Quotes about other
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“I said that to invite minds to concern themselves with Mind and its destiny was a sign and symptom of the times. Would that idea have occurred to me, had not a whole body of impressions been sufficiently significant and powerful to reflect themselves in me, and for that reflection to become action? And that action, which consists of expressing it in your presence, would not perhaps have been accomplished had I not felt that my impressions were those of many other people, that the sensation of a diminution of mind, of a menace to culture, of a twilight of the most pure gods was a sensation which imposed itself with increasing strength on all those who are capable of feeling something in the order of superior values of which we are speaking.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), p. 172

God, People, Feeling, Idea

“There is no city that is truly one other than this city that we [anahnti] are involved in bringing forth.”

Averroes (1126–1198) Medieval Arab scholar and philosopher

Averroes, Ralph Lerner (1974) Averroes On Plato's Republic. p. xxiv

“I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this — which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never — the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

"Letter from a Region of My Mind" in The New Yorker (17 November 1962); republished as "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind" in The Fire Next Time (1963)

Love, People, Problem, Learning

“Every man who is truly a man must learn to be alone in the midst of all others, and if need be against all others.”

Romain Rolland (1866–1944) French author

As quoted in A Book of French Quotations‎ (1963) by Norbert Guterman, p. 365

Learning

“… the other day, I went to a chiropractor. He's just a regular chiropractor. Whenever I meet someone who doesn't know me, they say, 'Oh you're the guy who bites the heads off everything.' I get kind of cheesed off with it, but at least they remember. The thing that pisses me off is that that's not what I'm about. If that's what you think Ozzy Osbourne's about, then you're way off.”

Ozzy Osbourne (1948) English heavy metal vocalist and songwriter

Launch.com, October 10, 1998

Way, Guy, Thinking

“The very reason [ the Greeks] got so far is that they knew how to pick up the spear and throw it onward from the point where others had left it. Their skill in the art of fruitful learning was admirable. We ought to be learning from our neighbors precisely as the Greeks learned from theirs, not for the sake of learned pedantry but rather using everything we learn as a foothold which will take us up as high, and higher, than our neighbor.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous), p. 30

Art, Learning

“To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.”

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

Source: Marius the Epicurean http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/8mrs110.txt (1885), Ch. 6

People

“Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word, about the other things, and I will come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that will shudder you. And you know I can do it; I saw Indians smash my dear parents' heads on the pillow next to mine, and I have seen some reddish work done at night, and I can make you wish you had never seen the sun go down!”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Abigail Williams
The Crucible (1953)

Parent, Sun, Night

“These people who have fled inward for their freedom also have to live outwardly, become visible, let themselves be seen; they are united with mankind through countless ties of blood, residence, education, fatherland, chance, the importunity of others; they are likewise presupposed to harbour countless opinions simply because these are the ruling opinions of the time; every gesture which is not clearly a denial counts as agreement.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

trans. Hollingdale, “Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.3, p. 139
Untimely Meditations (1876)

People, Education, Freedom, Chance

“If then we would indeed be “filled with wisdom and spiritual understanding;” if we would “walk worthy of the Lord unto all well pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God;” here let us fix our eyes! “Laying aside every weight, and the sin that does so easily beset us; let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Here best we may learn the infinite importance of Christianity. How little it can deserve to be treated in that slight and superficial way, in which it is in these days regarded by the bulk of nominal Christians, who are apt to think it may be enough, and almost equally pleasing to God, to be religious in any way, and upon any system. What exquisite folly it must be to risk the soul on such a venture, in direct contradiction to the dictates of reason, and the express declaration of the word of God! “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation?”
LOOKING UNTO JESUS!
Here we shall best learn the duty and reasonableness of an absolute and unconditional surrender of soul and body to the will and service of God.—“We are not our own; for we are bought with a price,” and must “therefore” make it our grand concern to “glorify God with our bodies and our spirits, which are God’s.” Should we be base enough, even if we could do it with safety, to make any reserves in our returns of service to that gracious Saviour, who “gave up himself for us?” If we have formerly talked of compounding by the performance of some commands for the breach of others; can we now bear the mention of a composition of duties, or of retaining to ourselves the right of practising little sins! The very suggestion of such an idea fills us with indignation and shame, if our hearts be not dead to every sense of gratitude.
LOOKING UNTO JESUS!
Here we find displayed, in the most lively colours, the guilt of sin, and how hateful it must be to the perfect holiness of that Being, “who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.” When we see that, rather than sin should go unpunished, “God spared not his own Son,” but “was pleased[99], to bruise him and put him to grief” for our sakes; how vainly must impenitent sinners flatter themselves with the hope of escaping the vengeance of Heaven, and buoy themselves up with I know not what desperate dreams of the Divine benignity!
Here too we may anticipate the dreadful sufferings of that state, “where shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth;” when rather than that we should undergo them, “the Son of God” himself, who “thought it no robbery to be equal with God,” consented to take upon him our degraded nature with all its weaknesses and infirmities; to be “a man of sorrows,” “to hide not his face from shame and spitting,” “to be wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities,” and at length to endure the sharpness of death, “even the death of the Cross,” that he might “deliver us from the wrath to come,” and open the kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
LOOKING UNTO JESUS!
Here best we may learn to grow in the love of God! The certainty of his pity and love towards repenting sinners, thus irrefragably demonstrated, chases away the sense of tormenting fear, and best lays the ground in us of a reciprocal affection. And while we steadily contemplate this wonderful transaction, and consider in its several relations the amazing truth, that “God spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all;” if our minds be not utterly dead to every impulse of sensibility, the emotions of admiration, of preference, of hope, and trust, and joy, cannot but spring up within us, chastened with reverential fear, and softened and quickened by overflowing gratitude. Here we shall become animated by an abiding disposition to endeavour to please our great Benefactor; and by a humble persuasion, that the weakest endeavours of this nature will not be despised by a Being, who has already proved himself so kindly affected towards us. Here we cannot fail to imbibe an earnest desire of possessing his favour, and a conviction, founded on his own declarations thus unquestionably confirmed, that the desire shall not be disappointed. Whenever we are conscious that we have offended this gracious Being, a single thought of the great work of Redemption will be enough to fill us with compunction. We shall feel a deep concern, grief mingled with indignant shame, for having conducted ourselves so unworthily towards one who to us has been infinite in kindness: we shall not rest till we have reason to hope that he is reconciled to us; and we shall watch over our hearts and conduct in future with a renewed jealousy, [Pg 243] lest we should again offend him. To those who are ever so little acquainted with the nature of the human mind, it were superfluous to remark, that the affections and tempers which have been enumerated, are the infallible marks and the constituent properties of Love. Let him then who would abound and grow in this Christian principle, be much conversant with the great doctrines of the Gospel.
It is obvious, that the attentive and frequent consideration of these great doctrines, must have a still more direct tendency to produce and cherish in our minds the principle of the love of Christ.”

