Quotes about nourishment
page 2

Fran Lebowitz photo

“Bread that must be sliced with an ax is bread that is too nourishing.”

"Food for Thought and Vice Versa" (p. 109).
Metropolitan Life (1978)

George Bird Evans photo
Johannes Kepler photo
Fred Rogers photo

“It's not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It's the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff.”

Fred Rogers (1928–2003) American television personality

Commencement Address at Middlebury College May, 2001 http://web.archive.org/web/20030906163501/http://www.middlebury.edu/offices/pubaff/general_info/addresses/Fred_Rogers_2001.htm

Caspar David Friedrich photo

“Gently rising hills block the view into the distance; line the wishes and desires of the children, who enjoy the blissful moments of the present without wanting to know what lies beyond. Bushes in bloom, nourishing herbs, and sweet-smelling flowers surround the quiet clear stream in which the pure blue of the cloudless sky is reflected like the glorious image of God in the souls of the children... There is no stone to be seen here, no withered branch, no fallen leaves. The whole of nature breathes, peace, joy, innocence and life.”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter

Quote from Friedrich's Diary entry, written Aug. 1803 at Loschwitz; as cited in Religious Symbolism in Caspar David Friedrich, by Colin J. Bailey https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:1m2225&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS-DOCUMENT.PDF, paper; Oct. 1988 - Edinburgh College of Art, pp. 11-12
Friedrich is describing here his first composition of the painting 'Spring', 1803 (a later version he painted in 1808, viewed and described then by Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert)
1794 - 1840

Alvin Toffler photo

“…the sudden rise of a religious movement in the West that restricts the eating of beef and thereby saves billions of tons of grain and provides a nourishing diet for the world as a whole.”

Alvin Toffler (1928–2016) American writer

The Eco-Spasm Report (1975). Quoted in The Higher Taste, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1983, p. 13

Adam Smith photo
Rihanna photo
Lal Bahadur Shastri photo
William Wordsworth photo
Warren Farrell photo

“When I eat a meal, I think of all the people whose labor has contributed to my nourishment, and that thought nourishes my appreciation. I hope it nourishes you too.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Interview by Jonathan Robinson (1994)

James Madison photo
John F. Kennedy photo

“Only the very courageous will be able to keep alive the spirit of individualism and dissent which gave birth to this nation, nourished it as an infant, and carried it through its severest tests upon the attainment of its maturity.”

Profiles in Courage (1956), p. 17 http://books.google.com/books?id=JVEHpHb-VKQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Pro%EF%AC%81les+in+Courage&hl=en&sa=X&ei=aZntUeC6CpOMyAG2_ICgAw&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=individualism%20&f=false
Pre-1960, Profiles in Courage (1956)

Ahmad Sirhindi photo

“Therefore, it is necessary that infidelity should be cursed in order to serve the faith (Islam). Cursing unbelief in the heart is the lesser way. The greater way is to curse it in the heart as well as with the body. In short, cursing means to nourish enmity towards enemies of the true faith, whether that enmity is harboured in the heart when there is fear of injury from them (infidels), or it is harboured in the heart as well as served with the body when there is no fear of injury from them.
In the opinion of this recluse, there is no greater way to obtain the blessings of Allah than to curse the enemies of the faith (be impatient with them). For Allah himself harbours enmity towards the infidels and infidelity…
Once I went to visit a sick man who was close to death. When I meditated on him, I saw that his heart was layered with darknesses. I intended to remove those darknesses. But he was not yet ready for it… When I meditated more deeply, I discovered that those darknesses had gathered due to his friendship with the infidels. They could not be dispersed easily. He had to suffer torments of hell before he could get purged of them…”

Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624) Indian philosopher

Maktubat-i-Imam Rabbani translated into Urdu by Maulana Muhammad Sa’id Ahmad Naqshbandi, Deoband, 1988, Volume III, pp. 660-63. These passages are from a long letter in which Ahmad Sirhindi answered a large number of questions from his disciples.
From his letters

Thomas Fuller (writer) photo

“5210. To nourish a Viper in one's Bosom”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Mikha'il Na'ima photo
Jean Paul photo

“The virtues, like the body, become strong more by labor than by nourishment.”

Jean Paul (1763–1825) German novelist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 368.

