Quotes about moment
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“Greta Van Susteren: And Governor, last night, there was a lot of talk about the "Sputnik moment" that the President talked about, um… Do you agree with him? Do you f— And is this our moment?”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

2014

Night

“Most human lives are forgotten after four generations. We build our splendid houses on the edge of the abyss then distract and dazzle ourselves with entertainers and sex while we slowly at first, then more rapidly, spin around the ever-thirsty plughole in the middle. My treasured possessions -- all the silly little mementoes and toys and special books I’ve carried with me for decades -- will wind up on flea market tables or rot on garbage heaps. Someone else will inhabit the rooms that were mine. Everything that was important to me will mean nothing to the countless generations that follow our own. In the grand sprawl of it all, I have no significance at all. I don’t believe a giant gaseous pensioner will reward or censure me when my body stops working and I don’t believe individual consciousness survives for long after brain death so I lack the consolations of religion. I wanted Annihilator to peek into that implacable moment where everything we are comes to an end so I had to follow the Black Brick Road all the way down and seriously consider the abject pointlessness of all human endeavours. I found these contemplations thrilling and I was drawn to research pure nihilism, which led me to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound and back to Ligotti. I have a fundamentally optimistic and positive view of human existence and the future and I think it’s important to face intelligent, well-argued challenges to that view on a regular basis. While I agree with Ligotti that the universe is, on the face of it, a blind emergent process, driven by chance over billions of years of trial and error to ultimately produce creatures capable of little more than flamboyant expressions of the agonizing awareness of their own imminent deaths, I don’t share his slightly huffy disappointment at this state of affairs. If the universe is intrinsically meaningless, if the mindless re-arrangement of atomic debris into temporarily arising then dissipating forms has no point, I can only ask, why do I see meaning everywhere, why can I find a point in everything? Why do other human beings like me seem to see meaning in everything too? If the sun is only an apocalyptic series of hydrogen fusion reactions, why does it look like an angel and inspire poetry? Why does the flesh and fur-covered bone and jelly of my cat’s face melt my heart? Is all that surging, roaring incandescent meaning inside me, or is it out there? “Meaning” to me is equivalent to “Magic.” The more significance we bring to things, even to the smallest and least important things, the more special, the more “magical” they seem to become. For all that materialistic science and existential philosophy tells us we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe, the evidence of my senses and the accounts of other human beings seem to indicate that, in fact, the whole universe and everything in it explodes second-to-second with beauty, horror, grandeur and significance when and wherever it comes into contact with consciousness. Therefore, it’s completely down to us to revel in our ability to make meaning, or not. Ligotti, like many extreme Buddhist philosophers, starts from the position that life is an agonizing, heartbreaking grave-bound veil of tears. This seems to be a somewhat hyperbolic view of human life; as far as I can see most of us round here muddle through ignoring death until it comes in close and life’s mostly all right with just enough significant episodes of sheer joy and connection and just enough sh-tty episodes of pain or fear. The notion that the whole span of our lives is no more than some dreadful rehearsal for hell may resonate with the deeply sensitive among us but by and large life is pretty okay generally for most of us. And for some, especially in the developed countries, “okay” equals luxurious. To focus on the moments of pain and fear we all experience and then to pretend they represent the totality of our conscious experience seems to me a little effete and indulgent. Most people don’t get to be born at all, ever. To see in that radiant impossibility only pointlessness, to see our experience as malignantly useless, as Ligotti does, seems to me a bit camp.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2014
http://www.blastr.com/2014-9-12/grant-morrisons-big-talk-getting-deep-writer-annihilator-multiversity
On life

Life, Death, Pain, People

“A painter should never speak because words are not the means at his command. Words cannot express visually dimension at a glance they can only establish their own relationship in time.
However, it is possible for a painter, at certain moments of his development to formulate some of the problems he is facing in the growth of his work. A painting cannot be explained. Words can only stimulate the act of looking.
A visual problem is never put a priori as a mathematical problem but is born in the process of painting and evolves in a state of unawareness of the painter.”

Fritz Glarner (1899–1972) Swiss artist

Source: George L. K. Morris, Willem De Kooning, Alexander Calder, Fritz Glarner, Robert Motherwell, Stuart Davis. " What Abstract Art Means to Me http://www.jstor.org/stable/4058250," in: The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 18, No. 3, (Spring, 1951), pp. 2-15

Mathematics, Problem, Time, Painting

“At any given moment in your life, you have the choice between love and fear. And that’s a choice you make. You make the choice of how you react to events.”

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

Interview with Windy City Queercast (5 February 2011) http://www.windycityqueercast.com/audio.html?ID=535

Love, Life, Fear

“More often than not, even the people and even the moments and even the circumstances that you feel you can go to for stability, for that piece of happiness, can all of a sudden shift, and can all of a sudden become tainted. And everything that you believe, or even that small moment of connection that you can feel can sometimes be destroyed. And I’m not a negative person — shockingly. I’m somewhat of a realist. And I’m a very passionate person, so I don’t like to expect that shift, I don’t like to expect for things that I love to become malignant or to become a great disappointment. But it happens. And it’s devastating. Every time.”

Davey Havok (1975) American singer

About the song "The Missing Frame", on I Heard A Voice

Love, Happiness, People, Disappointment

“Ambassador Taylor and, and, and, and me, and I, we had a very bad moment together at that day in the general staff. Ambassador want to see me uh because he uh made what we called a young turk at that time, a young general officer, namely Nguyen Cao Ky, and Nguyen Van Thieu, and other general. And uh… to kind of to insult them uh for, you know, being changing what we call the civilian government at that time.”

