Quotes about moment
page 30

“Well, you know, a lot of work nowadays [c. 1991] tends to be illustrative of theory already written, and some of it tends to be quite consciously didactic, as if the determination is to teach somebody something. And letting that go for the moment, as far as its value is concerned, it's exactly the opposite of what I seem to find most useful, and that is to leave things open and not determine anything except the very clear form. The form is always very simple and clear. What is experienced is uncertain and unforeseeable, which is why I do it, and its point is never clear to me, even after I've done it. So that's a very, very different way of looking at the nature of our responsibility in the world.”

Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) American artist

In an interview with Robert C. Morgan, 1991; in the 'Journal of Contemporary Art, 4', no. 2, p. 56-69

World, Way, Nature

“Vedder has a variety of comments about God and/or belief, at one point he was saying, "When you're out in the desert, you can't believe the amount of stars. We've sent mechanisms out there, and they haven't found anything. They've found different colours of sand, and rings, and gasses, but nobody's shown me anything that makes me feel secure in what happens afterwards. All I really believe in is this moment, like right now."”

Eddie Vedder (1964) musician, songwriter, member of Pearl Jam

Rolling Stone, Oct 31 1991, "Right Here, Right Now".

God, Feeling, Star

“But the great moment was over — here in Orizaba it was like Galilee between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection — all the enthusiasm had been spent.”

Graham Greene book The Lawless Roads

The Lawless Roads (1939)

“When I was a boy, while watching the funeral procession of the Great Martin Luther King Jr. on NBC, I observed a rickety wooden cart being pulled by two mules and behind the cart, a sea of people. In the cart lay the body of MLK; at that moment, he represented the totality of the human struggle. I remember feeling then, while watching the procession on TV, that we, as a country, were either going to pull together or else come apart.”

Robert Davi (1953) American actor and jazz singer

Davi: To Influence Hollywood, Conservatives Need to Grow a Pair http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/03/13/davi-influence-hollywood-conservatives-need-grow-pair/ (March 13, 2017)

People, Feeling, Boy, Sea

“Patched-up diplomatic solutions designed to answer the needs of the moment rarely last, and as they unravel they can actually make things worse.”

Margaret Thatcher book Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World

Source: Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, p. 203

“Judged by every standard which history has applied to Governments, the Soviet Government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. (Cheers.) It accords no political rights. It rules by terror. It punishes political opinions. It suppresses free speech. It tolerates no newspapers but its own. It persecutes Christianity with a zeal and a cunning never equalled since the times of the Roman Emperors. It is engaged at this moment in trampling down the peoples of Georgia and executing their leaders by hundreds. It is for this process that Mr. MacDonald asks us to make ourselves responsible. We are to render these tyrannies possible by lending to their authors money to pay for the ammunition to murder the Georgians, to enable the Soviet sect to keep its stranglehold on the dumb Russian nation, and to poison the world, and so far as they can, the British Empire, with their filthy propaganda. (Cheers.) That is what we are asked to take upon ourselves. It is an outrage on the British name.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Edinburgh (25 September 1924), quoted in The Times (26 September 1924), p. 14
Early career years (1898–1929)

Money, People, World, History

“Regarding the doll in the Purge, since it's one of my favorite moments in the series: The Custodians are the physical embodiment of a very vaporous notion -- human conscience. Does conscience really exist, or is it just a way of convincing ourselves that a center for moral judgment resides within us, thus lending our judgments a natural authority? As always, Trevor prefers to provide a tangible solution. He can't tolerate uncertainty. Whether it is real or not, Trevor understands the usefulness of the belief in conscience as a tool for practical ends, the improvement of society. In the end, the doll which emerges from the Custodian reveals to us that Trevor's artificial conscience, like the classical notion, is no more than a flimsy gimmick, a parlor trick, a plaything of the mind powered by a circular process. (Advocating the existence of conscience usually involves an appeal to our conscience). Notice that Trevor himself winds up the toy while in the train earlier in the episode.”

Peter Chung (1961) Korean-American animator

Response on LUSENET http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=003FAq

Way, Understanding, Nature, Training

“At night in his own bed, Alvin listened to the distant greensong, still warm and beautiful, still bright and hopeful even though the forest was getting so sparse, even though the future was so dim. Cause there’s no fear of future in the song of life, just the ever-joyful present moment. That’s all I want right now, thought Alvin. The present moment, which is good enough.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Red Prophet (1988), Chapter 19 (closing words).

Life, Fear, Beauty, Hope

“When four rowers are in a boat, with their backs to the bow, their simple office is to pull the oars. The steersman's office is to look ahead and work the helm. The moment that the rower turns steersman, and tries to look over his shoulder or outpull his fellow oarsman, the boat loses headway. So you and I are placed with our backs to the future. In our hands are the oars of Christian endeavor. Let God steer the boat, and let us attend to the oars.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 125.

God, Future

“That was a decisive moment in Lincoln’s career, and that’s the situation he faced when he got up to give his “House Divided” speech on June 16th of 1858. It was a crisis of his own career. It was also, in my opinion, the gravest crisis this country has ever faced, because the greatest danger to the future of the country came not, I think, from the pro-slavery argument, but from the morally neutral argument of Douglas. And that’s a long story and you’ll find it all spelled out in great detail in my book, which I hope you will read with great care.”

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

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

Books, Hope, Thinking, Decision

“On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg was in the hot seat. Cameras surrounded him. The energy in the room – and on Twitter – was electric. At last, the reluctant CEO is made to answer some questions! Except it failed. It was designed to fail. It was a show designed to get Zuckerberg off the hook after only a few hours in Washington DC. It was a show that gave the pretense of a hearing without a real hearing. It was designed to deflect and confuse. … The worst moments of the hearing for us, as citizens, were when senators asked if Zuckerberg would support legislation that would regulate Facebook. I don’t care whether Zuckerberg supports Honest Ads or privacy laws or GDPR. By asking him if he would support legislation, the senators elevated him to a kind of co-equal philosopher king whose view on Facebook regulation carried special weight. It shouldn’t. Facebook is a known behemoth corporate monopoly. It has exposed at least 87 million people’s data, enabled foreign propaganda and perpetuated discrimination. We shouldn’t be begging for Facebook’s endorsement of laws, or for Mark Zuckerberg’s promises of self-regulation. We should treat him as a danger to democracy and demand our senators get a real hearing.”

Zephyr Teachout (1971) American academic, political activist and candidate

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook hearing was an utter sham https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/11/mark-zuckerbergs-facebook-hearing-sham?CMP=fb_gu (11 April 2018), The Guardian.

People, Law, Democracy, Question

“It never ceases to surprise me how few friends the doomed have. One moment they are surrounded by smilingfaces, the next they are uterly friendless.”

