their elements, in diving beneath the effect to the cause, in detecting the more subtle differences and resemblances of things, in reading the future in the present, and especially in rising from particular facts to general laws or universal truths. … Oone man talks continually about the particular actions of this or another neighbor; whilst another looks beyond the acts to the inward principle from which they spring, and gathers from them larger views of human nature.”

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

Self-Culture (1838)

Truth , Law , Spring , Nature

“BE IT KNOWN unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, unto whom this work shall come: That we, through the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, have seen the plates which contain this record, which is a record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites, their brethren, and also of the people of Jared, who came from the tower of which hath been spoken. And we also know that they have been translated by the gift and power of God, for his voice hath declared it unto us; wherefore we know of a surety that the work is true. And we also testify that we have seen the engravings which are upon the plates; and they have been shown unto us by the power of God, and not of man. And we declare with words of soberness, that an angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates, and the engravings thereon; and we know that it is by the grace of God the Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, that we beheld and bear record that these things are true. And it is marvelous in our eyes. Nevertheless, the voice of the Lord commanded us that we should bear record of it; wherefore, to be obedient unto the commandments of God, we bear testimony of these things. And we know that if we are faithful in Christ, we shall rid our garments of the blood of all men, and be found spotless before the judgment-seat of Christ, and shall dwell with him eternally in the heavens. And the honor be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, which is one God. Amen. OLIVER COWDERY DAVID WHITMER MARTIN HARRIS”

David Whitmer (1805–1888) Book of Mormon witness

Book of Mormon, 1830 Edition, p. 585 (1830)

Men , God , People , Faith

“We spent Friday evening with our friends at the boarding-house, and our curiosity was gratified by the sight of their fellow-inmates, Mrs. Drew and Miss Hook, Mr. Wynne and Mr. Fitzhugh; the latter is brother to Mrs. Lance, and very much the gentleman. He has lived in that house more than twenty years, and poor man, is so totally deaf that they say he could not hear a cannon, were it fired close to him; having no cannon at hand to make the experiment, I took it for granted, and talked to him a little with my fingers, which was funny enough.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter (1808-12-27) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Housing

“At the Ashram I was told that the Maharshi was in the hall and anybody was free to walk in and see him. As I entered, I saw on the couch an elderly man, wearing but a loincloth, reclining against a round bolster. I sat down at the very foot of the couch. The Maharshi suddenly opened his eyes and looked straight into mine: I looked into his. A mere look, that was all. I felt that the Maharshi was, in that split moment, looking deep into me – and I was sure that he saw all my shallowness, confusions, faithlessness, imperfections, and fears. I cannot explain what happened in that one split moment. I felt opened, cleaned, healed, and emptied! A whirl of confusions: my atheism dropping away, but scepticism flooding in to question, wonder, and search. My reason gave me strength and I said to myself, ‘It is all mesmerism, my own foolishness.’ Thus assuring myself, I got up and walked away.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quoted in Forever is in the Now: The Timeless Message of Sri Ramana Maharshi http://books.google.co.in/books?id=K1YqAAAAYAAJ, p. 192

Fear , Search , Question

“Psychic disturbances are the consequences of the sexual chaos of society. For thousands of years, this chaos has had the function of psychically subjecting man to the prevailing conditions of existence, of internalizing the external mechanization of life. It has served to bring about the psychic anchoring of a mechanized and authoritarian civilization by making man incapable of functioning independently.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

General Survey
The Function of the Orgasm (1927)

Life

“A pen is certainly an excellent instrument to fix a man's attention and to inflame his ambition.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

14 November 1760
1750s, Diaries (1750s-1790s)

“Man as he came from the hand of his Maker was poetic in both mind and body, but the gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed Nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter to J.B. McChesney http://digitalcollections.pacific.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/muirletters/id/12909/rec/84 (19 September 1871)
1870s

Nature

“Ricky: You are the strangest man alive.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