Nguyen Khanh (1927–2013) South Vietnamese soldier

Confrontation with Maxwell Taylor in November 1964: On conflict with Maxwell D. Taylor in November 1964
1980s, Interview with Nguyen Khanh (1981)

Change, Time

“Well, When I started my "Invasions," the word "street art" did not even exist yet! Now "Street Art" is a Pivotal moment”

Invader (artist) (1969) French urban artist

"http://www.complex.com/style/2014/07/space-invader-interview"

Art

“The poems I am writing at the moment will be much closer to your present way of thinking. I am trying to renew poetic style, but within a classical framework. On the other hand, I don't want to lapse into imitating others. Letter to Picasso 1918”

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) French poet

Way, Thinking

““Are you coming?” he said.
“In a moment.”
“It’s now or never.”
Maybe it would be never, then. She was so transfixed by the formidable power being unleashed in front of her, she couldn’t avert her astonished gaze. It fascinated her that strength of this magnitude should be turned to the sordid business of atrocity; something was wrong with a reality that made that possible, and offered no cure for it, nor hope of cure.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

Part Thirteen “Magic Night”, Chapter iv “Symmetry”, Section 2 (p. 569)
(1987), BOOK THREE: OUT OF THE EMPTY QUARTER

Hope, Business, Reality

“Just because you live every waking moment with dreams of controlling other people doesn't mean the rest of us do.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, The Ships Of Earth (1994)

People, Dreams

“I know you are asking today, "How long will it take?" Somebody's asking, "How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?" Somebody's asking, "When will wounded justice, lying prostrate on the streets of Selma and Birmingham and communities all over the South, be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men?" Somebody's asking, "When will the radiant star of hope be plunged against the nocturnal bosom of this lonely night, plucked from weary souls with chains of fear and the manacles of death? How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?" I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because "truth crushed to earth will rise again." How long? Not long, because "no lie can live forever."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

How long? Not long, because "you shall reap what you sow."
1960s, How Long, Not Long (1965)

Death, Wisdom, Men, Children

“Valuable thought occurred today to share. Obvious in the moment. Can't retrieve now. Didn't capture. I teach this. Damn.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

18 November 2009 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/5819997093 Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

“It is unbearable to consider that at this very moment that we are gathered together in this hall on this festive occasion, hundreds and thousands of prisoners of conscience are suffering from undernourishment, as the result of year-long hunger, and of an almost total lack of proteins and vitamins in their daily food, of a shortage of medicines (there is a ban on the sending of vitamins and medicines to internees), and of over-exertion. They shiver with cold, damp, and exhaustion in ill-lit dungeons, where they are forced to wage a ceaseless struggle for their human dignity and their conviction against the "indoctrination machine", in fact against the very destruction of their souls.”

Andrei Sakharov (1921–1989) Soviet nuclear physicist and human rights activist

Nobel Peace Prize Speech (1975)

Hunger, Food, Soul, Suffering

“I just think if you have an emotion and you let that go that moment might pass. If you don't open the door for the person to come in, it would have just been like, "Nice to meet you — goodbye."”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

As quoted in "Heidi Klum: No Regrets About Risqué Oprah Interview" by Samantha McIntyre and Oliver Jones in People (27 October 2007)

Thinking, Personality

“Science looks and observes and art see and foresees. Every great scientist has experienced a moment when the artist in him saved the scientist.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

Naum Gabo (1937) "Editorial", p. 9
1936 - 1977, Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, 1937

Art, Science

“At the times in my life when I was feeling the most gregarious and looking for bosom friendships, I couldn't find any takers so that exactly when I was alone was when I felt the most like not being alone. The moment I decided I'd rather be alone and not have anyone telling me their problems, everybody I'd never even seen before in my life started running after me to tell me things I'd just decided I didn't think it was a good idea to hear about. As soon as I became a loner in my own mind, that's when I got what you might call a "following."”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

As soon as you stop wanting something you get it. I've found that to be absolutely axiomatic.
Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 1: Puberty

Life, Friendship, Feeling, Idea

“The most significant change in the games themselves is the addition of 'Follow the Follower' (p 62), a variation on the 'Mirror' game in which no one initiates and all reflect. This game quiets the mind and frees players to enter a time, space, a moment intertwined with one another in a non-physical, non-verbal, non-analytical, nonjudgmental way.”

Viola Spolin (1906–1994) American academic and acting theorist

Improvisation for the Theater 3rd Edition (1999), Viola Spolin's Preface to the Second Edition, page iv

Way, Game, Change, Time

“The indwelling deity who presides over the destiny of the race has raised in man's mind and heart the idea, the hope of a new order which will replace the old unsatisfactory order, and substitute for it conditions of the world's life which will in the end have a reasonable chance of establishing permanent peace and well-being…. It is for the men of our day and, at the most, of tomorrow to give the answer. For, too long a postponement or too continued a failure will open the way to a series of increasing catastrophes which might create a too prolonged and disastrous confusion and chaos and render a solution too difficult or impossible; it might even end in something like an irremediable crash not only of the present world-civilisation but of all civilisation…. The terror of destruction and even of large-scale extermination created by these ominous discoveries may bring about a will in the governments and peoples to ban and prevent the military use of these inventions, but, so long as the nature of mankind has not changed, this prevention must remain uncertain and precarious and an unscrupulous ambition may even get by it a chance of secrecy and surprise and the utilisation of a decisive moment which might conceivably give it victory and it might risk the tremendous chance.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

April, 1950 (From a Postcript Chapter to The Ideal of Human Unity.)
India's Rebirth

Life, Men, People, World

“In the heat of the moment, it can be all too easy to generate solutions that take on a life of their own, without reference to the core values of the people developing them or those expected to implement them.”

