Quotes about nothing
page 67

“When… we have a series of values of a quantity which continually diminish, and in such a way, that name any quantity we may, however small, all the values, after a certain value, are severally less than that quantity, then the symbol by which the values are denoted is said to diminish without limit. And if the series of values increase in succession, so that name any quantity we may, however great, all after a certain point will be greater, then the series is said to increase without limit. It is also frequently said, when a quantity diminishes without limit, that it has nothing, zero or 0, for its limit: and that when it increases without limit it has infinity or ∞ or 1⁄0 for its limit.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Introductory Chapter, pp.9-10
The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Way, Success

“Mother India is not a piece of earth; she is a Power, a Godhead, for all nations have such a Devi supporting their separate existence and keeping it in being. Such Beings are as real and more permanently real than the men they influence but they belong to a higher plane, are part of the cosmic consciousness and being and act here on earth by shaping the human consciousness on which they exercise their influence. It is natural for man who sees only his own consciousness individual, national or racial at work and does not see what works upon it and shapes it, to think that all is created by him and there is nothing cosmic and greater behind it.”

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

December 2, 1946(From a letter.)
India's Rebirth

Men, Exercises, Support, Nature

“I raised, and I have raised, millions of dollars for the vets. I'm helping the vets a lot. I think my popularity with the vets is through the roof, far greater than hers. She's done nothing. All she's done is tell everybody that the vets are in good shape. They're fine. And they're not fine. People are waiting on line for seven days to see a doctor. She thinks it's fine.”

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

2010s, 2016, July, This Week Interview (July 30, 2016)

People, Thinking, Waiting, Help

“Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. Here too nothing follows its spontaneous course, nothing is left to be accomplished by old natural methods. Everything has its cunningly devised implements, its preestablished apparatus; it is not done by hand, but by machinery.”

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

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Nature

“Heaven says nothing, and the whole earth grows rich beneath its silent rule. Men, too, are touched by heaven's virtue; yet, in their greater part, they are creatures of deceit. They are born, it seems, with an emptiness of soul, and must take their qualities wholly from things without. To be born thus empty into this modern age, this mixture of good and ill, and yet steer through life on an honest course to the splendors of success — this is a feat reserved for paragons of our kind, a task beyond the nature of the normal man.”

Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693) Japanese writer

Book I, ch. 1.
The Japanese Family Storehouse (1688)

Life, Men, Age, Soul

“They walked together like that all night, and there was no night, just a slight unreality, a momentary trance, with mist here and there as if the landscape were about to dissolve, and then nothing dissolved and the mist had vanished again. There was a crimson glow on the highest mountain ridges, and shining birds swarming in their thousands over the flame-gilded, mirror-smooth sea. And they went on talking together. Ólafur Kárason had no perception of the passing of time; only that voice with its dark, silk-edged, golden tones reverberated through his consciousness. When a man has lost what he loves most, there is no need to write poetry; the timber of a man's voice expresses all the poetry of life.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Love, Life, Mountain, Bird

“I always thought when I got older that I'd be jealous of my children but I'm not. It's the opposite. I love seeing their possibilities. Nothing makes me as happy as sitting at dinner with loved ones, having a glass of wine with a meal that I've cooked. What could be better?”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

Love, Happiness, Children, Wine

“That classical theory had catastrophic implications for the constitution of matter was barely appreciated by Planck and others at the turn of the century, and played no substantial role in the development of quantum theory until Bohr's work 13 years later.
The lesson that could be drawn from this, and also from the development of general relativity, is that a crisis will only become creative if it is formulated in a mathematically precise manner. This conclusion has an echo in Bell's insistence on having quantum mechanics "fully formulated in mathematical terms, with nothing left to the discretion of the theoretical physicist", but what it really calls for is a critique of the "orthodox" theory fully formulated in mathematical terms with nothing left to the discretion of the critic.”

Kurt Gottfried (1929) American physicist

Does quantum mechanics carry the seeds of its own destruction? (1991)

Mathematics

“I am very happy and thankful to be 'here' [Switzerland] and to remain. Here I can at least work a little on my good days, and be at peace among these simple, kindly people. In this solitude I have fought my way through to the possibility of continuing to live, even suffering so much. My time for circuses, 'cocottes' and company is over [referring to his wild 'Brücke'-years in Berlin]. I made what I could out of it, and I do not think it had been done in that way before. Otherwise there is nothing to link me with those 'événements'. During my 7 years in Berlin I let the whole essence of that kind of thing seep into me so thoroughly that I now know it back to front, and can leave it. Now I have other tasks, and they lie here… I cannot go down again into the throng. I am more than ever afraid of crowds. But more still, my work here is only at the beginning of its possibilities.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

Quote in a letter to architect Henry van de Velde, from Frauenkirch, 5 July 1919; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 224-225
1916 - 1919

Happiness, People, Lie, Peace

“I heard nothing from his excellence [Mr. Keiller bought a picture of 1000 pond and sent Israëls the money but no word about the picture]... I am sure he will be satisfied by it when he hears it is good. I have some practice in those matters of amateurs. The best pictures are the worst for them naturally. They have not the tools to understand it, but when they hear other saying it is fine, they make a high breast saying 'I' ordered that picture..”

Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) Dutch painter

Quote in a letter from The Hague, 19 Feb. 1886, to collector / friend Dr. John Forbes White in Aberdeen; as cited in Jozef Israëls, 1824 – 1911, ed. Dieuwertje Dekkers; Waanders, Zwolle 1999, Bijlage 2., p. 363
Quotes of Jozef Israels, 1871 - 1900

Money, Understanding, Nature

“Burton did not believe in miracles. Nothing happened that could not be explained by physical principles — if you knew all the facts.”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

Source: The Riverworld series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), Chapter 23 (p. 172)

“Experts have
their expert fun
ex cathedra
telling one
just how nothing
can be done.”

Piet Hein (1905–1996) Danish puzzle designer, mathematician, author, poet

Experts
Grooks

“Protocols:
Number 1, paras. 11,12,13,14
The political has nothing in common with the moral.
The word “right is an abstract thought and proved by nothing.
Where does right begin? Where does it end?
In any State in which there is a bad organization of authority, an impersonality of laws and of the rights over multiplying out of liberalism, I find a new right to attack by the right of the strong, and to scatter to the winds all existing forces of order and regulation, to reconstruct all institutions and to become sovereign lord of those who have left to us the rights of their power by laying them down voluntarily in their liberalism.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Law, Strong

“Actually we were brought up to ingratitude - a relentless training through which we were taught to find nothing whatever good in ourselves, whether natural or spiritual.. Conquering pride and conceit, they called it, practising humility, self-praise is no praise - all very well…Was pride really crushed by all this snubbing and humiliation? Was it not rather repressed…Worse still, we learnt this way to cultivate the devil's mirror eye of Hans Andersen's Snow Queen, over-vigilant, super-critical sight, sharpened to discover the worm in every bud, even the tiniest plant-louse! For if one practises this sort of discipline on oneself, day and night, it is asking too much - at any rate of a young girl - to judge one's neighbour by another yard-stick. All the time one's lynx-eyed consciousness remained on the alert, quick to pounce on everything negative - in you and in myself…Hans Andersen well knew how near this attitude is to blasphemy.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1953-54.

Way, Girl, Nature, Time

“Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Thought and Word, viii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books

Money

“From everything, nothing looks to nothing.”

Dejan Stojanovic book The Sign and Its Children

"While the Sign Sleeps," p. 17
The Sign and Its Children (2000), Sequence: “The Sign and Nothing”

“Aspiration, worthy ambition, desires for higher good for good ends — all these indicate a soul that recognizes the beckoning hand of the good Father who would call us homeward towards Himself — all these are the ground and justification for a Christian discontent; but a murmuring, questioning, fault-finding spirit has direct and sympathetic alliance with nothing but the infernal.”

Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–1881) Novelist, poet, editor

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 15.

Soul, Question

“I will pass over my flirtation with journalism as a way of making a living, an idea I dropped when I discovered that in the fifties — unlike now — female journalists always ended up writing the obituaries and the ladies' page. But how was I to make a living? There was not a roaring market in poetry, there, then. I thought of running away and being a waitress, which I later tried, but got very tired and thin; there's nothing like clearing away other people's mushed-up dinners to make you lose your appetite”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

On Writing Poetry (1995)

People, Way, Idea

“When he looked back at the primadonna she was watching them through the spyglasses. As if she might better assess them in that way where they set forth upon the shadowbanded road, the coming twilight. Inhabiting only that ocular ground in which the country appeared out of nothing and vanished again into nothing, tree and rock and the darkening mountains beyond, all of it contained and itself containing only what was needed and nothing more.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

Way, Mountain, Tree, Appearance

“b>It is both more difficult and more complicated to die than people think. Even though the soul craves for nothing but extinction and oblivion forever, the body is a conservative master which will not give up until the very end.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

People, Soul, Thinking

“I'm a fighter by nature and nothing will ever change that.”

Anastacia (1968) American singer-songwriter

Anastacia in breast cancer fight http://web.archive.org/web/20030219063115/http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2679681.stm, BBC Newsroom, January 21, 2003. General Quotes

Nature, Change

“Elak got up and recovered his rapier, loudly thanking Ishtar for his deliverance. "For," he thought, "a little politeness costs nothing, and even though my own skill and not Ishtar's hand saved me, one never knows." Too, there were other dangers to face, and if the gods are capricious, the goddesses are certainly even more so.”

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author

Short fiction, The Spawn Of Dagon (1938)

God

“Singers: We've got nothing always had nothing
nothing but holes and millions of them
Kokol: Living in holes
Polpoch: Dying in holes
Cucurucu: Holes in our bellies
Rossignol: and holes in our clothes”

Peter Weiss Marat/Sade

act 1, scene 16 (p. 35)
Marat/Sade (1963)

Clothes

“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 4

Indecision

“Work hard and be poor, do nothing and get more.”

Thomas Hardy book The Hand of Ethelberta

The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), ch. 1

“My soul is a canvas stretched across four wooden corners and tacked with copper nails that sink into the edges of timber like teeth. My art is nothing less than my salvation.”

Keariene Muizz (1977) American artist

New York Arts Magazine (December 2008)

Art, Soul

“The Christians mistake an incident for a cause, and honestly imagine that the Bible is the foundation of modern liberty and law. They forget physical conditions, make no account of commerce, care nothing for inventions and discoveries, and ignorantly give the credit to their inspired book.”

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

Orthodoxy (1884)

Books, Law, Imagination, Forgetting

““Nothing we did in those days has caused a change.”
“Because of what we did, things remained as they were, rather than getting worse,” I told him.”