David Gemmell book Stormrider

Source: Rigante series, Stormrider, Ch. 4

“The critics have no historical sense. I have no Cabinet papers by me and do not want to trust my memory. But recall the Fulham election, the Peace Ballot, Singapore, sanctions, Malta. The English will only learn by example. When I first heard of Hitler, when Ribbentrop came to see me, I thought they were all crazy. I think I brought Ramsay and Simon to meet Ribbentrop. Remember that Ramsay's health was breaking up in the last two years. He had lost his nerve in the House in the last year. I had to take all the important speeches. The moment he went I prepared for a General Election and got a bigger majority for re-armament. No power on earth could have got re-armament without a General Election except by a big split. Simon was inefficient. I had to lead the House and keep the machine together with those Labour fellows.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Conversation with Thomas Jones (21/22 January 1941), quoted in Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters. 1931-1950 (Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 482.
1940s

Health, Peace, Thinking, Sense

“In the rich countries, depending on the species, 80 to 95 percent of the animals we eat are “produced” in industrial breeding operations where their short lives are an uninterrupted continuity of pain. All of that becomes possible the moment we begin to regard other living beings as objects for consumption or reserves of meat that we can deal with however we please.”

Matthieu Ricard (1946) French writer and Buddhist monk

Source: A Plea for the Animals (2014), Chapter 4, p. 74

Pain, Animals, Dependency, Country

“Lord Southrop was, of course, eccentric in his views; and you never knew — here the housekeeper, with a despondent head-shake, paused, leaving unspoken the suggestion that a man who did not think or behave like other people might go mad at any moment.”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) British writer

11. "The Unknown Peer"
Trent Intervenes (1938)

People, Thinking, Madness

“I was a French Quarter rat from the moment I could get on a bus by myself and go to the French Quarter. I played music most of my early life and it just seemed that to entertain people was a really good thing to do.”

John Larroquette (1947) born 1947; American film, television and stage actor

Responding to the question, "When did you know that the acting thing was for you?" during an interview with Tavis Smiley, http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200804/20080411_larroquette.html Tavis Smiley Tonight (2008-10-18).

Life, People, Music

“They'll lead us bit by bit toward the revolutionary idea that we've grown about as powerful as it's wise to grow; that the rush of technological innovation that's marked the last five hundred years can finally slow, and spread out to water the whole delta of human possibility. But those decisions will only emerge if people understand the time for what it is: the moment when we stand precariously on the sharp ridge between the human past and the posthuman future, the moment when meaning might evaporate in a tangle of genes or chips.”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

Source: Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), p. 198

People, Idea, Understanding, Decision

“The sad fact is that not only is the youth exposed to rock, but rock is coming into the church. So called Christian rock; and it’s being sung by the choir. You actually hear now and then about a rock mass or a rock service. I spoke a few years ago at a church which was…I’ll never be asked about. A very large church with a plant that was equal to a small college campus, and I don’t mean too small of a college, a fair sized one. They had a number of choirs; they had one man in charge of all the music in the church, overall music director, a very brilliant, very intelligent man, but as wrongheaded as I’ve ever seen. Because he told me that his belief was that the only kind of music that should be played or sung or used in a church or any place was throw away music; that was his term. Music that was hip, so up to the moment, that it would capture the mood of the youth who were listening to the latest on television or radio. Music which six months down the line would be out of date because it would be throw away music, music of the moment, in order to speak to the youth. And I tried to get through this point to him, that speaking to them in terms of what’s of the moment is not what it’s all about it, it’s speaking from the Lord with eternal truths.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Dangers Inherent in Public Education (March 24, 1986)

Truth, Youth, Sadness, Music

“Our society has so cluttered our lives with artifacts [man-made things]… and organizational structures that [our] moment to moment relationships with nature are almost impossible.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Nature

“[It] would have been all the easier [if] the entire story of the scar had been presented as a recollection which awakens in Odysseus’ mind at this particular moment. It would have been perfectly easy to do; the story of the scar had only to be inserted two verses earlier, at the first mention of the word scar, where the motifs “Odysseus” and “recollection” were already at hand. But any such subjectivistic‐perspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background, resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past, is entirely foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.”

Erich Auerbach Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Source: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), p. 7

Lying, Past

“A number of little birds, to the amount, I believe, of twelve or fourteen, being taken from different cages, were placed upon a table in the presence of the spectators; and there they formed themselves into ranks like a company of soldiers: small cones of paper bearing some resemblance to grenadiers caps were put upon their heads, and diminutive imitations of muskets made with wood, secured under their left wings. Thus equipped, they marched to and fro several times; when a single bird was brought forward, supposed to be a deserter, and set between six of the musketeers, three in a row, who conducted him from the top to the bottom of the table, on the middle of which a small brass cannon charged with a little gunpowder had been previously placed, and the deserter was situated in the front part of the cannon; his guards then divided, three retiring on one side, and three on the other, and he was left standing by himself. Another bird was immediately produced; and, a lighted match being put into one of his claws, he hopped boldly on the other to the tail of the cannon, and, applying the match to the priming, discharged the piece without the least appearance of fear or agitation. The moment the explosion took place, the deserter fell down, and lay, apparently motionless, like a dead bird; but, at the command of his tutor he rose again; and the cages being brought, the feathered soldiers were stripped of their ornaments, and returned into them in perfect order.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 250
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Public entertainment

Fear, Bird, Light, Appearance

“Out of hundred years, a few moments were made that stayed with me, not a hundred years.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Me hicieron de cien años algunos minutos que se quedaron conmigo, no cien años.
Voces (1943)

“I'm not Machiavellian. I don't play chess with my life, you know. I respond in the moment, which is what makes me a good actor. It makes me, sometimes, a good interview subject but it also makes me a very easy target.”

Russell Crowe (1964) New Zealand-born Australian actor, film producer and musician

60 Minutes interview (2006)

Life

“Mystics like Saint Bernard, Saint Francis, Saint Bonaventure or Pascal had a right to make this objection, since they got into the Church, so to speak, by breaking through the windows; but society at large accepted and retains Saint Thomas's Man much as Saint Thomas delivered him to the government; a two-sided being, free or unfree, responsible or irresponsible, an energy or a victim of energy, moved by choice or moved by compulsion, as the interests of society seemed for the moment to need.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
Context: p>To religious mystics, whose scepticism concerned chiefly themselves and their own existence, Saint Thomas's Man seemed hardly worth herding, at so much expense and trouble, into a Church where he was not eager to go. True religion felt the nearness of God without caring to see the mechanism. Mystics like Saint Bernard, Saint Francis, Saint Bonaventure or Pascal had a right to make this objection, since they got into the Church, so to speak, by breaking through the windows; but society at large accepted and retains Saint Thomas's Man much as Saint Thomas delivered him to the government; a two-sided being, free or unfree, responsible or irresponsible, an energy or a victim of energy, moved by choice or moved by compulsion, as the interests of society seemed for the moment to need. Certainly Saint Thomas lavished no excess of liberty on the Man he created, but still he was more generous than the State has ever been. Saint Thomas asked little from Man, and gave much; even as much freedom of will as the State gave or now gives; he added immortality hereafter and eternal happiness under reasonable restraints; his God watched over man's temporal welfare far more anxiously than th State has ever done, and assigned him space in the Church which he can never have in the galleries of Parliament or Congress. [... ] No statute law ever did as much for Man, and no social reform ever will try to do it; yet Man bitterly complained that he had not his rights, and even in the Church is still complaining, because Saint Thomas set a limit, more or less vague, to what man was obstinate in calling his freedom of will.Thus Saint Thomas completed his work, keeping his converging lines clear and pure throughout, and bringing them together, unbroken, in the curves that gave unity to his plan. His sense of scale and proportion was that of the great architects of his age. One might go on studying it for a life-time.</p

“Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 2 (at page 19)

Waiting

“The universe according to Bohm actually has two faces, or more precisely, two orders. One is the explicate order, corresponding to the physical world as we know it in day-to-day reality, the other a deeper, more fundamental order which Bohm calls the implicate order. The implicate order is the vast holomovement. We see only the surface of this movement as it presents or "explicates" itself from moment to moment in time and space. What we see in the world — the explicate order — is no more than the surface of the implicate order as it unfolds.”