An Idiot Abroad

“Professor Smith has kindly submitted his book to me before publication. After reading it thoroughly and with intense interest I am glad to comply with his request to give him my impression.
The work is a broadly conceived attempt to portray man's fear-induced animistic and mythic ideas with all their far-flung transformations and interrelations. It relates the impact of these phantasmagorias on human destiny and the causal relationships by which they have become crystallized into organized religion.
This is a biologist speaking, whose scientific training has disciplined him in a grim objectivity rarely found in the pure historian. This objectivity has not, however, hindered him from emphasizing the boundless suffering which, in its end results, this mythic thought has brought upon man.
Professor Smith envisages as a redeeming force, training in objective observation of all that is available for immediate perception and in the interpretation of facts without preconceived ideas. In his view, only if every individual strives for truth can humanity attain a happier future; the atavisms in each of us that stand in the way of a friendlier destiny can only thus be rendered ineffective.
His historical picture closes with the end of the nineteenth century, and with good reason. By that time it seemed that the influence of these mythic, authoritatively anchored forces which can be denoted as religious, had been reduced to a tolerable level in spite of all the persisting inertia and hypocrisy.
Even then, a new branch of mythic thought had already grown strong, one not religious in nature but no less perilous to mankind — exaggerated nationalism. Half a century has shown that this new adversary is so strong that it places in question man's very survival. It is too early for the present-day historian to write about this problem, but it is to be hoped that one will survive who can undertake the task at a later date.”

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

Foreword of "Man and his Gods" by Homer W. Smith
Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and Religion (1999)

Truth , Books , Fear , Religion

“Fay: Have you given a thought to the priest?
Truscott: We can't have him in on it, miss. Our percentage wouldn't be worth having.
Fay: Mr McLeavy threatened to expose us.
Truscott: I've been exposed before.
Fay: What happened?
Truscott: I arrested the man. He's doing twelve years.”

Joe Orton (1933–1967) English playwright and author

Loot (1965), Act II

“Men may be very learned, and yet very miserable; it is easy to be a deep geometrician, or a sublime astronomer, but very difficult to be a good man. I esteem, therefore, the traveller who instructs the heart, but despise him who only indulges the imagination. A man who leaves home to mend himself and others, is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country, guided by the blind impulse of curiosity, is only a vagabond.”

Oliver Goldsmith book The Citizen of the World

The Citizen of the World (1760–1761), Letter VII.

Men , Travel , Home , Imagination

“The average person, when they see a black man, they would say "Man, he got soul cos' his color." But I disagree with that. I think that God would be a very selfish God if He gave all the soul to one race. He lets his rain fall on the red flowers, the green flowers, the blue flowers; the good, the bad, no races, so He lets His blessings fall on all races. So I think that there are types of souls, like there are different types of cars. But they're all cars. You know, I think that, when a white guy sing[s], if he have soul, that don't mean that he had to copy no negro to get it. I believe if he feels, when one sings from the heart and it reaches another heart, that's soul.”

Little Richard (1932) American pianist, singer and songwriter

Remarks on the question: can a white man sing soul music?. Pop Chronicles: Show 15 - The Soul Reformation I: A symposium on soul http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc19764/m1/, interview recorded 1.2.1968 http://web.archive.org/web/20110615153027/http://www.library.unt.edu/music/special-collections/john-gilliland/o-s.

God , Cars , Color , Guy

“The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment. An attempt to falsify the actuality of knowledge, to regard knowledge as a goal still to be reached.”

Franz Kafka book Parables and Paradoxes

"Paradise"
Parables and Paradoxes (1946)

World , Peace , Knowledge

“The color of the prisoner’s skin, and the form of his features, are not impressed upon the spiritual immortal mind which works beneath. In spite of human pride, he is still your brother, and mine, in form and color accepted and approved by his Father, and yours, and mine, and bears equally with us the proudest inheritance of our race — the image of our Maker. Hold him then to be a Man.”

William H. Seward (1801–1872) American lawyer and politician

Argument as defense attorney during the trial of an African-American criminal defendant, Auburn, New York (July 1846), published in Works of William H. Seward, vol. I (New York: Redfield, 1853), p. 417.

Color

“A rational man must be guided by the incentive system within which he operates. No matter what his own personal desires, he must be discouraged from certain activities if they carry penalties and attracted toward others if they carry large rewards. The carrot and the stick guide scientists and politicians as well as donkeys.”