Tim Hurson (1946) Creativity theorist, author and speaker

Think Better: An Innovator's Guide to Productive Thinking

Life, People

“The crucial moment of the end of the Cold War for me was the meeting between Gorbachev and Honecker, tyrant of East Germany, and Honecker said to him, and I'm sure Gorbachev is accurately conveying it, Honecker said to him if you don't send the tanks, "If you don't let us send out the tanks, it will be the fall of communism", and Gorbachev said "I wont send out the tanks, you may not send out the tanks."”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

and I believe in China they will send out the tanks.
2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011), Q&A

War, Communication

“Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), p. 313

Personality

““That’s a nice speech, Trujillo,” Rybicki said. “It doesn’t make it true.”
“General, at the moment, I wouldn’t place you as an authority on truth.””

John Scalzi The Last Colony

Source: The Last Colony (2007), Chapter 14 (p. 274)

Truth

“When I looked up at my father as a boy, I thought being a man was having control. Being the master and commander of your own destiny. How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends. I'm tired of people doubting. Of people choosing to believe they know what is possible because of what has happened before.”

Pierce Brown book Morning Star

Source: Morning Star (2016), Ch. 31: The Pale Queen

People, Boy, Freedom

“Perhaps the House will allow me to add this: that I am afraid we must brace ourselves to confront one of those terrible events in the order of Providence which baffle foresight, which appall the imagination and make us realise the inadequacy of words to do justice to what we feel. We cannot say more at this moment than to give a necessarily imperfect impression of our sense of admiration that the best traditions of the sea seem to have been observed and that willing sacrifices were offered to give the first chance for safety to those who were least able to help themselves, and of the heartfelt sympathy of the whole nation to those who find themselves suddenly bereaved of their nearest and dearest.”

H. H. Asquith (1852–1928) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Address to the House of Commons on the sinking of the RMS Titanic; see [Asquith Voices Sympathy, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9A02E3DF153CE633A25754C1A9629C946396D6CF, 16 April 1912, The New York Times]

Justice, Feeling, Imagination, Sense

“For the educated man, there is a moment of his early acquaintanceship with Dante when he realizes that all he has slowly taught himself to enjoy in poetry is everything that Dante has grown out of.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, At the Pillars of Hercules (1979)

Education

“.. there comes a point when something catches on the canvas, something grips on the canvas. I don’t know what it is, you can put your paint on the surface? Most of the time it looks like paint, and who the hell wants paint on a surface? But there does come a time – you take it off, put it on, goes over here, moves over a foot, as you go closer you start moving in inches not feet, half-inches – there comes a point when the paint doesn't feel like paint. I don't know why. Some mysterious thing happens. I think you have all experienced it.... What counts is that the paint should really disappear, otherwise it's craft. That's what I mean by something grips in a canvas. The moment that happens you are then sucked into the whole thing. Like some kind of rhythm.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, p. 67

Feeling, Hell, Thinking, Time

“Let us endeavour for a moment to disconnect our thinking selves from the mask of humanity; let us imagine ourselves scientific Saturnians, if you will, fairly acquainted with such animals as now inhabit the Earth, and employed in discussing the relations they bear to a new and singular 'erect and featherless biped,' which some enterprising traveller, overcoming the difficulties of space and gravitation, has brought from that distant planet for our inspection, well preserved, may be, in a cask of rum.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 85

Travel, Imagination, Thinking, Distant

“It appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again. The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer’s voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 58

Death, Men, Truth, Soul

“Life is brutal that way…the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.”

Dan Simmons book Endymion

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 60 (p. 561)

Life, Way, Loss

“The fact that a player is very short of time is, to my mind, as little to be considered as an excuse as, for instance, the statement of the law-breaker that he was drunk at the moment he committed the crime.”

Alexander Alekhine (1892–1946) Russian / French chess player, chess writer, and chess theoretician

On the Zeitnot problem.
Source: Chess Life, Vol. 16-18, 1961. p. 113.

Law, Time

“If there were a generic one-word expression for 'one whose fear of the uncertainties of success moves him to surrender at the very moment of victory', it would be 'Republican.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Some New Tactical Reflections".

Fear, Success, Victory

“Among its [Boresko's] curiosities is a high rock, which overhangs a fearful precipice, whose bottom is just as much below the surface of the surrounding country as the summit of the rock is above the surface. From its summit the rock presents the most enchanting views that the country affords… The atmosphere exerts, however, a medical influence. While inhaling it, each person possesses in imagination whatever he desires at the moment: riches, health, power, or even a lady's love. The place is appropriately termed the pinnacle of hope. …Hither come …all persons who wish to cheat the present moment of its anguish by pleasant anticipations of the future. Occasionally, however, a peculiar madness seizes the visiters, and they jump from the delightful pinnacle into the abyss below, whose noxious vapours prostrate all the energies of life, and reverse all the reveries of hope.”

Alexander Bryan Johnson (1786–1867) United States philosopher and banker

The Philosophical Emperor, a Political Experiment, or, The Progress of a False Position: (1841)

Love, Life, Health, Fear

“I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for — whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.”

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American playwright and novelist

Antrobus, in Act 3
The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)

World, Home, Time, Country

“Why am I seeking logic or sanity here? I'd asked myself at the moment. There hasn’t been any so far.”