David Bohm (1917–1992) American theoretical physicist

Synchronicity: Science, Myth, and The Trickster (1990) by Allan Combs & Mark Holland
Context: The universe according to Bohm actually has two faces, or more precisely, two orders. One is the explicate order, corresponding to the physical world as we know it in day-to-day reality, the other a deeper, more fundamental order which Bohm calls the implicate order. The implicate order is the vast holomovement. We see only the surface of this movement as it presents or "explicates" itself from moment to moment in time and space. What we see in the world — the explicate order — is no more than the surface of the implicate order as it unfolds. Time and space are themselves the modes or forms of the unfolding process. They are like the screen on the video game. The displays on the screen may seem to interact directly with each other but, in fact, their interaction merely reflects what the game computer is doing. The rules which govern the operation of the computer are, of course, different from those that govern the behavior of the figures displayed on the screen. Moreover, like the implicate order of Bohm's model, the computer might be capable of many operations that in no way apparent upon examination of the game itself as it progresses on the screen.

World, Reality, Universe, Time

“What excited me was the recognition that this was simply another version of the problem that had obsessed me all of my life -- the problem of those moments when life seems entirely delightful, when we experience a sensation of what G. K. Chesterton called "absurd good news." Life normally strikes most of us as hard, dull and unsatisfying; but in these moments, consciousness seems to glow and expand, and all the contradictions seem to be resolved. Which of the two visions is true? My own reflections had led me to conclude that the vision of "absurd good news" is somehow broader and more comprehensive than the feeling that life is dull, boring and meaningless. Boredom is basically a feeling of narrowness, and surely a narrow vision is bound to be less true than a broad one?”

Colin Wilson book The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders

Source: The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988), p. 16

Life, Feeling, Problem

“Yet science is going to tell you that the only things worth describing are those phenomena that can be repeatedly triggered. This is being these are the only phenomena that science can describe and that's the name of the game as far as they are concerned. But we, to claim our freedom, to take advantage of the tiny moment between immense abysses of unknowability, perhaps death, perhaps other reincarnations, perhaps transitions into other life forms, these things we don't know, but in the moment of being human we have the unique opportunity to figure things out. And I have the faith that it is possible, sometime, somewhere, to have a conversation, perhaps no progress will be made until the ninth hour, but to have a conversation in which reality could be literally pulled to pieces, beyond the point of reconstructing.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Psychedelic Society (1984)

Life, Death, Faith, Game

“When I was a kid, my parents got me into piano, viola, and trombone. They were the three instruments I went through. The moment I started playing trombone, which was the last one before guitar, I knew I wanted to play guitar really badly. I was a huge Metallica fan, and I’m really into Slash. I’ve always thought he was the coolest dude, and like the greatest guitar player. He’s awesome, and I love the fact that he did everything himself. He made the world of guitar fit around him, rather than him fitting around the world of guitar, which I think is really cool.”

Joe Trohman (1984) American musician

My Heart Will Always Be The B-Side To My Tongue (2004), Ultimate Guitar Interview (2008)

Love, World, Thinking, Parent

“…a [literary] style can be a whole way of existing, so that you exist, for the moment, in perfect sympathy with it: you don’t read it so much as listen to it as it sweeps you along—fast enough, often, to make you feel a blurred pleasure in your own speed. Often a phrase or sentence has the uncaring unconscious authority—how else could you say it?—that only a real style has.”

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

“An Unread Book”, p. 36
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Pleasure, Way, Feeling, Reading

“We are getting carried away by the on-the-move musicians. Most of the Carnatic concerts abroad are being organised by NRIs. The defining moment is when an artist is invited to a foreign land and applauded by the foreign nationals. They should forge artistic alliances and find new audiences by introducing people of other nationalities to our arts.”

M. Balamuralikrishna (1930–2016) Carnatic vocalist, instrumentalist and playback singer

Source: Chitra Swaminathan "He defines ‘style’ as tradition".

People, Art

“I will dispense for now from discussion of the moral character of the president's Charlottesville statements. Whether he intended to or not, what he communicated caused racists to rejoice, minorities to weep, and the vast heart of America to mourn. His apologists strain to explain that he didn't mean what we heard. But what we heard is now the reality, and unless it is addressed by the president as such, with unprecedented candor and strength, there may commence an unraveling of our national fabric.The leaders of our branches of military service have spoken immediately and forcefully, repudiating the implications of the president's words. Why? In part because the morale and commitment of our forces-made up and sustained by men and women of all races--could be in the balance. Our allies around the world are stunned and our enemies celebrate; America's ability to help secure a peaceful and prosperous world is diminished. And who would want to come to the aid of a country they perceive as racist if ever the need were to arise, as it did after 9/11?In homes across the nation, children are asking their parents what this means. Jews, blacks, Hispanics, Muslims are as much a part of America as whites and Protestants. But today they wonder. Where might this lead? To bitterness and tears, or perhaps to anger and violence?The potential consequences are severe in the extreme. Accordingly, the president must take remedial action in the extreme. He should address the American people, acknowledge that he was wrong, apologize. State forcefully and unequivocally that racists are 100% to blame for the murder and violence in Charlottesville. Testify that there is no conceivable comparison or moral equivalency between the Nazis--who brutally murdered millions of Jews and who hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives to defeat--and the counter-protestors who were outraged to see fools parading the Nazi flag, Nazi armband and Nazi salute. And once and for all, he must definitively repudiate the support of David Duke and his ilk and call for every American to banish racists and haters from any and every association.This is a defining moment for President Trump. But much more than that, it is a moment that will define America in the hearts of our children. They are watching, our soldiers are watching, the world is watching. Mr. President, act now for the good of the country.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

Facebook statement https://www.facebook.com/mittromney/posts/10154652303536121 (18 August 2017) 2017

Women, Men, Children, People

“Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.”

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989) American writer

"My Confession", p. 76
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Thinking

“What relationship could exist between the lives of the fools and healthy rabble who were well, who slept well, who performed the sexual act well, who had never felt the wings of death on their face every moment—what relationship could exist between them and one like me who has arrived at the end of his rope and who knows that he will pass away gradually and tragically?”

Sadegh Hedayat book The Blind Owl

The Blind Owl

Death, Fools

“It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other — for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended— the doors we had indiscreetly opened.”

Henry James book The Turn of the Screw

Source: The Turn of the Screw (1898), Ch. XIII.

“The charging of his enemy was but the work of a moment.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book I, Ch. 8.