Roger Zelazny book This Immortal

Source: This Immortal (1965), p. 131

Change

“A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth — science — which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Bk. IX, ch. 10
War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869)

Women, Men, People, Truth

“Are you Earthseed?
Do you believe?
Belief will not save you.
Only actions
Guided and shaped
By belief and knowledge
Will save you.
Belief
Initiates and guides action—
Or it does nothing.”

Octavia E. Butler book Parable of the Talents

Source: Parable of the Talents (1998), Chapter 20 (p. 382)

Knowledge

“There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

Introduction
The Wedge (1944)

“Yeah there ain't nothing not affected
When two hearts get connected.
All that is, will be, or ever was.
Every single choice we make,
Every breath we get to take,
Is all because two people fell in love.”

Brad Paisley (1972) American country music singer

Two People Fell in Love, written by Brad Paisley, Kelley Lovelace, and Tim Owens.
Song lyrics, Part II (2001)

Love, People, Heart

“When you think that most of us are doomed by divine grace to roast in hell, to say nothing of mortgages and hail and bad crops and extravagant womenfolks, 'tain't any laughing matter!”

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright

The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 3

Hell, Thinking

“people run away from burdens these days. There's nothing they hate more than to be burdened or tied. This accounts for this perverse cult of youthfulness: youth is in itself the yet unburdened state - so we worship youthful looks as the sign and symbol of that craving, almost the promise of its fulfilment. But to attempt to keep it for ever only leads to sterility in every sense: monstrous perversion of youth, destined as blossom of the fruit…”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1953-54.

Hate, People, Youth, Sense

“From the Latin word "imponere", base of the obsolete English "impone" and translated as "impress" in modern English, Nordic hackers have coined the terms "imponator" (a device that does nothing but impress bystanders, referred to as the "imponator effect") and "imponade" (that "goo" that fills you as you get impressed with something – from "marmelade", often referred as "full of imponade", always ironic).”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Polymorphism in Common Lisp http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/28cb9d4217fe6dc3 (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

“"A curse," said Lee. "Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling brain: 'homosexual'. I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted simpering female impersonators I'd seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion- just a minute, Doctore Kildare, this isn't your script. I might as well have destroyed myself, ending an existence which seemed to offer nothing but grotesque misery and humiliation. Nobler, I thought to die a man than life on, a sex monster. It was a wise old queen - Bob, we called her- who taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see, to conquer prejudice and ignorance and hate with knowledge and sincerity and love. Whenever you are threatened by a hostile presence, you emit a thick cloud of love like an octopus squirts out ink."”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

Source: Queer: A Novel (1985), Chapter Three

Love, Life, Hate, Hostility

“Believing in the one thing
That has gotten us this far — That's what love is for
To help us through it
That's what love is for
Nothing else can do it
Melt our defenses
Bring us back to our senses
Give us strength to try once more
Baby, that's what love is for.”

Amy Grant (1960) American musician

"That's What Love Is For", co-written with Michael Omartian and Mark Mueller
Song lyrics, Heart in Motion (1991)

Love, Sense, Help, Baby

“Nothing embitters my old age [like] the circulation of absurd stories that I retire as civilization advances, that I shun the white men and seek the Indians, and that now even when old, I seek to retire beyond the second Alleganies.”

Daniel Boone (1734–1820) American settler

As quoted in Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (1993) by John Mack Faragher p. 302

Men, Age

“So little is said about the scholarship boy in pages and pages of educational literature. Nothing is said of the silence that comes to separate the boy from his parents.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Education, Boy, Literature, Parent

“Great goddess, to whose throne in Cynthian fires,
This earthly altar endless fumes expires;
Therefore, in fumes of sighs and fires of grief,
To fearful chances thou send'st bold relief,
Happy, thrice happy type, and nurse of death,
Who, breathless, feeds on nothing but our breath,
In whom must virtue and her issue live,
Or die for ever.”

George Chapman (1559–1634) English dramatist, poet, and translator

Hymnus in noctem, line 1
The Shadow of Night (1594)

Death, Happiness, Fear, Chance

“Is it life? I would rather be without it, for there is quare small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night's porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed jars and foreign bacon. Many a man has spent a hundred years trying to get the dimensions of it and when he understands it at last and entertains the certain pattern of it in his head, be the hokey he takes to his bed and dies. He dies like a poisoned sheepdog. There is nothing so dangerous you can't smoke it, nobody will give you tuppence halfpenny for the half of it, and it kills you in the wind-up. It is a quare contraption, very dangerous, a certain death-trap.”

Flann O'Brien (1911–1966) Irish writer

Page 165
The Various Lives Of Keats And Chapman (2010)

Life, Death, Drink, Understanding

“Science can explain why we value things, but the same goes for values we reject as wrong. That's why scientific explanations of what we value cannot justify those values or serve as a basis to enforce them on others. Since science is the only possible source of justification, if it doesn't work to justify values, nothing does.”

Alexander Rosenberg (1946) American philosopher

The Atheist's Guide to Reality (2011)

Science

“You know we’ve been teaching the kids that they’re nothing but animals and today a lot of them act like animals.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Age of the Earth

Animals

“That life had been one without excitement, with no adventure. It had been too safe. All the elements that made it up were right there before his eyes, and nothing new could ever be expected. It was like, he had once thought, a little plastic boat that would sail on forever, without incident, until it finally sank, which would be a secret relief to all.”

Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977), Chapter 4 (p. 64)

Life, Secret

“Fascinated in the sense that it’s advanced human rights; it’s advanced in the sense that everything in your license, everything in your birth certificate can now be determined by the person himself. Nothing to be determined by the accident of birth. That is advanced citizenship, and I am all for it.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Outrage http://outragemag.com/is-chiz-your-vice-president-for-eleksyon2016/ 2016

Birth, Sense, Personality

“The Protestant churches generally hold that the elements of the sacrament are flesh and blood only in a tropical sense; they nourish our souls as meat and the juice of it would our bodies. But the Catholics maintain that they are literally just that; although they possess all the sensible qualities of wafer-cakes and diluted wine. But we can have no conception of wine except what may enter into a belief, either —
# That this, that, or the other, is wine; or,
# That wine possesses certain properties.
Such beliefs are nothing but self-notifications that we should, upon occasion, act in regard to such things as we believe to be wine according to the qualities which we believe wine to possess. The occasion of such action would be some sensible perception, the motive of it to produce some sensible result. Thus our action has exclusive reference to what affects the senses, our habit has the same bearing as our action, our belief the same as our habit, our conception the same as our belief; and we can consequently mean nothing by wine but what has certain effects, direct or indirect, upon our senses; and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon. Now, it is not my object to pursue the theological question; and having used it as a logical example I drop it, without caring to anticipate the theologian's reply. I only desire to point out how impossible it is that we should have an idea in our minds which relates to anything but conceived sensible effects of things. Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects; and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves, and mistake a mere sensation accompanying the thought for a part of the thought itself. It is absurd to say that thought has any meaning unrelated to its only function. It is foolish for Catholics and Protestants to fancy themselves in disagreement about the elements of the sacrament, if they agree in regard to all their sensible effects, here or hereafter.
It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The final sentence here is an expression of what became known as the Pragmatic maxim, first published in "Illustrations of the Logic of Science" in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (January 1878), p. 286

Soul, Motivation, Idea, Question

“There's been a lot of analysis about the so-called gender wars... me playing the so-called gender card because heavens knows no-one noticed I was a woman until I raised it, but against that background, I do want to say about all of these issues, the reaction to being the first female Prime Minister does not explain everything about my Prime Ministership, nor does it explain nothing about my Prime Ministership. I've been a little bit bemused by those colleagues in the newspaper who have admitted that I have suffered more pressure as a result of my gender than other Prime Ministers in the past but then concluded that it had zero effect on my political position or the political position of the Labor Party. It doesn't explain everything... it explains some things. And it is for the nation to think in a sophisticated way about those shades of grey. What I am absolutely confident of is it will be easier for the next woman and the woman after that and the woman after that - and I'm proud of that.”

Julia Gillard (1961) Australian politician and lawyer, 27th Prime Minister of Australia

Resignation Press Conference after leadership ballot "Australia's Prime Minister Julia Gillard Defeated In Shock Leadership Challenge by Kevin Rudd" http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/06/26/australia-julia-gillard-defeated-leadership-contest_n_3501448.html?utm_hp_ref=uk, in Huffington Post, 26 June 2013

War, Way, Confidence, Thinking

“The doctrine of the Essens is this: That all things are best ascribed to God. They teach the immortality of souls, and esteem that the rewards of righteousness are to be earnestly striven for; and when they send what they have dedicated to God into the temple, they do not offer sacrifices because they have more pure lustrations of their own; on which account they are excluded from the common court of the temple, but offer their sacrifices themselves; yet is their course of life better than that of other men; and they entirely addict themselves to husbandry. It also deserves our admiration, how much they exceed all other men that addict themselves to virtue, and this in righteousness; and indeed to such a degree, that as it hath never appeared among any other men, neither Greeks nor barbarians, no, not for a little time, so hath it endured a long while among them. This is demonstrated by that institution of theirs, which will not suffer any thing to hinder them from having all things in common; so that a rich man enjoys no more of his own wealth than he who hath nothing at all. There are about four thousand men that live in this way, and neither marry wives, nor are desirous to keep servants; as thinking the latter tempts men to be unjust, and the former gives the handle to domestic quarrels; but as they live by themselves, they minister one to another. They also appoint certain stewards to receive the incomes of their revenues, and of the fruits of the ground; such as are good men and priests, who are to get their corn and their food ready for them. They none of them differ from others of the Essens in their way of living, but do the most resemble those Dacae who are called Polistae [dwellers in cities].”

Josephus on the Essenes

AJ 18.1.5
Antiquities of the Jews

Life, Men, God, Food

“No dream is too big, no challenge is too great. Nothing we want for our future is beyond our reach. America will no longer settle for anything less than the best.”

