Quotes about nothing
page 51

“Life cannot be reconciled with the idea that back of the universe is a Supreme Being, all merciful and kind, and that he takes any account of the human beings and other forms of life that exist upon the earth. Whichever way man may look upon the earth, he is oppressed with the suffering incident to life. It would almost seem as though the earth had been created with malignity and hatred. If we look at what we are pleased to call the lower animals, we behold a universal carnage. We speak of the seemingly peaceful woods, but we need only look beneath the surface to be horrified by the misery of that underworld. Hidden in the grass and watching for its prey is the crawling snake which swiftly darts upon the toad or mouse and gradually swallows it alive; the hapless animal is crushed by the jaws and covered with slime, to be slowly digested in furnishing a meal. The snake knows nothing about sin or pain inflicted upon another; he automatically grabs insects and mice and frogs to preserve his life. The spider carefully weaves his web to catch the unwary fly, winds him into the fatal net until paralyzed and helpless, then drinks his blood and leaves him an empty shell. The hawk swoops down and snatches a chicken and carries it to its nest to feed its young. The wolf pounces on the lamb and tears it to shreds. The cat watches at the hole of the mouse until the mouse cautiously comes out, then with seeming fiendish glee he plays with it until tired of the game, then crushes it to death in his jaws. The beasts of the jungle roam by day and night to find their prey; the lion is endowed with strength of limb and fang to destroy and devour almost any animal that it can surprise or overtake. There is no place in the woods or air or sea where all life is not a carnage of death in terror and agony. Each animal is a hunter, and in turn is hunted, by day and night. No landscape is beautiful or day so balmy but the cry of suffering and sacrifice rends the air. When night settles down over the earth the slaughter is not abated. Some creatures are best at night, and the outcry of the dying and terrified is always on the wind. Almost all animals meet death by violence and through the most agonizing pain. With the whole animal creation there is nothing like a peaceful death. Nowhere in nature is there the slightest evidence of kindness, of consideration, or a feeling for the suffering and the weak, except in the narrow circle of brief family life.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Source: The Story of My Life (1932), p. 383

Life, Death, Pain, Family

“My mind has been so much occupied these days by the thought of Cézanne, of how he has been one of the three or four powerful artists who have affected me like a thunderstorm, like some great event. Do you still remember what we saw at Vollard [art-seller in Paris who showed Cézanne's works frequently in his gallery] in 1900? And then, during the final days of my last stay in Paris, those truly astonishing early paintings of his at the Galerie Pellerin. Tell your husband he should see the things there... If it were not absolutely necessary [Paula was pregnant] for me to be here right now [Germany], nothing could keep me away from Paris.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In a letter from Worpswede, 21 October, 1907, to her friend Clara Rilke-Westhoff; as quoted in Voicing our visions, - Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 208
October 1907 Rilke started to write his famous series 'Letters on Cézanne' to his wife Clara Rilke-Westhoff
1906 + 1907

Art, Painting

“What, for instance, induced me, when so far distant from my country, voluntarily to devote myself to her cause? Her commerce? I neither knew nor cared any thing about it. Her funds? I was so happy as hardly to understand the meaning of the word. Her lands? I could, alas! lay claim to nothing but the graves of my parents.—What, then, was the stimulus? What was I proud of? It was the name and fame of England. Her laws, her liberties, her justice, her might; all the qualities and circumstances that had given her renown in the world, but above all her deeds in arms, her military glory.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Political Register (27 October 1804).

Happiness, World, Justice, Law

“"Nothing," wrote General de Gaulle, "strengthens authority so much as silence." Speech dilutes thought; it allows one's courage to leak away - in short, it dissipates the concentration that is required.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

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

Courage, Silence

“And most important, nothing was to be taken for granted in that place. In Death’s world, any covenant, no matter how mighty, can fall null—any spell, however cogent, can be abrogated. The only certain law in that place is Death itself.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 1, Chapter 6 (p. 49)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

Death, World, Law

“What do you want?" the ape asked at last.
"Nothing," said Ervic.
"You may have that!”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

retorted the ape
Glinda of Oz Ch. 18 : The Cleverness of Ervic
Later Oz novels

“I mean, the computer industry promises nothing. Did you ever read a shrink-wrapped license agreement? You should read one. It basically says, if this product deliberately kills your children, and we knew it would, and we decided not to tell you because it might harm sales, we're not liable. I mean, it says stuff like that. They're absurd documents. You have no rights.”

Bruce Schneier (1963) American computer scientist

[Hartford Advocate, 2006-04-27, Your computer is not secure]
Politics and societal issues of the digital age

Children, Reading

“We are reduced to the alternative of choosing an unconditional submission to the tyranny of irritated ministers or resistance by force. The latter is our choice. We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery. Honour, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us.”

John Dickinson (1732–1808) American politician

From Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Causes_and_Necessity_of_Taking_Up_Arms, adopted by the Second Continental Congress (1775)

Justice, Freedom

“Suppose someone sits down where you are sitting right now and announces to me that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. The last thing I want to do with him is to get involved in a technical discussion of cavalry tactics at the Battle of Austerlitz. If I do that, I'm getting tacitly drawn into the game that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. Now, Bob Lucas and Tom Sargent like nothing better than to get drawn into technical discussions, because then you have tacitly gone along with their fundamental assumptions; your attention is attracted away from the basic weakness of the whole story. Since I find that fundamental framework ludicrous, I respond by treating it as ludicrous – that is, by laughing at it – so as not to fall into the trap of taking it seriously and passing on to matters of technique.”