George Stigler (1911–1991) American economist

Stigler (1975, p. 171) as cited in: Owen E.Hughes (2003) Public Management and Administration. p. 11

Penalty , Personality

“Mercer,” Rick said.
“I am your friend,” the old man said. “But you must go on as if I did not exist. Can you understand that?” He spread empty hands.
“No,” Rick said. “I can’t understand that. I need help.”
“How can I save you,” the old man said, “if I can’t save myself?” He smiled. “Don’t you see? There is no salvation.”
“Then what’s this for?” Rick demanded. “What are you for?”
“To show you,” Wilbur Mercer said, “that you aren’t alone. I am here with you and always will be. Go and do your task, even though you know it’s wrong.”
“Why?” Rick said. “Why should I do it? I’ll quit my job and emigrate.”
The old man said, “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”

Philip K. Dick book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“That’s all you can tell me?” Rick said.
Source: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Chapter 15 (pp. 178-179)

Life , Smile , Understanding , Universe

“It's impossible for men and women who love each other not to hurt each other now and then, but most women would settle happily for a man who tried not to cause the same hurt twice.”

Merle Shain (1935–1989) Canadian writer

Some Men are More Perfect Than Others (1973)

Love , Women , Men , Hurt

“Uncertainty is he root of all progress and all growth. As the old adage goes, the man who believes he knows everything learns nothing. We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something.”

Mark Manson (1984) American writer and blogger

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 6, “You’re Wrong About Everything (But So Am I)” (p. 135)

Learning

“It is not in the nature of man to accept permanent failure.”

Edmund Cooper book Seed of Light

Seed of Light (1959)

Failure , Nature

“The best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky book Notes from Underground

Variant translation: If I had to define man it would be: a biped, ungrateful.
Part 1, Chapter 8 (page 28)
Notes from Underground (1864)

“He [the painter J. A. Kruseman in Amsterdam] is very amicable with his students without exposing his mastery to disdain. I sometimes see him painting from time to time. And I almost visit daily his studio. You must know that his students don't work in the same room where the big man is staying... Sometimes one or two days pass that he doesn't see our work, he let follow the students their own way most of the time... Thanks God he tells me I have feeling and talent.”

Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) Dutch painter

translation from original Dutch text: Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat uit de brief van Jozef Israëls, in het Nederlands): Hij [de schilder J.A. Kruseman te Amsterdam] gaat zeer amical met zijn discipelen om zonder zijn meesterschap aan minachting bloot te stellen. Ik zie hem nu en dan wel eens schilderen. En kom in zijn atelier bijna dagelijksch. Gij moet namenlijk weten dat zijn leerlingen niet in dezelfde kamer zitten te werken waar de groote man zit.. .Soms gaan er wel een of 2 dage voorbij dat hij het werk niet komt zien, hij laat de leerlingen meest hun eigen manier volgen.. .Hij zegt mij Gode zij dank gevoel en dispositie toe..
In a letter of Jozef Israels from Amsterdam, 16 July 1843, to his friend, pharmacist Essingh in Groningen; from R.K.D. Archive, A.S. Kok, The Hague
Quotes of Jozef Israels, 1840 - 1870

God , Way , Feeling , Time

“In the spirit of enthusiasm or vanity, the prophet [Muhammad] rests the truth of his mission on the merit of his book; audaciously challenges both men and angels to imitate the beauties of a single page; and presumes to assert that God alone could dictate this incomparable performance. This argument is most powerfully addressed to a devout Arabian, whose mind is attuned to faith and rapture; whose ear is delighted by the music of sounds; and whose ignorance is incapable of comparing the productions of human genius… If the composition of the Koran exceed the faculties of a man to what superior intelligence should we ascribe the Iliad of Homer, or the Philippics of Demosthenes?”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

EGPaIV" Edward Gibbon, [1788], Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/gibbon/05/daf05010.htm, Vol. 5, Chapter L: Description Of Arabia And Its Inhabitants. Part IV.
The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire: Volume 1 (1776)

Men , God , Truth , Books

“I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Volume iii, p. 231
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Country

“My little China Girl
You shouldn't mess with me.
I'll ruin everything you are.
I'll give you television.
I'll give you eyes of blue.
I'll give you a man who wants to rule the world.”

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

China Girl, written with Iggy Pop — Video at YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A34kCOtegQ
Song lyrics, Let's Dance (1983)

World , Girl

“em>The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident (though there is a great deal of it) to have contributed anything of permanent value to the storehouse of human thought.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

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

“And yet this very singleness of vision and thorough oneness with his age is a mark of the successful man. It is as though Nature needs must make men narrow in order to give them force.”