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

Victory Speech http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/us/politics/trump-speech-transcript.html (9 November 2016) 2010s, 2016, November

Dreams, Future

“How we come to have the world-views we do is an interesting question. No doubt reason plays a part, but human needs for meaning and purpose are usually more important. At times personal taste may be what decides the issue. There is nothing to say that, when all the work of reason is done, only one view of the world will remain. There may be many that fit everything that can be known. In that case you might as well choose the view of the world you find most interesting or beautiful. Adopting a world-view is more like selecting a painting to furnish a room than testing a scientific theory. The test is how it fits with your life.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Freedom for Über-Marionettes: What Science Won't Tell You (p. 150)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

Life, World, Beauty, Question

“Here is a list of some of the questions and their short answers (…) The interesting thing is to recognize how totally unavoidable they are, provided you place your confidence in science to provide the answers
Is there a God? No.
What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is.
What is the purpose of the universe? There is none.
What is the meaning of life? Ditto.
Why am I here? Just dumb luck.
Does prayer work? Of course not.
Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Are you kidding?
Is there free will? Not a chance!
What happens when we die? Everything pretty much goes on as before, except us.
What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is no moral difference between them.
Why should I be moral? Because it makes you feel better than being immoral.
Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don't like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes.
What is love, and how can I find it? Love is the solution to a strategic interaction problem. Don't look for it; it will find you when you need it.
Does history have any meaning or purpose? It's full of sound and fury, but signifies nothing.
Does the human past have any lessons for our future? Fewer and fewer, if it ever had any to begin with.”

Alexander Rosenberg (1946) American philosopher

The Atheist's Guide to Reality (2011)

Love, Life, God, Feeling

“Since it is hardly likely that contemporary critics seriously mean to bar prose narratives that are unrealistic from the domain of literature, one suspects that a special standard is being applied to sexual themes. … There is nothing conclusive in the well-known fact that most men and women fall short of the sexual prowess that people in pornography are represented as enjoying; that the size of organs, number and duration of orgasms, variety and feasibility of sexual powers, and amount of sexual energy all seem grossly exaggerated. Yes, and the spaceships and the teeming planets depicted in science-fiction novels don’t exist either. The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography or science-fiction from being literature. … The materials of the pornographic books that count as literature are, precisely, one of the extreme forms of human consciousness. Undoubtedly, many people would agree that the sexually obsessed consciousness can, in principle, enter into literature as an art form. … But then they usually add a rider to the agreement which effectively nullifies it. They require that the author have the proper “distance” from his obsessions for their rendering to count as literature. Such a standard is sheer hypocrisy, revealing one again that the values commonly applied to pornography are, in the end, those belonging to psychiatry and social affairs rather than to art. (Since Christianity upped that ante and concentrated on sexual behavior as the root of virtue, everything pertaining to sex has been a “special case” in our culture, evoking particularly inconsistent attitudes.) Van Gogh’s paintings retain their status as art even if it seems his manner of painting owed less to a conscious choice of representational means than to his being deranged and actually seeing reality the way he painted it. … What makes a work of pornography part of the history of art rather than of trash is not distance, the superimposition of a consciousness more conformable to that of ordinary reality upon the “deranged consciousness” of the erotically obsessed. Rather, it is the originality, thoroughness, authenticity, and power of that deranged consciousness itself, as incarnated in a work.”

Susan Sontag book Styles of Radical Will

“The Pornographic Imagination,” pp. 45-47
Styles of Radical Will (1966)

Women, Men, People, Books

“If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity.”

Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) Hungarian-British author and journalist

Epilogue
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)

Imagination, Reality, Time, Past

“You should only boast about having nothing to boast about!”

Fausto Cercignani (1941) Italian scholar, essayist and poet

Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni

“The dreamer sometimes falls into the doldrums, but is said to emerge from them again. And the absent-minded person also makes up for it with bouts of perspicacity. Sometimes he is a person whose right to exist has a justification that is not always immediately obvious to you, or more usually, you may absent-mindedly allow it to slip from your mind. Someone who has been wandering about for a long time, tossed to and fro on a stormy sea, will in the end reach his destination. Someone who has seemed to be good for nothing, unable to fill any job, any appointment, will find one in the end and, energetic and capable, will prove himself quite different from what he seemed at first.”

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

1880s, 1880, Letter to Theo (Cuesmes, July 1880)

Time, Personality, Sea

“Creation is in fact a fault, man's famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator's example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The New Gods (1969)

God, Appearance

“We are then brought to consider Platinotype, which, on the whole, may be regarded as the most suitable for general pictorial work. Its power of rendering relative tones and atmosphere is perhaps unequalled, whilst, although every one who has used it has sometimes wished that the undeveloped image were more visible, yet the pale, ghost-like print made by the light is very much better than nothing at all, and, indeed, may often be quite sufficient to guide us in our endeavours to control the action of light in a manner to be shortly described.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing methods and their bearing on pictorial photography, p. 72

Light

“Nothing tends to materialize man and to deprive his work of the faintest trace of mind more than the extreme division of labor.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter XV-IXX, Chapter XVIII.

“There’s nothing to fear, Lebannen,” he said gently, mockingly. “They were only the dead.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 11, "Selidor"

Fear, Dead

“Nothing is impossible. Just put a lot of effort and dedication because any of you can be the same or better than Yamilet…”

Yamilet Peña (1992) female gymnast from the Dominican Republic

Quoted in Manauri Jorge, 2012.
ARS Universal Press Conference, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 2012-08-19

Effort

“I have nothing but scorn for the notion of an Islamic bomb. There is no such thing as an Islamic bomb or a Christian bomb. Any such weapon is a means of terrorizing humanity, and we are against the manufacture and acquisition of nuclear weapons. This is in line with our definition of—and opposition to—terrorism.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Time (8 June 1981) " An Interview with Gaddafi http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,922551-2,00.html" Interviews