William Wilberforce (1759–1833) English politician

Source: Real Christianity (1797), p. 240-243.

Love, Death, Wisdom, God

“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Palm Sunday

"Self-Interview", originally appeared in The Paris Review no. 69 (1977)
Palm Sunday (1981)

History, Literature, Thinking

“If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Citas, Candide (1759)

World

“In default of any other proof, the thumb would convince me of the existence of a God.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Reported as something said by Newton in Charles Dickens's All the Year Round https://books.google.es/books?id=bd0NAAAAQAAJ&q=%22the+thumb+would+convince+me+of+the+existence+of+a+God%22+dickens&dq=%22the+thumb+would+convince+me+of+the+existence+of+a+God%22+dickens&hl=es&sa=X&ei=fgHtVJ3BB4WXgwTAzoOwBA&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAA (1864), Vol. 10, p. 346; later found in " The Book of the Hand http://dds.crl.edu/loadStream.asp?iid=28101" (1867) by A R. Craig, S. Low and Marston, p. 51: "In want of other proofs, the thumb would convince me of the existence of a God; as without the thumb the hand would be a defective and incomplete instrument, so without the moral will, logic, decision, faculties of which the thumb in different degrees offers the different signs, the most fertile and the most brilliant mind would only be a gift without worth." A slight variant of this is cited as something Newton once "exclaimed" in Human Nature : An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective http://books.google.es/books?id=c6O0AAAAIAAJ&q=In+the+absence+of+any+other+proof,+the+thumb+alone+would+convince+me+of+God's+existence.&dq=In+the+absence+of+any+other+proof,+the+thumb+alone+would+convince+me+of+God's+existence.&hl=es&sa=X&ei=KAkMUuLjL-am2gWtnoHgDg&ved=0CFUQ6AEwBQ, Vol. 1, Issues 7-12 (1978), p. 47: "In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence."

God

“In 1946, when I was still an adolescent, I went and signed my name on the other side of the sky during a fantastic 'realistico-imaginary' voyage.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

Source: before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings", p. 14

“Psychology has a long past, yet its real history is short. For thousands of years it has existed and has been growing older; but in the earlier part of this period it cannot boast of any continuous progress toward a riper and richer development. In the fourth century before our era that giant thinker, Aristotle, built it up into an edifice comparing very favorably with any other science of that time. But this edifice stood without undergoing any noteworthy changes or extensions, well into the eighteenth or even the nineteenth century. Only in recent times do we find an advance, at first slow but later increasing in rapidity, in the development of psychology.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) German psychologist

Source: Psychology: An elementary textbook, 1908, p. 3: Partly cited in: Edwin Boring (1929) A History of Experimental Psychology p. ix

History, Science, Change, Time

“Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Seven (14 May 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Love, Men, Nature

“For several years past the revenues of the government have been unequal to its expenditures, and consequently loan after loan, sometimes direct and sometimes indirect in form, has been resorted to. By this means a new national debt has been created, and is still growing on us with a rapidity fearful to contemplate — a rapidity only reasonably to be expected in a time of war. This state of things has been produced by a prevailing unwillingness either to increase the tariff or resort to direct taxation. But the one or the other must come. Coming expenditures must be met, and the present debt must be paid; and money cannot always be borrowed for these objects. The system of loans is but temporary in its nature, and must soon explode. It is a system not only ruinous while it lasts, but one that must soon fail and leave us destitute. As an individual who undertakes to live by borrowing soon finds his original means devoured by interest, and, next, no one left to borrow from, so must it be with a government. We repeat, then, that a tariff sufficient for revenue, or a direct tax, must soon be resorted to; and, indeed, we believe this alternative is now denied by no one.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Whig Circular (1843), reported in Richard Watson Gilder and Daniel Fish Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume 1 (1905)
1840s

Money, War, Fear, Nature

“We will never recognize the true value of our own lives until we affirm the value in the life of others.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

1980s, First term of office (1981–1985), Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation (1983)

Life

“Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.”

Marilyn Frye (1941) feminist philosopher and professor

"Oppression", in Politics Of Reality – Essays In Feminist Theory (1983)

Way, Bird, Time, Past

“It is not merely that we want to see the game played fairly. We also want to see the rules changed, so that there shall be both less opportunity and less temptation to cheat, and less chance for some few people to gain a proﬁt to which either they are not entitled at all, or else which is so enormous as to be greatly in excess of what they deserve, even though their services have been great. We wish to do away with the proﬁt that comes from the illegitimate exercise of cunning and craft. We also wish to secure a measurable equality of opportunity, a measurable equality of reward for services of similar value. To do all this, two, mutually supplementary movements are necessary. On the one hand, there must be - I think there now is - a genuine and permanent moral awakening, without which no wisdom of legislation or administration really means anything; and, on the other hand, we must try to secure the social and economic legislation without which any improvement due to purely moral agitation is necessarily evanescent.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, The Progressives, Past and Present (1910)

Wisdom, People, Exercises, Game

“There are three things that smell of fish. One of them is fish. The other two are growing on you!”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

"Jumbo Go Away".
You Are What You Is (1981)

Fish

“From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery.”

John Henry Newman (1801–1890) English cleric and cardinal

Apologia Pro Vita Sua [A defense of one's own life] (1864)

Age, Religion, Dreams, Idea

“Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.”

Erving Goffman book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Source: 1950s-1960s, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959, p. 13.

Way

“When Jesus sent forth his servants formerly he sent them to preach this Gospel. When the Father and the Son and Moroni and others came to Joseph Smith, he had a priesthood conferred upon him which he conferred upon others for the purpose of manifesting the laws of life, the Gospel of the Son of God, by direct authority, that light and truth might be spread forth among all nations.”

John Taylor (Latter Day Saints) (1808–1887) third president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Life, God, Truth, Law

“Among the vulnerable for whom the Church wishes to care with particular love and concern are unborn children, the most defenceless and innocent among us. Nowadays efforts are made to deny them their human dignity and to do with them whatever one pleases, taking their lives and passing laws preventing anyone from standing in the way of this. Frequently, as a way of ridiculing the Church’s effort to defend their lives, attempts are made to present her position as ideological, obscurantist and conservative. Yet this defence of unborn life is closely linked to the defence of each and every other human right. It involves the conviction that a human being is always sacred and inviolable, in any situation and at every stage of development. Human beings are ends in themselves and never a means of resolving other problems. Once this conviction disappears, so do solid and lasting foundations for the defence of human rights, which would always be subject to the passing whims of the powers that be. Reason alone is sufficient to recognize the inviolable value of each single human life, but if we also look at the issue from the standpoint of faith, “every violation of the personal dignity of the human being cries out in vengeance to God and is an offence against the creator of the individual.””