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

Source: The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Ch. III: Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

Men , Age , Nature , Success

“I still think that Boccioni was a great artist and a passionate man. I like El Lissitsky's painting very much. But Mondrian that great merciless artist, is the only one who had nothing left over. The point they all had in common was to be both inside and outside at the same time. A new of likeness!... for me to be inside and outside is to be in an unheated studio with broken windows in the winter.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

De Kooning's speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract At' - at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.
1950's

Thinking , Passion , Winter , Time

“For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Confession (1882), Ch. 9

Life

“I think I'm a sober person. I think the press tries to make you into something a little bit different. In my case, a little bit of a wild man, I'm not, I'm actually not. I'm a very sober person.”

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

During an interview on 60 Minutes (11 November 2016)
2010s, 2016, November

Thinking , Personality

“I couldn't get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn't last. I began to wonder what the minister meant when he said, "God, the father, sees even the smallest sparrow fall. He watches over all his children." That jumbled it all up for me. But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn't God. So at night, when I went to bed, I would think, "I am clean. I am sleepy." And then I went to sleep. It didn't keep me from enjoying the cleaness any less. I just knew that God wasn't there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.”

Frances Farmer (1913–1970) American actress

God Dies (1931)

God , Children , Feeling , Thinking

“There is nothing which a prudent man must shun more carefully than living with a view to popularity and giving serious thought to the things esteemed by the multitude, instead of making sound reason his guide of life, so that, even if he must gainsay all men and fall into disrepute and incur danger for the sake of what is honourable, he will in no wise choose to swerve from what has been recognized as right.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

Source: On Greek Literature, p. 429

Life , Men

“The counterpart of such devotion to the commands of Jesus Christ is a thoroughgoing opposition to the institutions of culture. To Tolstoy these seem to be founded on a complex foundation of errors, including the acceptance of the inevitability of evil in man's present life, the belief that life is governed by external laws so that men cannot attain blessedness by their own efforts, the fear of death, the identification of true life with personal existence, and, above all, the practice of and belief in violence. Even less than Tertullian does he think that human corruption is resident in human nature; the evil with which men contend is in their culture only.”

H. Richard Niebuhr (1894–1962) American theologian

Source: Christ and Culture (1951), p. 60

Life , Death , Men , Fear

“I am always deeply suspicious of received wisdom. As far as I am concerned man-made global warming is nothing more than a hypothesis that hasn't got any basis in fact. Every day more scientists are modifying their initial views. Recently 60 German scientists wrote to Chancellor Angela Merkel saying there was no proof for carbon causing global warming.”

Godfrey Bloom (1949) UK EU parliament member

BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/politics_show/regions/yorkshire_and_lincolnshire/8298649.stm

Wisdom

“It hadn’t had to take the form of this terrible bubble. It might as easily have been a sudden sharp burst behind his eyes or a slower, subtler gnawing at his vitals. But he’d known it was coming, as every man knows and tries to forget it is coming.”

Algis Budrys (1931–2008) American writer

The Burning World, p. 64
The Unexpected Dimension (1960)

Forgetting

“Now see what a Christian is, drawn by the hand of Christ. He is a man on whose clear and open brow God has set the stamp of truth; one whose very eye beams bright with honor; in whose very look and bearing you may see freedom, manliness, veracity; a brave man — a noble man — frank, generous, true, with, it may be, many faults; whose freedom may take the form of impetuosity or rashness, but the form of meanness never.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 104.

God , Truth , Freedom , Christ

“The Light, The Thunder, The Dunes of Sand, The Sun, The Moon, Man and the land. If we work a little, we might see, if we think and reflect on each rock and tree, there’s no measure to all it’s worth — sustainable earth.”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"Sustainable Earth"
For Whom The Troubadour Sings (2010)

Thinking , Tree , Light , Sun

“Hi, I'm bunny the life guard and if there's any life-saving to do I'm the man to do it”

Chris Pontius (1974) American actor

[The Loop- Jackass Episodes]

Life

“The precise reason why abstinence from animal food will be the first act … of a moral life is admirably explained in the book, The Ethics of Diet [by Howard Williams]; and not by one man only, but by all mankind in the persons of its best representatives during all the conscious life of humanity. … the moral progress of humanity — which is the foundation of every other kind of progress — is always slow; but … the sign of true, not casual, progress is its uninterruptedness and its continual acceleration. And the progress of vegetarianism is of this kind. That progress, is expressed both in the words of the writers cited in the above-mentioned book and in the actual life of mankind, which from many causes is involuntarily passing metre and more from carnivorous habits to vegetable food, and is also deliberately following the same path in a movement which shows evident strength, and which is growing larger and larger — viz., vegetarianism.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: The First Step (1892), Ch. X

Life , Books , Food , Animals

“A man is as old as he's feeling, a woman is as old as she looks.”