Dan Simmons book Endymion

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 25 (p. 190)

“I will confess to you that never for one moment have I had any doubt that I had to do what I did, and when I look back I don't see what more I could have done, having regard to the state of public opinion and the sharpness of party feeling. That is a tremendous solace to me. Few men can have known such a reversal of fortune in so short a time.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Archbishop of Canterbury (14 October 1940), quoted in Keith Feiling, Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946), p. 455.
Post-Prime Ministerial

Men, Feeling, Time

“I talk about going to his Inauguration and crying when he took the oath, 'cause I was so afraid he was going to "wreck the economy and muck up the drinking water"… the failure of my pessimistic imagination at that moment boggles my mind now.”

Sarah Vowell (1969) American author, journalist, essayist and social commentator

Referring to George W. Bush on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart http://www.cc.com/video-clips/e88k08/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-sarah-vowell (2006-02-21)

Imagination, Failure, Drink, Water

“Perhaps the happiest moment of my life was then, when I saw that our line didn’t break and that the enemy’s did.”

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)

About the success of the crucial charge he led at Opequon, in a letter to Sardis Birchard (20 December 1864)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)

Life

“The power of the present moment is so immense it is capable - when lived in fully - of destroying forever every past mistake and regret.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

The Power of Esoterics

Past

“We should consider for a moment how much the Christian understanding of life is based on the reality of "Grace"; let us also recall that the Holy Spirit Himself is called "Gift"; that the greatest Christian teachers have said that the Justice of God is based on Love; that something given, something free of all debt, something undeserved, something not-achieved - is presumed in everything achieved or laid claim to; that what is first is always something received — if we keep all this before our eyes, we can see the abyss that separates this other attitude from the inheritence of Christian Europe.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), Leisure, the Basis of Culture, p. 20

Love, Life, God, Justice

“Anna’s reaction is more complex than you might imagine, and it’s at such a moment you appreciate the woman in the writer-director’s chair. Women, I suspect, are more likely than men to view sex from the over-all perspective of what we may call their lives. In a country like Saudi Arabia, whose citizens express discomfort about men and women even attending movies together, I have little doubt which gender is more concerned.”

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

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/humpday-2009 of Humpday (22 July 2009) Reviews, Three-and-a-half star reviews

Women, Men, Sex, Imagination

“And you remember, Rabbi Wise has declared, in a heated moment, that our plays seem to be written for the hosiery buyers. If Dr. Wise had only witnessed our new summer reviews, he doubtless would have amended his statement to read “by the hosiery buyers.””

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25758762M/Dorothy_Parker_Complete_Broadway_1918-1923, Chapter 2: 1919, p.89

Reading, Summer

“I love putting my kids to sleep. Cherishing every moment of it knowing that it won't be the same once they are all grown up.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Francis Escudero Twitter feed: @SayChiz (9:09 p.m. 2012 September 09).
2012, Twitter Feed

Love, Sleep

“When we look to presumed sources of origin for competing evolutionary explanations of the giraffe's long neck, we find either nothing at all, or only the shortest of speculative conjectures. Length, of course, need not correspond with importance. Garrulous old Polonius, in a rare moment of clarity, reminded us that "brevity is the soul of wit" (and then immediately vitiated his wise observation with a flood of woolly words about Hamlet's Madness.)”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"The Tallest Tale", p. 304
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Soul, Madness

“"I would give anything to know what you thought at the moment you died," Pierce said. His voice echoed in the tomb. The flame went out.”

Michael Crichton book Easy Go

Easy Go (1967)

“The most signal triumphs of the Romantic portrayal of memory are not those which recall past happiness, but remembrances of those moments when future happiness still seemed possible, when hopes were not yet frustrated.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: The Romantic Generation (1995), Ch. 3 : Mountains and Song Cycles

Happiness, Hope, Memory, Past

“Systems with unknown behavioral properties require the implementation of iterations which are intrinsic to the design process but which are normally hidden from view. Certainly when a solution to a well-understood problem is synthesized, weak designs are mentally rejected by a competent designer in a matter of moments. On larger or more complicated efforts, alternative designs must be explicitly and iteratively implemented. The designers perhaps out of vanity, often are at pains to hide the many versions which were abandoned and if absolute failure occurs, of course one hears nothing. Thus the topic of design iteration is rarely discussed. Perhaps we should not be surprised to see this phenomenon with software, for it is a rare author indeed who publicizes the amount of editing or the number of drafts he took to produce a manuscript.”

Fernando J. Corbató (1926–2019) American computer scientist

"A Managerial View of the Multics System Development" http://www.multicians.org/managerial.html, Conference on Research Directions in Software Technology, Providence, Rhode Island, October 10-12, 1977 published in Research Directions in Software Technology (1978), P. Wegner (ed.), MIT Press, ISBN 0262230968, pp. 139-158. Also reprinted in Tutorial: Software Management, Donald J. Reifer (ed.), IEEE Computer Society Press, (1979, 1981, 1986)

Pain, Behavior, Failure, Problem

“I photographed the ears. Something organic. Something from the inside out. Coming from the head. I did this ear series in New York ['Ohr' (Ear). c. 1980] and I asked people, women, on the street if I could photograph their ear. Not a single woman said no. Because I didn't ask for their face, but for something largely anonymous.... just women on the street... It only took a moment. The women always said, what, my ear? Sure! But I never offended anyone by examining them. It was just the ear. And everyone thought that was great. That was a nice experience. For me as a photographer, too. Of course, I did work with some light and hair shining in the sun... I tried to make the situation nice for the ear.”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

2001 - 2010, Isa Genzken in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans' (2003)

Women, People, Light, Sun

“Gentlemen, the melancholy event of yesterday reads to us an awful lesson against being too much troubled about any of the objects of ordinary ambition. The worthy gentleman, who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of contest, whilst his desires were as warm, and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us, what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Speech at Bristol on declining the poll (9 September 1780), referring to a Mr. Richard Coombe.
1780s

Hope, Reading

“I thought, wow, those people are showing off like me, that’s what I do at home. I can do that and get paid. That was my first realisation that maybe I wasn’t going to be a secretary or a postwoman or a lollipop woman. I did have a moment of thinking I liked the lollipop woman idea. But can you imagine? I would be like, ‘F**king move your car!’ I don’t think that would work.”

