Quotes about moment
page 36

“Think naught a trifle, though it small appear;
Small sands the mountain, moments make the year,
And trifles life.”

Edward Young (1683–1765) English poet

Satire VI, l. 208.
Love of Fame (1725-1728)

“There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share — black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book II, Ch. 14
My Antonia (1918)

Light, Appearance, Sun

“The defensiveness of Islam is its crucial feature today. It's what, by the way, is in such contrast to the most interesting period of Islamic history, when Islam was an open, absorbing religion, constantly taking in outside influences, as opposed to its current hedgehog-like posture, prickly to the outside … always looking backward. This is not how it was in the creative moment, in the first four, six, eight centuries of Islam, where it was constantly seeking out and absorbing.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/makiya.html, PBS Frontline (2002)

Religion, Way, History

“It is the very joy of man's heart to admire, where he can; nothing so lifts him from all his mean imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true admiration.”

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

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Heart, Joy

“Confidence isn't always out front and screaming, 'Look at me, look at me.'Confidence can be sitting back for a moment and letting someone else take the lead when you need to. You don't always have to be showboating.”

Erika Jayne (1969) American singer, actress and television personality

Interview to Cosmopolitan (2016)

Confidence

“Then he tries to kiss me again. And the second time he tries to kiss me he starts biting my lip … He starts to, um, bite on my top lip and I tried to pull away from him. And then he forces me down on the bed. And I just was very frightened, and I tried to get away from him and I told him ‘No,’ that I didn’t want this to happen but he wouldn’t listen to me. … It was a real panicky, panicky situation. I was even to the point where I was getting very noisy, you know, yelling to ‘Please stop.’ And that’s when he pressed down on my right shoulder and he would bite my lip. … When everything was over with, he got up and straightened himself, and I was crying at the moment and he walks to the door, and calmly puts on his sunglasses. And before he goes out the door he says ‘You better get some ice on that.’ And he turned and went out the door”

Juanita Broaddrick (1942) American nursing home administrator

Clinton Accuser's Story Aired https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/broaddrick022599.htm (February 25, 1999)

Kiss, Time, Cry

“How to define the moment that I write?”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Qui définit le moment où j'écris?
"Un cours inedit" in Magazine littéraire (May 1984), page 34.

“The present time Latin America is going through, with its impressive natural and human resources, devoid of racial and religious conflicts, is a unique moment, and I believe that Argentina and Argentines are at the doorstep of an unprecedented opportunity.”

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (1953) Argentine politician and ex President of Argentina

Fuente: Telam 29/10/2006 http://web.archive.org/20070927195620/www.telam.com.ar/vernota.php?tipo=N&idPub=41633&id=109550&dis=1&sec=1 Unsourced, 2006

Nature, Time

“Thirty years of lax budget policy (the Trente Dispendieuses) marked by soaring public spending in the 1980’s, the happy-go-lucky attitude of the 1990’s and finally, a policy of procrastination in the 2000’s characterised by the development of creative budgetary marketing strategies exclusively destined to delay the (always) socially and politically painful moment of addressing the accounts.”

Éric Pichet (1960) economist

Le programme de stabilité et le pacte de responsabilité : la trajectoire des finances publiques de 2014 à 2017 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2499496 Article in Revue de Droit Fiscal n31-35 (2014). Budgetary policy, From the Expensive 30 toe the Expensive 36, The Expensive 30

Pain, Happiness

“I don't set goals. Like, that's what I want to be doing however many years from now. I do what I love to do at the moment.”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Love

“And each moment is different, and each man
is different, and we are all equal.”

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–1987) Brazilian poet

E cada instante é diferente, e cada
homem é diferente, e somos todos iguais.
"Os últimos dias" ["The Last Days"]
A Rosa do Povo [Rose of the People] (1945)

“If you think that you are bound, you remain bound; you make your own bondage. If you know that you are free, you are free this moment. This is knowledge, knowledge of freedom. Freedom is the goal of all nature.”

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

Pearls of Wisdom

Nature, Knowledge, Thinking, Freedom

“.. I don’t see any point in simply stating something that is easily available. But then that may just be my own psychology, a kind of negative position. It seems to me that if you avoid everything you can avoid, then you do what you can't avoid doing, and you do what is helpless, and unavoidable. That seems to me more interesting than any other position at this moment – for me anyway.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

interview at Johns' studio, Billy Klüver, March 1963, as quoted in Jasper Johns, Writings, sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe, Moma New York, 1996, p. 87
1960s

“Imagine a person who has been and is addicted to a passion. There comes a moment (as it does to everyone, perhaps many times – alas, perhaps many times in vain!), a moment he seems to be brought to a halt: a good resolution is awakening. Imagine that one morning he said to himself (let us suppose him to be a gambler), “I solemnly vow that I will nevermore have anything to do with gambling, never – tonight will be the last time” – ah, my friend, he s lost! I would rather bet on the opposite, however strange that may seem. If there was a gambler who said to himself, “Well, now, you may gamble every blessed day all the rest of your life – but tonight you are going to leave it alone,” and he did – ah, my friend, he is saved for sure! The first gambler’s resolution is a trick by the craving, and the second gambler’s is to fool the craving.”

Sören Kierkegaard book For Self-Examination

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, Hong p. 45
1850s, For Self-Examination (1851), What is Required in Order to Look at Oneself with True Blessing in the Mirror of the Word?

Life, Fools, Imagination, Passion

“Oh, there are evil moments in our life,
When but a thought, a word, a look, has power
To dash the cup of happiness aside,
And stamp us wretched!”