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

Section 213
2010s, 2013, Evangelii Gaudium · The Joy of the Gospel

Love, Life, God, Children

“He who thinks a great deal is not suited to be a party man: he thinks his way through the party and out the other side too soon.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

I.579
Human, All Too Human (1878)

Way, Thinking

“We live in a world where the truth is shattered, and most people run from it. They don’t want other people to see them inside and out. Me, I’m an open book. What you see is what you get. I try to be as real and as honest as possible, and I think people respect that.”

Tyrann Mathieu (1992) All-American college football player, defensive back, cornerback

"Bickley: Tyrann Mathieu planning to soar again in 2016", The Arizona Republic (11 Apr 2016) https://eu.azcentral.com/story/sports/nfl/cardinals/2016/04/09/bickley-tyrann-mathieu-planning-soar-again-2016/82842236/.

People, Truth, Books, World

“I have twice gone fishing with rod and line just because other boys asked me to, but this sport was soon made impossible for me by the treatment of the worms that were put on the hook for bait, and the wrenching of the mouths of the fishes that were caught. I gave it up, and even found courage enough to dissuade other boys from going.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924)

Boy, Courage, Fish, Sport

“If you dig a pit for others to fall into,
you will fall into it yourself.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

Rumi Daylight (1990)

“This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were.
It can't happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.
So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2008, Election victory speech (November 2008)

Way, Change, Chance, Victory

“When I began the following Work, my only object was to extend and explain more fully the Memoir which I read at the public meeting of the Academy of Sciences in the month of April 1787, on the necessity of reforming and completing the Nomenclature of Chemistry. While engaged in this employment, I perceived, better than I had ever done before, the justice of the following maxims of the Abbé de Condillac, in his System of Logic, and some other of his works. "We think only through the medium of words.—Languages are true analytical methods.—Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method.—The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged."”

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) French chemist

Source: Elements of Chemistry (1790), p.xiii

Justice, Art, Thinking, Science

“I went into physics to hang around with the bright kids. I wasn't doing anything else and I didn't want to look dumb, so I thought I'd pretend to be a physicist, just like the others. It was five or ten years after my Ph. D. before I realized I was pretty good.”

Leon M. Lederman (1922–2018) American mathematician and physicist

From Subatomic World Explorer, as noted on American Academy of Achievement web site http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/led0pro-1 (URL accessed on October 20, 2008)

“It does not matter what’s the color of your skin, what language do you speak, what religion you believe in. It is that we should all consider each other as human beings and we should respect each other and we should all fight for our rights, for the rights of children, for the rights of women and for the rights of every human being.”

Malala Yousafzai (1997) Pakistani children's education activist

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Speech (October 10, 2014)

Women, Children, Religion, Color

“What Senator McCain has lately been suggesting is that somehow I'm going to take money from people making over $250,000, and give it to people who "pay no taxes". What he's confusing is the fact that even if you don't pay income tax, there are a lot of people who don't pay income tax, but you're still paying a whole lot of other taxes. You're paying payroll tax, which is a huge burden on a lot of middle-income families. You're paying sales taxes. You're paying property taxes. There are a whole host of taxes that you're paying. So when we provide an offset to the waitress or the janitor, these folks are working.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

This isn't some giveaway to people who are on welfare. This is giving help to people who are working hard every day. Remarks at a a rally in Lake Worth, Florida (21 October 2008) http://www-tc.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2008/10/21/20081021_wrap.mp3 2008

Money, People, Family, Help

“Farabi followed Plato not merely as regards the manner in which he presented the philosophic teaching in his most important books. He held the view that Plato’s philosophy was the true philosophy. To reconcile his Platonism with his adherence to Aristotle, he could take three more or less different ways. First, he could try to show that the explicit teachings of both philosophers can be reconciled with each other. He devoted to this attempt his Concordance of the opinions of Plato and Aristotle. The argument of that work is partly based on the so-called Theology of Aristotle: by accepting this piece of neo-platonic origin as a genuine work of Aristotle, he could easily succeed in proving the substantial agreement of the explicit teachings of both philosophers concerning the crucial subjects. It is however very doubtful whether Farabi considered his Concordance as more than an exoteric treatise, and thus whether it would be wise of us to attach great importance to its explicit argument. Secondly, he could show that the esoteric teachings of both philosophers are identical. Thirdly, he could show that “the aim” of both philosophers is identical.”

Al-Farabi (872–951) Philosopher in 10th century Central Asia

Leo Strauss, Farabi's Plato http://contemporarythinkers.org/leo-strauss/essay/farabis-plato/, Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945. Reprinted, revised and abbreviated, in Persecution and the Art of Writing.

Books, Way

“The British soldier is second to none in the communities of fighting men. Some may possess more élan, others may be better disciplined; but none excels him in all-round character. We require no training in bravery in Britain; we can trust to our own native manliness to see us through. So it is with the soldier. It is his natural pride which gives him his fighting qualities. How often he has stood firm before tyranny and oppression, the last hope of the free world! In the midst of the noise and confusion of the battlefield, the simple homely figure of the British soldier stands out calm and resolute—dominating all around him with his quiet courage, his humour and his cheerfulness, his unflinching acceptance of the situation. May the ideals for which he has struggled never vanish from the world! May he never be forgotten by the nation for which he has fought so nobly! I know better than most to what heights the British soldier can aspire. His greatness is a measure of the greatness of the British character, and I have seen the quality of our race proved again and again on the battlefield.”

Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1887–1976) British Army officer, Commander of Allied forces at the Battle of El Alamein

Memoirs (London: Collins, 1958), pp. 543-544.