Michelle Gomez (1966) Scottish actress

An interview with the Sunday Herald talking about when she went to see Kiss Me Kate when she was seven.

People, Cars, Home, Imagination

“We wince at the brutality of parents who ship their young kids around to perform for adults at the expense of their childhood — but, then, that was Mozart’s childhood, and though by the end Mozart may have wished for less attention as a kid performer and more as a grownup composer, he never for a moment wished not to be Mozart.”

Adam Gopnik (1956) American journalist

How to Raise a Prodigy, The New Yorker (2018)

Parent, Childhood

“The moment people talk of "implementing" instead of "doing," and of "finalizing" instead of "finishing," the organization is already running a fever.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959), p. 94

People

“We cannot agree that an act of plunder which threatens the livelihood of many nations should be allowed to succeed. And we must make sure that the life of the great trading nations of the world cannot in the future be strangled at any moment by some interruption to the free passage of the Canal.”

Anthony Eden (1897–1977) British Conservative politician, prime minister

Conclusion of broadcast (8 August 1956), quoted in Anthony Gorst and Lewis Johnman, The Suez Crisis (Routledge, 2013), p. 70

Life, World, Future

“The Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) used to remember Allah at all moments.”

Aisha (605–678) Muhammad's wife

Sahih Muslim

Peace

“Throwing down your own sword is also an art of war. If you have attained mastery of swordlessness, you will never lack for a sword. The opponent's sword is your sword. This is acting at the vanguard of the moment.”

Yagyū Munenori (1571–1646) samurai and daimyo of the early Edo period

As quoted in Soul of the Samurai (2005) by Thomas Cleary, p. 28
Variant translation: If you have attained mastery of swordlessness, you will never be without a sword.

War, Art

“Eternity was in that moment.”

William Congreve The Old Bachelor

Act IV, scene vii
The Old Bachelor (1693)

“I know I’m also the girl who’s Chinese family doesn’t speak Chinese, and I’ve grown up watching Western philosophy movies teaching me that I should follow my heart and that I can do and be anything I desire. It almost feels like sometimes I’m too Asian, and then other times I’m not Asian enough. I don’t know… I’m not typical. I don’t fit the box. I’m just ME… Moments like these push me to grow and become better and all I can do is be the best me I can be and trust that what’s right for me will come along.”

Nikki SooHoo (1988) American actress

My Reflection in Mulan http://nikkisoohoo.com/blog/2016/11/7/my-reflection-in-mulan (November 7, 2016)

Family, Feeling, Girl, Time

“As every enquiry, which regards religion, is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular, which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning its origin in human nature. Happily, the first question, which is the most important, admits of the most obvious, at least, the clearest, solution. The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion. But the other question, concerning the origin of religion in human nature, is exposed to some more difficulty. The belief of invisible, intelligent power has been very generally diffused over the human race, in all places and in all ages; but it has neither perhaps been so universal as to admit of no exception, nor has it been, in any degree, uniform in the ideas, which it has suggested. Some nations have been discovered, who entertained no sentiments of Religion, if travellers and historians may be credited; and no two nations, and scarce any two men, have ever agreed precisely in the same sentiments.”

David Hume The Natural History of Religion

Introduction
The Natural History of Religion (1757)

Men, Age, Religion, Travel

“There’s no way to get from the point in Hemn space where we are now, to one that includes pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, following any plausible action principle. Which is really just a technical term for there being a coherent story joining one moment to the next. If you simply throw action principles out the window, you’re granting the world the freedom to wander anywhere in Hemn space, to any outcome, without constraint. It becomes pretty meaningless. The mind…knows that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next—that restricts our world’s path to points that tell an internally consistent story. So it focuses its worrying on outcomes that are more plausible…”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Orolo and Erasmas, Part 4, "Anathem"
Anathem (2008)

World, Way, Freedom

“For let there be no mistake about it: freedom is not an end in itself—it is only a means to an end. The moment you achieve freedom from something, the question arises: What is this freedom for? It is this question which the Muslim millah is now being called upon to answer.”

Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) Austro-Hungarian writer and academic

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Calling All Muslims, Radio Broadcast #1, p 92

Question, Freedom

“I know that timid breathing. Where
Do I begin and end? And where,
As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares
Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

“A fact is discovered, a theory is invented; is any theory ever deep enough for it to be truly called a creation? Most scientists would answer: no! Science, they would say, engages only part of the mind - the rational intellect - but creation must engage the whole mind. Science demands none of that ground swell of emotion, none of the rich bottom of personality, which fills out the work of art…
Creation consists in finding unity, finding likenesses, finding pattern…
Nature herself is chaos; she is full of infinite variety without order. But if you see her with inner vision, a creative mind (whether a poetic mind like Charles Baudelaire's or a scientific mind like Isaac Newton's), there comes a moment when many different aspects suddenly crystallize in a single unity. You have found a key; you have found a clue; you have found the path which organizes the material. You have found what Coleridge called "unity in variety."”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

That is the moment of creation. Source: The Creative Process, 1958, p. 97-98: As quoted in: S.P. Sector (‎1997). A Study of Issues Relating to the Patentability of Biotechnological Subject Matter. Footnote 51. https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/eng/ip00201.html