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

The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Life, Happiness, Evil

“The result of this mental dullness is that inner vacuity and emptiness that is stamped on innumerable faces and also betrays itself in a constant and lively attention to all events in the external world, even the most trivial. This vacuity is the real source of boredom and always craves for external excitement in order to set the mind and spirits in motion through something. Therefore in the choice thereof it is not fastidious, as is testified by the miserable and wretched pastimes to which people have recourse. … The principal result of this inner vacuity is the craze for society, diversion, amusement, and luxury of every kind which lead many to extravagance and so to misery. Nothing protects us so surely from this wrong turning as inner wealth, the wealth of the mind, for the more eminent it becomes, the less room does it leave for boredom. The inexhaustible activity of ideas, their constantly renewed play with the manifold phenomena of the inner and outer worlds, the power and urge always to make different combinations of them, all these put the eminent mind, apart from moments of relaxation, quite beyond the reach of boredom.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 329–330
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

People, World, Idea, Wealth

“At Toulon, Napoleon, looking out of the batteries, drew back a step to let some one take his place. The next moment the new arrived was killed. That step brought the French Empire, and made possible the bloody roll of its victories and defeats. The rout at Waterloo turned on a shower of rain hindering Grouchy's advance. The resolution of a moment, with some men, has been the turning-point of infinite issues to a world.”

John Cunningham Geikie (1824–1906) Scottish Presbyterian minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 387.

Men, World, Victory

“We experience moments in which we accept ourselves, because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we. If only more such moments were given us! For it is such moments that make us love our life, that make us accept ourselves, not in our goodness and self-complacency, but in our certainty of the eternal meaning of our life.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.77-78, (Paul Tillich: The Shaking of the Foundations. 1963. Pelican Books. p. 164

Love, Life, Feeling

“There isn't any division of time to express the marrow of our lives, the time between the explosion of lead from the muzzle and the meat impact, between the impact and the darkness. There's only barren instant replay that shows nothing new. I shot her; she fell; and there was an indescribable moment of silence, an infinite duration of time, and we all stepped back, watching the ball go around and around, ticking, bouncing, lighting for an instant, going on, heads and tails, red and black, odd and even…I think that moment ended. I really do. But sometimes, in the dark, I think that hideous random moment is still going on, that the wheel is even yet in spin, and I dreamed all the rest. What must it be like for a suicide coming down from a high ledge? I'm sure it must be a very sane feeling. That's probably why they scream all the way down.”

Stephen King book Rage

Rage (1977)

Dreams, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“The two guides call out to a man early and late. And yet, no, for when remorse calls to a man it is always late. The call to find the way again by seeking out God in the confession of sins is always at the eleventh hour. Whether you are young or old, whether you have sinned much or little, whether you have offended much or neglected much, the guilt makes this call come at the eleventh hour. The inner agitation of the heart understands what remorse insists upon, that the eleventh hour has come. For in the sense of time, the old man’s age is the eleventh hour; and the instant of death, the final moment in the eleventh hour. The indolent youth speaks of a long life that lies before him. The indolent old man hopes that his death is still a long way off. But repentance and remorse belong to the eternal in a man.”

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

Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, 1847 p. 40-41
1840s, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), Purity of Heart (1847)

Life, Death, God, Youth

“Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next - a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please - your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this "decision" and believe that you are in the process of making it.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: 2010s, Free Will (2012), p. 9

Decision, Freedom, Appearance, Time

“The historical significance of the Proclamation is not so much that it enacted the emancipation of people of African descent; on the contrary, it was a military strategy. But if we examine the meaning of this historical moment we might better be able to grasp the failures as well as the successes of emancipation. I have thought that perhaps we were not asked to reflect on the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation because we might realize that we were never really emancipated. But anyway, at least we may be able to understand the dialectics of emancipation; because we still live the popular myth that Lincoln freed the slaves and that this continues to be perpetuated in popular culture, even by the film Lincoln. Lincoln did not free the slaves. We also live with the myth that the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement freed the. Civil rights, of course, constitute an essential element of the freedom that was demanded at that time, but it was not the whole story.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Closures and Continuities (2013)

People, Failure, Understanding, Freedom

“"What kind of parent would want their children to have servants?" he asks, disgusted by the idea. "The moment a child thinks it is entitled to anything, they think they deserve everything. Why do you think the Core is such a Babylon? Because it's never been told no.
"Look at the Institute you attended. Sexual slavery, murder, cannibalism of fellow Golds?" He shakes his head. "Barbaric. It's not what the Ancestors intended. But the Coreworlders are so desensitized to violence they've forgotten it's to have a purpose. Violence is a tool. It is meant to shock. To change. Instead, they normalize and celebrate it. And create a culture of exploitation where they are so entitled to sex and power that when they are told no, they pull a sword and do as they like."”

Pierce Brown book Morning Star

Source: Morning Star (2016), Ch. 41: The Moon Lord

Children, Sex, Idea, Thinking

“Only the misapprehension that [Paglia] can be wise like lightning could explain her brief appearance, in Inside Deep Throat, to tell us that the cultural artefact in question was 'an epochal moment in the history of modern sexuality.' On the contrary, it was a moronic moment in the history of exploitation movies made by people so untalented that they can't even be convincing when they masturbate.”

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

On Camille Paglia (New York Times Book Review, March 27, 2005)
Essays and reviews

People, History, Question, Appearance

“History, in [Nietzsche’s] view, belongs to him who is fighting a great fight, and who needs examples, teachers and comforters, but cannot find them among his contemporaries. Without history the mountain chain of great men’s great moments, which runs through millennia, could not stand clearly and vividly before me.”

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 17

Men, History, Mountain, Teachers

“New York used to be the financial capital of the world. It's no longer even the financial capital of the U. S. For the moment, Washington is.”

Ian Bremmer (1969) American political scientist

"The New Capitals of Capital," http://fearandloathingingtown.blogspot.com/2009/03/quote-of-day_21.html Forbes (March 19, 2009).