“On the other hand, the cheapest form of pride is national pride; for the man affected therewith betrays a want of individual qualities of which he might be proud, since he would not otherwise resort to that which he shares with so many millions. The man who possesses outstanding personal qualities will rather see most clearly the faults of his own nation, for he has them constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool, who has nothing in the world whereof he could be proud, resorts finally to being proud of the very nation to which he belongs. In this he finds compensation and is now ready and thankful to defend, … all the faults and follies peculiar to it.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

From 'Parerga and Paralipomena', Vol. 1, Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, 'What A Man Represents', pp. 360
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Life, Wisdom, World, Fools

““Your concept is a tremendous network of inconsistencies.”
“In what way?” the countess said, not very much interested.
“It seems to be based on reverence for the young, and an extremely patient and protective attitude toward their physical and mental welfare. Yet you make them live in these huge caves, utterly out of contact with the natural world, and you teach them to be afraid of death—which of course makes them a little insane, because there is nothing anybody can do about death. It is like teaching them to be afraid of the second law of thermodynamics, just because living matter sets that law aside for a very brief period.”

James Blish book A Case of Conscience

Source: A Case of Conscience (1958), Chapter 12 (pp. 149-150)

Death, World, Law, Way

“Those who think the information brought out at a criminal trial is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth are fools. Prosecuting or defending a case is nothing more than getting to those people who will talk for your side, who will say what you want said.”

F. Lee Bailey (1933) American lawyer

New York Times, 20 September 1970.

People, Truth, Fools, Thinking

“Their lordships had some experience in that House two years ago, when restrictive laws were passed and when the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended…The effect of these measures was, in his opinion, the cause of a great portion of the discontent which now prevailed. After all the experience which they had had, there was no attempt at conciliation, no concession to the people; nothing was alluded to but a resort to coercion…The natural consequence of such a system, when once begun, was that it could not be stopped: discontents begot the necessity of force; the employment of force increased discontents: these would demand the exercise of new powers, till by degrees they would depart from all the principles of the constitution…Could government rest with confidence upon the sword for security? It was impossible that a government of such a nature could exist in England…without that spirit which the knowledge of the advantages they enjoyed under their constitution infused, all their energies would flag, and all their feelings by which their glory as a nation had been established, would be utterly dissipated.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Speech in the House of Lords (23 November 1819). Parliamentary Debates, vol. xli, pp. 7-19, quoted in Alan Bullock and Maurice Shock (ed.), The Liberal Tradition from Fox to Keynes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 5-6.
1810s

People, Law, Feeling, Exercises

“The reality is this is a war. These people are waging war on us. This has gone on for 1,400 years. This is nothing new. And the whole time while this goes on, the police leaders or political leaders want to invite more! They want to invite more!”

Tommy Robinson (1982) English right-wing activist

"Former EDL leader Tommy Robinson arrives at scene of London terror attack" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/22/former-edl-leader-tommy-robinson-arrives-scene-london-terror/, The Telegraph (22 March 2017) 2017

War, People, Reality, Time

“There is nothing in nature so impracticable as the obstinacy of your true husband; it is the insurmountable obstacle—the Alps no female vinegar can melt.”

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

Other Gift Books

Nature

“The person of faith, (Henri Nouwen) says, is able to see in that moment the faithful presence of God, the one who has never left us, who keeps his word. He comes and picks up those bricks from the crumbling wall and begins to fashion something new, not a wall but a concave space, where we are invited to a deeper intimacy with the ones we love and with God. It is in that greater sharing, that greater intimacy that we begin to realize that the real stability in life is not the wall of our accomplishments but the faithfulness of the ones we love and the faithfulness of God, because both reveal how rich life is in keeping a promise, in keeping one's word. There is nothing to compare with having someone keep their word to us.”

Blase J. Cupich (1949) Catholic bishop

"Homily for the Marriage Jubilee Mass", at Holy Name Cathedral, August 30, 2015, reprinted in the online edition of The Catholic New World, the Chicago archdiocesan newspaper, in the Archbishop's Column (September 20 - October 3, 2015)

Love, Life, God, Faith

“I know nothing of man’s rights, or woman’s rights; human rights are all that I recognise.”

Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) American abolitionist

Letter 15 (October 20, 1837).
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837)

“Protocols
Number 21, paras 1, 11
To what I reported to you at the last meeting I shall say nothing more, because they have fed us with national moneys opf the Goyim….
We have taken advantage of the venality of administrators and slackness of rulers to get our moneys twice, thrice, and more times over, by lending to Goy governments moneys which were not.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Money, Time

“For many years he had suffered from consumption, aggravated perhaps by his work of glass polishing. On Sunday, February 21, 1677, the end came unexpectedly, and almost suddenly. …
Credit must be given to Colerus [John Kohler]… for his downright contradiction of the tales concerning Spinoza's death-bed which were circulated, it would seem, by persons who thought it would tend to edification to represent Spinoza as the blustering infidel of popular orthodox polemics, who is invariably assailed by doubt and disquietude in his last moments, and as invariably strives to disguise them with feeble bravado. Colerus very honestly says that the people of the house… knew nothing of any such matters, and did not believe a word of them.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Selected works, Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1880)

Death, People, Suffering, Housing

“O! what a Godlike Power is that of doing Good! — I envy the Rich and the Great for nothing else!”