Men, World, Hope, Home

“You & James Ferdinand simply can't learn to distinguish betwixt intellectual opinion & irrelevant instinctive emotion... For instance, he has the idea that I place an exaggerated intellectual valuation on the 18th century merely because my chance emotions have given me a strong but irrational subjective sense of belonging to it. I've told that bird dozens of times that I have no especial intellectual brief for Georgian days... He can't understand my ability to class as merely one period among others an age to which random early impressions have so closely bound my emotions & sense of identity... the point is that my own personal mess of subjective emotions has nothing whatever to do with my intellectual opinions. I have freely declared myself at all times (like everybody else in his respective way) a mere product of my background, & do not consider the values of that background as applicable to outsiders. The only way for the individual to achieve any contentment or harmonic relationship to a pattern is to adhere to the background naturally his; & that is what I am doing. Others I urge to adhere to their own respective backgrounds & traditions, however remote from mine these may be. When I venture now & then to suggest values of a more general kind, I approach the problem in an entirely different way—speaking not as Old Theobald of His Majesty's Rhode-Island Colony, but as the cosmic & impersonal Ec'h-Pi-El, denizen of the invisible world 'Ui-ulh in the second zone of curved space outside angled space... If there is any approach to an absolute value in the cosmos—or at least on this planet—then this is it. Sincerity—is-or-isn't-ness—technical perfection—harmony—coherence—consistency—symmetry—all these things are obviously aspects of one single property of space, energy, & general mathematical harmonics whose universality gives it the deepest possible significance. I have thought this all my life, & that is why to me one Newton or Einstein, one M. Atilius Regulus, M. Porcius Cato, or P. Cornelius Scipio, seems to me in certain ways worth a full dozen of your prattling little Keatses & Baudelaires.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 312
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

Life, Age, World, Way

“(Unlike Muslims), the other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty to them, save only for purposes of defence… They are merely required to establish their religion among their own people. This is why the Israelites after Moses and Joshua remained unconcerned with royal authority for about four hundred years. Their only concern was to establish their religion… The Israelites dispossessed the Canaanites of the land that God had given them as their heritage in Jerusalem and the surrounding region, as it had been explained to them through Moses. The nations of the Philistines, the Canaanites, the Armenians, the Edomites, the Ammonites, and the Moabites fought against them. During that time political leadership was entrusted to the elders among them. The Israelites remained in that condition for about four hundred years. They did not have any royal power and were harassed by attacks from foreign nations. Therefore, they asked God through Samuel, one of their prophets, that he permit them to make someone king over them. Thus, Saul became their king. He defeated the foreign nations and killed Goliath, the ruler of Philistines. After Saul, w:David became king, and then Solomon. His kingdom flourished and extended to the borders of the land of the Hijaz and further to the borders of Yemen and to the borders of the land of the Byzantines. After Solomon, the tribes split into two dynasties. One of the dysnaties was that of the ten tribes in the region of Nablus, the capital of which is Samaria(Sabastiyah), and the other that of the children of Judah and Benjamin in Jerusalem. Their royal authority had had an uninterrupted duration of a thousand years.”

Ibn Khaldun book Muqaddimah

Muqaddimah, Translated by Franz Rosenthal, pp.183-184, Princeton University Press, 1981.
Muqaddimah (1377)

God, War, Children, People

“Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves”

Pericles (-494–-429 BC) Greek statesman, orator, and general of Athens

2.37
History of the Peloponnesian War

Law

“He has been for two thousand years the supreme Head of the Church Invisible, the Spiritual Hierarchy, composed of the disciples of all faiths. He recognises and loves those who are not Christian but who retain their allegiance to their Founders – the Buddha, Mohammed and others. He cares not what the faith is, if the objective is love of God and of humanity.”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Reappearance of the Christ (1948), Chapter III: The Reappearance of the Christ, World Expectancy

Love, God, Faith

“The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It's the way I see football, the way I see life.”

Bill Shankly (1913–1981) Scottish footballer and manager

[Powley, Adam, Robert, Gillan, Shankly's Village: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Glenbuck and its Famous Footballing Sons, https://books.google.com/books?id=Qe7NCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT162&lpg=PT162&dq=%22The+socialism+I+believe+in+is+everyone+working+for+each+other,+everyone+having+a+share+of+the+rewards.+It%27s+the+way+I+see+football,+the+way+I+see+life.%22&source=bl#v=onepage, 2016-08-18, 2015, Worthing, UK, Pitch, 931595421, 9781785310706]

Life, Way, Football

“It is a mistake to classify the passions as lawful and unlawful, so as to yield to the one and refuse the other. All alike are good if we are their masters; all alike are bad if we abandon ourselves to them. Nature forbids us to extend our relations beyond the limits of our strength; reason forbids us to want what we cannot get, conscience forbids us, not to be tempted, but to yield to temptation. To feel or not to feel a passion is beyond our control, but we can control ourselves. Every sentiment under our own control is lawful; those which control us are criminal. A man is not guilty if he loves his neighbour's wife, provided he keeps this unhappy passion under the control of the law of duty; he is guilty if he loves his own wife so greatly as to sacrifice everything to that love.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau book Emile, or On Education

Emile, or On Education (1762), Book V

Love, Law, Feeling, Nature

“So long as we confine our attention to income from property, and leave out of account any increment or decrement in the value of prospects due to changes in people's own earning power (accumulation or decumulation of “Human Capital”), Income No. 1 ex post is not a subjective affair, like other kinds of income; it is almost completely objective.”

John Hicks (1904–1989) British economist

178-9
Value and capital, (1939)

People, Change

“About ten months ago a report reached my ears that a certain Fleming had constructed a spyglass by means of which visible objects, though very distant from the eye of the observer, were distinctly seen as if nearby. Of the truly remarkable effect several experiences were related, to which some persons gave credence while others denied them. A few days later a report was confirmed to me in a letter from a noble Frenchman in Paris, Jacques Badovere, which caused me to apply myself wholeheartedly to inquire into means by which I might arrive at the invention of a similar instrument. This I did shortly afterwards, my basis being the theory of refraction. First I prepared a tube of lead, at the ends I fitted two glass lenses, both plane on one side while on the other side one was spherically convex and the other concave. Then placing my eye near the concave lens I perceived objects satisfactorily large and near, for they appeared three times closer and nine times larger than when seen with the naked eye alone. Next I constructed another one, more accurate, which represented objects as enlarged more than sixty times. Finally, sparing neither labor nor expense, I succeeded in constructing for myself so excellent an instrument that objects seen by means of it appeared nearly one thousand times larger and over thirty times closer than when regarded with our natural vision.”

Galileo Galilei book Sidereus Nuncius

Translation by Stillman Drake in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957)
Sidereus Nuncius (Venice, 1609)

Nature, Distant, Appearance, Time

“Fellow citizens of New Haven, if the Republican Party of this nation shall ever have the national house entrusted to its keeping, it will be the duty of that party to attend to all the affairs of national housekeeping. Whatever matters of importance may come up, whatever difficulties may arise in the way of its administration of the government, that party will then have to attend to. It will then be compelled to attend to other questions, besides this question which now assumes an overwhelming importance — the question of Slavery. It is true that in the organization of the Republican party this question of Slavery was more important than any other; indeed, so much more important has it become that no other national question can even get a hearing just at present. The old question of tariff — a matter that will remain one of the chief affairs of national housekeeping to all time — the question of the management of financial affairs; the question of the disposition of the public domain — how shall it be managed for the purpose of getting it well settled, and of making there the homes of a free and happy people — these will remain open and require attention for a great while yet, and these questions will have to be attended to by whatever party has the control of the government. Yet, just now, they cannot even obtain a hearing, and I do not purpose to detain you upon these topics, or what sort of hearing they should have when opportunity shall come.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Allow the humblest man an equal chance (1860)

People, Way, Home, Question

“Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this ancient Holy Land, the House of Abraham, Muhammad, and all the other Prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors....
You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.