World

“The invention of writs was really the making of the English Common Law; and the credit of this momentous achievement, which took place chiefly between 1150 and 1250, must be shared between the officials of the royal Chancery, who framed new forms, and the royal judges, who either allowed them or quashed them.”

Edward Jenks (1861–1939) British legal scholar

Source: A Short History Of The English Law (First Edition) (1912), Chapter IV, Improved Legal Procedure, p. 45

Law

“The present moment is not one to be proud of. The normal vulgarity of democratic politics has become the shameless demagoguery of democratic decadence. The routine operation of party politics has given way to the mindless polarization of partisan fanatics. The characteristic limitations of popular leaders have yielded to an abdication of leadership itself. A public life with occasional cringeworthy moments has been replaced by one that is on the whole cringeworthy.”

William Kristol (1952) American writer

2010s, 2017, After Trump (2017)

Life, Way

“There is a widespread public misperception, particularly among the New Age sector, that the Chinese word for “crisis” is composed of elements that signify “danger” and “opportunity.” I first encountered this curious specimen of alleged oriental wisdom about ten years ago at an altitude of 35,000 feet sitting next to an American executive. … While it is true that wēijī does indeed mean “crisis” and that the wēi syllable of wēijī does convey the notion of “danger,” the jī syllable of wēijī most definitely does not signify “opportunity.” … The jī of wēijī, in fact, means something like “incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes).” Thus, a wēijī is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. A wēijī indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary.”

Victor H. Mair (1943) American sinologist and linguist

danger + opportunity ≠ crisis http://www.pinyin.info/chinese/crisis.html (2009).

Wisdom, Age, Change, Time

“The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.”

Walter Pater (1839–1894) essayist, art and literature critic, fiction writer

On the Mona Lisa, in Leonardo da Vinci The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)

Love, Life, Women, Men

“I don’t know the why of anything, even when I pretend most diligently I do. The truth is the last time I had any idea why or what I was supposed to do I was lying in a shell hole, looking up at the sky. My mind was filled with a Bach keyboard sonata, which was one of the last I’d learned, I forget which one now. I absolutely knew I was about to die and I was completely happy and at peace, in a way I never was before or since, not even with you, in our best moments. It was so easy, you see, a kind of absolute joy and peace, because I knew it was all done and I was all square with life. Nothing left to do but let things take their course. And when I didn’t die, I didn’t know what to do. So I thought, I’ll take my revolver, go out and blow a hole through my head. Only I knew it wouldn’t work. I knew, I just knew you couldn’t do it that way. You couldn’t make it happen, not if you wanted to find peace. So, I thought, then, a sniper can do it for me. But no matter how I tried to let them no sniper ever found me. And all the other times I went out and lay in shell holes in No Man’s Land it wasn’t the same, and I knew I wouldn’t die this time, and of course I never did. I had this mad feeling I’d become some sort of Wandering Jew. And everything for so long afterwards was about dragging this living corpse of myself around, giving it things to do, because here it was, alive. And nothing made any sense and I didn’t even hope it would. I followed paths that were there to be followed, I did what others said to do.”

Basil Rathbone (1892–1967) British actor

Letter https://thegreatbaz.wordpress.com/2013/03/18/fuller-text-of-letter-quoted-in-a-life-divided/

Life, Happiness, Truth, Peace

“In 1860, the South did not appeal to the right of revolution. They appealed to a right of secession, which they claim to be a Constitutional right under the Constitution itself. In 1776, the colonists did not claim that in breaking with Great Britain they were exercising a right granted by the British Constitution. They had conducted their struggle until that moment by appealing it through the British constitution. But when they decided on independence, they appealed instead to the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

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

God, Law, Exercises, Nature

“Life is a wave, which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

Vitality.
Fragments of Science, Vol. II (1879)

Life

“It is authority that provokes revolution…. This occurs when a feeling of impunity takes root among the elite: We are allowed anything, we can do anything. This is a delusion, but it rests on a certain rational foundation. For a while it does indeed look as if they can do whatever they want. Scandal after scandal and illegality after illegality go unpunished. The people remain silent…They are afraid and do not yet feel their own strength. At the same time, they keep a detailed account of the wrongs, which at one particular moment are to be added up. The choice of that moment is the greatest riddle of history.”

Ryszard Kapuściński book Shah of Shahs

Shah of Shahs, Vintage International edition, p. 106

People, Feeling, History, Time

“One of the marks of maturity is the need for solitude: a city should not merely draw men together in many varied activities, but should permit each person to find, near at hand, moments of seclusion and peace.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

"Planning for the Phases of Life" http://books.google.com/books?id=JypxP4R4cogC&q=%22One+of+the+marks+of+maturity+is+the+need+for%22+%22a+city+should+not+merely+draw+men+together+in+many+varied+activities+but+should+permit+each+person+to+find+near+at+hand+moments+of+seclusion+and+peace%22&pPA40#v=onepage, The Urban Prospect: Essays (1968)

Men, Peace, Solitude, Drawing

“No statistician present at this moment will have been in doubt about the meaning of my words when I mentioned the common statistical model. It must be a stochastic device producing random results. Tossing coins or a dice or playing at cards are not flexible enough. The most general chance instrument is the urn filled with balls of different colours or with tickets bearing some ciphers or letters. This model is continuously used in our courses as a didactic tool, and in our statistical analyses as a means of translating realistic problems into mathematical ones. In statistical language " urn model " is a standard expression.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: The Concept and the Role of the Model in Mathematics and Natural and Social Sciences (1961), p. 79; Partly cited in: Norman L. Johnson and Samuel Kotz (1977) Urn Models and Their Application: an. Approach to Modern Discrete Probability Theory http://dis.unal.edu.co/~gjhernandezp/sim/hide/Urn%20Models%20and%20Their%20Application%20-%20An%20approach%20to%20modern%20discrete%20probability%20theory_Norman%20L.Johnson(Wiley%201977%20413s).pdf, John Wiley & Sons.