Art, Nature, Science, Parting

“I remember one clear example of the problem of communicating what is to be learned. You may have heard of or gone through a similar experience with a student or your child. Years ago, the child of a friend whom I was visiting arrived home from his day at school, all excited about something he had learned. He was in the first grade and his teacher had started the class on reading lessons. The child, Gary, announced that he had learned a new word. "That's great, Gary," his mother said. "What is it?" He thought for a moment, then said, "I'll write it down for you." On a little chalkboard the child carefully printed, HOUSE. "That's fine, Gary," his mother said. "What does it say?" He looked at the word, then at his mother and said matter-of-factly, "I don't know."The child apparently had learned what the word looked like — he had learned the visual shape of the word perfectly. The teacher, however, was teaching another aspect of reading — what words mean, what words stand for or symbolize. As often happens, what the teacher had taught and what Gary had learned were strangely incongruent.As it turned out, my friend's son always learned visual material best and fastest, a mode of learning consistently preferred by a number of students. Unfortunately, the school world is mainly a verbal, symbolic world, and learners like Gary must adjust, that is, put aside their best way of learning and learn the way the school decrees. My friend's child, fortunately, was able to make this change, but how many other students are lost along the way?”

Betty Edwards (1926) American artist

Source: The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979), p.237

World, School, Way, Home

“Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which he has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, and act of birth and rebirth, of child bearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for a woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

May 25, 1932
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Love, Pleasure, World, Art

“If you're not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world - if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order - then you're wasting your day.”

Douglas Coupland book Girlfriend in a Coma

Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

Life, World, Nature

“I don't want you to be the victim of circumstance, I want you to be the owner of the moment.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 156

“If, then, at the end of this analysis, I am asked to take off the mortar-board of the academic and put on the hat of someone deeply involved in the political developments of the age he lives in, I have no hesitation in saying that my preference is for the rule of law rather than of men. The rule of law is now celebrating its final triumph as the basis of the democratic system. What is democracy other than a set of rules (the so-called rules of the game) for the solution of conflicts without bloodshed? And what constitutes good democratic government if not rigorous respect for these rules? I for one have no doubts about how such questions are to be answered. And precisely because I have no doubts I can conclude in all good conscience that democracy is the rule of law par excellence. The very moment a democracy loses sight of this, its inspiring principle, it rapidly reverts into its opposite, into one of the many forms of autocratic government which haunt the chronicles of historians and the speculations of political thinkers.”

Norberto Bobbio (1909–2004) Italian legal scholar

The Future of Democracy: A Defence Of The Rules Of The Game (1984), Ch. 7: The Rule of Men or the Rule of Law

Men, Age, Law, Democracy

“Right now, at this very moment, on American highways, there are no less than 5,000 concentration camp trucks. Trucks that we have constructed. Inside these trucks, there are living, terrified innocent beings. Cows and pigs and chickens. These trucks are being driven to concentration camp's slaughterhouses that we carefully constructed all across America. When the trucks arrive, the animals are so frightened that they won't even get off the truck. They're not stupid, they know what's next. So people go on the trucks with electric prods and force them to walk down the chutes to their own deaths. Or if the animals are small enough to man handle, like chickens, we'll just grab them off the trucks and toss them inside. Inside, these innocent, living beings are hanged upside down, fully conscious. In other words, they go in alive, against their will, and come out chopped up, into hundreds of pieces.”

Gary Yourofsky (1970) animal rights activist

Part of the speech to the students of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Summer 2010)

Death, People, Stupidity, Animals

“Our people say "Death to America," and this is like saying "I seek God's refuge from the accursed Satan," which is recited before any chapter of the Koran, even before "In the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful." Why is this? So the believer will never forget, even for a moment, the presence of Satan. So he will never forget, even for a moment, that Satan is ready to attack him and to destroy his spiritual shield and is faith… The saying "Death to America" is for this purpose.”

Ali Khamenei (1939) Iranian Shiite faqih, Marja' and official independent islamic leader

March 14, 2005 speech http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/606.htm 2005

Death, God, People, Faith

“But complacency or self-congratulation can imperil our security as much as the weapons of tyranny. A moment of pause is not a promise of peace.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Third State of the Union Address

Peace

“Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.”

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

No. 381 (17 May 1712).
The Spectator (1711–1714)

“The desire for security, very marked in women, draws the weaker among them to men who, by their strength or ability, seem to offer protection and support. In time of war they count a warrior's scalps; in time of peace they hunt for genius or wealth. To the man in love the giving of gifts is a way of asserting his power. The penguin and the banker offer pebbles of varying brilliance to their respective loved ones. The finch presents twigs and leaves to its mate as the young man presents woolen threads in the form of carpets and curtains to his fiancee. The swallow and the woman begin to thing of the nest the moment they have chosen their males.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Loving

Love, Women, Men, War

“.. The thought crossed my mind, how society today in its fall, at moments seen against the light of a renewal, stands out as a large, gloomy silhouette. Yes, for me, the drama of storm in nature, the drama of sorrow in life, is the most impressive.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from The Hague, The Netherlands, Summer 1883; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 319) p. 21 1880s, 1883

Life, Nature, Light

“I considered that the painter's personality should be kept out of things, and therefore pictures should be anonymous. It was I who decided that pictures should not be signed, and for a time Picasso did the same. I thought that from the moment someone else could do the same as myself, there was no difference between the pictures and they should not be signed. Afterwards I realized it was not so and began to sign my pictures again. Picasso had begun again anyhow. I realized that one cannot reveal oneself without mannerism, without some evident trace of one's personality. But all the same one should not go too far in that direction..”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1946 - 1963, In conversation with Dora Vallier' (1954), p. 265