Robert Solow (1924) American economist

Quoted in Conversations with Economists (1983) by Arjo Klamer, p. 146

Game

“If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) Russian author

Book II, ch. 6 (trans. Constance Garnett)
Pyotr Miusov, summarizing an argument made by Ivan at a social gathering
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880)

Love, Life, World, Law

“Nothing but what has visible substance, is capable of actual possession.”

Joseph Yates (judge) (1722–1770) English barrister and judge

4 Burr. Part IV., 2384.
Dissenting in Millar v Taylor (1769)

“Nothing is more chilling than such a spectacle of unremitting self-sacrifice. This is a woman born to be abandoned by her ungrateful husband at the very pinnacle of success she helped to make for him, for a shameless hussy of nineteen.”

Germaine Greer book The Female Eunuch

The Psychological Sell
The Female Eunuch (1970)

Success, Help

“The AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.”

Susan Sontag book AIDS and Its Metaphors

AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989), p. 180

World, Problem

“One who wallows in regret cannot see into their future. Wallowing in regret brings nothing but harm; by doing so, they only bring afflictions upon themselves.”

Jun Hong Lu (1959) Australian Buddhist leader

Quotes from Word of Wisdoms Vol.3

Affliction, Future

“Nothing so dates a man as to decry the younger generation.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Speech at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (8 October 1952)

“Listen up, me name be Buchanan, me knows enough things bout politics. Get involved, mack daddies. Y'all better realize, that nothing be a better way to get your kicks. West side, aight?”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

As quoted in "Rekognize" http://www.hark.com/clips/lkkxsfbcbd-listen-up-me-name-be-buchanan-me-knows-nuff-tings-bout-politics (25 July 2004), Da Ali G Show. 2000s

Way

“Your problem has nothing to do with git, and everything to do with emacs. And then you have the gall to talk about "Unix design" and not gumming programs together, when you yourself use the most gummed-up piece of absolute sh*t there is!”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Message, Git mailing list, 2008-12-17, Gmane, Torvalds, Linus, 2008-12-18 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/103400, 2000s, 2008

Problem

“It's been on my mind – what would something be like if it were unbalanced? It's been a vexing question for a long time. But it took the experience of working with radical kinds of symmetry, not just a rectangle, but a diamond shape, as well as extreme extensions of shapes, before I finally came to the idea of everything being unbalanced, nothing vertical, nothing horizontal, nothing parallel. I came to the fact that unbalancing has its own order. In a peculiar way, it can still end up feeling symmetrical. I don't know but what the very nature of our response to art is experienced symmetrically.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Source: Color, Format and Abstract Art' (1977), pp. 99 – 105

Art, Way, Feeling, Idea

“I was just trying to show you,” he went on, “just how insubstantial a ‘common sense’ idea can be when you pin it down. Neither ‘common sense’ nor ‘logic’ can prove anything. Proof comes from experiment, or to put it another way, from experience, and from nothing else.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Rocket Ship Galileo

Source: Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), Chapter 10, “The Method of Science”, p. 105

Way, Idea, Sense

“The sports page records people's accomplishments, the front page usually records nothing, but man's failures.”

Barbara Walters (1929) American broadcast journalist, author, and television personality

Occasionally attributed to Walters; actually said by Earl Warren, as quoted in Sports Illustrated (July 22, 1968).
Misattributed

People, Failure, Sport

“A thought that has found a plastic expression must continue to expand in keeping with its own plastic idiom. A plastic idea must be expressed with plastic means just as a musical idea is expressed with musical means, or a literary idea with verbal means. Neither music nor literature are wholly translatable into other art forms; and so a plastic art cannot be created through a superimposed literary meaning. The artist who attempts to do so produces nothing more than a show-booth. He contents himself with visual story-telling. He subjects himself to a mechanistic kind of thinking which disintegrates into fragments.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 40-46
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

Art, Music, Literature, Idea

“The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play
And in one word, just nothing.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Attributed

World

“Creationists do deliberately misrepresent evolution many different ways in all their arguments. Even when they know better, they still say that evolution necessarily requires the godless origin of life from inorganic matter. But it doesn’t mean that, and never did. For one thing, all the building blocks of life were already organic long before the first organism, before anything could be considered alive. We’ve even detected vast amounts of organic matter in deep space. But creationists claim space evolved too, and that the big bang is part of the same evolutionary process as that which leads to new species on earth. So they often say that evolution requires “something coming from nothing”, which is ironic since creationists believe that themselves while strict scientists do not.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"6th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3k0dDFxkhM, Youtube (February 2, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Life, Way, Parting

“There are basically two types of creationists; the professional or political creationists; these are the activists who lead the movement and who will regularly deliberately lie to promote their propaganda; and the second type which are the innocently-deceived followers commonly known as “sheep”. I know lots of intellectual Christians, but I can’t get any of them to actually watch the televangelists, because they either already know how phony they are, or they don’t want to find out. But that only allows a radical fringe to claim support from they masses they now also claim to represent. So there’s nothing to stop them. Professional creationists are making money hand over fist with faith-healing scams or bilking little old ladies out of prayer donations, or selling books and videos at their circus-like seminars where they have undeserved respect as powerful leaders. All of them feign knowledge they can’t really possess, and some of them claim degrees they’ve never actually earned… Were it not for this con, they’d have to go back to selling used cars, wonder drugs, and multi-level marketing schemes. They will never change their minds no matter what it costs anyone else.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnJX68ELbAY, Youtube (November 11, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Money, Lie, Books, Faith

“Identity is not taste or fashion; it has nothing to do with what we’ve purchased in the past or want to buy in the future. Identity comes from making real choices that force you to decide what is true, fair, and just. Identity is not given to you; it’s earned by your life experiences.”