Mathematics, Problem, Chance

“Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive.”

Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer

Generation X (1991)

Life, Money, Water

“THE MOMENT OF CHOICE
A moment of choice is a moment of truth. It's the testing point of our character and competence.”

Stephen R. Covey book First Things First

Source: First Things First (1994), p. 169

Truth

“I gave life to the walls
a voice I gave them
more friendly so that would become my company
and the guards asked
to know where they could find the paint.The walls of the cell
kept the secret
and the mercenaries searched everywhere
but paint they could not find.Because they did not think for one moment
that they should search into my veins.”

Alexandros Panagoulis (1939–1976) Greek politician and poet

I Bogia (The Paint).
Poetry, Vi scrivo da un carcere in Grecia (I write you from a prison in Greece) (1974)

Life, Secret, Search, Thinking

“The moment I appeared the crowd started jeering and booing and shouting ‘faggot’ and spitting, I had hired a bodyguard and when the jeering started I turned to see where the bodyguard was, I could just see the back of his head as he was running out of the stadium.”

Sacha Baron Cohen (1971) English stand-up comedian, writer, actor, and voice actor

Describing the reaction of a 60,000 crowd of American Football fans and his bodyguard, while appearing as Bruno (the flamboyantly homosexual fashion journalist) at an NFL match http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2557633.html

Appearance

“Be humble. It becomes a creature, a depending and borrowed being, that lives not of itself, but breathes in another's air with another's breath, and is accountable for every moment of time and can call nothing its own, but is absolutely a tenant at will of the great Lord of heaven and earth.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

Advice to his children (1699)

Time, Dependency

“Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling, and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.”

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) German writer

Siddhartha (1922)

Life, Wisdom, Secret, Art

“With the capture of Saddam Hussein the Administration's stated goal of removing him from power has been accomplished. Now the focus must be on ending the occupation. International law must be followed and Saddam Hussein must be held accountable for his actions.The United States must seize this moment and end the occupation of Iraq. The United States must reach out to the world community with a new plan to stabilize Iraq, bring UN peacekeepers in, and bring US troops home.”

Dennis Kucinich (1946) Ohio politician

Official press release, Washington, D.C. (14 December 2003), printed on Kucinich's website http://kucinich.house.gov/news/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=28638.

World, Law, Home, Communication

“We're at that kind of moment where we really have to understand that everyone is totally connected and everyone is important.”

Becky Stark (1976) American singer

As quoted in Lavender Diamond seeks world peace, by Jake Coyle in USA Today (27 April 2007) http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/2007-04-27-3719120128_x.htm

Understanding

“After a moment she let go of him and rubbed her eyes. “Sorry,” she said to both of them.
“Don’t be, child,” said Trixie. “Sometimes crying is the best medicine you can give yourself.”
“I never cry,” Maggie said, hearing the tears in her voice, and the anger. “Crying’s for people who are helpless.”
“Who told you that?” asked Trixie.
“Learned it from looking around.”
“Well, it’s not true. You can’t always judge by appearances. Crying’s a power tool to cleanse the soul, if you use it right. I think you used it right. Do you feel helpless?””

Nina Kiriki Hoffman (1955) American writer

“No,” said Maggie.
Source: The Thread That Binds the Bones (1993), Chapter 11 (p. 105)

People, Feeling, Soul, Thinking

“For I've finally realized, that I could be infinitely better than before, definitely stronger. I'll face whatever comes my way, I'll savor each moment of the day, Love as many people as I can along the way. Help someone who's given up, even if it's just to raise my eyes and pray.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

Always Tomorrow
2007, 2008

Love, People, Way, Help

“Peaceful coexistence cannot be limited to the powerful countries if we want to ensure world peace. Peaceful coexistence must be exercised among all states, regardless of size, regardless of the previous historical relations that linked them, and regardless of the problems that may arise among some of them at a given moment.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Address to the United Nations (1964)

World, Peace, Exercises, Problem

“It is a great difficulty and great necessity to have to start with the smallest. I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing, about Europe; ignoring poets and fashions, to be almost primitive. Then I want to do something very modest; to work out by myself a tiny, formal motive, one that my pencil; will be able to hold without any technique. One favorable moment is enough. The little thing is easily and concisely set down. It's already done! It was a tiny but real affair, and someday, through the repetition of such small but original deeds, there will come one work upon which I can really build.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (June 1902), as cited in Artists on Art, from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 442
1895 - 1902

Motivation, Fashion

“All love affairs are tragedies in the end unless the lovers die at the same moment.”

Katharine Kerr (1944) American writer

[Snare, 2003, Macmillan, ISBN 0312890451, p. 557]

Love, Lovers

“My reason will still not understand why I pray, but I shall still pray, and my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Pt. VIII, ch. 19
Anna Karenina (1875–1877; 1878)

Life, Understanding

“I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord.
And I've been waiting for this moment for all my life, Oh Lord.
Can you feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord, oh Lord.”

Phil Collins (1951) English musician, songwriter and actor

"In the Air Tonight"
Face Value (1981)

Life, Feeling, Waiting

“Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Between Going and Staying

Love, Books, World, Light

“Silence. Archie let it gather. He could always feel a heightening of interest in the room. It always happened this way when an assignment was about to be given. He knew what they were thinking- what's Archie come up with this time? Sometimes Archie resented them. The members of The Vigils did nothing but enforce the rules. Carter was muscle and Obie an errand boy. Archie alone was always under pressure, devising the assignments, working them out. As if he was some kind of machine. Press a button: out comes an assignment. What did they know about the agonies of it all? The nights he tossed and turned? The times he felt used up, empty? And yet he couldn't deny he exulted in moments like this, the guys leaning forward in anticipation, the mystery that surrounded them all, the kid Goober white-faced and frightened, the place so quiet you could almost hear your own heartbeat. And all eyes on him: Archie.”