“The life I had dreamed of so often during those hot summers on the farm in Georgia or during what seemed like endless hours on the oil truck with my grandfather, expired as Dr. King expired. As so many of you do, I still know exactly where I was when I heard the news. It was a low moment in our nation's history and a demarcation between hope and hopelessness for many of us.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Life, Dreams, Hope, History

“Between too early and too late, there is never more than a moment.”

Franz Werfel book Jacobowsky und der Oberst

Zwischen zu früh und zu spät, liegt immer nur ein Augenblick.
Jacobowsky und der Oberst : Komödie einer Tragödie in drei Akten (1945), p. 52

“1/2 cup of hope and 1/2 cup of kindness seem like a litmus test by asking "Is the glass half empty or half full?" Nature shows us in every waking moment that where there is life, there is hope. And to quote the movie Horns starring Daniel Radcliffe and Juno Temple, "Man is not born evil. The Devil himself was a fallen angel," there is kindness in everyone if you dig deep enough.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

Life, Hope, Angels, Quotes

“In moments of great anxiety there is a sort of natural superstition about the heart, which the reason rejects in cooler moments.”

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

Traits and Trials of Early Life (1836)

Nature, Heart

“I liked the room [his new place in London, c. 1906] the moment I saw it, so here I am set up as a swell... Don't you take this to be a trap set up for the unwary, you know you're always touching a sore spot when you talk painting, and drag my suicides before the public, the right name for potboilers, one has to give up all aim for any good intention, and do the technical skill and cleverness to please those with halfpennies and farthings in their pocket, to be favoured to live... I just got a letter from somebody, saying: but with potboiling one can make money, money always considered to be the principal. I told him he was greatly mistaken, when a little honesty remains, one can scarcely ask anything for them.”

Matthijs Maris (1839–1917) Dutch painter

in a letter to David Croal Thomson (1907), as cited in: The Brothers Maris (James – Matthew – William), ed. Charles Holme; text: D.C. Thomson https://ia800204.us.archive.org/1/items/cu31924016812756/cu31924016812756.pdf; publishers, Offices of 'The Studio', London - Paris, 1907, p. BMxv

Money, Suicide, Painting

“But when the dreaded moment's there
He'll face us all, a soldier yet,
Watch his bared wounds with unmoved air,
(Though tell-tale lashes still are wet),
And smoke his Woodbine cigarette.”

Eva Dobell (1876–1963) British poet

Unsourced, In A Soldiers' Hospital 1: Pluck

“Childhood is that time in which we never question the fact that every adult act is not only an autonomous occurrence in the universe, but that it is also filled, packed, overflowing with meaning, whether that meaning works for ill or good, whether the ill or good is or is not comprehended.
Adulthood is that time in which we see that all human actions follow forms, whether well or badly, and it is the perseverance of the forms that is, whether for better or worse, their meaning.
Various cultures make the transition at various ages, which transition period lasts for varying lengths of time, one accomplishing it in a week with careful dances, ancient prayers, and isolate and specified rituals; another, letting it take its own course, offering no help for it, and allowing it to run on frequently for years. But at the center of the changeover there is a period—whether it be a moment’s vision or a year-long suspicion—where the maturing youth sees all adult behavior as merely formal and totally meaningless.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Section 3 (p. 114)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

Youth, Age, Behavior, Question

“From this moment on, Peru is free and independent by the general will of its people and by the justice of its cause that God defends. Long live the nation! Long live the freedom! Long live the independence!”

José de San Martín (1778–1850) Argentine general and independence leader

El Perú es desde este momento libre e independiente por la voluntad general de los pueblos y por la justicia de su causa que Dios defiende. ¡Viva la patria! ¡Viva la libertad! ¡Viva la independencia!
(Declaration of the Peruvian independence, July 28, 1821).

God, People, Justice, Freedom

“The strength of an organization lies in precise coordination of its parts, in strict correspondence of various mutually connected functions. This coordination is maintained through constant growth in tektological variety, but not without bounds:... there comes a moment when the parts of the whole become too differentiated in their organization and their resistance to the surrounding environment weakens. This leads sooner or later to disorganization.”

Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) Physician, philosopher, writer

Source: Tektology. The Universal Organizational Science, 1922, p. 248, as cited in: George Gorelik, " Reemergence of Bogdanov's Tektology in Soviet Studies of Organization http://monoskop.org/images/0/00/Gorelik_George_1975_Reemergence_of_Bogdanovs_Tektology_in_Soviet_Studies_of_Organization.pdf." Academy of Management Journal 18.2 (1975): 345-357.

Parting

“The skein of human continuity must often become this tenuous across the centuries (hanging by a thread, in the old cliché), but the circle remains unbroken if I can touch the ink of Lavoisier's own name, written by his own hand. A candle of light, nurtured by the oxygen of his greatest discovery, never burns out if we cherish the intellectual heritage of such unfractured filiation across the ages. We may also wish to contemplate the genuine physical thread of nucleic acid that ties each of us to the common bacterial ancestor of all living creatures, born on Lavoisier's ancienne terre more than 3.5 billion years ago—and never since disrupted, not for one moment, not for one generation. Such a legacy must be worth preserving from all the guillotines of our folly.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Lying Stones of Marrakech

"The Proof of Lavoisier's Plates", p. 114
The Lying Stones of Marrakech (2001)

Age, Light

“Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves. It creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handed-down frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other people's findings. Spontaneity is the moment of personal freedom when we are faced with reality, and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In this reality the bits and pieces of ourselves function as an organic whole. It is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression.”

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

Improvisation for the Theater 1963), page 4

People, Reality, Freedom, Memory

“At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment. If he's being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that's a fulfilling notion. But if he's in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid.”

William Least Heat-Moon book Blue Highways

Part Five, Chapter 3.
Blue Highways (1982)

Life, Death, Stupidity, Feeling

“The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Speech on Reform of Representation in the House of Commons (7 May 1782)
1780s

Time

“The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world to the sole disposal of a magistrate, created and circumstanced, as would be a President of the United States.”

Alexander Hamilton Federalist Papers

No. 75
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

World, History

“Always Do Your Best. Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.”

Miguel Ángel Ruiz book The Four Agreements

The Four Agreements (1997)

Change, Positive

“SOLON CR is indicated for the short-term treatment of psychological unease grounded in obsession with thinking about the near and distant future. By severing the link between the present moment and a patient’s perceived future state, researchers have found a pronounced and significant drop in all forms of anxiety. As well, researchers have found that disengagement with “the future” has allowed many patients complaining of persistent loneliness to live active and productive single lives with no fear or anxiety.”