John Twelve Hawks American writer

Against Authority: Freedom and the Rise of Surveillance States (2014)

Life, Fashion, Past, Future

“Objects enter into each other... Chardin [French classical still-life painter] was the first to have glimpsed that and rendered the atmosphere of objects... Notice how a light transversal plane straddling the bridge of your nose makes the values more evident to the eye... Well, he noticed that before we did... He neglected nothing. He also perceived that whole encounter in the atmosphere of the tiniest particles, the fine dust of emotion that surrounds objects..”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 220 in: 'What he told me – III. The Studio'

Life, Light

“Subconsciously he knew too, that the oriental woman is not a sensualist in the European sense; there is nothing mawkish in her constitution. Her true obsessions are power, politics and possessions - however much she might deny it. The sex ticks on in the mind, but its motions are warmed by the kinetic brutalities of money.”

Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet

Source: The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960), Mountolive (1958), X

Money, Sex, Sense

“I begged God to cure my aching limbs. But he did nothing, he gave me no advice. Didn't this God abandon Jesus Christ? Oh if it comes to you, I'll die for your sins.”

Ed Harcourt (1977) British musician

I'am The Drug.

God, Christ

“A king’s son has nothing but inferiors, each one a potential assassin.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 1, “The Grasshopper and the King” (p. 12).

“[History]… is nothing else but the rise and disappearance of races.”

Arthur Kemp (1962) British writer

Pontikos Revealed: a white-hating race-mixer http://www.white-history.com/whois.htm Quotes from other works:

History

“You think it a great triumph to make the sun draw brown landscapes for you! That was also a discovery, and some day may be useful. But the sun had drawn landscapes before for you, not in brown, but in green, and blue, and all imaginable colours, here in England. Not one of you ever looked at them, then; not one of you cares for the loss of them, now, when you have shut the sun out with smoke, so that he can draw nothing more, except brown blots through a hole in a box. There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the vale of Tempe; you might have seen the Gods there morning and evening, — Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the Light — walking in fair procession on the lawns of it, and to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags. You cared neither for Gods nor grass, but for cash (which you did not know the way to get); you thought you could get it by what the Times calls "Railroad Enterprise." You Enterprised a Railroad through the valley — you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange — you Fools Everywhere.”

John Ruskin book Fors Clavigera

Fors Clavigera, letter v (1 May 1871).
Fors Clavigera (1871-1878 and 1880-1884)

Love, God, Fools, Way

“Our task is not so much discovery as re-discovery. What one needs is not so much thinking as remembering. Sometimes it suffices to sit quietly and listen well, when venerable men have thought before us. Constant forgettings of truths once perceived are the very charm of the human mind; the history of human thought is nothing more than the story of these forgettings and rememberings and forgettings again.”

Lin Yutang (1895–1976) Chinese writer

On the Wisdom of America (1950), p. xiv

Men, Truth, History, Thinking

“There is nothing small in God's eyes; let there be nothing small in thine.”

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

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Karma

God

“Like Kant before him, Darwin insists that the source of all error is semblance. Analogy, he says again and again, is always a ‘deceitful guide’ (see pp. 61, 66, 473). As against analogy, or as I would say merely metaphorical characterizations of the facts, Darwin wishes to make a case for the existence of real ‘affinities’ genealogically construed. The establishment of these affinities will permit him to postulate the linkage of all living things to all others by the ‘laws’ or ‘principles’ of genealogical descent, variation, and natural selection. These laws and principles are the formal elements in his mechanistic explanation of why creatures are arranged in families in a time series. But this explanation could not be offered as long as the data remained encoded in the linguistic modes of either metaphor or synecdoche, the modes of qualitative connection. As long as creatures are classified in terms of either semblance or essential unity, the realm of organic things must remain either a chaos of arbitrarily affirmed connectedness or a hierarchy of higher and lower forms. Science as Darwin understood it, however, cannot deal in the categories of the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ any more than it can deal in the categories of the ‘normal’ and ‘monstrous.’ Everything must be entertained as what it manifestly seems to be. Nothing can be regarded as ‘surprising,’ any more than anything can be regarded as ‘miraculous.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

Family, Law, Error, Nature

“Nothing you believe is true. To know this is freedom.”

Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer

Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life (2002)

Freedom

“He had come out of the war twice-decorated and with a thoughtful respect for the horrors of combat. He had seen terrible things, participated in terrible things…but that was the nature of war, and it was not something you could enter into halfway. War was a state of mind, war was all or nothing.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Memory Wire

Source: Memory Wire (1987), Chapter 15 (p. 134)

War, Nature

“I oppose Islam, for the simple reason that Islam opposes me and everything I believe in. I don't care how Muslims feel about that. I don't care how anyone feels about it, nor should I be required to. In my opinion, Islam's disgusting treatment of women is a crime against humanity, nothing less. It's a thousand percent wrong, there's no grey area, it's unconscionable and unforgivable, and it's poisoning the whole world. It's not different or relative, it's backward and uncivilised. There's no excuse for it, and no excuse for defending it.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Free speech in Europe" (10 November 2010)
2010

Women, World, Feeling

“"The Day I Tried to Live" has nothing to do with suicide. It's much more meant to be like everyman's story. In spite of how most people present themselves, they probably struggle to feel comfortable or normal around other people, to feel as if they fit in. Everybody wants to and tries to. That's what that song is about. And "Like Suicide" is just a title. It's not about suicide at all.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Interview with Request Magazine, October 1994 http://web.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/request_10-94.shtml, On depression and suicide

People, Feeling, Suicide

“This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments …. For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of the Earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme at this speed is 15180 calories …. The energy of our most violent explosive - nitroglycerine - is less than 1500 calories per grammer. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one tenth of the energy to escape the Earth … hence the proposition appears to be basically unsound.”