Robert Cormier book The Chocolate War

Source: The Chocolate War (1974), p. 33

Way, Guy, Feeling, Boy

“[D]oes the real world have any more substance than visions and hallucinations — when we're having them? At any given moment, what's happening in our minds is all and everything that happens.”

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

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/uncle-boonmee-who-can-recall-his-past-lives-2011 of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (14 April 2011) Reviews, Three-and-a-half star reviews

World

“the circle of politicians which surrounded him--flatterers, eventual profiteers, chaged ideas and convictions like changing a shirt, followed the expediency of the moment. p245”

Fernando Sabino (1923–2004) Brazilian writer

Idea, Change

“During the years when my own daughters were pupils in this school I attended many of these gatherings, and heard many speeches made by men who stood where I stand at this moment. They said all sorts of things. I recall one speaker who said that as he looked out at the girls who were assembled to receive prizes, and to pay their last respects to their school, he felt as though he were looking over a garden of exquisite flowers. He was drunk, poor man, and it would be absurd to treat his remark as though he were speaking on oath.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

What Every Girl Should Know.
One-Half of Robertson Davies (1977)

Men, School, Girl, Flowers

“Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

The Second World War, Volume I : The Gathering Storm (1948) Chapter 19 (Prague, Albania, and the Polish Guarantee).
Post-war years (1945–1955)

Hope, Chance, Victory, Fight

“When an individual appears before others, he wittingly and unwittingly projects a definition of the situation, of which a conception of himself is an important part. When an event occurs which is expressively incompatible with this fostered impression, significant consequences are simultaneously felt in three levels of social reality, each of which involves a different point of reference and a different order of fact.
First, the social interaction, treated here as a dialogue between two teams, may come to an embarrassed and confused halt; the situation may cease to be defined, previous positions may become no longer tenable, and participants may find themselves without a charted course of action…
Secondly, in addition to these disorganizing consequences for action at the moment, performance disruptions may have consequences of a more far-reaching kind. Audiences tend to accept the self projected by the individual performer during any current performance as a responsible representative of his colleague-grouping, of his team, and of his social establishment…
Finally, we often find that the individual may deeply involve his ego in his identification with a particular role, establishment, and group and in his self-conception as someone who does not disrupt social interaction or let down the social units which depend upon that interaction.”

Erving Goffman book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Source: 1950s-1960s, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959, p. 155-6

Reality, Appearance, Parting, Dependency

“A man who is not poor nor ill, nor about to be stoned to death, must not distress himself if he does not feel all through his life what faith Stephen had only in his last moments.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 221.

Life, Death, Faith, Feeling

“Every moment of every day and night he was able to take the measure of his failure now. Even his family's poverty which for years he had refused to admit, began to grow familiar to him, but like the memory of a companion that one has left behind. Rose-Anna…She'd been a young girl at his side, then tired, then overwhelmed, and here she was sleeping beside him on a kind of pallet, on the floor. He could hear the whimpers from the children in their sleep.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P. 281-282

Children, Family, Girl, Failure

“Consider one of the standard "laments" or "stories of wonder" in conventional tales of natural history: the mayfly that lives but a single day (a sadness even recorded in the technical name for this biological group - Ephemoptera). Yes, the adult fly may enjoy only a moment in the sun, but we should honor the entire life cycle and recognize that the larvae, or juvenile stages, live and develop for months. Larvae are not mere preparations for a brief adulthood. We might better read the entire life cycle as a division of labor, with larvae as feeding and growing stages, and the adult as a short-lived reproductive machine. In this sense, we could well view the adult fly's day as the larva's clever and transient device for making a new generation of truly fundamental feeders.”

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

Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 356
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Life, Sadness, History, Nature

“Whatever shall we do in future? The nation that does not arm continuously is lost – as France has been lost, as Britain will be lost but for the Grace of God. In this mechanistic age where bravery and improvised organization at the last moment will not help. The only alternative is a League of the Nations or of some nations strong enough to withstand aggression …”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

As quoted by W. K. Hancock in SMUTS 2: The Fields of Force 1919-1950, p. 360

God, Age, Strong, Future

“And to me it seems that you have fallen asleep upon a white rock, and in a parish of dreams, and have dreamt all this in a moment while it was night.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Philopatris, xxi, as translated in the epigraph, p. 8
The White Stone (1905)

Dreams, Night

“It is a lamentable fact if, in the midst of our civilization, and at the close of the nineteenth century, the workhouse is all that can be offered to the industrious labourer at the end of a long and honourable life. I do not enter into the question now in detail. I do not say it is an easy one; I do not say that it will be solved in a moment; but I do say this, that until society is able to offer to the industrious labourer at the end of a long and blameless life something better than the workhouse, society will not have discharged its duties to its poorer members.”

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

Speech in London (11 December 1891), quoted in The Times (12 December 1891), p. 7.
1890s

Life, Question

“I loved Latin -- the grammar, the difficult tenses, the history -- but for some reason I was very bad at it, shamefully and blushingly bad at it. … In moments of stress the embarrassment of how bad I was at Latin -- a subject I loved -- really hit me. It was like being laughed at by someone you desperately loved.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Storey
8 1/2 Women

Love, History

“What one needs to do at every moment of one's life is to put an end to the old world and to begin a new world.”