Douglas Coupland book Generation A

Source: Generation A (2009), p. 95

Fear, Thinking, Distant, Future

“I must say that when my Southern Christian Leadership Conference began its work in Birmingham, we encountered numerous Negro church reactions that had to be overcome. Negro ministers were among other Negro leaders who felt they were being pulled into something that they had not helped to organize. This is almost always a problem. Negro community unity was the first requisite if our goals were to be realized. I talked with many groups, including one group of 200 ministers, my theme to them being that a minister cannot preach the glories of heaven while ignoring social conditions in his own community that cause men an earthly hell. I stressed that the Negro minister had particular freedom and independence to provide strong, firm leadership, and I asked how the Negro would ever gain freedom without his minister's guidance, support and inspiration. These ministers finally decided to entrust our movement with their support, and as a result, the role of the Negro church today, by and large, is a glorious example in the history of Christendom. For never in Christian history, within a Christian country, have Christian churches been on the receiving end of such naked brutality and violence as we are witnessing here in America today. Not since the days of the Christians in the catacombs has God's house, as a symbol, weathered such attack as the Negro churches.
I shall never forget the grief and bitterness I felt on that terrible September morning when a bomb blew out the lives of those four little, innocent girls sitting in their Sunday-school class in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. I think of how a woman cried out, crunching through broken glass, "My God, we're not even safe in church!" I think of how that explosion blew the face of Jesus Christ from a stained-glass window. It was symbolic of how sin and evil had blotted out the life of Christ. I can remember thinking that if men were this bestial, was it all worth it? Was there any hope? Was there any way out?… time has healed the wounds -- and buoyed me with the inspiration of another moment which I shall never forget: when I saw with my own eyes over 3000 young Negro boys and girls, totally unarmed, leave Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church to march to a prayer meeting -- ready to pit nothing but the power of their bodies and souls against Bull Connor's police dogs, clubs and fire hoses. When they refused Connor's bellowed order to turn back, he whirled and shouted to his men to turn on the hoses. It was one of the most fantastic events of the Birmingham story that these Negroes, many of them on their knees, stared, unafraid and unmoving, at Connor's men with the hose nozzles in their hands. Then, slowly the Negroes stood up and advanced, and Connor's men fell back as though hypnotized, as the Negroes marched on past to hold their prayer meeting. I saw there, I felt there, for the first time, the pride and the power of nonviolence.
Another time I will never forget was one Saturday night, late, when my brother telephoned me in Atlanta from Birmingham -- that city which some call "Bombingham" -- which I had just left. He told me that a bomb had wrecked his home, and that another bomb, positioned to exert its maximum force upon the motel room in which I had been staying, had injured several people. My brother described the terror in the streets as Negroes, furious at the bombings, fought whites. Then, behind his voice, I heard a rising chorus of beautiful singing: "We shall overcome."”

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

Tears came into my eyes that at such a tragic moment, my race still could sing its hope and faith. Interview in Playboy (January 1965) https://web.archive.org/web/20080706183244/http://www.playboy.com/arts-entertainment/features/mlk/04.html 1960s

Life, Men, God, People

“The unsuspecting fish, who knew nothing but a life in the river, went about its routine like any other day, but in an instant was ripped out of its reality to meet with death. Like that fish, we routinely live our lives hardly aware that, at the least expected moment, the yellow-eyed hawk of fate in the form of crises, tragedy or even death, may wrench us out of our comfortable environment. We regularly hear of it in the news or see it around us but rarely take seriously that it could happen to us. Perhaps the lesson here is to guard against complacency and give a higher priority to our spiritual needs. If the fish swam deeper, the hawk would not be able to reach it. Similarly, if we go deeper into our connection to God, we will find an inner reality so deep and satisfying that it lifts the consciousness to a place where we could deal with the effects of unforeseeable fate with a stable, detached mind.”

Radhanath Swami (1950) Gaudiya Vaishnava guru

?
The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)

Life, Death, God, Fate

“I'll tell you what harms the vast majority of Muslims that love freedom and hate terror: Muslim theocracy does. Muslim intolerance does. Wahabism does. Salafism does. Islamism does. Jihadism does. Sharia law does. The mere conservatism of traditional Islam does. We're not talking about only jihadists hating homosexuals and thinking they should die, we're talking about conservative Muslims. The percentage of British Muslims polled who said that homosexuality was morally acceptable was zero. Do you realize what it takes to say something so controversial in a poll that not even 1% of those polled would agree with it? There's almost no question that extreme that you will ever see in a poll that gets a zero, but ask British Muslims whether homosexuality is morally acceptable, and that's what you get. And the result is more or less the same in dozens of other countries. It's zero in Cameroon, zero in Ethiopia. 1% in Nigeria, 1% in Tanzania, 1% in Mali, 2% in Kenya, 2% in Chad. 1% in Lebanon, 1% in Egypt, 1% in the Palestinian territories, 1% in Iraq, 2% in Jordan, 2% in Tunisia, 1% in Pakistan. But 10% in Bangladesh. Bangladesh: that bright spot in the Muslim world where they are regularly hunting down and butchering secular writers with machetes. The people who suffer under this belief system are Muslims themselves. The next generation of human beings born into a Muslim community who could otherwise have been liberal, tolerant, well-educated, cosmopolitan productive people are to one or another degree being taught to aspire to live in the Middle Ages, or to ruin this world on route to some fictional paradise after death. That's the thing we have to get our heads around. And yes, some of what I just said applies with varying modifications to other religions and other cults. But there is nothing like Islam at this moment for generating this kind of intolerance and chaos. And if only a right wing demagogue will speak honestly about it, then we will elect right wing demagogues in the West more and more in response to it. And that will be the price of political correctness: that's when this check will finally get cashed. That will be the consequence of this persistent failure we see among liberals to speak and think and act with real moral clarity and courage on this issue. The root of this problem is that liberals consistently fail to defend liberal values as universal human values. Their political correctness, their multiculturalism, their moral relativism has led them to rush to the defense of theocrats and to abandon the victims of theocracy and to vilify anyone who calls out this hypocrisy for what it is as a bigot. And to be clear, and this is what liberals can't seem to get, is that speaking honestly about the ideas that inspire Islamism and jihadism, beliefs about martyrdom, and apostasy and blasphemy and paradise and honour and women, is not an expression of hatred for Muslims. It is in fact the only way to support the embattled people in the Muslim community: The reformers and the liberals and the seculars and the free thinkers and the gays and the Shiia in Sunni-majority context and Sufis and Ahmadiyyas, and as Maajid Nawaz said, the minorities within the minority, who are living under the shadow, and sword rather often, under theocracy. […] If you think that speaking honestly about the need for reform within Islam will alienate your allies in the Muslim community, then you don't know who your allies are.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, "Waking Up with Sam Harris Podcast #38 — The End of Faith Sessions 2" (15 June 2016) https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-end-of-faith-sessions-2 2010s

Love, Death, Women, Hate

“Resolved, never to lose one moment of time; but improve it the most profitable way I possibly can.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

No. 5.
Seventy Resolutions (1722-1723)

Way, Time

“Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Italiens ou français, la misère nous regarde tous. Depuis que l'histoire écrit et que la philosophie médite, la misère est le vêtement du genre humain; le moment serait enfin venu d'arracher cette guenille, et de remplacer, sur les membres nus de l'Homme-Peuple, la loque sinistre du passé par la grande robe pourpre de l'aurore.
Letter To M. Daelli on Les Misérables (1862)

People, History, Tear, Past

“Under the conditions of modern life we have more control over our thoughts, and in connection with this there is a special method by which we may work on the development of our consciousness using that instrument which is most obedient to our will; that is, our mind, or the intellectual centre. In order to understand more clearly what I am going to say, you must try to remember that we have no control over our consciousness. When I said that we can become more conscious, or that a man can be made conscious for a moment simply by asking him if he is conscious or not, I used the words "conscious" or "consciousness" in a relative sense. There are so many degrees of consciousness and every higher degree means "consciousness" in relation to a lower degree. But, if we have no control over consciousness itself, we have a certain control over our thinking about consciousness, and we can construct our thinking in such a way as to bring consciousness. What I mean is that by giving to our thoughts the direction which they would have in a moment of consciousness, we can, in this way, induce consciousness.”