A.W. Bickerton (1842–1929) British scientist

From Basics of space flight, Ludwik Marian Celnikier, 1993, ISBN 2863321323, quoting "Discouraging Words", Spaceflight, 34, 225 (1992).

Idea, Appearance, Speed

“My hearers, this discourse has not wandered out into the world to look for conflict, it has not tried to get the better of anybody, it has not even tried to uphold anybody, as though there was battle without. It has spoken to you; not by way of explaining anything to you, but trying to speak secretly with you about your relationship to that secret wisdom mentioned in our text. Oh that nothing may upset you in respect to this, “neither life nor death nor things present nor things to come nor any other creature” (Romans 8:38) –not this discourse, which, though it may have profited you nothing, yet has striven for what after all is the first and the last, to help you have what the Scripture calls “faith in yourself before God” (Romans 14:22).”

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

Source: 1840s, Sermon Preached at Trinitatis Kirke, 1844, P. 173

Life, Death, Wisdom, God

“Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.”

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

Quoted in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2010), p. 230
1920s, Viereck interview (1929)

“It seems to me that the notion of machine that was current in the course of the Industrial Revolution – and which we might have inherited – is a notion, essentially, of a machine without goal, it had no goal ‘of’, it had a goal ‘for’. And this gradually developed into the notion of machines with goals ‘of’, like thermostats, which I might begin to object to because they might compete with me. Now we’ve got the notion of a machine with an underspecified goal, the system that evolves. This is a new notion, nothing like the notion of machines that was current in the Industrial Revolution, absolutely nothing like it. It is, if you like, a much more biological notion, maybe I’m wrong to call such a thing a machine; I gave that label to it because I like to realise things as artifacts, but you might not call the system a machine, you might call it something else.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Pask (1972) in: Mary Catherine Bateson Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation. New York : Alfred A Knopf. Quotes in: Usman Haque (2007) " The Architectural Relevance of Gordon Pask http://www.haque.co.uk/papers/architectural_relevance_of_gordon_pask.pdf" in: Architectural Design. Vol 77, Issue 4, p. 54.

“Stark said wearily, “I don’t think you understand.” Normally he was tolerant of tribal fancies, but he felt no great tenderness for the Outdwellers. “The stars are already defiled. They’re only suns, like that one over your head. They have worlds around them, like this one under your feet. People live on those worlds, people who never heard of Outdwellers or their footling goddess. And the starships fly between them. It’s all going on out there, this second as you stand here, and nothing you can do will stop it.””

Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: The Ginger Star (1974), Chapter 15 (pp. 126-127)

People, World, Star, Understanding

“Nothing should be treasured more highly than the value of the day.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Nichts ist höher schätzen als der Werth des Tages.
Maxim 789, trans. Stopp
Variant translation by Saunders: Nothing is more highly to be prized than the value of each day. (332)
Variant translation: Nothing is worth more than this day.
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

“The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their property. That right is preserved sacred and incommunicable in all instances, where it has not been taken away or abridged by some public law for the good of the whole. The cases where this right of property is set aside by private law, are various. Distresses, executions, forfeitures, taxes etc are all of this description; wherein every man by common consent gives up that right, for the sake of justice and the general good. By the laws of England, every invasion of private property, be it ever so minute, is a trespass. No man can set his foot upon my ground without my license, but he is liable to an action, though the damage be nothing; which is proved by every declaration in trespass, where the defendant is called upon to answer for bruising the grass and even treading upon the soil. If he admits the fact, he is bound to show by way of justification, that some positive law has empowered or excused him. The justification is submitted to the judges, who are to look into the books; and if such a justification can be maintained by the text of the statute law, or by the principles of common law. If no excuse can be found or produced, the silence of the books is an authority against the defendant, and the plaintiff must have judgment.”

Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden (1714–1794) English lawyer, judge and Whig politician

Entick v. Carrington, 19 Howell’s State Trials 1029 (1765), Constitution Society, United States, 2008-11-13 http://www.constitution.org/trials/entick/entick_v_carrington.htm,

Men, Books, Justice, Law

“Pilar — remember — nothing is so boring as devotion.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Murder for Christmas (1939, Holiday for Murder, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas)

“I do not find it surprising that the Jains, the Buddhists, and the Hindus have all taken seriously the lives of others. The ability to imagine ourselves into the minds and bodies of “others”—whether humans we term different from us (Down syndrome children; Alzheimer sufferers; the so-called mentally ill) or the animals we use for our food—is of central importance because the failure to do so is precisely what led to the horrors of Auschwitz. So, when people ask, Have you nothing more important to think about? the answer is: There is nothing more important to think about than the heart of empathy, which in the final analysis is nothing other than the ability to love. Becoming a vegan is simply one manifestation of that love.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Introduction, pp. 27-28
The Face on Your Plate (2009)

Love, Children, People, Food

“And the sad fact is that all nanotech life out of our control—out of anyone’s control. The essence of nanotech life’s evolution is autonomy, self-will, and goals which have nothing to do with those of the harboring life form.
Humanity, you mean, said Lourdusamy.
Precisely.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 13 (p. 261)

Life, Sadness

“Jennifer was great. She is fantastic. Really easy to work with, no drama, really down-to-earth, such a funny girl. Nothing but good things to say about her. She really was great to work with. And it always makes it easier when you’re working with people that you like and you enjoy being around.”