Samuel Richardson book Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded

Page 312
Pamela (1740)

Envy

“A youth loathes nothing more than his own callowness. Experience is his object. Experience, however ghastly, for the lad longs before all for the lined face and the chiseled squint of the vetern.”

Steven Pressfield book Last of the Amazons

Damon p. 91
Last of the Amazons (2002)

Youth

“He who does nothing is the one who does nothing.'…'Blessed are the lazy who lie in boats, for they shall inherit a suntan.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Stephanie Parker, Chapter 9, p. 107
2000s, The Choice (2007)

Lie

“Dialogue in Hell:
Ninth Dialogue

Machiavelli: And where have you ever seen that a constitution, really worthy of the name, really durable, has ever been the result of popular deliberation? A constitution must come forth fully armed from the head of one man alone, or it is nothing but a work condemned to oblivion. Without homogeneity, without linking of parties, without practical strength, it will necessarily bear the imprint of all the weaknesses of sight that have presided at its composition….

Montesquieu: …One would say, to hear you, that you are going to draw a people out of chaos or out of the deep night of their first origins….

Machiavelli: I do not say no: therefore you will see that I need not destroy your institutions from top to bottom to arrive at my goal. It will suffice me to modify the arrangements and to change the methods.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

People, Hell, Change, Drawing

“Say, He Whom God shall make manifest is indeed the Primal Veil of God. Above this Veil ye can find nothing other than God, while beneath it ye can discern all things emanating from God. He is the Unseen, the Inaccessible, the Most Exalted, the Best Beloved.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

XVI, 17
The Kitáb-I-Asmá

God

“Lone I muse but feel not lonely,
Covert solitude’s my lore;
For my company I only
Want my thoughts and nothing more.”

Lope De Vega book La Dorotea

A mis soledades voy,
de mis soledades vengo,
porque para andar conmigo
me bastan mis pensamientos.
Act I, sc. iv. Translation from John Armstrong Crow An Anthology of Spanish Poetry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979) p. 107.
La Dorotea (1632)

Feeling, Solitude

“I will have nothing to do with this pseudo-religious approach to politics. I part company with the Congress and Gandhi. I do not believe in working up mob hysteria. Politics is a gentleman's game.”

Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) Founder and 1st Governor General of Pakistan

Speaking to journalist Durga Das in London (December 1920) as quoted in Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity : The Search for Saladin (1997) by Akbar S. Ahmed, p. 67

Game, Parting

“There are symbolic dreams—dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities—realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call honorary town councilors of the worm universe. In the worm universe, there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers. A cow is bound to get her pliers sometimes. It has nothing to do with me. Yet the fact that the cow chose me to obtain her pliers changes everything.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 12, Wherefore the Worm Universe

Dreams, Reality, Universe, Change

“If the young are watched too closely, if they are kept habitually under surveillance, the spring of action is weakened, the power of initiative is destroyed, and they become mediocre, commonplace, mechanical men and women, from whom nothing excellent or distinguished may be expected. Parents and teachers … must so deal with the young as to bring them little by little under the control of reason and conscience; and in this, nothing thwarts more surely than excessive supervision, for it draws attention from the inner view and voice to the eyes of the watchers. It may cultivate a love of decency and propriety, but not the creative feeling that we live with God and that righteousness is life.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 257-258

Love, Life, Women, Men

“During all my wandering through two decades and two continents, I've found nothing more pathetic than the universal misery of young boys trying to charm young girls.”

Stephen Vizinczey (1933) Hungarian-Canadian writer

In Praise of Older Women (1965)

Girl, Boy, Universe

“753. By doing nothing we learne to do ill.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Learning

“I can guarantee they (Gambia) had had no contacts with (People's Republic of) China. We have cross-checked with various sources and were sure that the case had nothing to do with (People's Republic of) China. (People's Republic of) China has had no role in the case (Gambia's termination of diplomatic relations with ROC) so far.”

David Lin (1950) Taiwanese politician

David Lin (2013) cited in " Taiwan declares ties with the Gambia ‘terminated’ http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2013/11/19/2003577196/2" on Taipei Times, 19 November 2013

People

“"What is Bazarov?" Arkady smiled. "Would you like me to tell you, uncle, what he really is?""Please do, nephew.""He is a nihilist!""What?" asked Nikolai Petrovich, while Pavel Petrovich lifted his knife in the air with a small piece of butter on the tip and remained motionless."He is a nihilist," repeated Arkady."A nihilist," said Nikolai Petrovich. "That comes from the Latin nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who… who recognizes nothing?""Say — who respects nothing," interposed Pavel Petrovich and lowered his knife with the butter on it."Who regards everything from the critical point of view," said Arkady."Isn't that exactly the same thing?" asked Pavel Petrovich."No, it's not the same thing. A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered.""Well, and is that good?" asked Pavel Petrovich. "That depends, uncle dear. For some it is good, for others very bad.""Indeed. Well, I see that's not in our line. We old-fashioned people think that without principles, taken as you say on faith, one can't take a step or even breathe. Vous avez changé tout cela; may God grant you health and a general's rank, and we shall be content to look on and admire your… what was the name?""Nihilists," said Arkady, pronouncing very distinctly."Yes, there used to be Hegelists and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you will manage to exist in the empty airless void; and now ring, please, brother Nikolai, it's time for me to drink my cocoa."”

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) Russian writer

Source: Father and Sons (1862), Ch. 5.