P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) Russian esotericist

Fourth Lecture, p. 74.
The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution (1950)

Life, Way, Understanding, Thinking

“No funeral gloom, my dears, when I am gone,
corpse-gazing, tears, black raiment, graveyard grimness.
Think of me as withdrawn into the dimness,
yours still, you mine.
Remember all the best of our past moments,
and forget the rest;
and so to where I wait, come gently on.”

William Allingham (1824–1889) Irish man of letters and poet

Poem: No funeral gloom - part of funeral of actress Ellen Terry 1928.

Thinking, Tear, Waiting, Past

“The whole result of continued labour is not often consumed and enjoyed in a moment; the result generally lasts for a certain length of time. We must then conceive the capital as being progressively uninvested.”

William Stanley Jevons The Theory of Political Economy

Source: The Theory of Political Economy (1871), Chapter VII, Theory of Capital, p. 191.

Time

“After my speech, the President detached himself from the group of appalling old waxworks who accompanied him and took his place at the lectern. He then gave a kind of "propaganda" speech which was loudly cheered by the bussed-in party faithful at the suitable moment in the text.”

Charles, Prince of Wales (1948) son of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom

Katie Nicholl, Dominic Turnbull, "Appalling waxworks", Mail on Sunday, 13 November 2005, p. 1.
Entry in private journal about the handover of British sovereignty in Hong Kong in 1997 referring to President Jiang Zemin of China. The contents were disclosed in the Mail on Sunday in November 2005.
2000s

Faith

“The track temperature is at 32 degrees celsius already and it's climbing like a mountain face at the moment.”

Martin Brundle (1959) British racecar driver

Mountain

“How many voices have escaped you until now,
the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,
the steady accusations of the clock
numbering the minutes no one will mark.
The terrible clarity this moment brings,
the useless insight, the unbroken dark.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Insomnia" http://www.danagioia.net/poems/insomnia.htm Poetry, The Daily Horoscope (1986)

“M. Révérony said immediately: "Most Holy Father, this is a child who wants to enter Carmel at fifteen, but the superiors are considering the matter at this moment." (The good pope is so old that one would say he is dead; I would never have pictured him like this.) The Holy Father said simply:"If God wills it, you will enter." [-]I was crying a lot when writing this letter; my heart is heavy. However, God cannot give me trials that are above my strength. He has given me the courage to bear this trial. I am the Child Jesus' little ball; if He wishes to break His toy, He is free. Yes, I will all that He wills.”

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

Thérèse's account of the papal audience, November 20,1887
General Correspondence

God, Courage, Heart, Cry

“The memories of the first Independence Day may have faded, but the power of that magical moment must never be forgotten.”

Shashi Tharoor (1956) Indian politician, diplomat, author

The Hindu, "1947, first-hand ", Sunday, Aug 15, 2004 Available Online http://www.hinduonnet.com/mag/2004/08/15/stories/2004081500530300.htm 2000s

Memory

“I was walking tru Amsterdam when I heared I’m Outta Love blasting out of an open window. In that moment I rang their doorbell and when those people opened the door I said ‘Roomservice!’ Never I saw people dropping their jaws that much (laughs) I saw their eyes goin from me to their tv that had mtv on, back to me and back to the tv again, you saw they where thinking, how can this woman be in both places in the same time? But once they got over that shock they did not wanna let me go anymore, ‘come in, there is plenty to drink, there is plenty of everything (winks), what do you wanna eat, are u staying over…?’ Sweet people, real cute, only later I realized, oh my god, what if they were just making love to my music, they would have opend the door naked!”

Anastacia (1968) American singer-songwriter

Het stomende dubbelinterview: Natalia en Anastacia http://www.humo.be/humo-archief/29756/het-stomende-dubbelinterview-natalia-en-anastacia, Humo, September 27, 2010. General Quotes

Love, God, People, Making love

“It was not love at all, really, but rather a yearning for the honor and respect of the other men that held them. Pride, then… Indeed, all their connection with each other at this moment was tied up with the respect they felt they were earning by their actions.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, The Call Of Earth (1992)

Love, Men

“Listen! what is life? It is a feather, it is the seed of the grass, blown hither and thither, sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act, sometimes carried away into the heavens. But if that seed be good and heavy it may perchance travel a little way on the road it wills. It is well to try and journey one’s road and to fight with the air. Man must die. At the worst he can but die a little sooner…
Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-driven bird at night we fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of the fire, and, lo! we are gone again into the Nowhere. Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the Hand with which we hold off Death. It is the glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset.”

H. Rider Haggard book King Solomon's Mines

Source: King Solomon's Mines (1885), Chapter 5, "Our March into the Desert"

Life, Death, Way, Travel

“I think the destiny of all men is not to sit in the rubble of their own making but to reach out for an ultimate perfection which is to be had. At the moment, it is a dream. But as of the moment we clasp hands with our neighbor, we build the first span to bridge the gap between the young and the old. At this hour, it’s a wish. But we have it within our power to make it a reality. If you want to prove that God is not dead, first prove that man is alive.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

Speech at Moorpark College, Moorpark, California (3 December 1968).
Other

Men, God, Dreams, Thinking

“Centuries ago, when I first stood on that little boulevard stage in Paris — when I saw the happy faces, when I heard applause — I felt as if my body and soul had found their destiny; I felt as if every promise in my birth and childhood had begun its fulfillment at last.
Oh, there were other actors, worse and better; other singers; other clowns; there have been a million since and a million will come after this moment. But each of us shines with his own inimitable power; each of us comes alive in his own unique and dazzling moment; each of us has his chance to vanquish the others forever in the eye of the beholder, and that is the only kind of accomplishment I can really understand: the kind of accomplishment in which the self-this self, if you will — is utterly whole and triumphant.”

Anne Rice The Vampire Chronicles

Lestat
Tale of the Body Thief (1992)

Happiness, Soul, Birth, Understanding

“Strong, weak and electromagnetic interaction are evidently part of a grand unified theory. These temperatures are today quite inaccessible. They were achieved only in the earliest moments of the Big Bang. Since then, the universe has congealed, losing its symmetry.”

Sheldon L. Glashow (1932) American theoretical physicist

Source: The Charm of Physics (1991), p. 244

Strong, Universe, Parting

“Death is not extinction. Neither the soul nor the body is extinguished or put out of existence. The body weighs just as much as before, the only properties it loses at the moment of death are potential properties. So also all we can assert concerning the vital principle is that it no longer animates that material organism: we cannot safely make further assertion regarding it, or maintain its activity or inactivity without further information.”

Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) British physicist

Raymond, pp. 296–297 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t80k3mq4s;view=1up;seq=338 Raymond, or Life and Death (1916)

Death, Soul, Animals

“But how is the spirit of expenditure to be exorcised? Not by preaching; I doubt if even by yours. I seriously doubt whether it will ever give place to the old spirit of economy, as long as we have the income-tax. There, or hard by, lie questions of deep practical moment.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to Richard Cobden (5 January 1864), quoted in The Life of William Ewart Gladstone Volume II (1903) by John Morley, p. 62
1860s

Lie, Question

“Even the death we feel approaching is not absolute but only incidental. At that moment we perform yet another act. The act is the form, the way in which death is faced.”

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

Death, Way, Feeling

“It seems odd to think of you at Lake George tonight – I can smell the outdoors – and hear it – and see the stars – So often before I went to bed at night I would walk out toward the barn and look at the sky in the open space. There was no light little house – there were no people – there was only the night – I will never go back again – maybe to stand just for a moment where I put the little bit that was left of Alfred [ Alfred Stieglitz, her husband] after he was cremated – but I think not even for that. I put him where he would hear the lake.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

That is finished.
In a letter to William Howard Schubart, (nephew of her died husband), Abiquiu, New Mexico, August 4, 1950; as quoted in Voicing our visions, -Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, pp. 228-29
1950 - 1970

People, Star, Thinking, Light

“Having begun my life in science searching for the equation beyond time, I now believe that the deepest secret of the universe is that its essence rests in how it unfolds moment by moment in time.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2013)

Life, Secret, Search, Universe

“With the passing of the years, each neighbourhood, each street in a city evokes a memory, a meeting, a regret, a moment of happiness for those who were born there and have lived there. Often the same street is tied up with successive memories, to the extent that the topography of a city becomes your whole life, called to mind in successive layers as if you could decipher the writings superimposed on a palimpsest. And also the lives of the thousands upon thousands of other, unknown, people passing by on the street or in the Métro passageways at rush hour.”

Patrick Modiano (1945) French writer

From Nobel Lecture (2014)

Life, Happiness, People, Memory

“The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes," she continued, "is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.”

George Sand Le Beau Laurence

La beauté qui parle aux yeux, reprit-elle, n’est que le prestige d’un moment; l’œuil du corps n'est pas toujours celui de l'âme.
Le Beau Laurence, ch. 1 (1870); Carroll Owen (trans.) Handsome Lawrence (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871) p. 30

Beauty, Soul

“The feeling that we call "I" seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will. And yet this feeling, however imperturbable it may appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: 2010s, Waking Up (2014), p. 83

Feeling, Soul, Freedom, Appearance

“[W]e live in a popular-front moment, where no one on “our side” is worth criticizing too much, if at all, and everyone on “their side” is evil. This has as much to do with ratings and page views as it does with ideology. Moths chase light, but the incentive for politicians, producers, and pundits is to follow the heat. I’m still torn over how people such as Mark Zuckerberg should deal with slanderous carnival barkers like Alex Jones. But I’m convinced a lot of people are to blame for the problem reaching Zuckerberg’s desk in the first place.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2010s, 2018, Are We to Blame for the Alex Jones Problem? (2018)

People, Problem, Light, Evil

“He treated me as a man… He did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the color of our skins.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

About Abraham Lincoln (1864), as quoted in Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 https://books.google.com/books?id=cwVkgrvctCcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22Eric+Foner%22+%22Republicans%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiOwdup3aLLAhVK7SYKHZufDmUQ6AEIRjAH#v=onepage&q&f=false, by Eric Foner, p. 6 1860s

Color, Feeling

“[On Las Vegas audiences] Those audiences are wonderful. Talk about the most bitter group of people on the planet Earth! For one brief shining moment, I am Mr. Happy!”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

Anticipation (2008)

Happiness, People

“I see the possibility of being 'made new' again and the gift of rebirth is all that lets anyone really live.... The great secret.... is never to get stuck, imprisoned in common social patterns. They always paralyse the real quality of life – the 'going onward' is all that matters, and the dead moments in one’s life through trying to be a unit in any society or social concept are terrifying really.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

letter to Adelaide Kuntz, September 7, 1933; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 168
1931 - 1943

Life, Secret, Dead

“In the moment of our talking, envious time has ebb'd away.
Seize the present; trust to-morrow e'en as little as you may.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Book I, ode xi
Translations, The Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace (1863)

Time

“I think he [ Andy Warhol ] would be very interested in the moment that the Dalai Lama appears, being involved in such a kind of idea. Andy has always difficulties with this kind of political activities, because he works in another kind of world, but he is always... Also when he was here [in Germany] last week, he is very interested to hear a lot of new information. He has a kind of observing sense in the back of his mind. So, he is always interested to follow the development, and there is really a kind of imaginative process going on, I think.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Source: 1980's, Interview with Louwrien Wijers, 1981, p. 189 - in 'Joseph Beuys and the Dalai Lama'

World, Imagination, Idea, Thinking

“Soon she saw the dining room light shining through the parted curtains. Its humble glow provoked a goodness in her heart that was no longer calculating or defiant, nor a kind of currency with which to barter and exchange; what she felt was an infinite, poignant affinity for this life that was her family’s. No longer did it seem harassed and restricting, but rather made beautiful from start to finish like a lighthouse beam before her. Home would take her in, home would cure her. Her hand on the doorknob, she paused for one long, ineffable moment. Then she pushed open the door. And it was as if an arctic wind chilled her frail efforts to make a fresh beginning.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P. 257

Life, Family, Beauty, Home

“The male sexual drive is supposed to fall off during moments of stress,” he thought. “It is comforting sometimes to know that I must be abnormal. Especially in a situation like this. Perpetual lust has got to be good for the human race.”

George Alec Effinger (1947–2002) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Relatives (1973)., Chapter 8 (p. 126).

“Today's age of politicized and intolerant Christianism seems to me to be one of those moments when Christianity has estranged itself most thoroughly from the priorities and spirit of its founder. But this will pass. Christianity will survive Christianism. Some true followers of Jesus will recover their faith from Caesar's grip at some point.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

"Christians and Torture" http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2006/03/christians_and_.html, The Daily Dish (23 March 2006)

Age, Faith

“Prayer helped me with the loss of my wife to cancer and with a child who had fallen on tough times. Now prayer helps me to be a father, to be an actor and to be a man, it always helps to have a bit of prayer in your back pocket. At the end of the day, you have to have something and for me that is God, Jesus, my Catholic upbringing, my faith. In a way (my life) all leads back to a little boy in Navan, my home town on the banks of the Boyne. Sometimes, it has been painted in melodramatic tones but it was a fantastic way to be brought up. The Catholicism and the Christian brothers, those are deep-rooted images and the foundation for a person of some acting skill, God has been good to me. My faith has been good to me in the moments of deepest suffering, doubt and fear. It is a constant, the language of prayer… I might not have got my sums right from the Christian Brothers or might not have got the greatest learning of literature from them but I certainly got a strapping amount of faith. But there is one thing that the people of Ireland know how to do and that is to survive. You have to keep your faith and stay optimistic.”