Mortimer Collins (1827–1876) British writer

The Unknown Quantity, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Feeling

“The growing singles world gives us another vantage point from which to see how sexual desire and excitement are a matter of distance elements. A couple goes to bed, perhaps on the first or second date, with seemingly great sexual appetite and desire for each other. The sex was "great," but the man, who believed he really wanted "great sex," never comes back for more; or the woman, who seemed to have been so "turned on" and sexually responsive, is not interested in a repeat performance.There is an often expressed "singles lament": "The ones I'm really turned on to don't seem to want me; while the people who want me, I can't get excited over."”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

Then, finally, the disturbing conclusion: "The good ones are all taken, only the undesirable or 'sick' ones are left."</p>
Sexual excitement and distance: sex is not sex, is sex, is not sex, p. 110
The Inner Male (1987)

People , World , Sex

“God has created the human frame for the express purpose of giving man the opportunity of realizing the Divinity.”

Hans Ji Maharaj (1900–1966) Indian guru

God

“What we've lost - 'I said in more or less these terms' - is the proper interest in and taste for detail. We've been noting that for a long time yet the loss is irremediable. In the old days man was everything. A human face was worth a poem. When nature appeared behind a human being it was a kind of backdrop taking the place of the dark background of portrait painters or the gold of the Italian primitives… The day when a separation took place art was diminished. It was transformed the day that the 'subject' and the 'genre' destroyed great painting, denaturing even landscapes.”

Eugène Fromentin (1820–1876) French painter

Quote of Fromentin, as cited by Sarah Anderson in Between Sea and Sahara: An Orientalist Adventure, 'Chapter IV', Eugène Fromentin, (1859); transl. Blake Robinson; publisher I.B. Tauris 2004, p. 4

Art , Nature , Appearance , Loss

“By the time that he mowed the last man down
He was high as he had ever been
Laughing to the sounds of the world going around
Completely unaware of the win
And while the papers would say he was scattered that day
He was pretty as a pitcher could be
The day Dock Ellis of the pittsburgh pirates
Threw a no hitter on lsd”

Todd Snider (1966) American singer

America's Favorite Pastime (The Ballad of Dock Ellis).
The Excitement Plan (2009)

World , Time

“A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 574 (30 July 1714).
The Spectator (1711–1714)

“We are so accustomed to hear arithmetic spoken of as one of the three fundamental ingredients in all schemes of instruction, that it seems like inquiring too curiously to ask why this should be. Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic—these three are assumed to be of co-ordinate rank. Are they indeed co-ordinate, and if so on what grounds?
In this modern “trivium” the art of reading is put first. Well, there is no doubt as to its right to the foremost place. For reading is the instrument of all our acquisition. It is indispensable. There is not an hour in our lives in which it does not make a great difference to us whether we can read or not. And the art of Writing, too; that is the instrument of all communication, and it becomes, in one form or other, useful to us every day. But Counting—doing sums,—how often in life does this accomplishment come into exercise? Beyond the simplest additions, and the power to check the items of a bill, the arithmetical knowledge required of any well-informed person in private life is very limited. For all practical purposes, whatever I may have learned at school of fractions, or proportion, or decimals, is, unless I happen to be in business, far less available to me in life than a knowledge, say, of history of my own country, or the elementary truths of physics. The truth is, that regarded as practical arts, reading, writing, and arithmetic have no right to be classed together as co-ordinate elements of education; for the last of these is considerably less useful to the average man or woman not only than the other two, but than 267 many others that might be named. But reading, writing, and such mathematical or logical exercise as may be gained in connection with the manifestation of numbers, have a right to constitute the primary elements of instruction. And I believe that arithmetic, if it deserves the high place that it conventionally holds in our educational system, deserves it mainly on the ground that it is to be treated as a logical exercise. It is the only branch of mathematics which has found its way into primary and early education; other departments of pure science being reserved for what is called higher or university instruction. But all the arguments in favor of teaching algebra and trigonometry to advanced students, apply equally to the teaching of the principles or theory of arithmetic to schoolboys. It is calculated to do for them exactly the same kind of service, to educate one side of their minds, to bring into play one set of faculties which cannot be so severely or properly exercised in any other department of learning. In short, relatively to the needs of a beginner, Arithmetic, as a science, is just as valuable—it is certainly quite as intelligible—as the higher mathematics to a university student.”