God, People, Health, Faith

“I have nothing to teach you that will help you to make a living. [as art teacher, advising his students]”

John Sloan (1871–1951) American painter

Source: Loughery, John. John Sloan: Painter and Rebel. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. , pp. 224-225

Art, Teachers, Help

“Love is one of the great mysteries of life. There is nothing more sacred, nothing more mysterious, nothing more powerful. I come back to that – great literature is nearly always full of love, in a very broad sense. … You come out of the book with a warm feeling.”

John Minford (1946) New Zealand sinologist

Master-Insight.com Interview (2016)

Love, Life, Books, Feeling

“Nothing prevents us being natural so much as the desire to appear so.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

Rien n'empêche tant d'être naturel que l'envie de le paraître.
Maxim 431.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Nature, Appearance

“There's nothing that's ever happened in the world that didn't start in one human mind.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

2000s, In Depth with Tom Clancy (2002)

World

“There is nothing worse than having your personal problems become somebody else's entertainment.”

Maureen O'Hara (1920–2015) Irish-American film actress and singer

Source: Tis Herself (2004), p.239

Problem, Personality

“The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, so boy get running
It's the best years of your life they want to steal.”

Joe Strummer (1952–2002) British musician, singer, actor and songwriter

“Clampdown” (1979)

Life, Men, Boy

“Nothing ends without breaking, because everything is endless.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Nada termina sin romperse, porque todo es sin fin.
Voces (1943)

“There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

The Defeat of Death
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XXIII - Death

Death

“"He who wants to protect everything, protects nothing," is one of the fundamental rules of defense.”

Adolf Galland (1912–1996) German World War II general and fighter pilot

Quoted in "The First and the Last," 1954.
The First and the Last (1954)

“As for drugs, my impression is that their effect was almost completely negative, simply removing people from meaningful struggle and engagement. Just the other day I was sitting in a radio studio waiting for a satellite arrangement abroad to be set up. The engineers were putting together interviews with Bob Dylan from about 1966-7 or so (judging by the references), and I was listening (I'd never heard him talk before — if you can call that talking). He sounded as though he was so drugged he was barely coherent, but the message got through clearly enough through the haze. He said over and over that he'd been through all of this protest thing, realized it was nonsense, and that the only thing that was important was to live his own life happily and freely, not to "mess around with other people's lives" by working for civil and human rights, ending war and poverty, etc. He was asked what he thought about the Berkeley "free speech movement" and said that he didn't understand it. He said something like: "I have free speech, I can do what I want, so it has nothing to do with me. Period."”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

If the capitalist PR machine [term used in the question] wanted to invent someone for their purposes, they couldn't have made a better choice. Reply (via email) to Douglas Lain, June 1994 https://web.archive.org/web/20021214024709/http://www.douglaslain.com/diet-soap.html Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994

Life, War, People, Understanding

“In this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.”

Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977), Chapter 4 (p. 64)

World

“To protect and serve their own interests, the wealthy and privileged have used feminists and pacifists to promote a masculinity that has nothing to do with being good at being a man, and everything to do with being what they consider a “good man.” Their version of a good man is isolated from his peers, emotional, effectively impotent, easy to manage, and tactically inept.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

On Being a Good Man
The Way of Men (2012)

“How and among whom this Palladian taste became formed it will be our business presently to inquire. The first point to note is that it had nothing to do with Wren, Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor, or Archer except in so far as, by excluding the works of these architects from salvation, it was better able to distinguish its own particular sort of grace. The second point to note is that, once formulated, the Palladian taste became the taste of the second generation of the Whig aristocracy, the sons of that Whiggery which dated its accession to power from 1688 and to which, in Anne’s time, artistic and intellectual leadership, once centred at the Court, had passed. This second Whig generation had strong beliefs and strong dislikes, conspicuous among the latter being the Stuart dynasty, the Roman Church, and most things foreign. In architectural terms that meant the Court taste of the previous half-century, the works of Sir Christopher Wren in particular and anything in the nature of Baroque.”

John Summerson (1904–1992) British architectural historian

Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830

Business, Nature, Strong, Time

“…there is nothing more corrupting, nothing more destructive of the noblest and finest feelings of our nature, than the exercise of unlimited power.”

William Henry Harrison (1773–1841) American general and politician, 9th President of the United States (in office in 1841)

Letter to Simón Bolívar (27 September 1829). Quoted in The Life of Major-General William Henry Harrison: Comprising a Brief Account of His Important Civil and Military Services (Philadelphia, PA: Grigg & Elliot, 1840)

Feeling, Exercises, Nature

“There is no excuse whatever for uncritically accepting what one takes over from others. For no thing is good or bad in itself, only as it relates to specific circumstances and to our own intentions. This fact means that there is nothing guaranteed or absolute about conventions; it gives us the daily responsibility of distinguishing good from bad.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

“And so what remains in our lives? What remains in this whole, entire world to do? And like I was saying, where does Mr. Mind take you and put you every time? Where does that mind place you? It places you every time at a place that has nothing to do with the outrageous that has nothing, has nothing to do with the with the beautiful, has nothing to do with the incredible, has nothing to with anything except darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness, darkness. And this is where the mind puts you.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Holi Festival, Miami, Florida, on Sunday, April 1978, printed in Divine Times April/May 1978 Volume 7, Number 3
1970s

World, Beauty, Time

Quotes about nothing page 67

Quotes about nothing
page 67