Time, Personality

“It was an important moment. The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood, gave way. A new character came of the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began, with shadow play, faceless voices, impalpable entities. The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), pp. 17

Justice, Way, Reality

“My ears may have been playing a trick on me, but I thought I heard the gentleman a moment ago say something quote unquote about homos in the military. Was I right in hearing that expression? Was the gentleman referring to the thousands and thousands of gay people who have put their lives on the line in countless wars defending this country? Was that the groups of people that the gentleman was referring to? You have insulted thousands of men and women who have put their lives on the line. I think they are owed an apology.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Speaking to Representative Duke Cunningham on the floor of the House of Representatives, 11 May 1995, from Watch Bernie Sanders Demolish A Republican Over ‘Homos In The Military’ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-duke-cunningham-homophobia_us_56cb75eee4b041136f17dc9f by Zach Carter, The Huffington Post (22 February 2016) 1990s

Women, Men, War, People

“I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.”

Charlie Chaplin book My Autobiography

My Autobiography (1964)

Feeling, Idea, Time, Personality

“It was right and proper to exploit the excellences of the moment, but still, when conditions reached an apex, there was nowhere to go but down.”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

Source: Dying Earth (1950-1984), Cugel's Saga (1983), Chapter 2, section 3, "The Ocean of Sighs"

“I fervently wish no misery ever came near anyone; yet it is that alone that gives us an insight into the depths of our lives, does it not? In our moments of anguish, gates barred forever seem to open and let in many a flood of light.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Light

“"You hear your fate," said the Sphere to me, while the Council was passing for the third time the formal resolution. "Death or imprisonment awaits the Apostle of the Gospel of Three Dimensions." "Not so," replied I, "the matter is now so clear to me, the nature of real space so palpable, that methinks I could make a child understand it. Permit me but to descend at this moment and enlighten them." "Not yet," said my Guide, "the time will come for that. Meantime I must perform my mission. Stay thou there in thy place." Saying these words, he leaped with great dexterity into the sea (if I may so call it) of Flatland, right in the midst of the ring of Counsellors. "I come," cried he, "to proclaim that there is a land of Three Dimensions."”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 18. How I came to Spaceland, and What I Saw There

Death, Fate, Understanding, Nature

“The world didn’t stop because we weren’t in it anymore; far from it. Night after night tiny bodies fell to the ground on our TV screen: black people, young people, Vietnamese people, poor people—some dead, some only bashed up for the moment. There were always more of them to replace the fallen and join them the next night. Then came the period when people we knew—not knew personally, but knew of—started falling to the ground: Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. Was that more alarming? Lisa said it was natural. “They gotta kill them,” she explained. “Otherwise it’ll never settle down.””

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted (1994)

People, World, Nature, Personality

“I have very strongly of late the wish that others may be as sensitive as myself and the fear that they will not be. Colleague Sir Frank Adcock stumped by the sunset-portent unheeding. And I can't arge that I gain, or that others would gain, anything for humanity by observing and recording what went on for a few moments in the sky on Boar Race evening. I sometimes pretend to myself that I am public-spirited. I am not. I am an hedonist who wants pleasant sensations. On the other hand I am not the usual type of hedonist, for I want sensations to be had”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

if not by myself, then by someone else. The show shouldn't end with my death, which becomes a minor boo-hoo.

p. 211 (1959)
Commonplace Book (1985)

Death, Fear

“The battle raged with great fury: victory was long doubtful, till two Indian princes, Brahman Dew and Dabishleem, with other reinforcements, joined their countrymen during the action, and inspired them with fresh courage. Mahmood at this moment perceiving his troops to waver, leaped from his horse, and, prostrating himself before God implored his assistance' At the same time he cheered his troops with such energy, that, ashamed to abandon their king, with whom they had so often fought and bled, they, with one accord, gave a loud shout and rushed forwards. In this charge the Moslems broke through the enemy's line, and laid 5,000 Hindus dead at their feet' On approaching the temple, he saw a superb edifice built of hewn stone. Its lofty roof was supported by fifty-six pillars curiously carved and set with precious stones. In the centre of the hall was Somnat, a stone idol five yards in height, two of which were sunk in the ground. The King, approaching the image, raised his mace and struck off its nose. He ordered two pieces of the idol to be broken off and sent to Ghizny, that one might be thrown at the threshold of the public mosque, and the other at the court door of his own palace. These identical fragments are to this day (now 600 years ago) to be seen at Ghizny. Two more fragments were reserved to be sent to Mecca and Medina. It is a well authenticated fact, that when Mahmood was thus employed in destroying this idol, a crowd of Brahmins petitioned his attendants and offered a quantity of gold if the King would desist from further mutilation. His officers endeavoured to persuade him to accept of the money; for they said that breaking one idol would not do away with idolatry altogether; that, therefore, it could serve no purpose to destroy the image entirely; but that such a sum of money given in charity among true believers would be a meritorious act. The King acknowledged that there might be reason in what they said, but replied, that if he should consent to such a measure, his name would be handed down to posterity as 'Mahmood the idol-seller', whereas he was desirous of being known as 'Mahmood the destroyer': he therefore directed the troops to proceed in their work'…'The Caliph of Bagdad, being informed of the expedition of the King of Ghizny, wrote him a congratulatory letter, in which he styled him 'The Guardian of the State, and of the Faith'; to his son, the Prince Ameer Musaood, he gave the title of 'The Lustre of Empire, and the Ornament of Religion'; and to his second son, the Ameer Yoosoof, the appellation of 'The Strength of the Arm of Fortune, and Establisher of Empires.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

He at the same time assured Mahmood, that to whomsoever he should bequeath the throne at his death, he himself would confirm and support the same.'
Tarikh-i-Firishta, translated into English by John Briggs under the title History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, 4 Volumes, New Delhi Reprint, 1981. p. 38-49 (Alternative translation: "but the champion of Islam replied with disdain that he did not want his name to go down to posterity as Mahmud the idol-seller (but farosh) instead of Mahmud the breaker-of-idols (but shikan)." in Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3)
Sack of Somnath (1025 CE)

Death, Money, God, Faith

“All women are aware of that moment when suddenly the boys don’t look at you. It’s a fairly common thing, when suddenly you no longer attract that instant male attention because of the way you look. I never really knew how to enjoy beauty, but it took the form of a subconscious arrogance, expecting things, all muddled up with celebrity.”