Pierce Brosnan (1953) Irish-American actor, film producer, and environmentalist

Pierce Brosnan talks about his deep Catholic faith http://www.irishcentral.com/culture/entertainment/pierce-brosnan-talks-about-his-deep-catholic-faith-118983269-237736371 (March 31, 2011)

Life, God, People, Fear

“Remember this moment. If we don't convince the field marshal (Fedor von Bock) to fly to Hitler at once and have these orders (Commissar Order) canceled, the German people will be burdened with a guilt the world will not forget in a hundred years. This guilt will fall not only on Hitler, Himmler, Göring, and their comrades but on you and me, your wife and mine, your children and mine, that woman crossing the street, and those children over there playing ball.”

Henning von Tresckow (1901–1944) German general

1941. Fest, Joachim. Plotting Hitler's Death, 175
Robert Kane, Disobedience and Conspiracy in the German Army, 1918-1945, p. 163.

Children, People, World, Flying

“A hundred years die in a moment, just as a moment dies in a moment.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Mueren cien años en un instante, lo mismo que un instante en un instante.
Voces (1943)

“He realized that Florentine personified this kind of wretched life against which his whole being was in revolt. And in the same moment he understood the feeling that drew him toward her: she was his own poverty, his solitude, his sad childhood, his lonely youth. She was all that he had hated, all that he had left behind him, but also everything that remained intimately linked to him, the most profound part of his nature and the powerful spur of his destiny.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

P 205
The Tin Flute (1945)

Life, Hate, Youth, Sadness

“There was a time, and not so long ago, when one could score a success also here with a bit of irony, which compensated for all other deficiencies and helped one get through the world rather respectably, gave one the appearance of being cultured, of having a perspective on life, an understanding of the world, and to the initiated marked one as a member of an extensive intellectual freemasonry. Occasionally we still meet a representative of that vanished age who has preserved that subtle, sententious, equivocally divulging smile, that air of an intellectual courtier with which he has made his fortune in his youth and upon which he had built his whole future in the hope that he had overcome the world. Ah, but it was an illusion! His watchful eye looks in vain for a kindred soul, and if his days of glory were not still a fresh memory for a few, his facial expression would be a riddle to the contemporary age, in which he lives as a stranger and foreigner. Our age demands more; it demands, if not lofty pathos then at least loud pathos, if not speculation then at least conclusions, if not truth then at least persuasion, if not integrity then at least protestations of integrity, if not feeling then at least verbosity of feelings. Therefore it also coins a totally different kind of privileged faces. It will not allow the mouth to be defiantly compressed or the upper lip to quiver mischievously; it demands that the mouth be open, for how, indeed, could one imagine a true and genuine patriot who is not delivering speeches; how could one visualize a profound thinker’s dogmatic face without a mouth able to swallow the whole world; how could one picture a virtuoso on the cornucopia of the living world without a gaping mouth? It does not permit one to stand still and to concentrate; to walk slowly is already suspicious; and how could one even put up with anything like that in the stirring period in which we live, in this momentous age, which all agree is pregnant with the extraordinary? It hates isolation; indeed, how could it tolerate a person’s having the daft idea of going through life alone-this age that hand in hand and arm in arm (just like itinerant journeymen and soldiers) lives for the idea of community.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (1841), p. 246-247

Life, Hate, Truth, Youth

“Let us embrace, and from this very moment vow an eternal misery together.”

Thomas Otway The Orphan

The Orphan (1680), Act iv. Sc. 2. Compare: "Let us swear an eternal friendship", John Hookham Frere, The Rovers, act i. sc. 1.

“A man, to use an old-fashioned phrase, of some twenty-eight summers, he gave the impression at the moment of having experienced at least that number of very hard winters.”

P.G. Wodehouse book A Pelican at Blandings

A Pelican at Blandings (1969)

Fashion, Winter, Summer

“I would like to clarify the answer published in my name in last month’s issue of Moment Magazine. First of all, the opinions published in my name are solely my own, and do not represent the official policy of any Jewish movement or organization. Additionally, my answer, as written, is misleading. It is obvious, I thought, that any neighbor of the Jewish people should be treated, as the Torah commands us, with respect and compassion. Fundamental to the Jewish faith is the concept that every human being was created in the image of G-d, and our sages instruct us to support the non-Jewish poor along with the poor of our own brethren. The sub-question I chose to address instead is: how should we act in time of war, when our neighbors attack us, using their women, children and religious holy places as shields. I attempted to briefly address some of the ethical issues related to forcing the military to withhold fire from certain people and places, at the unbearable cost of widespread bloodshed (on both sides!)—when one’s own family and nation is mercilessly targeted from those very people and places. Furthermore, some of the words I used in my brief comment were irresponsible, and I look forward to further clarifying them in a future issue. I apologize for any misunderstanding my words created.”

Manis Friedman (1946) American rabbi

Clarification of previous statement http://momentmagazine.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/a-statement-from-rabbi-friedman/ On the Israeli-Arab conflict

Women, War, Children, People

“But on the other hand, the understanding, reflection, is also a gift of God. What shall one do with it, how dispose of it if one is not to use it? And if one then uses it in fear and trembling not for one’s own advantage but to serve the truth, if one uses it that way in fear and trembling and furthermore believing that it still is God who determines the issue in its eternal significance, venturing to trust in him, and with unconditional obedience yielding to what he makes use of it: is this not fear of God and serving God the way a person of reflection can, in the somewhat different way than the spontaneously immediate person, but perhaps more ardently. But if this is the case, does not a maieutic element enter into the relation to other man or to various other men. The maieutic is really only the expression for a superiority between man and man. That is exists cannot be denied-but existence presses far more powerfully upon the superior one precisely because he is a maieutic (because he has the responsibility) than upon the other. As far as I am concerned, there has been no lack of witnesses. All my upbuilding discourses are in fact in the form of direct communication. Consequently there can be a question only about this, something that has occupied me for a long time (already back in earlier journals): should I for one definitely explain myself as author, what I declare myself to be, how I from the beginning understood myself to be a religious author. But now is not the time to do it; I am also somewhat strained at the moment, I need more physical recreation.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

JP VI 6234 (Pap. IX A 222 1848)
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

Men, God, Truth, Fear

““Good men are dying at this very moment to protect you, your factories, your possessions, and all civilization.”
“Good men are dying every moment,” Gretchen replied coldly, “somewhere. Since they did not ask my leave to do so, I feel no particular obligation toward them.””

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 13, “Tabloids” (p. 219)

Men, Feeling

“What the country needs most at the present moment is a spirit of self-sacrifice on the part of our educated young men, and they may take it from me that they cannot spend their lives in a better cause than raising the moral and intellectual level of their unhappy low castes and promoting their well-being.”

Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866–1915) social and political leader during the Indian Independence Movement

Extract from his speech on improving the lot of low-caste Hindus. Page=702
Sources of Indian Tradition

Men, Education, Parting, Country

“What sustains us in any competition are the moments of interiority when the competition vanishes; what sustains us in any struggle are the moments when we forget the struggle.”

Adam Gopnik (1956) American journalist

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

Forgetting

Quotes about moment page 30

Quotes about moment
page 30