Joshua Girling Fitch (1824–1903) British educationalist

Source: Lectures on Teaching, (1906), pp. 267-268.

Life , Truth , Education , School

“Nothing will a man rue more than refusal to listen to the wise.”

Philo (-15–45 BC) Roman philosopher

54.
Every Good Man is Free

“A man, in so far as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more personality a man has and the greater his interior riches and the more he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from his fellows.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God

Personality

“It is not the rich man's son that the young struggler for advancement has to fear in the race of life, nor his nephew, nor his cousin. Let him look out for the "dark horse" in the boy who begins by sweeping out the office.”

Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) American businessman and philanthropist

Source: Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, 1920, Chapter III

Life , Fear , Boy , Horse

“I don’t hold with prophets,” said Alvin. “Near as I can tell, they end up just as dead as the next man.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Seventh Son (1987), Chapter 10.

Dead

“If you wish women to love you, be original; I know a man who used to wear felt boots summer and winter, and women fell in love with him.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

Love , Women , Winter , Summer

“Body and spirit I surrendered whole
To harsh instructors—and received a soul…
If mortal man could change me through and through
From all I was—What may the God not do?”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Wonder
Epitaphs of the War (1914-1918) (1918)

God , Soul , Change

“Why then are the arts and sciences important? I suppose with the sciences we could say that the answer is obvious: we have radium, penicillin, television and recorded sound, motor-cars and aircraft, air-conditioning and central heating. But these achievements have never been the primary intention of science; they are a sort of by-product, the things that emerge only when the scientist has performed his main task. That task is simply stated: to be curious, to keep on asking the question 'Why?' and not to be satisfied till an answer has been found. The scientist is curious about the universe: he wants to know why water boils at one temperature and freezes at another; why cheese is different from chalk; why one person behaves differently from another. Not only 'Why?' but ‘What?' What is salt made of? What are the stars? What is the constitution of all matter? The answers to these questions do not necessarily malke our lives any easier. The answer to one question—'Can the atom be split?' - has made our lives somewhat harder. But the questions have to be asked. It is man's job to be curious; it is man's job to try to find out the truth about the world about us, to answer the big question 'What is the world really like?”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Truth , World , Art , Cars

“Pooh Bah: This professional conscientiousness is highly creditable to you, but it places us in a very awkward position.
Koko: My good sir, the awkwardness of your position is grace itself compared with that of a man engaged in the act of cutting off his own head.”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

The Mikado (1885)

“My uncle jumped up from the desk, loving him more than he loved any other man in the world, and through him loving the lost nation, the multitude dead, and the multitude living in every alien corner of the world.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Inhale and Exhale (1936), Antranik and the Spirit of Armenia

Love , World , Dead

“His picture to me seems always to have the enthusiasm and freshness of youth, moved with the high-minded and patriotic purpose of maturity. He displayed the same ambition for faithful service, whether he was leading his soldiers in the last charge for American liberty at Yorktown or rebuking the mob at Paris for its proposal to make him king. His part in the French Revolution is well known. He served the cause of ordered liberty in America; he was unwilling to serve any other cause in France. His admirers might say of him on the first anniversary of Bastile Day, 'He is galloping through the ages' But he refused to be a man on horseback. He knew that the welfare of his country lay in moderation. The people trusted him, but the extremists, whether Jacobin or Royalist, feared him. He urged the National Assembly to establish by constitutional guarantees what the Revolution had gained.”

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

1920s, Ordered Liberty and World Peace (1924)

People , Youth , Age , Fear

“Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.”

Cyril Connolly book The Unquiet Grave

Part II: Te Palinure Petens (p. 58)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

“Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means!”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

Heart

“Though music is the chief excellence of the Neapolitans, Naples has produced some good Painters. Luca Giordano, and Salvator Rosa, were both of them born here : the latter, to judge by a ridiculous anecdote that is told of him, was a man of wit, as well as a painter.”