Julie Christie (1940) British actress and activist

As quoted in "A Role About Winter for Julie Christie, a Star in Eternal Spring http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/18/movies/18chri.html?_r=0" by Alan Riding in The New York Times (18 April 2007)]

Women, Beauty, Way, Boy

“While II was looking for a good enough excuse to run away from Anand; I was befriended by Tribhuvandas Patel, the young cooperative chairman and almost without realizing it I began to share his dream of building a strong organization that would free the famers from clutches of the middle man. In one of my weker moments I accepted |w:Tribhuvandas Kishibhai Patel|Tribhuvandas’s]] suggestion that I work for the nascent Kaira Cooperative. I have never regretted that decision in my 33-year career as an employee of the farmers.”

Verghese Kurien (1921–2012) Indian founder of dairy-cooperative Amul

In p. 74
Quote, Our Leaders

Dreams, Decision, Strong

“God's hand is strange to us. He cares nothing for the moment, nothing for the feeble ambitions of men and women. He sees the road that flows onward forever.”

Orson Scott Card book Stone Tables

Stone Tables (1997)

Women, Men, God

“Until now, neither the distinction between “worthy, since durable” and “vain, since transient,” nor the unbridgeable abyss separating the two, has disappeared for a moment from reflections on human happiness. Nonentity, the demeaning and humiliating insignificance of the individual bodily presence in the world by comparison with the unperturbed eternity of the world itself, has haunted philosophers (and non-philosophers, during their brief spells of falling into and staying in a philosophical mood) for more than two millennia. In the Middle Ages it was raised to the rank of the highest purpose and supreme concern of mortals, and deployed to promote spiritual values over the pleasures of the flesh—as well as to explain (and, hopefully argue away) the pain and misery of the brief earthly existence as a necessary and therefore welcome prelude to the endless bliss of the afterlife. It returned with the advent of the modern era in a new garb: that of the futility of individual interests and concerns, shown to be abominably short-lived, fleeting and vagrant when juxtaposed with the interests of “the social whole”—the nation, the state, the cause.”

Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) Polish philosopher and sociologist

Source: The Art of Life (2008), p. 31.

Pain, Happiness, Pleasure, Age

“Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment—so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment nor to escape the consequences.”

Ayn Rand book The Virtue of Selfishness

Sometimes paraphrased as "You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality."
The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

Life, Happiness, Fraud, Reality

“At the moment there is a great tendency in painting to discover the 'new' harmony by constructive means whereby the rhythmic is built on an almost geometric form... I am certain that our own modern harmony is not to be found in the 'geometric' way, but rather in the anti-geometric, anti-logical way. And this way is that of 'dissonance in art', in painting, therefore, just as much as in music. And 'today's' dissonance in painting and music is merely the consonance of 'tomorrow.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote in Kandinsky's letter to Arnold Schönberg, 18 Jan. 1911; as cited in Schonberg and Kandinsky: An Historic Encounter, by Klaus Kropfinger; edited by Konrad Boehmer; published by Routledge (imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informal company), 2003, p. 9
1910 - 1915

Art, Music, Way, Painting

“As a matter of general principle, I believe there can be no doubt that criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government … too many people desire to suppress criticism simply because they think that it will give some comfort to the enemy to know that there is such criticism. If that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcome to it as far as I am concerned, because the maintenance of the right of criticism in the long run will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy, and will prevent mistakes which might otherwise occur.”

Robert A. Taft (1889–1953) politician from the United States, son of 27th US President William Howard Taft

Speech at the Executive Club of Chicago, December 19, 1941

War, People, Feeling, Thinking

“God thus includes the world; he is, in fact, the totality of world parts, which are indifferently causes and effects. Now AR [absolute perfection in some respects, relative perfection in all others] is equally far from either of these doctrines; thanks to its two-aspect view of God, it is able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or pandeism. AR means that God is, in one aspect of himself, the integral totality of all ordinary causes and effects, but that in another aspect, his essence (which is A), he is conceivable in abstraction from any one or any group of particular, contingent beings (though not from the requirement and the power always to provide himself with some particulars or other, sufficient to constitute in their integrated totality the R aspect of himself at the given moment).”

Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) Philosopher

Source: Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (1941), P. 348.

God, World, Parting, Perfection

“I am the angel of reality,
Seen for a moment standing in the door.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

"Angel Surrounded by Paysans" (1949)

Angels, Reality

“Aristides de Sousa Mendes was neither a superhero endowed with supernatural powers nor a saint capable of working miracles, but rather a man who loved others and who believed in humanity above all else. He was a man who was truly alone during one of the darkest moments in history.”

Aristides de Sousa Mendes (1885–1954) Portuguese diplomat

Louis-Philippe Mendes, Huffington Post, 18 April 2012 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/louisphilippe-mendes/holocaust-remembrance-day_b_1434733.html About

Love, History