Quotes about self
page 45

“Andre Almeida. Back in, by Veloso. Oh, it's a miscue to Nani! Oh my goodness, me! The USA pressed the 'self-destruct' button there! A catastrophe in the U. S. defense.”

Ian Darke (1950) British association football and boxing commentator

United States v. Portugal http://www.listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=gQC2SusDfIw (22 June 2014). 2010s, 2014, 2014 FIFA World Cup

“It is easy to distinguish the evil worked by sin and vice, but the trained eye sees also the evil done by self-righteous or self-regarding virtue.”

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

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Karma

Evil, Training

“It should be obvious that the criticism of this opinion serves not to present counter-arguments, but to discredit and attack me because I've deviated from the prescribed path. In his intriguing and thoughtful essay on My Race Problem and Ours, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, a self-described social Democrat, correctly observes that 'If racial loyalty is deemed essentially and morally virtuous, then a black person's adoption of positions that are deemed racially disloyal will be seen by racial loyalists as a supremely threatening sin, one warranting the harsh punishments that have historically been visited upon alleged traitors.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Perhaps this is the defensive solidarity to which Richard Wright refers. If so, it is a reaction I understand, but resolutely decline to follow.
1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Law, Understanding, Problem, Personality

“Block [my blog] if you want, but I cannot self-censor, because that is the only reason I have the blog. We both know this is a game. You have to play your part, and I have to play mine.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, A Kind of True Living, 2007

Game, Parting

“What is love? From the spiritual and inner point of view, love is self-expansion. Human love binds and is bound. Divine Love expands, enlarges itself.”

Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) Indian writer and guru

My Rose Petals (1971)

Love

“There is nothing like a broken heart to nourish your own sense of self”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 127

Sense, Heart

“Every court must have its fool, every great ideal must attract some who are motivated only by self-interest.”

Michael Moorcock book The Runestaff

Book 1, Chapter 7 “A Well-Known Traveler” (p. 413)
The Runestaff (1969)

Fools, Motivation

“"Globalism" is often the most self-interested and "nationalist" thing you can do. It has been a bonanza to the United States, for sure. In capitalism, your narrowest interests are advanced by cooperation. A genius system.”

Jay Nordlinger (1963) American journalist

Twitter post https://twitter.com/jaynordlinger/status/1038770310034673664 (9 September 2018) 2010s

“Out upon the folly which, in estimating human misery, allows aught to bear comparison with the agony of the poor! I use the word poor relatively; I call not those poor to whom honesty brings self-respect, whose habits and whose means have gone together, and whose industry is its own support. But those are the poor whose exertion supplies not their wants—to whom cold, hunger, and weariness, are common feelings; who have known better days—to whom the past furnishes contrast, and the future fear.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Hunger, Fear, Feeling, Support

“Do not believe for an instant that the world's conspiring elite in every nation have so much as a serious quarrel among them. They have just one object: control through tribute. Your slavery, through tribute, and mine… Behind this attack are the self-styled elite, secure in their own power and riches… To be effective we must direct our attacks on the real criminals, the wealthy, and powerful and secret elite of all the world - the conspirators laboring day and night to enslave us.”

Taylor Caldwell book Captains and the Kings

Captains and the Kings (1974)
1970s-

Secret, World, Night

“[S]hould we attempt to use sensible words to deal with these problems, they will be caught up immediately in the structures of the official arguments which accompany the official modern ideologies — arguments as sterile as the ideologies are irrelevant. Our society contains no method of serious self-criticism for the simple reason that it is now a self-justifying system which generates its own logic.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Voltaire's Bastards (1992)

Problem

“Although a Buddhist seeks refuge in the Buddha, he does not make any self-surrender. Nor does a Buddhist sacrifice his freedom of thought by becoming a follower of the Buddha. He can exercise his own free will and develop his knowledge even to the extent of becoming a Buddha himself.”

Narada Maha Thera (1898–1983) Sri Lankan monk and missionary

Buddhism in a Nutshell

Exercises, Knowledge, Freedom

“Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Evil

“The German people trusted the Führer. Given his authoritarian direction of the state, they had no inﬂuence on events. Ignorant of the crimes of which we know today, the people have fought with loyalty, self-sacrifice, and courage, and they have suffered too in this life-and-death struggle into which they were arbitrarily thrust. The German people are free from blame.”

Hermann Göring (1893–1946) German politician and military leader

Göring's closing statement to the Nuremberg tribunal (31 August 1946)

Life, Death, People, Courage

“The love of man and woman is as fire
To warm, to light, but surely to consume
And self-consuming die…
But comrade-love is as a welding blast
Of candid flame and ardent temperature:
Glowing more fervent, it doth bind more fast;
And melting both but makes the union sure.
The dross alone is burnt—till at the last
The steel, if cold, is one and strong and pure.”