“The operational sciences hoped to nourish business management, which however largely ignored them, and the latter continues to be undernourished by the business schools which are fairly broad but shallow everywhere. By over focus on short-range financial values, business management in the United States has lost a dozen major markets to the Japanese, added pollution in all its forms, and enriched itself out of all proportion to its value as just one factor of production.
Action science, developed by the social sciences over many years in relative isolation from the applied physical sciences, and which might otherwise have humanized them and made engineering more productive, was doomed to fail by being on one end of the two-culture problem wherein science and the humanities do not even speak the same language.
I could go on listing a few dozen paradigms: art, law, computer software design, medicine, politics, and architecture, each addressed to a certain context, level, or phase, each good in itself, but each limited to the fields of its origin and its purposes. The methodological problem is the same as if, in designing any large system, each subsystem designer were left to design each subsystem to the best requirements he knew. The overall requirement might not be met; overall harmony could not be achieved, and conflict could ensue to cause failure at the system level.
What is envisioned is a new synthesis, a unified, efficient, systems methodology (SM): a multiphase, multi-level, multi-paradigmatic creative problem-solving process for use by individuals, by small groups, by large multi-disciplinary teams, or by teams of teams. It satisfies human needs in seeking value truths by matching the properties of wanted systems, and their parts, to perform harmoniously with their full environments, over their entire life cycles”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi-xii, cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Leo Tolstoy photo
Mark Pattison photo
André Malraux photo
Georges Bernanos photo
David Smith (rower) photo
Thomas Jefferson photo

“That we are overdone with banking institutions which have banished the precious metals and substituted a more fluctuating and unsafe medium, that these have withdrawn capital from useful improvements and employments to nourish idleness, that the wars of the world have swollen our commerce beyond the wholesome limits of exchanging our own productions for our own wants, and that, for the emolument of a small proportion of our society who prefer these demoralizing pursuits to labors useful to the whole, the peace of the whole is endangered and all our present difficulties produced, are evils more easily to be deplored than remedied.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Abbe Salimankis (1810) ME 12:379 The Writings of Thomas Jefferson "Memorial Edition" (20 Vols., 1903-04) edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, Vol. 12, p. 379; also quoted at "Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government: Money & Banking" at University of Virginia http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1325.htm
Posthumous publications, On financial matters

Niccolo Machiavelli photo
Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swamiji photo

“Just as food (bhojan) nourishes the body, Bhajan (chanting the divine name) nourishes the mind.”

As quoted at Yoga Sangeeta Web site http://yogasangeeta.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&id=42&Itemid=266

J. R. D. Tata photo

“At the Crossroads. The effective execution of a Plan is what counts and not mere planning on paper; it is not what we put on our plate or even what we eat that provides nourishment and growth, but what we digest.”

J. R. D. Tata (1904–1993) Indian businessman

The Central Advisory Council of Industries, New Delhi, August 13, 1965
Keynote: Excerpts from his speeches and chairman's statements to shareholders

Upton Sinclair photo
Ja'far al-Sadiq photo

“Precision, accuracy and pondering in wisdom and sciences, will nourish and develop a person's brain.”

Ja'far al-Sadiq (702–765) Muslim religious person

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 247
Regarding Knowledge & Wisdom, General

Jiddu Krishnamurti photo

“Thought nourishes, sustains and gives continuity to fear and pleasure.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

3rd Public Talk, Bombay (Mumbai), India (14 February 1971)
1970s

Confucius photo

“Let the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection, and a happy order will prevail throughout heaven and earth, and all things will be nourished and flourish.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean

Richard Cobden photo
Burkard Schliessmann photo
John Ruskin photo
Carl Lewis photo
George Ohsawa photo

“"You are what you eat." Nothing else. Never. If you are nourished with cow's milk and later with herbs, you'll become someone whose whole life is good only for being exploited by others.”