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) Russian philosopher

The Beginning and the End (1947)

Life, World

“The odors perceived by the ant seem to lead to a highly standardized course of conduct; but the value of a simple stimulus, such as an odor, for conveying information depends not only on the information conveyed by the stimulus itself but on the whole nervous constitution of the sender and receiver of the stimulus as well. Suppose I find myself in the woods with an intelligent savage who cannot speak my language and whose language I cannot speak. Even without any code of sign language common to the two of us, I can learn a great deal from him. All I need to do is to be alert to those moments when he shows the signs of emotion or interest. I then cast my eyes around, perhaps paying special attention to the direction of his glance, and fix in my memory what I see or hear. It will not be long before I discover the things which seem important to him, not because he has communicated them to me by language, but because I myself have observed them. In other words, a signal without an intrinsic content may acquire meaning in his mind by what he observes at the time, and may acquire meaning in my mind by what I observed at the time. The ability that he has to pick out the moments of my special, active attention is in itself a language as varied in possibilities as the range of impressions that the two of us are able to encompass. Thus social animals may have an active, intelligent, flexible means of communication long before the development of language.”

Norbert Wiener book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

VIII. Information, Language, and Society. p. 157.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Intelligence, Communication, Learning, Memory

“The chequered flag is really just a stupid wooden stick and a piece of cloth. It's a small thing, but it means so much when you cross the line at moments like that. It was unbelievable.”

Sebastian Vettel (1987) German racing driver in Formula 1

http://www.sebastian-vettel.org/quotes.htm
After his 4th position in China 2007.
Sourced quotes

Stupidity, Clothes

“Boredom, yes, as in those moments when the eyes stare without itinerary—when the brain’s hard drive revolves at low rpm, uncoupled from regimen, responsibility, the whole Logistical Life that becomes one’s life in the middle years, what Hinduism calls the Householder Phase, to do to do to do to do to do. But now alpha waves are lapping at the shore of the mind as you depart the secretarial for the sacramental realm.”

Steven Heighton (1961) Canadian writer

Workbook (2011), p. 15

Life

“In the lonelier and perhaps even more disheartening moments which come to any national leader, I hope there will be a corner of your mind and heart which takes cheer from the fact that you have an admiring friend, a staunch ally that will be all the way with LBJ.”

Harold Holt (1908–1967) Australian politician, 17th Prime Minister of Australia

address to President Johnson at the White House, 27 June 1966
As prime minister
Source: The Life and Death of Harold Holt, p. 181.

Hope, Way, Heart, Loneliness

“Here is our opportunity and our challenge. If the nuclear powers are prepared to declare a truce, let us seize the moment to strengthen the institutions and procedures which will serve as the means for the pacific settlement of disputes among men.”

Haile Selassie (1892–1975) Emperor of Ethiopia

Address to the United Nations (1963)

Men

“I have often stated that baseball's proudest moment and its most powerful social statement came on April 15, 1947 when Jackie Robinson first set foot on a Major League Baseball field. On that day, Jackie put an end to segregation in baseball and ushered in the era in which baseball became the true national pastime. By celebrating Jackie Robinson Day every April 15, we have ensured that the incredible contributions and sacrifices he made — for baseball and society — will not be forgotten.”

Bud Selig (1934) American baseball executive

“And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Sputnik Sweetheart

Beauty, Travel, Star, Reality

“The FBI may decide to leave a suspected mole undisturbed for years in order to feed him false critical information at an opportune moment or to use him to catch a bigger fish.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Fish, Falseness

“Life, he decided, was for living, not for having, and he wanted to experience every moment that he could. At the deepest level, he'd come to understand that life could end at any moment, and it was better to be happy than busy.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Micah Sparks, Chapter 17, p. 339
2000s, Three Weeks with My Brother (2004)

Life, Happiness, Understanding, Business

“I met [Meyerbeer] at the performance of my "Battle." Most of the composers then in Vienna were kind enough to undertake something or other in my orchestra, and the young man played the big drum. Ha! ha! ha! (a peal of laughter). I had reason not to be very well satisfied with him. He was always behindhand, and I had to give it him roundly. (New peal of laughter.) He must have felt mortified by my observations; but there is no reliance to be placed in him; he has not the courage to raise his arm at the proper moment.”

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770–1827) German Romantic composer

10th October, 1814
In: Johann Wenzel Tomaschek, "A Talk with Beethoven", The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, Vol. 33, Beethoven Supplement (Dec. 15, 1892)

Courage, Laughter

“Yet all this is not ressentiment. These are only stages in the development of its sources. Revenge, envy, the impulse to detract, spite, *Schadenfreude*, and malice lead to ressentiment only if there occurs neither a moral self-conquest (such as genuine forgiveness in the case of revenge) nor an act or some other adequate expression of emotion (such as verbal abuse or shaking one's fist), and if this restraint is caused by a pronounced awareness of impotence. There will be no ressentiment if he who thirsts for revenge really acts and avenges himself, if he who is consumed by hatred harms his enemy, gives him “a piece of his mind,” or even merely vents his spleen in the presence of others. Nor will the envious fall under the dominion of ressentiment if he seeks to acquire the envied possession by means of work, barter, crime, or violence. Ressentiment can only arise if these emotions are particularly powerful and yet must be suppressed because they are coupled with the feeling that one is unable to act them out—either because of weakness, physical or mental, or because of fear. Through its very origin, ressentiment is therefore chiefly confined to those who serve and are dominated at the moment, who fruitlessly resent the sting of authority. When it occurs elsewhere, it is either due to psychological contagion—and the spiritual venom of ressentiment is extremely contagious—or to the violent suppression of an impulse which subsequently revolts by “embittering” and “poisoning” the personality. If an ill-treated servant can vent his spleen in the antechamber, he will remain free from the inner venom of ressentiment, but it will engulf him if he must hide his feelings and keep his negative and hostile emotions to himself.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Hostility, Fear, Feeling, Forgiveness

“This is Empire Day, and we lift up our eyes beyond our immediate surroundings and our everyday tasks to behold the great inheritance which is ours. Our feet are set in a large space, and if the Titan has known moments of weariness, if our burdens are heavy, our shoulders are yet broad, and they have long been fitted to bear the vast orb of our fate.”