James Jeffrey Roche (1847–1908) American journalist

My Comrade, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Love, Light, Strong

“I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights,'yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. This new psychology looks to me very much like children learning some summary and not very adequate alphabet, exulting in putting their a-b-c-d of the subconscient and the mysterious underground super-ego together and imagining that their first book of obscure beginnings (c-a-t cat, t-r-e-e tree) is the very heart of the real knowledge. They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below, upari budhna esam [Rig-Veda, 1.24.7]. The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above. The self-chosen field of these psychologists is besides poor, dark and limited; you must know the whole before you can know the part and the highest before you can truly understand the lowest. That is the promise of the greater psychology awaiting its hour before which these poor gropings will disappear and come to nothing…. Wanton waste, careless spoiling of physical things in an incredibly short time, loose disorder, misuse of service and materials due either to vital grasping or to tamasic inertia are baneful to prosperity and tend to drive away or discourage the Wealth-Power. These things have long been rampant in the society and, if that continues, an increase in our means might well mean a proportionate increase in the wastage and disorder and neutralise the material advantage. This must be remedied if there is to be any sound progress…. Asceticism for its own sake is not the ideal of this yoga, but self-control in the vital and right order in the material are a very important part of it… and even an ascetic discipline is better for our purpose than a loose absence of true control. Mastery of the material does not mean having plenty and profusely throwing it out or spoiling it as fast as it comes or faster. Mastery implies in it the right and careful utilisation of things and also a self-control in their use…. There is a consciousness in [things], a life which is not the life and consciousness of man and animal which we know, but still secret and real. That is why we must have a respect for physical things and use them rightly, not misuse and waste, ill-treat or handle with a careless roughness. This feeling of all being consciousness or alive comes when our own physical consciousness'and not the mind only'awakes out of its obscurity and becomes aware of the One in all things, the Divine everywhere.”

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

Undated
India's Rebirth

Life, Children, Truth, Secret

“If the Hindus sang Vande Mãtaram in a public meeting, it was a ‘conspiracy’ to convert Muslims into kãfirs. If the Hindus blew a conch, or broke a coconut, or garlanded the portrait of a revered patriot, it was an attempt to ‘force’ Muslims into ‘idolatry’. If the Hindus spoke in any of their native languages, it was an ‘affront’ to the culture of Islam. If the Hindus took pride in their pre-Islamic heroes, it was a ‘devaluation’ of Islamic history. And so on, there were many more objections, major and minor, to every national self-expression. In short, it was a demand that Hindus should cease to be Hindus and become instead a faceless conglomeration of rootless individuals. On the other hand, the ‘minority community’ was not prepared to make the slightest concession in what they regarded as their religious and cultural rights. If the Hindus requested that cow-killing should stop, it was a demand for renouncing an ‘established Islamic practice’. If the Hindus objected to an open sale of beef in the bazars, it was an ‘encroachment’ on the ‘civil rights’ of the Muslims. If the Hindus demanded that cows meant for ritual slaughter should not be decorated and marched through Hindu localities, it was ‘trampling upon time-honoured Islamic traditions’. If the Hindus appealed that Hindu religious processions passing through a public thoroughfare should not be obstructed, it was an attempt to ‘disturb the peace of Muslim prayers’. If the Hindus wanted their native languages to attain an equal status with Urdu in the courts and the administration, it was an ‘assault on Muslim culture’. If the Hindus taught to their children the true history of Muslim tyrants, it was a ‘hate campaign against Islamic heroes’. And the ‘minority community’ was always ready to ‘defend’ its ‘religion and culture’ by taking recourse to street riots.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Muslim Separatism – Causes and Consequences (1987)

Hate, Children, Peace, Religion

“Every naturalism begins as involuntary naïveté. Initially, we cannot help thinking that the “order of things” is an objective order. For the first glance falls on the things and not on the “eyeglasses.” In the work of enlightenment, this first innocence becomes irretrievably lost. Enlightenment leads to the loss of naïveté and it furthers the collapse of objectivism through a gain in self-experience. It effects an irreversible awakening and, expressed pictorially, executes the turn to the eyeglasses, i. e., to one’s own rational apparatus. Once this consciousness of the eyeglasses has been awakened in a culture, the old naïveté loses its charm, becomes defensive, and is transformed into narrow-mindedness, which is intent on remaining as it is. The mythology of the Greeks is still enchanting; that of fascism is only stale and shameless. In the first myth, a step toward an interpretation of the world was taken; in simulated naïveté, an artful stupefaction (Verdummung) is at work—the predominant method of self-integration in advanced social orders.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 59

World, Art, Nature, Thinking

“For the development of nationhood from one or more ethnicities, by far the most important and widely present factor is that of an extensively used vernacular literature. A long struggle against an external threat may also have a significant effect as, in some circumstances, does state formation, though the latter may well have no national effect whatever elsewhere. A nation may precede or follow a state of its own but it is certainly assisted by it to a greater self-consciousness. Most such developments are stimulated by the ideal of a nation-state and of the world as a society of nations originally 'imagined', if you like the word, through the mirror of the Bible, Europe's primary textbook, but turned into a formal political philosophy no earlier than the nineteenth century and then next to canonised by President Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles peace settlement of 1920.”