Liam Hemsworth (1990) Australian actor

On life on the movie set with actress Jennifer Lawrence. — November 1, 2012, Q&A: Liam Hemsworth on The Hunger Games and Losing Weight for His Role, Krista Smith, November 8, 2011, Vanity Fair, Conde Nast http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/11/Liam-Hunger-Games-Post,

People, Girl

“It is a curious fact that with Through the Looking-Glass the faculty of making book illustrations departed from me. … I have done nothing in that direction since.”

John Tenniel (1820–1914) British illustrator, graphic humourist and political cartoonist

Declining to illustrate a later book by Lewis Carroll, as quoted in The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898), p. 146

Books

“I do not know which makes a man more conservative — to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Source: Essays in Persuasion (1931), The End of Laissez-faire (1926), Ch. 1

Past

“One thing that characterized the Communist state was that no one got to say anything they really believed, ever. That's because one in three people were informers. That was a lovely society, and it only killed about 30 million people between 1919 and 1959. That's what happens when the archetypal structure of society gets tilted badly, and when people forget that they have a responsibility to fulfill as citizens who are awake and capable of stating the truth. The archetype shifts so there's nothing left of the great father except for the tyrant.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

Love, People, Truth, Forgetting

“If I have been critical, it is because I believe it is my obligation to do so. And as a matter and duty of conscience, the notion that one should stay silent — and as the norms and values that keep America strong are undermined and as the alliances and agreements that ensure the stability of the entire world are routinely threatened by the level of thought that goes into 140 characters — the notion that we should say or do nothing in the face of such mercurial behavior is ahistoric and, I believe, profoundly misguided.”

Jeff Flake (1962) American politician

Speech in the U.S. Senate (2017)

World, Behavior, Strong

“George W. Bush revels in being a war president. His campaign is shamelessly exploiting the fears generated by 9/11. Vice President Cheney is conjuring mushroom clouds into our cities. But fear is a bad counselor; we must resist it wherever it comes from. President Roosevelt had the right idea when he said, "We have nothing to fear but Fear itself."”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Speech at the National Press Club (2004)

War, Fear, Idea

“Out of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product. These were Underworld, The Scoundrel, Wuthering Heights, Viva Villa, Scarface, Specter of the Rose, Actors and Sin, Roman Holiday, Spellbound, Nothing Sacred.”

Ben Hecht (1894–1964) American screenwriter

from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959

Holiday

“West Lake flower garden: a desert, now.
Alone, at the window, I read through old pages.
A smudge of rouge, a scent of perfume, but
I still weep.
Is there a Fate for books?
Why mourn for a half-burned poem?
There is nothing, there is no one to question,
and yet this misery feels like my own.
Ah, in another three hundred years
will anyone weep, remembering my fate?”

Nguyễn Du (1765–1820) Vietnamese poet

"Reading Hsiao-ch'ing", in The Harpercollins World Reader: The Modern World, eds. Mary Ann Caws and Christopher Prendergast (HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), ISBN 978-0065013832, p. 1411
Hsiao-Ching was "a seventeenth-century poet who was forced to become a concubine to a man whose jealous primary wife burned almost all of her poems" — David Damrosch, "Global Scripts and the Formation of Literary Traditions", in Approaches to World Literature (2013), p. 98

Fate, Books, Feeling, Flowers

““The intent of the Goddess is neither known nor knowable. She makes us dance, male and female, in ever-converging gyres that bring us ultimately each to our own destiny, and that destiny is always the same and never escapable. She does not tell us why.”
“You said there were no outside forces ordering our lives. That there was nothing but chance and random occurrence.”
He shrugged.
“You did!”
“The Goddess is unknowable and her aims unfathomable, unpredictable, and ineluctable. They might as well be random. We live our brief lives in ignorance and then we die. That’s all.””

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 7 (p. 101)

Chance, Dance

“A writer who does not write is nothing. One may as well be a fisherman who doesn't fish, a stripper who doesn't strip, or a beggar who doesn't beg.”

Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964) writer

7 December 2004
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2004

Fish

“I spent my childhood alone, overweight and ugly, angry at everything, and knowing nothing of a life beyond this sadness.”

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

cubanet.org (May 15, 2000)
2007, 2008

Life, Sadness, Childhood

“Occasionally I talk with people who see doctors as people who do nothing but give of themselves and never receive from anyone else – especially not from their patients. That is totally false. The longer I remain in my profession, the more I realize how much I receive from those who come to me for help.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 113

People, Help, Falseness

“[Hollywood]: It's a nuthouse. The other day a man phoned and wanted me to endorse a certain brand of cigarettes. I had nothing against them and in fact will smoke them or anything else that comes along, but I didn't know why he was bothering me. I thought maybe if I was nice they'd give me a carton as a thank offering, so I rather tentatively broached the matter of remuneration. What was the endorsement worth, I asked, and he said three thousand dollars. What are you going to do in an atmosphere like that?”