George Ohsawa (1893–1966) twentieth century Japanese philosopher

Atomic Age - And the Philosophy of the Far East (1977), p. 53

Francis Marion Crawford photo
Joni Mitchell photo
Jane Roberts photo

“The following pages were written in the Concentration Camp in Dachau, in the midst of all kinds of cruelties. They were furtively scrawled in a hospital barrack where I stayed during my illness, in a time when Death grasped day by day after us, when we lost twelve thousand within four and a half months … “You asked me why I do not eat meat and you are wondering at the reasons of my behavior … I refuse to eat animals because I cannot nourish myself by the sufferings and by the death of other creatures. I refuse to do so, because I suffered so painfully myself that I can feel the pains of others by recalling my own sufferings … I am not preaching … I am writing this letter to you, to an already awakened individual who rationally controls his impulses, who feels responsible, internally and externally, for his acts, who knows that our supreme court is sitting in our conscience … I have not the intention to point out with my finger … I think it is much more my duty to stir up my own conscience … That is the point: I want to grow up into a better world where a higher law grants more happiness, in a new world where God's commandment reigns: You shall love each other.””

Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz (1906–1991) German journalist, poet and prisoner in Dachau concentration camp

“Animals, My Brethren,” in The Dachau Diaries; as quoted in John Robbins, Diet for a New America, H J Kramer, 2011, chapter 5 https://books.google.it/books?id=h-9ARz2YAlgC&pg=PT83.

Georges Duhamel photo
Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka photo
Émile Durkheim photo

“…potted thinking is easily accepted, is concentrated in form, and has lost the vitamins essential to mental nourishment.”

Susan Stebbing (1885–1943) British philosopher

As quoted in Thinking to Some Purpose (1939), p. 63

Caterina Davinio photo

“And I go down the stairs again
with the screeching of my worn out
soul

P. G. tunes instruments
for his golden arm
alchemy in a metropolitan shell

The squeak of time was
thrown back into the cracks
where the plaster has the form of a twisting branch

and my veins are sturdy trunks,
scaly, for drops of green sap
nourishment rising
from the bowels of the earth,
…”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

The Book of Opium (1975 - 1990), (Heroin) P. G.'s Basement
Source: Caterina Davinio, Il libro dell'oppio 1975 – 1990 (The Book of Opium 1975 – 1990), Puntoacapo Editrice, Novi Ligure 2012. English translation by Caterina Davinio and David W. Seaman.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo

“The partnership between the progressive school and the deepened democracy may help to nourish the childlike intensity of ordinary people as they grow older.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Democracy Realizedː The Progressive Alternative (1998), p. 249

Anaïs Nin photo
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley photo
Mircea Eliade photo
Jane Roberts photo
Sarah Fuller Flower Adams photo

“He sendeth sun, he sendeth shower,-
Alike they’re needful to the flower;
And joys and tears alike are sent
To give the soul fit nourishment.
As comes to me or cloud or sun,
Father! thy will, not mine, be done.”

Sarah Fuller Flower Adams (1805–1848) English poet, hymnwriter

"He sendeth Sun, he sendeth Shower", reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 282; and in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Samuel Rutherford photo
Bhakti Tirtha Swami photo
Norman Mailer photo

“Politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

Aleister Crowley photo
Aristophanés photo

“Bdelycleon: It is so that you may know only those who nourish you”

tr. O'Neill 1938, Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Aristoph.+Wasps+704
Wasps (422 BC)

Robert Hall photo
Yoko Shimomura photo

“It [music] is the nourishment for my joy to live.”

Yoko Shimomura (1967) Japanese video game composer

WDR.de, Partituren für PC - Die virtuose Musik der Computerspiele http://www.wdr5.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Sendungen/Scala/2008/08/Manuskripte/08_20_MusikComputerspiele_01.pdf

Octavia E. Butler photo
Walter Benjamin photo

“The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Source: (1940), XVII

Báb photo
Pope Benedict XVI photo
Alauddin Khalji photo

“The Sultan requested the wise men to supply some rules and regulations for grinding down the Hindus, and for depriving them of that wealth and property which fosters disaffection and rebellion. … The people were brought to such a state of obedience that one revenue officer would string twenty khiits, mukaddims, or chaudharis together by the neck, and enforce payment by blows. No Hindu could hold up his head, and in their houses no sign of gold or silver, tonkas or jitals, or of any superfluity was to be seen. These things, which nourish insubordination and rebellion, were no longer to be found. Driven by destitution, the wives of the khuls and mukaddims went and served for hire in the houses of the Musulmans…. The Hindu was to be so reduced as to be left un- able to keep a horse to ride on, to carry arms, to wear fine clothes, or to enjoy any of the luxuries of life. …. I have, therefore, taken my measures, and have made my subjects obedient, so that at my command they are ready to creep into holes like mice. Now you tell me that it is all in accordance with law that the Hindus should be reduced to the most abject obedience. I am an unlettered man, but I have seen a great deal; be assured then that the Hindus will never become submissive and obedient till they are reduced to poverty. I have, therefore, given orders that just sufficient shall be left to them from year to year, of corn, milk, and curds, but that they shall not be allowed to accumulate hoards and property.”