Adrian Hastings (1929–2001) Roman Catholic priest, historian and author

Source: The construction of nationhood: ethnicity, religion, and nationalism (1997), p. 2; As cited in: nationalismproject.org http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/hastings.htm by Eric G.E. Zuelow, 1999-2007.

World, Peace, Imagination, Literature

“I should be writing a third paper on the Nerves, but I cannot proceed without making some experiments, which are so unpleasant to make that I defer them. You may think me silly, but I cannot perfectly convince myself that I am authorised in nature, or religion, to do these cruelties—for what?—for anything else than a little egotism or self-aggrandisement; and yet, what are my experiments in comparison with those which are daily done? and are done daily for nothing. So my employment is, correcting the press of my new edition of the Anatomy, and writing notes for my Physiology, which I mean to make an additional volume to the Anatomy.”

Charles Bell (1774–1842) Scottish surgeon and artist (1774-1842)

Letter to his brother on 1 July 1822; in Letters of Sir Charles Bell, K.H., F.R.S.L. & E. Selected from his Correspondence with his Brother, George Joseph Bell, London: John Murray, 1870, pp. 275 https://books.google.it/books?id=UZ1cAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA275-276.

Religion, Nature, Thinking

“Our country needs visionary and far-sighted leaders. People who appreciate and understand that our lives are inexplicably linked and our futures tied together. The vision must be one that is inclusive and open to everyone. It is a matter of enlightening self-interest.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Opening address to the Leadership Fiji 2006 program, 9 March 2006.

People, Understanding, Future, Country

“(James Garner) was a very good-looking fellow, all the girls went crazy for him, and a good actor at that, but he, like others I used to work with, seemed to be self-conscious and nervous, for no discernible reason. I mean, these guys were famous and successful. But they often behaved like little girls when it came to things like, Why is he getting a longer close-up and I don't, stuff like that. I mean, this may be important when this one close-up is all the screen time you have, but they are the leading players, so why do they behave that way? I never understood that…”

Donald O'Brien (actor) (1930–2003) Italian film and TV actor

Euro Trash Cinema magazine interview (March 1996)

Way, Guy, Girl, Time

“I say to my students, I say to my own children, I say to myself, uh the most abject form of slavery there is, is slavery to one's own feelings or passions or desires. The goal, the project of living a human life, a truly human life, is all about self-mastering. Now, if people live in a culture that encourages them to be masters of themselves and if they become masters of themselves, if they're able to control their own passions, no one's going to be perfect, we're not going to eliminate sin from the world or from the human heart, but if we're able to be masters of ourselves, masters of our own passions, then we will be able as a people to govern ourselves, we can genuinely make the republican experiment in ordered liberty work. But if we, if we lose it at the personal level, there's no way it's going to work at the societal level.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

2016, Interview with Bill Kristol (2016)

Life, Children, People, World

“Most Men are Cowards, all Men should be Knaves.
The Difference lies, as far as I can see,
Not in the thing it self, but the Degree.”

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680) English poet, and peer of the realm

ll. 169-171.
A Satire Against Mankind (1679)

Men

“Chorus of the Eumenides: …
Never by lapse of time
The soul defaced by crime
Into its former self returns again;
For every guilty deed
Holds in itself the seed
Of retribution and undying pain.

Never shall be the loss
Restored, till Helios
Hath purified them with his heavenly fires;
Then what was lost is won,
And the new life begun,
Kindled with nobler passions and desires.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

The Masque of Pandora and Other Poems (1875)

Life, Pain, Soul, Passion

“He is a truly complex fellow, not unlike the Michelangelos and da Vincis of the Renaissance period. He's a supreme artist but he is constantly filled with doubts and self-anger about his work--and that is what makes him so good. He is a perfectionist who is never sure he is attaining perfection.”

Fred Astaire (1899–1987) American dancer, singer, actor, choreographer and television presenter

Rouben Mamoulian, quoted in Satchell, Tim. Astaire, The Biography. Hutchinson, London. 1987. ISBN 0091737362. p. 200.