During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug) -- while praying to the same God -- with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the actions and in the deeds of the "white" Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan, and Ghana.

We were truly all the same (brothers) -- because their belief in one God had removed the "white" from their minds, the 'white' from their behavior, and the 'white' from their attitude.

I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man -- and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their "differences" in color.

With racism plaguing America like an incurable cancer, the so-called "Christian" white American heart should be more receptive to a proven solution to such a destructive problem. Perhaps it could be in time to save America from imminent disaster -- the same destruction brought upon Germany by racism that eventually destroyed the Germans themselves.

They asked me what about the Hajj had impressed me the most.... I said, "The brotherhood! The people of all races, color, from all over the world coming to gether as one! It has proved to me the power of the One God.... All ate as one, and slept as one. Everything about the pilgrimage atmosphere accented the Oneness of Man under One God.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Text of a letter written following his Hajj (1964)

Life, God, People, Truth

“Furthermore, thanks to the Marxist religion, they (the Russians) have everything required to make them patient. They have been promised happiness on earth (a feature which distinguishes Marxism from the Christian religion)— but in the future. The Jew, Mardochee Marx, like the good Jew that he was, was awaiting the coming of the Messiah. He has placed the Messiah conception in a setting of historic materialism by asserting that terrestrial happiness is a factor in an almost endless process of evolution. "Happiness is within your reach," he says, "that I promise you. But you must let evolution take its course and not try to hurry matters." Mankind always falls for a specious trick of that sort… Lenin did not have the time, but Stalin will carry on the good work, and so on and so on… Marxism is a very powerful force. But how shall we assess Christianity, that other child of Judaism, which will not commit itself further than to promise the faithful happiness in another world? Believe me, it is incomparably stronger!”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

25 February 1945.
Disputed, The Testament of Adolf Hitler (1945)

World, Faith, Religion, Time

“For those who practise tyranny and deprive others of their rights, I will be harsh and stern, but for those who follow the law, I will be most soft and tender.”

Umar (585–644) Second Caliph of Rashidun Caliphate and a companion of Muhammad

As quoted in Al Farooq, Umar (1944) by Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Ch. 5, p. 123

Law

“Faith seems to me wholly lost, and hope dead; for I am so plunged and submerged in the source of his infinite love, as if I were quite under water in the sea and could not touch, see, feel anything on any side except water it seems to me that I have and hold in certainty that which I believed and hoped at other times. I no longer see union, for I know nothing more and can see nothing more than him alone without me. I do not know where the I is, nor do I seek it, nor do I wish to know or be cognizant of it.”

Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510) Italian author and nurse

Love, Faith, Hope, Feeling

“We shall be quiet and wait till a star falls from heaven. Can you see, how above one light appears after the other and they together form a dome! We sit in silence and fold our hands in prayer. We shall be quiet and wait until a star falls from heaven.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Original: (de) Wir wollen stille sein und warten, bis ein Stern vom Himmel fällt. Siehst du, wie oben Licht an Licht sich zündet zu einem Dom! Wir sitzen im Schweigen und falten die Hände zum Gebet. Wir wollen stille sein und warten bis ein Stern vom Himmel fällt.
Source: Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Star, Light, Silence, Appearance

“"Education to personality" has become a pedagogical ideal that turns its back upon the standardized-the collective and normal-human being. It thus fittingly recognizes the historical fact that the great, liberating deeds of world history have come from leading personalities and never from the inert mass that is secondary at all times and needs a demagogue if it is to move at all. The paean of the Italian nation is addressed to the personality of the Duce, and dirges of other nations lament the absence of great leaders.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Lecture, The Inner Voice, Kulturbund, Vienna (1932); quoted in The Integration of Personality, Farrar & Rinehart, NY (1939)

World, Education, History, Time

“Well, I kind of split my life into two pieces. One was where my chess career lies. There, I kept my sanity, so to speak, and my logic. And the other was my religious life. I tried to apply what I learned in the church to my chess career too. But I still was studying chess. I wasn't just "trusting in God" to give me the moves.”

Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) American chess prodigy, chess player, and chess writer

1970s, BOBBY FISCHER SPEAKS OUT! (1977)

Life, God, Study, Learning

“I don’t see anyone better than me. No player does things that I cannot do myself, but I see things others can’t do. There’s no more complete player than me. I’m the best player in history — in the good and the bad moments.”

Cristiano Ronaldo (1985) Portuguese association football player

[Dev, Sarthak, Football Paradise, The Ballon d’Or: It’s time football stopped trying to be Hollywood, 15 December 2017, 4 February 2018, https://www.footballparadise.com/ballon-dor/]
In the wake of winning his fifth Ballon d’Or in December 2017.

History

“Militarily it was impossible to invade with the dispositions we had made. We had only seven divisions in Albania. Two of them were necessary to hold the Albanian population from going into revolt. Two others were in reserve. That left us three divisions with which to undertake an offensive. Against us, the Greeks disposed of fifteen divisions. We might have been able to undertake an offensive had those figures been reversed.”

Pietro Badoglio (1871–1956) Italian general during both World Wars and a Prime Minister of Italy

Quoted in "We Cannot Escape History" - Page 85 - by John Thompson Whitaker - Europe - 1943

“For my part, I assure you, I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion.”

Alexander the Great (-356–-323 BC) King of Macedon

Quoted by Plutarch in Life of Alexander http://books.google.com/books?id=vWIOAAAAYAAJ&q=%22for+my+part+I+assure+you+I+had+rather+excel+others+in+the+knowledge+of+what+is+excellent+than+in+the+extent+of+my+power+and+dominion%22&pg=PA167#v=onepage from Plutarch's Lives as translated by John Dryden (1683)

Knowledge, Parting

“In a progressive country change is constant; and the great question is, not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, the traditions of the people, or in deference to abstract principles and arbitrary and general doctrines. The one is a national system; the other…is a philosophic system.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Speech on Reform Bill of 1867, Edinburgh, Scotland (29 October 1867); quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume II. 1860–1881 (London: John Murray, 1929), p. 291.