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

Speech in Hyde Park (24 May 1929), published in This Torch of Freedom (1935), p. 25. In 1902 Joseph Chamberlain said "The weary Titan staggers under the too vast orb of its fate".
1929

Fate

“I firmly believe that the moment our hearts are emptied of pride and selfishness and ambition and self-seeking and every thing that is contrary to God's law, the Holy Ghost will come and fill every corner of our hearts; but if we are full of pride and conceit and ambition and self-seeking and pleasure and the world, there is no room for the Spirit of God; and I believe many a man is praying to God to fill him when he is full already with something else.”

Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899) American evangelist and publisher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 319.

God, Pleasure, World, Law

“Citizenship is no light trifle to be jeopardized any moment Congress decides to do so under the name of one of its general or implied grants of power.”

Hugo Black (1886–1971) U.S. Supreme Court justice

Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 267–68 (1967)

Light

“The beginning of wisdom is to admit to being inept. We’re all a bit slow. We have our moments, but in the end, we have to resort to bumbling through. It is what makes conviction so egregious.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 40 (p. 376)

Wisdom

“Dream big, when you’re up against it all, when you’re standing on a narrow bridge and you’re about to fall.
Dream big, when you're blocked by a wall, keep on saying in your head, nothing is impossible.
Dream big, and when your moment arrives, look up to the stars and thank God you're alive.
Dream big, the power is inside of you. You'll be love for whoever you are and for whatever you do.”

Ross Mintzer (1987) American musician and performer

Lyrics from the song, “Victory” (April 13, 2013) from MTV Italy Official Lyrics http://testicanzoni.mtv.it/testi-The-Ross-Mintzer-Band_24824218/testo-Victory-14030759 Song lyrics

Love, God, Dreams, Star

“The moment is your only duty. Your duty at any time in your life is to do what you have to do from moment to moment. What you have to do is what you cannot avoid doing. What you cannot avoid doing is what you do.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Life, Time

“"Don't be afraid," I muttered. "We belong together."
I was abruptly overwhelmed by the truth of my own words. This moment was so perfect, so right, there was no way to doubt it.”

Stephenie Meyer (1973) American author

Bella Cullen to Edward Cullen, p. 85
Twilight series, Breaking Dawn (2008)

Truth, Way, Perfection

“I never made more effort than I did when practicing under U Pandita. But most of this effort arose from the very illusion of bondage to the self that I was seeking to overcome. The model of this practice is that one must climb the mountain so that freedom can be found at the top. But the self is already an illusion, and that truth can be glimpsed directly, at the mountain's base or anywhere else along the path. One can then return to this insight, again and again, as one's sole method of meditation—thereby arriving at the goal in each moment of actual practice.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: 2010s, Waking Up (2014), p. 126

Truth, Mountain, Effort, Freedom

“Actually, none of this is fine. None of it! Trump should be directing all resources at his disposal to punish Russia for the attacks and prevent future ones. But he is not. America’s commander wants to be chummy with the enemy who committed the crime. Trump is more concerned with protecting his presidency and validating his election than he is in protecting this country. This is an incredible, unprecedented moment. America is being betrayed by its own president. America is under attack and its president absolutely refuses to defend it. Simply put, Trump is a traitor and may well be treasonous.”

Charles M. Blow (1970) American journalist

Trump, Treasonous Traitor https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/15/opinion/trump-russia-investigation-putin.html (July 15, 2018), The New York Times. Quote

Future, Country

“I flatter my self to have demonstrated that, neither the Friendly Qualities and kind Affections that are natural to Man, nor the real Virtues he is capable of acquiring by Reason and Self-Denial, are the Foundation of Society; but that what we call Evil in this World, Moral as well as Natural, is the grand Principle that makes us sociable Creatures, the solid Basis, the Life and Support of all Trades and Employments without Exception: That there we must look for the true Origin of all Arts and Sciences, and that the Moment Evil ceases, the Society must be spoiled, if not totally dissolved.”

Bernard Mandeville book The Fable of the Bees

"A Search into the Nature of Society", p. 428
The Fable of the Bees (1714)

Life, World, Art, Support

“She dropped her glove, to prove his love, then looked at him and smiled;
He bowed, and in a moment leaped among the lions wild:
The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place,
Then threw the glove, but not with love, right in the lady's face.
"By God!" said Francis, "rightly done!" and he rose from where he sat:
"No love," quoth he, "but vanity, sets love a task like that."”

Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) English critic, essayist, poet and writer

The Glove and the Lions http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1084.html

Love, God, Smile

“She must be a fool with a witness, who can believe a man, proud and vain as he is, will lay his boasted authority, the dignity and prerogative of his sex, on moment at her feet, but in prospect of taking it up again to more advantage; he may call himself her slave a few days, but it is only in order to make her his all the rest of his life.”

Mary Astell (1666–1731) English feminist writer

Reflection upon Marriage, as quoted in Astell: Political Writings, p. 44.

Life, Fools, Sex

“Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud, also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level — man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Existence (1958), p. 36; also published in The Discovery of Being : Writings in Existential Psychology (1983), Part II : The Cultural Background, Ch. 5 : Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud, p. 87

Understanding, Study, Science

“All wrong. The words seemed in this moment to describe Hale’s whole life.”

Tim Powers book Declare

Source: Declare (2001), Chapter 7 (p. 182)

Life

“We are each either among the demoralized showing the way to a future of eternal nightmare, or we are losers celebrating our moment in hell.”

Thomas Ligotti book The Spectral Link

The Spectral Link

Way, Hell, Future

“Film-making encompasses everything, from tricking people into investing in it, to putting on the show, to trying to distill down to moments in time, and ape reality but send this other message. It's got everything. When I was a kid I loved to draw, and I loved my electric football sets, and I painted little things and made sculptures and did matte painting and comic books and illustrated stuff, and took pictures, had a darkroom, loved to tape-record stuff. It's all of that. It's not having to grow up. It's four-dimensional chess, it's strategy, and it's being painfully honest, and unbelievably deceitful, and everything in between.”