Peter Beckford (1643–1710) Governor of Jamaica

Music

“Once your fans start noticing that your channel isn't doing as well as it used to be, they are quick to point out why: It is you. "It is not because I got tired of your content - it is because of you - you've changed man!"”

PewDiePie (1989) Swedish YouTuber and video game commentator

24 July 2018
2018, DON'T StART YOUTUBE BEFORE WATCHING THIS

Change

“What has the church done? It made the wife a slave—the property of the husband, and it placed the husband as much above the wife as Christ was above the husband. It taught that a nun is purer, nobler than a mother. It induced millions of pure and conscientious girls to renounce the joys of life—to take the veil woven of night and death, to wear the habiliments of the dead—made them believe that they were the brides of Christ. For my part, I would as soon be a widow as the bride of a man who had been dead for eighteen hundred years. The poor deluded girls imagined that they, in some mysterious way, were in spiritual wedlock united with God. All worldly desires were driven from their hearts. They filled their lives with fastings—with prayers—with self-accusings. They forgot fathers and mothers and gave their love to the invisible. They were the victims, the convicts of superstition—prisoners in the penitentiaries of God. Conscientious, good, sincere—insane. These loving women gave their hearts to a phantom, their lives to a dream.”

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

A Thanksgiving Sermon (1897)

Love , Life , Death , Women

“Secondly, the student is trained to accept historical mis-statements on the authority of the book. If education is a pre- paration for adult life, he learns first to accept without question, and later to make his own contribution to the creation of historical fallacies, and still later to perpetuate what he has learnt. In this way, ignorant authors are leading innocent students to hysterical conclusions. The process of the writers' mind provides excellent material for a manual on logical fallacies. Thirdly, the student is told nothing about the relationship between evidence and truth. The truth is what the book ordains and the teacher repeats. No source is cited. No proof is offered. No argument is presented. The authors play a dangerous game of winks and nods and faints and gestures with evidence. The art is taught well through precept and example. The student grows into a young man eager to deal in assumptions but inapt in handling inquiries. Those who become historians produce narratives patterned on the textbooks on which they were brought up. Fourthly, the student is compelled to face a galling situation in his later years when he comes to realize that what he had learnt at school and college was not the truth. Imagine a graduate of one of our best colleges at the start of his studies in history in a university in Europe. Every lecture he attends and every book he reads drive him mad with exasperation, anger and frustration. He makes several grim discoveries. Most of the "facts", interpretations and theories on which he had been fostered in Pakistan now turn out to have been a fata morgana, an extravaganza of fantasies and reveries, myths and visions, whims and utopias, chimeras and fantasies.”

Khursheed Kamal Aziz (1927–2009) historian

The Murder of History, critique of history textbooks used in Pakistan, 1993

Life , Truth , Books , Education

“Could she not obtain from him the promise to discharge his weapon in the air, if the duel was with pistols, or, if it was with swords, simply to disarm his enemy?
Like nearly all persons unversed in the art, she believed in infallible fencers, in marksmen who never missed their aim, and she had also ideas profoundly, absolutely inexact on the relations of one man with another in the matter of an insult.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Source: Cosmopolis (1892), Ch. 7 "A Little Relative of Iago"

Art , Idea , Personality

“Life becomes the way it is lived; and man may live the way he wants to live when he learns to think what he wants to think.”

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

Source: Your Forces and How to Use Them (1912), p. 107

Life , Way , Thinking , Learning

“Man is a free agent, not in many things but in all things, subject, of course, to the requirements of the Natural and the Moral Law. In fact, Man is so free that he can even defy and disobey his Creator. Man's freedom is however conditioned by rules of safety, morality etc., which counsel him that he may not do certain things. This is not however, a negation of Freedom.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Planning for a Better World

Law , Nature , Freedom

“My enemy is not the man who wrongs me, but the man who means to wrong me.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus

“[He] wasn't interested in meeting the kind of women who would come to one of those places looking for the kind of man who hoped to meet a woman there.”

Orson Scott Card Treasure Box

Treasure Box (1996)

Women , Hope

“Oh, the tragedy and the anguish. You just gotta Rage Against the Appliance, man. The toast is burning and you just gotta rip it out and free it before it fills the house with smoke. Rage Against the Toaster.”