People, Law, Question, Change

“Dragon is the category of primate predator. Predator is a weird category, right? Because there's crocodiles in it, and then there's lions. And they don't have much in common except that they eat you. So it's a functional category. So the dragon is the imagistic representation of the functional category of predator. It's like this: If you're a monkey, then a bird will pick you off, like an eagle. That's the wings. If it wasn't an eagle, then it was a cat (dragon claws), because they climb trees and give you a good chomping. And if it wasn't a cat, then you go down to the ground and a snake would get you, or maybe the snake would climb up the tree. So a dragon is a cat-snake-bird. And that's the thing that you really want to avoid. An the other thing is that it breathes fire, which is interesting because fire was both greatest friend and greatest enemy of humanity.”

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

Concepts

Cats, Bird, Tree

“He spent the whole time sitting on a log in the woodshed, sometimes starting straight ahead with the fixity of a blind man who knows that even if he turns his head in the other direction he will still not see anything”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 30 (Vintage 2003)

Time

“We have a better story to tell. But to say that our vision for the future is better is not to say that it will inevitably win. Because history also shows the power of fear. History shows the lasting hold of greed and the desire to dominate others in the minds of men. Especially men. History shows how easily people can be convinced to turn on those who look different, or worship God in a different way. So, if we’re truly to continue Madiba’s long walk towards freedom, we’re going to have to work harder and we’re going to have to be smarter.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2018, Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture (2018)

Men, God, People, Fear

“The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Four (16 July 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

World, Feeling, Sister, Falseness

“Men standing in opposite hemispheres will converse and deride each other and embrace each other, and understand each other's language.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

"Of Hemispheres, which are infinite; and which are divided by an infinite number of Lines, so that every Man always has one of these Lines between his Feet."
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings

Men, Understanding

“I am surprised that the trouble has been contained to the degree it has. Until two years ago, New York City used wiser methods than any other city to deal with racial problems. Now it is a case of outright scare tactics. This won’t work, because the Negro is not afraid. If the tactics are not changed, this could escalate into something very, very serious.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

"Malcolm X Lays Harlem Riot To ‘Scare Tactics’ of Police" https://www.nytimes.com/1964/07/21/malcolm-x-lays-harlem-riot-to-scare-tactics-of-police.html, The New York Times, July 21, 1964

Problem, Change

“People get annoyed with you if you treat them like they're automatons that lack free will. It's something that people find very constraining. There's something slave-like about that even. The demand that you don't have actual autonomy and, even worse, that you're not responsible for your choices – it's an insult to someone to suggest to them that they're not responsible for their decisions. To do that to someone, from a legal perspective, you have to argue something like diminished capacity. You are mentally ill, or you don't have the intellectual capacity, or you were under some substance, or you had a brain injury, and that's why you're not responsible for your actions. Part of the respect that you give other human beings is that you acknowledge that they are responsible for their actions. Part of that, too, is that if you do something good, you're also responsible for that. It's got to be more annoying than anything else to strive virtuously, to produce something of extreme value, and then to be treated as if it is a mere deterministic outcome, and that your actual choices had nothing to do with that. It can be extraordinarily punishing.”

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

Other

People, Decision, Parting

“The ethic of Reverence for Life prompts us to keep each other alert to what troubles us and to speak and act dauntlessly together in discharging the responsibility that we feel. It keeps us watching together for opportunities to bring some sort of help to animals in recompense for the great misery that men inflict upon them, and thus for a moment we escape from the incomprehensible horror of existence.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics

Life, Men, Feeling, Help

“Identity is only productive when one doesn't think about it. There's nothing more sterile for a person or a country than to be never-endingly affirming itself, because one always affirms oneself by denying the other.”

Nuria Amat

Queen Cocaine (2005)

Thinking, Personality, Country

“In arranging the bodies in order of their electrical nature, there is formed an electro-chemical system which, in my opinion, is more fit than any other to give an idea of chemistry.”

Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848) Swedish chemist

Jöns Jacob Berzelius, Essai sur le théorie des proportions chimiques (1819). Translated in Henry M. Leicester and Herbert S. Klickstein, A Source Book in Chemistry 1400-1900 (1952), 260.

Idea, Nature

“20.02.94, Kyiv, 18:15 a boy from the crowd:
- Sofia Mihailovna, how many languages do you speak?
- I speak Moldavian, Ukrainian and Russian, but what is important is that we understand each other.”

Sofia Rotaru (1947) Ukrainain soviet and Ukrainian musician, singer, songwriter, actress, author of Moldavian origin

Boy, Understanding

“We are facing an external attack against us, which is more dangerous than any other previous wars… We are dealing with those who are extremists, who only know the language of killing and criminality.”

Bashar al-Assad (1965) President of Syria

As quoted by Holly Yan et. al. Al-Assad touts plan for resolution, says enemies of Syria 'will go to hell' http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/06/world/meast/syria-civil-war/?hpt=hp_t1, CNN (Jan. 17, 2013)

War

“Sometimes is a synonym which extends itself, and contrasts by just much the domain of its colleague. At other times it is an historical event which comes to modify and renew the vocabulary.”

Michel Bréal (1832–1915) French philologist

Source: Essai de semantique, 1897, p. 113, cited in Alessandro Carlucci (2013), Gramsci and Languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony. p. 74

Time

“Woman, compared to other creatures, is the image of God, for she bears dominion over them. But compared unto man, she may not be called the image of God, for she bears not rule and lordship over man, but ought to obey him. The woman shall be subject to man as unto Christ. For woman, has not her example from the body and from the flesh, that so she shall be subject to man, as the flesh is unto the Spirit, because that the flesh in the weakness and mortality of this life lusts and strives against the Spirit, and therefore would not the Holy Ghost give example of subjection to the woman of any such thing.”

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) early Christian theologian and philosopher

As quoted by John Knox The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate http://www.swrb.com/newslett/actualNLs/firblast.htm (1558) Disputed

Life, God, Christ

“Shall I pass by and leave you lying there because of the expedition you led against Greece, or shall I set you up again because of your magnanimity and your virtues in other respects?”

Alexander the Great (-356–-323 BC) King of Macedon

Pausing and addressing to a fallen statue of Xerxes the Great Plutarch. The age of Alexander: nine Greek lives. Penguin, 1977. p. 294 http://books.google.com/books?ei=0bC3T9ejHcPQsgarjcHWBw&id=eFAJAQAAIAAJ&q=%22set+you+up+again+because+of+your+magnanimity+and+your+virtues+in+other+respects%22#search_anchor

Lying

“So true is it that all transactions of preeminent importance are wrapt in doubt and obscurity; while some hold for certain facts the most precarious hearsays, others turn facts into falsehood; and both are exaggerated by posterity.”