Frances Farmer (1913–1970) American actress

Collier's magazine, (8 May 1937)

“It is a very helpful insight to say we are vehicles for our DNA, we are hosts for DNA parasites which are our genes. Those are insights which help us to understand an aspect of life. But it's emotive to say, that's all there is to it, we might as well give up going to Shakespeare plays and give up listening to music and things, because that's got nothing to do with it. That's an entirely different subject.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

An Interview by Sheena McDonald (1995)

Life, Music, Understanding, Help

“We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a colour, a surface. [quote of Van Doesburg, c. 1925]”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

quoted in 'Abstract Art', Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson 1990, p. 107
Hans Arp used some years earlier already this new term: 'concrete art' as a rejection of the term 'abstract art'
1920 – 1926

Quotes, Painting

“These changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes,
Nothing remains quite the same.
Through all of the islands and all of the highlands,
If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes
Song lyrics, Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes (1977)

Change

“A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Preface
1900s, John Bull's Other Island (1907)

Thinking

“Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

World

“I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. the world just pours it out.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Lighthousekeeping (2004)

Love, World, Nature, Light

“Even the blandest (or bluffest) “scholarly work” fears getting into trouble: less with the adversaries whose particular attacks it keeps busy anticipating than through what, but for the spectacle of this very activity, might be perceived as an overall lack of authorization. It is as though, unless the work at once assumed its most densely professional form, it would somehow get unplugged from whatever power station (the academy, the specialization) enables it to speak. Nothing expresses—or allays—this separation anxiety better than the protocol requiring an introduction to “situate” the work within its institutional and discursive matrix. The same nervous ritual that attests a positive dread of being asocial — of failing to furnish the proper authorities with one’s papers, and vice versa — places these possibilities at an infinite remove from a writing whose thorough assimilation, courted from the start, makes it too readable to need to be read much further.”

D. A. Miller (1948) American literary critic

The Novel and the Police (1988), p. vii

Fear, Business, Reading

“There is nothing that God has judged good for us that He has not given us the means to accomplish, both in the natural and the moral world.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 261
Undated

God, World, Nature

“The soul wills and yet does not will:
Its will belongs to Another.
It has eyes only for this beauty;
It no longer seeks to possess, as was its wont --
It lacks the strength to possess such sweetness.
The base of this highest of peaks
Is founded on nichil [nothing],
Shaped nothingness, made one with the Lord.”

Jacopone da Todi (1236–1306) Italian Franciscan mystic

The Lauds

Beauty, Soul

“My work is independent of my will. My best works are created when driven by an inner strength. This has nothing to do with my will. It is that immediate spontaneity of my intense way of living that makes the difference between my work and a lot of other artists who make art works with their mind.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

Letter to H. E. Kramer, 14-11-1927, as quoted in: Bram van Velde, A Tribute, Municipal Museum De Lakenhal Leiden, Municipal Museum Schiedam, Museum de Wieger, Deurne 1994, p. 46 (English translation: Charlotte Burgmans)
1920's

Art, Way

“A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“Yes, a man ought to be courageous enough, loyal enough, and rich enough, not to produce but one prodigious work, in order that this work should be a chef-d'oeuvre, and glorify the man in his creation... If I could have my wish, I would be a millionaire for nothing else save to effect the genesis of a single and unique picture, to consecrate myself thereto and to find my pleasure therein, to suffer and joy in it, until, content with my work, after years of trial, I could sign it and say: 'There my powers stop and there my heart ceases to beat.”

Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867) French painter (1812-1867)

as quoted by Charles Sprague Smith, in Barbizon days, Millet-Corot-Rousseau-Barye publisher, A. Wessels Company, New York, July 1902, pp. 160-61
undated quotes

Pleasure, Courage, Suffering, Heart

“I’m vegan in my fashion and vegetarian in my food. I don’t buy any leather goods or anything made from animal products – no down, nothing. It’s something people should be mindful of. … I think because I came to live in L. A. the transition was simple because vegetarianism is so common there. And I didn’t feel like I was missing that much by being a vegetarian. … I had a moment about 9 years ago. It was so odd. I was talking to my then-boyfriend and he was talking about a fishing trip and how he’d never had the experience of ‘killing’ his food. Even though I had fished my whole life, something just snapped in me and I said, I’m not eating this anymore. … Being vegan is more challenging, especially when it comes to going out to eat. But I found Chicago has great vegetarian and vegan restaurants. … Healthwise, I notice when I wasn’t eating meat anymore I felt so much lighter.”

Torrey DeVitto (1984) actress, model, violinist

"‘Chicago Med’ star Torrey DeVitto takes holistic approach to health, life" https://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment/chicago-med-star-torrey-devitto-takes-holistic-approach-to-health-life/, interview with Chicago Sun-Times (24 January 2018).

Life, People, Food, Feeling

“When we see men still so unhappily bound with prejudice and tradition that they are blind to the beauties and light of the grandest conception that science has yet won for man, we sorrow, and in sympathy again recall the plea that the unhappy Castelli made to the pope who was about to inflict punishment upon Galileo for his demonstration of the movements of the earth: "Your Holiness, nothing that can be done can now hinder the earth from moving."”

Ralph Vary Chamberlin (1879–1967) American biologist (1879-1967)

"Evolution and Theological Belief" (1911)

Men, Beauty, Light, Science

“Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Bach, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.”