Alauddin Khalji (1266–1316) Ruler of the Khalji dynasty

Tarikh-i Firoz Shahi, of Ziauddin Barani in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. III : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. p. 182 ff.
Quotes from Muslim medieval histories

Walter Warlimont photo
Julia Butterfly Hill photo
Thich Nhat Hanh photo
Lewis Gompertz photo
Charles Sanders Peirce photo

“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

Cloris Leachman photo
Max Scheler photo

“We do not use the word “ressentiment” because of a special predilection for the French language, but because we did not succeed in translating it into German. Moreover, Nietzsche has made it a terminus technicus. In the natural meaning of the French word I detect two elements. First of all, ressentiment is the repeated experiencing and reliving of a particular emotional response reaction against someone else. The continual reliving of the emotion sinks it more deeply into the center of the personality, but concomitantly removes it from the person's zone of action and expression. It is not a mere intellectual recollection of the emotion and of the events to which it “responded”—it is a re-experiencing of the emotion itself, a renewal of the original feeling. Secondly, the word implies that the quality of this emotion is negative, i. e., that it contains a movement of hostility. Perhaps the German word “Groll” (rancor) comes closest to the essential meaning of the term. “Rancor” is just such a suppressed wrath, independent of the ego's activity, which moves obscurely through the mind. It finally takes shape through the repeated reliving of intentionalities of hatred or other hostile emotions. In itself it does not contain a specific hostile intention, but it nourishes any number of such intentions.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Marguerite Yourcenar photo

“It is not difficult to nourish admirable thoughts when the stars are present.”

Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–1987) French writer

Il n'est pas difficile de nourrir des pensées admirables lorsque les étoiles sont présentes.
Alexis (1929)

Anaïs Nin photo
Angela Davis photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo

“If a person is unwilling to make a decisive resolution, if he wants to cheat God of the heart’s daring venture in which a person ventures way out and loses sight of all shrewdness and probability, indeed, takes leave of his senses or at least all his worldly mode of thinking, if instead of beginning with one step he almost craftily seeks to find out something, to have the infinite certainty changed into a finite certainty, then this discourse will not be able to benefit him. There is an upside-downness that wants to reap before it sows; there is a cowardliness that wants to have certainty before it begins. There is a hypersensitivity so copious in words that it continually shrinks from acting; but what would it avail a person if, double-minded and fork-tongued he wanted to dupe God, trap him in probability, but refused to understand the improbable, that one must lose everything in order to gain everything, and understand it so honestly that, in the most crucial moment, when his soul is already shuddering at the risk, he does not again leap to his own aid with the explanation that he has not yet fully made a resolution but merely wanted to feel his way. Therefore, all discussion of struggling with God in prayer, of the actual loss (since if pain of annihilation is not actually suffered, then the sufferer is not yet out upon the deep, and his scream is not the scream of danger but in the face of danger) and the figurative victory cannot have the purpose of persuading anyone or of converting the situation into a task for secular appraisal and changing God’s gift of grace to the venture into temporal small change for the timorous. It really would not help a person if the speaker, by his oratorical artistry, led him to jump into a half hour’s resolution, by the ardor of conviction started a fire in him so that he would blaze in a momentary good intention without being able to sustain a resolution or to nourish an intention as soon as the speaker stopped talking.”

Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong, One Who Prays Aright Struggles In Prayer and is Victorious-In That God is Victorious p. 380-381
1840s, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

Carl Linnaeus photo
Ehud Olmert photo
Samuel Adams photo
Mata Amritanandamayi photo
Rāmabhadrācārya photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
James Branch Cabell photo

“I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

Coth, in Book Four : Coth at Porutsa, Ch. XXVI : The Realist in Defeat
The Silver Stallion (1926)