Tacitus book Annals

Book III, 19
Annals (117)
Variant: So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.

“Be content to bless each other, that is all the blessing you need, and how I wish that all blessings were so.”

José Saramago book Baltasar and Blimunda

Abençoem-se antes um ao outro, é quanto basta, pudessem ser todas as bênçãos como essa.
Source: Baltasar and Blimunda (1982), p. 175

“But in reason if one man has no right to command all other men--the expedient of despotism--neither has he any right to command even one other man; nor yet have ten men, or a million, the right to command even one other man, for ten times nothing is nothing, and a million times nothing is nothing.”

Isabel Paterson (1886–1961) author and editor

Source: The God of the Machine (1943), p. 122

Men, Time

“Islam is not a ‘religion’ in the sense this term is commonly understood. It is a system encompassing all fields of living. Islam means politics, economics, legislation, science, humanism, health, psychology and sociology. It is a system which makes no discrimination on the basis of race, color, language or other external categories. Its appeal is to all mankind. It wants to reach the heart of every human being.”

Abul A'la Maududi (1903–1979) Indian theologian, politician and philosopher

1978, Towards Understanding Islam, Chapter 7, Lahore, Pakistan.
1970s

Health, Religion, Color, Sense

“There are today an increasing number of people whose awareness is, in the strict sense of the phrase, without a focus; and the techniques which have transformed the framework of daily life for such people at such a prodigious pace – I am thinking particularly of the cinema and the radio – are making a most powerful contribution towards this defocalizing process. … The human creature under normal conditions finds his bearings in relation to other people, and also to physical objects, that are not only close to him in space but also linked to him by a feeling of intimacy. Of this feeling of intimacy, I would say that in itself it tends to create a focus for human awareness. One might go farther and speak of a kind of constellation, at once material and spiritual, which under normal conditions assembles itself around each human being. … This kind of constellation around the individual life is, in a great many countries, in process of dissolution.”

Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) French philosopher, playwright, music critic and leading Christian existentialist

Source: Man Against Mass Society (1952), pp. 146-147

Life, People, Feeling, Thinking

“I envy no quality of the mind or intellect in others; not genius, power, wit, nor fancy; but, if I could choose what would be most delightful, and, I believe, most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing.”

Humphry Davy (1778–1829) Cornish chemist

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 241

Envy

“Listen to learned men, but do so only with one ear!… Let the other be always ready to receive the sweet accents of the voice of your heavenly Friend!”

André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) French physicist and mathematician

Écoute les savants, mais ne les écoute que d'une oreille!... Que l'autre soit toujours prête à recevoir les doux accents de la voix de ton ami céleste!
Ampère's Meditation, September 1805

Men, Learning

“Something has risen up in this country as fatal in the political world as it has been in the landed world of Ireland—we have a great Parliamentary middleman. It is well known what a middleman is; he is a man who bamboozles one party, and plunders the other, till, having obtained a position to which he is not entitled, he cries out, "Let us have no party questions, but fixity of tenure."”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1845/apr/11/maynooth-college in the House of Commons (11 April 1845). 1840s

World, Question, Country

“God is not interested merely in freeing black men and brown men and yellow men, but God is interested in freeing the whole human race. We must work with determination to create a society, not where black men are superior and other men are inferior and vice versa, but a society in which all men will live together as brothers and respect the dignity and worth of human personality.”

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

1950s, Give Us the Ballot (1957)
Context: We must not seek to use our emerging freedom and our growing power to do the same thing to the white minority that has been done to us for so many centuries. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man. We must not become victimized with a philosophy of black supremacy. God is not interested merely in freeing black men and brown men and yellow men, but God is interested in freeing the whole human race. We must work with determination to create a society, not where black men are superior and other men are inferior and vice versa, but a society in which all men will live together as brothers and respect the dignity and worth of human personality.

Men, God, Personality

“The noble lord in this case, as in so many others, first destroys his opponent, and then destroys his own position afterwards. The noble lord is the Prince Rupert of parliamentary discussion: his charge is resistless, but when he returns from the pursuit he always finds his camp in the possession of the enemy.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Speech in the House of Commons (24 April 1844), referring to Lord Stanley; compare: "The brilliant chief, irregularly great, / Frank, haughty, rash,—the Rupert of debate!", Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The New Timon (1846), Part i.
1840s

“Any time Uncle Sam, with all his machinery for warfare, is held to a draw by some rice eaters, he’s lost the battle. He had to sign a truce. America’s not supposed to sign a truce. She’s supposed to be bad. But she’s not bad any more. She’s bad as long as she can use her hydrogen bomb, but she can’t use hers for fear Russia might use hers. Russia can’t use hers, for fear that Sam might use his. So, both of them are weapon-less. They can’t use the weapon because each’s weapon nullifies the other’s. So the only place where action can take place is on the ground. And the white man can’t win another war fighting on the ground. Those days are over. The black man knows it, the brown man knows it, the red man knows it, and the yellow man knows it. So they engage him in guerrilla warfare. That’s not his style. You’ve got to have heart to be a guerrilla warrior, and he hasn’t got any heart.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964)

War, Fear, Time, Heart

“In fact, contempt for happiness is usually contempt for other people's happiness, and is an elegant disguise for hatred of the human race.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1950s, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956), p. 198

People, Happiness

“Another illustration. When for the first time I met Mister Clay, the other day in the cars, in front of us sat an old gentleman with an enormous wen upon his neck. Everybody would say the wen was a great evil, and would cause the man's death after a while. But you couldn't cut it out, for he'd bleed to death in a minute. But would you engraft the seeds of that wen on the necks of sound and healthy men? He must endure and be patient, hoping for possible relief. The wen represents slavery on the neck of this country. This only applies to those who think slavery is wrong. Those who think it right would consider the snake a jewel, and the wen an ornament.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

Death, Men, Hope, Cars

“The Declaration of Independence was formed by the representatives of American liberty from thirteen States of the confederacy; twelve of which were slaveholding communities. We need not discuss the way or the reason of their becoming slaveholding communities. It is sufficient for our purpose that all of them greatly deplored the evil and that they placed a provision in the Constitution which they supposed would gradually remove the disease by cutting off its source. This was the abolition of the slave trade. So general was conviction, the public determination, to abolish the African slave trade, that the provision which I have referred to as being placed in the Constitution, declared that it should not be abolished prior to the year 1808. A constitutional provision was necessary to prevent the people, through Congress, from putting a stop to the traffic immediately at the close of the war. Now, if slavery had been a good thing, would the Fathers of the Republic have taken a step calculated to diminish its beneficent influences among themselves, and snatch the boon wholly from their posterity? These communities, by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: "We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures… Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children's children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began, so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built…”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, Speech at Lewistown, Illinois (1858)