Charles Bukowski book Women

Women (1978)

People, Health, Food, Travel

“Needless to say, there is no formal or mathematical content to ID—a “theory” that explains everything, explains nothing, and predicts nothing. ID cannot explain why millions of species were created and then became extinct. Even more importantly, it cannot explain “mistakes” in the design of living organisms such as us.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 2, “Just a Theory: What Scientists Do” (p. 39)

Mathematics

“We have reached the bottom of the 9th inning, and now it is happening, what we normally experience at any ballpark when a visiting pitcher is so close to greatness, even the hometown fans come to root for him. He has come too far, he has journeyed too long to drop it.
(With 2 out) Chris Gwynn standing at the plate, Dennis Martinez delivers…Fastball hit JUST foul along the third base line. Foul by a foot, and now the crowd seems to be inspired. It's as if they take it as a sure sign that Dennis will get what he wants, and what he wants is suddenly what they want. 47,224 on their feet. One pitch away from a pitcher's absolute Nirvana. The pitcher's dream: A perfect game. Dennis Martinez ready, here's the pitch…Popped deep in the air to center field, going deep on it is Marquis Grissom, he's got it on the track!
(Crowd cheers)
Dennis Martinez getting mobbed by his teammates on this 28th of July, 1991, 3:22 pm in the afternoon. Dennis Martinez has reached the ultimate, a perfect game against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Nothing scratchy, nothing flukey, it was a masterpiece! And with tears pouring down his cheeks, he goes down the steps and into the Expo dugout. What a game!”

Vin Scully (1927) American sports broadcaster

Dennis Martinez's perfect game at Dodger Stadium, July 28, 1991, based off of video on mlb.com

Dreams, Angels, Game, Tear

“Your only safety lies in placing yourself in circumstances which will make exertion necessary, and which will secure Divine assistance. Never mind your infirmities. You have nothing to do with them. Your business is to trust, and to go forward. If you wait till the sea becomes land, you will never walk on it. You must leave the ship, and, like Peter, set your feet upon the waves, and you will find them marble.”

Edward Payson (1783–1827) American religious leader

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

Business, Waiting, Sea

“Frank's chromosome was now breeding as true as ever. Blood group, creed, colour of skin — nothing was proof against it. The numbers with shared consciousness, procreating for all they were worth, trebled every generation.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Let's Be Frank (1957)

“In times like these, given the cultural and social context in which we are living, there may be a greater risk of reducing Christian hope to an ideology, to a group slogan or to outward appearances. Nothing is more contrary to Jesus' message! He does not want his disciples to "recite" a part, even that of hope. He wants them "to be" hope and they can only be hope if they remain united to him! He wishes each one of you, dear young friends, to be a small source of hope for your neighbour and, all together, to become an oasis of hope for the society in which you are integrated.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

In Homily for Holy mass on the fourth anniversary of the death of John Paul II http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20090402_anniv-morte-gpii_en.html (2 April 2009) 2009

Hope, Appearance, Time, Parting

“I need to explore and discover and so that has given me, really, to some what seems like courage, but really it's just in my stars, there's nothing I can do about it.... I guess I'll just take my award and run now.”

Joni Mitchell (1943) Canadian musician

Said on being inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, www.chartattack.com (January 29, 2007)

Star, Courage

“They did not put much value on my capacities, which were admittedly few, but genuine. I read everything, I wrote constantly, and I had boyfriends by the barrelful. “Why don’t you do the assigned reading?” they’d ask. “Why don’t you write your papers instead of whatever you’re writing—what is that, a short story?” “Why don’t you expend as much energy on your schoolwork as you do on your boyfriends?” By my senior year I didn’t even bother with excuses, let alone explanations. “Where is your term paper?” asked my history teacher. “I didn’t write it. I have nothing to say on that topic.” “You could have picked another topic.””

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

“I have nothing to say on any historical topic.”
Girl, Interrupted (1994)

History, Teachers, Reading

“I am leaving in order to have peace and quiet, to be rid of the influence of civilization. I want only to do simple, very simple art, and to be able to do that, I have to immerse myself in virgin nature, see no one but savages, live their life, with no other thought in mind but to render, the way a child would, the concepts formed in my brain and to do this with the aid of nothing but the primitive means of art, the only means that are good and true.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 48: quoted in the interview 'Paul Gauguin Discussing His Paintings', Jules Huret, printed in L'Écho de Paris, (23 February 1891)

Life, Peace, Art, Way

“You should always cook eggs slowly" was Joan's advice in the kitchen on 118th Street. Joan did everything slowly, Edie reflected; she spoke, walked, dressed and read slowly, as if savoring every moment. She read everything, every newspaper and magazine. She liked the cartoons of William Steig in The New Yorker, particularly the one of the dejected fellow saying, "My mother loved me but she died." Joan didn't get along with her mother, and felt that she had nothing in common with her parents' country-club existence. She had rebelled against her background by living the New York City bohemian life.”