Dave Eggers photo
Alain Finkielkraut photo

“According to … the French counterrevolutionaries and German Romantics, … the corpus of prejudices was a country’s cultural treasure, its ancient and tested intelligence, present as the consciousness and guardian of its thought. Prejudices were the “we” of every “I”, the past in the present, the revered vessels of the nation’s memory, its judgements carried from age to age. Pretending to spread enlightenment, the philosophes had set out to extirpate these precious residua. … The result was that they had uprooted men from their culture at the very moment when they bragged of how they would cultivate them. … Convinced that they were emancipating souls, they succeeded only in deracinating them. These calumniators of the commonplace had not freed understanding from its chains, but cut it off from its sources. The individual who, thanks to them, must now cast off childish things, had really abandoned his own nature. … The promises of the cogito were illusory: free from prejudice, cut off from the influence of national idiom, the subject was not free but shrivelled and devitalised. … Everyday opinion should therefore be regarded as the soil where thought was nourished, its hearth and sanctuary, … and not, as the philosophes would have it, as some alien authority which overwhelmed and crushed it. … The cogito needed to be steeped in the profundities of the collective mind; the broken links with the past needed repairing; the quest for independence should yield to that for authenticity. Men should abandon their scepticism and give themselves over to the comforting warmth of majoritarian ideas, bowing down before their infallible authority.”

Alain Finkielkraut (1949) French essayist, born 1949

Source: The Undoing of Thought (1988), pp. 25-26.

Francesco Petrarca photo

“You who hear in scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs with which I nourished my heart during my first youthful error, when I was in part another man from what I am now.”

Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse il suono
di quei sospiri ond'io nudriva 'l core
in sul mio primo giovenile errore
quand'era in parte altr'uom da quel ch'i' sono.
Canzone 1, opening lines
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Life

Orrin H. Pilkey photo
Mahmud Tarzi photo

“The oppressed martyrs of our culture have shed blood that nourish the red tulips of our nation.”

Mahmud Tarzi (1865–1933) Afghan writer

An Afghan Intellect By Yama Atta & Hashmat Haidari http://www.afghanmagazine.com/articles/tarzi.html Link

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Gardiner Spring photo
Franz Marc photo
Peter L. Berger photo
William O. Douglas photo
Hariprasad Chaurasia photo

“Half-a-century ago, I came to Odisha to embark on my musical journey. This land has nourished my soul and nurtured my spirit. Through this Gurukul I wish to give back a small part of what I received from here.”

Hariprasad Chaurasia (1938) Indian bansuri player

During the launching of his “Vrindaban Gurukul”, an institution for training in Indian classical music in Orissa. Quoted in A step forward in promotion of classical music, 22 March 2010, 19 December 2013, The Hindu http://www.hindu.com/2010/03/22/stories/2010032258300200.htm,

Leszek Kolakowski photo
Isaac Barrow photo

“These Disciplines [mathematics] serve to inure and corroborate the Mind to a constant Diligence in Study; to undergo the Trouble of an attentive Meditation, and cheerfully contend with such Difficulties as lie in the Way. They wholly deliver us from a credulous Simplicity, most strongly fortify us against the Vanity of Scepticism, effectually restrain from a rash Presumption, most easily incline us to a due Assent, perfectly subject us to the Government of right Reason, and inspire us with Resolution to wrestle against the unjust Tyranny of false Prejudices. If the Fancy be unstable and fluctuating, it is to be poised by this Ballast, and steadied by this Anchor, if the Wit be blunt it is sharpened upon this Whetstone; if luxuriant it is pared by this Knife; if headstrong it is restrained by this Bridle; and if dull it is roused by this Spur. The Steps are guided by no Lamp more clearly through the dark Mazes of Nature, by no Thread more surely through the intricate Labyrinths of Philosophy, nor lastly is the Bottom of Truth sounded more happily by any other Line. I will not mention how plentiful a Stock of Knowledge the Mind is furnished from these, with what wholesome Food it is nourished, and what sincere Pleasure it enjoys. But if I speak farther, I shall neither be the only Person, nor the first, who affirms it; that while the Mind is abstracted and elevated from sensible Matter, distinctly views pure Forms, conceives the Beauty of Ideas, and investigates the Harmony of Proportions; the Manners themselves are sensibly corrected and improved, the Affections composed and rectified, the Fancy calmed and settled, and the Understanding raised and excited to more divine Contemplation. All which I might defend by Authority, and confirm by the Suffrages of the greatest Philosophers.”

Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician

Source: Mathematical Lectures (1734), p. 31: Prefatory Oration