Life, Men, War, Children

“Here and there, among a thousand other peddlers, are slyly hissing dealers who urge you to come along with them to allegedly "very beautiful" girls, and not only to girls. They keep at it, walk alongside, praising their wares until you answer roughly. They don't know that you have resolved to eat nothing but rice just to escape from sexuality!”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Letter from Naples, Italy to Otto Grautoff (1896); as quoted in A Gorgon's Mask: The Mother in Thomas Mann's Fiction (2005) by Lewis A. Lawson, p. 35

Beauty, Girl

“I started thinking about that, and I used to think that the Talib would come, and he would just kill me. But then I said, 'If he comes, what would you do Malala?' then I would reply to myself, 'Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.' But then I said, 'If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there would be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others with cruelty and that much harshly, you must fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education.' Then I said I will tell him how important education is and that 'I even want education for your children as well.”

Malala Yousafzai (1997) Pakistani children's education activist

And I will tell him, 'That's what I want to tell you, now do what you want.' 2010 - Source: Brian Jones, " 16-Year-Old Malala Yousafzai Leaves Jon Stewart Speechless With Comment About Pacifism http://www.businessinsider.com/malala-yousafzai-left-jon-stewart-speechless-2013-10," Business Insider, Oct. 9, 2013, 9:38 PM: from an interview on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart:

Children, Education, Peace, Shoe

“The structure known, but not yet accessible by synthesis, is to the chemist what the unclimbed mountain, the uncharted sea, the untilled field, the unreached planet, are to other men. The achievement of the objective in itself cannot but thrill all chemists, who even before they know the details of the journey can apprehend from their own experience the joys and elations, the disappointments and false hopes, the obstacles overcome, the frustrations subdued, which they experienced who traversed a road to the goal. The unique challenge which chemical synthesis provides for the creative imagination and the skilled hand ensures that it will endure as long as men write books, paint pictures, and fashion things which are beautiful, or practical, or both.”

Robert Burns Woodward (1917–1979) American chemist

Robert Burns Woodward, "Art and Science in the Synthesis of Organic Compounds: Retrospect and Prospect," in Pointers and Pathways in Research (Bombay:CIBA of India, 1963).

Men, Books, Beauty, Hope

“When God sees the Soul pure as it was in its origins, He tugs at it with a glance, draws it and binds it to Himself with a fiery love that by itself could annihilate the immortal soul. In so acting, God so transforms the soul in Him that it knows nothing other than God; and He continues to draw it up into His fiery love until He restores it to that pure state from which it first issued. These rays purify and then annihilate. The soul becomes like gold that becomes purer as it is fired, all dross being cast out. Having come to the point of twenty-four carats, gold cannot be purified any further; and this is what happens to the soul in the fire of God’s love”

Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510) Italian author and nurse

Source: The Treatise on Purgatory, p. 79-80

Love, God, Soul, Drawing

“It is always the under side of the branches of any plant that show themselves to the wind which strikes it, and one leans against the other.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XVII Flight

“In regard to the Germans and foreigners, I esteem them no better than other people, nor any worse. It is not my nature, when I see a people borne down by the weight of their shackles-the oppression of tyranny-to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke, than to add anything that would tend to crush them.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Speech to Germans at Cincinnati, Ohio (1861), Commercial version

Life, People, Nature

“The only law that a Christian should listen to and read is the law of God's Commandments. And it is not right to comply with, implement or observe any other law.”

Jan Hus (1369–1415) Czech linguist, religion writer, theologist, university educator and science writer

Source: A Companion to Jan Hus (2015), p. 231.

God, Law, Reading

“Friends, I will disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such foul slander and abuse any opponent of any other party.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1910s, Address at Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1912)

“We know today that nothing will restore the pre-machine condition of reasonably universal employment save an artificial allocation of working hours involving the use of more men than formerly to perform a given task.... The primary function of society, in spite of all the sophistries spurred of selfishness, is to give men better conditions than they could get without it; and the basic need today is jobs for all—not for "property" for a few of the luck and the acquisitive.... In view of the urgent need for change, there is something almost obscene in the chatter of the selfish about various psychological evils allegedly inherent in a New Deal promising decent economic security and humane leisure for all instead of for a few.... What is worth answering is the kindred outcry about "regimentation", "collective slavery", "violation of Anglo-Saxon freedom", "destruction of the right of the individual to make his own way" and so on; with liberal references to Stalin, Hitler, Mustapha Kemal, and other extremist dictators who have sought to control men's personal, intellectual, and artistic lives, and traditional habits and folkways, as well as their economic fortunes. Naturally the Anglo-Saxon balks at any programme calculated to limit his freedom as a man and a thinker or to disturb his inherited perspectives and daily customs—and need we say that no plan ever proposed in an Anglo-Saxon country would conceivably seek to limit such freedom or disturb such perspectives and customs? Here we have a deliberate smoke-screen—conscious and malicious confusion of terms. A decent planned society would indeed vary to some extent the existing regulations (for there are such) governing commercial and economic life. Yet who save a self-confessed Philistine or Marxist (the plutocrat can cite "Das Kapital" for his purpose!) would claim that the details and conditions of our merely economic activities form more than a trivial fraction of our whole lives and personalities? That which is essential and distinctive about a man is not the routine of material struggle he follows in his office; but the civilised way he lives, outside his office, the life whose maintenance is the object of his struggle. So long as his office work gains him a decently abundant and undisputedly free life, it matters little what that work is—what the ownership of the enterprise, and what and how distributed its profits, if profits there be. We have seen that no system proposes to deny skill and diligence an adequate remuneration. What more may skill and diligence legitimately ask? Nor is any lessening in the pride of achievement contemplated. Man will thrill just as much at the overcoming of vast obstacles, and the construction of great works, whether his deeds be performed for service or for profit. As it is, the greatest human achievements have never been for profit. Would Keats or Newton or Lucretius or Einstein or Santayana flourish less under a rationally planned society? Any intimation that a man's life is wholly his industrial life, and that a planned economic order means a suppression of his personality, is really both a piece of crass ignorance and an insult to human nature. Incidentally, it is curious that no one has yet pointed to the drastically regulated economic life of the early Mass. Bay colony as something "American!"”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Unpublished (and probably unsent) letter to the Providence Journal (13 April 1934), quoted in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy, edited by J. T. Joshi, pp. 115-116
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, Men, Way, Nature