Joan Vollmer (1923–1951) Common-law wife of William S. Burroughs

About

Love, Life, Parent, Reading

“Socialism without public ownership is nothing but a fantastic apology.”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

The Daily Herald, 1956.
1950s

“Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)

Way, Memory, Heart, Night

“You're gutless. It's how you were made. And that's not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you've never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is.. God help him.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

(288) Amir
The Kite Runner (2003)

God, Help

“They were kept in the dark, squatting there with nothing to dwell upon beyond the fact they were unclean. Even the touch of their shadow would sour the land, blighting crops that grew there…. At the end of their confinement they were led out blinking into the harsh and masculine glare of the sun. Their clothing was taken from them and destroyed. Their anger in darkness turning, unreleased, unspoken, its mouth a red wound…”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

Alan Moore, Swamp Thing #40 The Curse
Swamp Thing (1983–1987)

Sun, Clothes, Anger

““Dame Fairy of the Silver Eyes: allow me to put you a question, which is this: where should I seek the Holy Grail?”
“Determine its location and go to that spot; that is my wise advice.”
Travante spoke tentatively: “If you could guide me to my lost youth, I would be most grateful.”
Twisk jumped high in the air, pirouetted, settled slowly to the ground. “I am not an index of the world’s worries. I know nothing either of Christian crockery nor truant time! And now: silence!”

Jack Vance Lyonesse Trilogy

Source: Lyonesse Trilogy (1983-1989), Madouc (1989), Chapter 8, section 3 (p. 881)

Youth, World, Question, Silence

“Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

"Information Sharing, Patriot Act Vital to Homeland Security" http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040420-2.html speech at Kleinshans Music Hall, Buffalo, New York, 20 April 2004; whitehouse.gov (accessed 2006-05-18) 2000s, 2004

Way, Understanding, Thinking, Change

“If, then, the things achieved by nature are more excellent than those achieved by art, and if art produces nothing without making use of intelligence, nature also ought not to be considered destitute of intelligence. If at the sight of a statue or painted picture you know that art has been employed, and from the distant view of the course of a ship feel sure that it is made to move by art and intelligence, and if you understand on looking at a horologe, whether one marked out with lines, or working by means of water, that the hours are indicated by art and not by chance, with what possible consistency can you suppose that the universe which contains these same products of art, and their constructors, and all things, is destitute of forethought and intelligence? Why, if any one were to carry into Scythia or Britain the globe which our friend Posidonius has lately constructed, each one of the revolutions of which brings about the same movement in the sun and moon and five wandering stars as is brought about each day and night in the heavens, no one in those barbarous countries would doubt that that globe was the work of intelligence.”
Si igitur meliora sunt ea quae natura quam illa quae arte perfecta sunt, nec ars efficit quicquam sine ratione, ne natura quidem rationis expers est habenda. Qui igitur convenit, signum aut tabulam pictam cum aspexeris, scire adhibitam esse artem, cumque procul cursum navigii videris, non dubitare, quin id ratione atque arte moveatur, aut cum solarium vel descriptum vel ex aqua contemplere, intellegere declarari horas arte, non casu, mundum autem, qui et has ipsas artes et earum artifices et cuncta conplectatur consilii et rationis esse expertem putare. [88] Quod si in Scythiam aut in Brittanniam sphaeram aliquis tulerit hanc, quam nuper familiaris noster effecit Posidonius, cuius singulae conversiones idem efficiunt in sole et in luna et in quinque stellis errantibus, quod efficitur in caelo singulis diebus et noctibus, quis in illa barbaria dubitet, quin ea sphaera sit perfecta ratione.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book II, section 34
De Natura Deorum – On the Nature of the Gods (45 BC)

Art, Feeling, Star, Intelligence

“There is nothing so small but that we may honor God by asking His guidance of it, or insult Him by taking it into our own hands.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 264.

God

“I have always been convinced that if a woman once made up her mind to marry a man nothing but instant flight could save him.”

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British playwright, novelist, short story writer

"The escape", p. 309
Short Stories, Collected short stories 1

“Goebbels is and always has been surrounded by mistrust and deep dissimulation. It was this mistrust that accounted for his being set down as a Bolshevist in disguise, though he cares no more for Socialism and Communism than for patriotism and nationalism. Germany? The testing ground for revolution. Socialism? Nothing but a means to an end a means to revolution, but never the goal of one.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: Men in Chaos (1942), p. 47

Communication

“There'd always been something about the boy, he was smart and stupid at the same time. As if he was meant to do everything the wrong way. Junior league ball, the boy was twelve, they subbed him in for the pitcher, good arm but he chokes, eight runs straight, loses the game. Afterward acting like nothing happened. It made no sense. The feeling that gave you, watching your son lose the game, but he just shrugged it off, didn't care.”

Philipp Meyer book American Rust

American Rust (2009)

Stupidity, Way, Feeling, Game

“I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing … Silence … Waves.
— Nothing happens? Or Has everything happened,
and we are standing now, quietly, in the new life?”

Juan Ramón Jimenéz (1881–1958) Spanish poet

"Oceans", as translated by Robert Bly; quoted in Opening Our Moral Eye : Essays, Talks & Poems Embracing Creativity & Community (1996) by Mary Caroline Richards.

Life, Feeling, Silence

“It is not events and the things one sees and enjoys that produce happiness, but a state of mind which can endow events with its own quality, and we must hope for the duration of this state rather than the recurrence of pleasurable events. Is this state actually an interior one, and can we recognize it otherwise than the by the changes it produces in all exterior things? If we exclude sensation and memory from our thoughts, there is nothing left but a wordless emptiness. Where can pure ecstasy and pure happiness be found? As certain phosphorescent fish see the deep water, the seaweed, and the other creatures of the sea light up at their approach but never perceive the movable source of this illumination because it is in themselves, so the happy man, though he is aware of his effect upon others, has difficulty in perceiving his happiness and even greater difficulty in predicting it.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

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

Happiness, Pleasure, Hope, Fish