Beck (1970) American Musician (b.1970)

Spin magazine, July 1994

Rage , Housing

“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”

Conor Cruise O'Brien (1917–2008) Irish politician

In Irish Times, Dublin (July 15, 1969) ; as quoted in The Columbia Book of Quotations, ed. Robert Andrews, Columbia University Press (1993), p. 900 : ISBN 0231071949, 9780231071949

History

“But we need to stand up for every minority. The Bill of Rights isn't for the prom queen. The Bill of Rights isn't for the high-school quarterback. They're gonna be treated fairly; they always do fine. The Bill of Rights is truly for those who might be unorthodox, who might have an unusual idea, who might not look like everybody else. … I said to him, "You could take an American citizen and send them to Guantanamo Bay with no trial?" and he said, "Yeah, if they're dangerous." So I said, "It begs the question, doesn't it, who gets to decide who's dangerous and who's not?" Anybody remember Richard Jewell, the Olympic bomber—the so-called "Olympic bomber" as it turns out? Everybody thought he was guilty; he was "convicted" on t. v. within hours—but it turned out he wasn't—it wasn't him, he wasn't guilty. But could you imagine if he had been a black man in the South in 1920, what would have happened to him? The Bill of Rights is to protect minorities, whether it's the colour of your skin or the shade of your ideology. We need to be the party that protects the rights of everyone.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

2010s

School , Imagination , Idea , Question

“The second proposition admits and encourages the very practice we censure so justly, for which the saint [ Augustine of Hippo ] was so famous, and by which he contributed so much to promote contentions in his own days, and to perpetuate them to ours. The practice of deducing doctrines from the scriptures that are not evidently contained in them… Who does not see that the direct tendency of this practice is exactly the same as the event has proved it to be? It composes and propagates a religion, seemingly under the authority of God, but really under that of man. The principles of revelation are lost in theology, or disfigured by it: and whilst some men are impudent enough to pretend, others are silly enough to believe, that they adhere to the gospel, and maintain the cause of God against infidels and heretics, when they do nothing better, nor more, than espouse the conceits of men, whom enthusiasm, or the ambition of forming sects, or of making a great figure in them, has inspired. If you ask now what the practice of the christian fathers, and of other divines, should have been, in order to preserve the purity of faith, and to promote peace and charity, the answer is obvious… They should have adhered to the word of God: they should have paid no regard to heathen philosophy, jewish cabala, the sallies of enthusiasm, or the refinements of human ingenuity: they should have embraced, and held fast the articles of faith and doctrine, that were delivered in plain terms, or in unequivocal figures: they should not have been dogmatical where the sense was doubtful, nor have presumed even to guess where the Holy Ghost left the veil of mystery undrawn.”

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751) English politician and Viscount

Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophical Works http://books.google.com/books?id=E6ATAAAAQAAJ (1754) Vol.III, Essay IV, Sect XVI

Men , God , Peace , Faith

“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against.”

Francis Crick (1916–2004) British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

New York NY: Simon & Schuster, 1981, p. 88.
Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (1981)

Life , Imagination , Idea , Knowledge

“It may be impossible for a man by merely willing it to add wings to his body, but it is possible for any man, by merely willing it, to add wings to his soul. This perennial miracle of the moral nature is capable of happening at any time.”

Felix Adler (1851–1933) German American professor of political and social ethics, rationalist, and lecturer

Section 6 : Higher Life
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)

Soul , Nature , Time

“I will say no more, than that I will act as I shall answer hereafter to God and to man.”

William the Silent (1533–1584) stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht, leader of the Dutch Revolt

After his wedding ceremony, on marrying his second wife, who was a Lutheran, as quoted in William the Silent (1897) by Frederic Harrison, p. 32

God

“Your friend Will is a good man, too, but I fear he's no longer an archer." "It would have been better, I sometimes think-" "If he had died? Wish death on no man, Thomas, it comes soon enough without a wish."”

Bernard Cornwell The Grail Quest

Mordecai and Thomas of Hookton, p. 352
The Grail Quest, Vagabond (2002)

Death , Fear , Thinking

“Why then should I clothe him to make him look ridiculous in the foolish masculine fashions of his time? There is nothing more banal than these statues of recent notabilities, to be seen in every big city of Europe, masquerading as tailors' models of their ugly period. Man's naked form on the other hand belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Auguste Rodin in: The Cornhill Magazine, (1925), p. 766; Cited in: Anthony Mario Ludovici (1926). Personal Reminiscences of Auguste Rodin. p. 111
1900s-1940s

People , Age , History , Fashion