David Fincher (1962) American film director

Gavin Smith goes one-on-one with David Fincher (1999)

Love, People, Books, Reality

“Somehow it doesn't seem long since I trudged in a picket-line; in the street here, and in the rain. A fairly muted demonstration against the Museum, which wasn't always in a mood for showing abstract paintings by Americans. It was fun I suppose-needless to say, the picketing produced no results. Yet a majority of the picketers are visible through their works at the moment, upstairs on the third floor, where it's warm and out of the rain. However, this is no time to celebrate in fact it's better if artists never celebrate. New abstract picket-lines are doubtless assembling, to protest the former picketers.”

George L.K. Morris (1905–1975) American painter and sculptor

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

Mood, Time, Painting

“[Black Jade] had her lamp relit and began to compose a series of quatrains, writing them directly on the handkerchiefs that Pao-yu had sent. After writing three stanzas, she began to feel exhausted and feverish. Going to her mirror, she found her cheeks flushed as if they were afire. She thought nothing of it, but from that moment on, her illness entered a more critical stage.”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), p. 178

Feeling

“And it was this that awed him — the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time.”

Thomas Wolfe book Look Homeward, Angel

Source: Look Homeward, Angel (1929), p. 157

Life, Change, Time, Speed

“This morning the music of a brass band which had stopped under my windows moved me almost to tears. It exercised an indefinable, nostalgic power over me; it set me dreaming of another world, of infinite passion and supreme happiness. Such impressions are the echoes of Paradise in the soul; memories of ideal spheres whose sad sweetness ravishes and intoxicates the heart. O Plato! O Pythagoras! ages ago you heard these harmonies, surprised these moments of inward ecstasy, — knew these divine transports! If music thus carries us to heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881) Swiss philosopher and poet

17 March 1870
Source: Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

Happiness, Age, World, Sadness

“(About Elton John) He's my fairy Godfather; literally that's what I call him. […] Hopefully while I'm in town there'll be a moment I can share my new boobs with him. I have to show him, because he gets to see. Not that he's really caring, but I flashed him my other ones so he has to see these ones too. He has to see the new set.”

Anastacia (1968) American singer-songwriter

I'd give Barbra Streisand a lesbian kiss http://attitude.co.uk/anastacia-interview-id-give-barbra-streisand-lesbian-kiss/, Attitude, April 2, 2014. General Quotes

“time in an allegory of itself imparts to us lessons of wisdom which the moment they are formulated are immediately destroyed by the merest flickers of light or shadow which are nothing more than time in its incarnations and disincarnations which are the phrases that I am writing on this paper and that disappears as I read them:
they are not the sensations, the perceptions, the mental images, and the thoughts which flare up and die away here, now, as I write or as I read what I write: they are not what I see or what I have seen, they are the reverse of what is seen and of the power of sight—but they are not the invisible: they are the unsaid residuum;
they are not the other side of reality but, rather, the other side of language, what we have on the tip of our tongue that vanishes before it is said, the other side that cannot be named because it is the opposite of a name:
what is not said is not this or that which we leave unsaid, nor is it neither-this-nor-that: it is not the tree that I say I see but the sensation that I feel on sensing that I see it at the moment when I am just about to say that I see it, an insubstantial but real conjunction of vibrations and sounds and meanings that on being combined suggest the configuration of a green-bronze-black-woody-leafy-sonorous-silent presence;
no, it is not that either, if it is not a name it surely cannot be the description of a name or the description of the sensation of the name or the name of the sensation:
a tree is not the name tree, nor is it the sensation of tree: it is the sensation of a perception of tree that dies away at the very moment of the perception of the sensation of tree;
names, as we already know, are empty, but what we did not know, or if we did know, had forgotten, is that sensations are perceptions of sensations that die away, sensations that vanish on becoming perceptions, since if they were not perceptions, how would we know that they are sensations?;
sensations that are not perceptions are not sensations, perceptions that are not names—what are they?
if you didn’t know it before, you know now: everything is empty;
and the moment I say everything-is-empty, I am aware that I am falling into a trap: if everything is empty, this everything-is-empty is empty too;
no, it is full, full to overflowing, everything-is-empty is replete with itself, what we touch and see and taste and smell and think, the realities that we invent and the realities that touch us, look at us, hear us, and invent us, everything that we weave and unweave and everything that weaves and unweaves us, momentary appearances and disappearances, each one different and unique, is always the same full reality, always the same fabric that is woven as it is unwoven: even total emptiness and utter privation are plenitude (perhaps they are the apogee, the acme, the consummation and the calm of plenitude), everything is full to the brim, everything is real, all these invented realities and all these very real inventions are full of themselves, each and every one of them, replete with their own reality;
and the moment I say this, they empty themselves: things empty themselves and names fill themselves, they are no longer empty, names are plethoras, they are donors, they are full to bursting with blood, milk, semen, sap, they are swollen with minutes, hours, centuries, pregnant with meanings and significations and signals, they are the secret signs that time makes to itself, names suck the marrow from things, things die on this page but names increase and multiply, things die in order that names may live:”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 9

Wisdom, Secret, Feeling, Thinking

“Besides the theory there are a lot of small technical details that must be learned so well that you can recall them almost instantaneously, such as the trigonometric identities… put one part of the identity on one side of a 3 x 5 card and the other part on the other side. Using these flash cards you can, in the odd moments of your daily life, learn the mechanical parts of the course. …for this kind of low-level material many short learning sessions are much more efficient than a few long, intense ones; but this is not necessarily true for larger ideas. …most students will not use such trivial devices as flash cards; it seems to be beneath their dignity. They suffer accordingly.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Life, Idea, Suffering, Learning

Quotes about moment page 36

Quotes about moment
page 36