Perfection, Anger

“While early American society was an agrarian society, it was fast becoming more commercial, and commercial goals made their way among its agricultural classes almost as rapidly as elsewhere. The more commercial society became, however, the more reason it found to cling in imagination to the noncommercial agrarian values. The more farming as a self-sufficient way of life was abandoned for farming as a business, the more merit men found in what was being left behind. And the more rapidly the farmers' sons moved into the towns, the more nostalgic the whole culture became about its rural past. The American mind was raised upon a sentimental attachment to rural living and upon a series of notions about rural people and rural life that I have chosen to designate as the agrarian myth. The agrarian myth represents a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins.
Like any complex of ideas, the agrarian myth cannot be defined in a phrase, but its component themes form a clear pattern. Its hero was the yeoman farmer, its central conception the notion that he is the ideal man and the ideal citizen.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R. (1955), Chapter I, part I, p. 23

Life, Men, People, Way

“If this truth has once and for all been discarded and men have decided for integral adjustment, if reason has been purged of all morality regardless of cost, and has triumphed over all else, no one may remain outside and look on. The existence of one solitary "unreasonable" man elucidates the shame of the entire nation. His existence testifies to the relativity of the system of radical self-preservation that has been posited as absolute.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The End of Reason" (1941), p. 45.

Men, Truth

“Those subjects have the greatest educational value, which are richest in incentives to the noblest self-activity.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 84

Education

“Troy: Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such self help films as "Smoke Yourself Thin!"”

Phil Hartman (1948–1998) Canadian American actor, comedian, screenwriter, and graphic artist

and "Get Confident, Stupid!".
On the Simpsons, Troy McClure

Stupidity, Confidence, Help

“The case is a good example of what Van Vogt came to call "the violent man" or the "Right Man." He is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem — to feel that he is a "somebody." He is obsessed by the question of "losing face," so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Essential Colin Wilson (1985), p. 211

Feeling, Question

“The self is not so much linked to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the same thing as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the self aged fifty is the continuation of the self aged forty.”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) Austrian physicist

Source: My View of the World (1951), p. 28

Age, Sense

“Chrétien is nothing if not versatile: popular, recherché, allusive, insistent, arch, naïve, racy and demure…He has a dramatist's flair for the handling of dialogue, a deft and economic way with characterization, the sharp confidence of the logician in his handling of rhetorical figures and the self-assurance of the entertainer in the deployment of humour (he is master of the verbal nudge). It is his essential vivacity that one misses most in his imitators.”

Chrétien de Troyes book Yvain, the Knight of the Lion

Tony Hunt "Chrétien de Troyes' Arthurian Romance, Yvain", in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 128.
Criticism

Way, Confidence

“Abolitionism proposes to destroy the right and extinguish the principle of self-government for which our forefathers waged a seven years' bloody war, and upon which our system of free government is founded.”

Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861) American politician

Speech in the Senate (3 March 1854)
1850s

War

“The truth is that, from the immense spectacle of the world, each novelists retains the one adventure which enable shim to give expression to his own essential self, just as the painter sees in nature only pictures painted in his manner.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

Truth, World, Nature, Painting

“When one intends to move or when one intends to speak, one should first examine one’s own mind and then act appropriately with composure. When one sees one’s mind to be attached or repulsed, then one should neither act nor speak, but remain still like a piece of wood. When my mind is haughty, sarcastic, full of conceit and arrogance, ridiculing, evasive and deceitful, when it is inclined to boast, or when it is contemptuous of others, abusive, and irritable, then I should remain still like a piece of wood. When my mind is averse to the interests of others and seeks my own self-interest, or when it wishes to speak out of a desire for an audience, then I will remain still like a piece of wood. When it is impatient, indolent, timid, impudent, garrulous, or biased in my own favor, then I will remain still like a piece of wood.”

Šantidéva (685–763) 8th-century Indian Buddhist monk and scholar

§ 5.47
Bodhicaryavatara, A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life

“Fundamental to everything the [ancient] Greeks achieved was their conviction that good for humanity was possible only if men were free, body, mind, and spirit, and if each man limited his own freedom. A good state or work of art or piece of thinking was possible only through the self-mastery of the free individual, self-government.”

Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) American teacher and writer

Introduction
The Echo of Greece (1957)

Men, Art, Thinking, Freedom

“From Hindus and Muslims have I broken free', said Arjan Dev Ji, the fifth Sikh guru, in the 1590s. (…) Yet, it is not as straightforward as separatists might wish. No Sikh Guru was ever a Muslim, ergo the half-sentence: 'Of Muslims have I broken free', does not mean that he abandoned Islam. Therefore, the other half need not be construed as a repudiation of Hinduism either. Rather, it may be read as repudiating the whole 'identity' business including the division of mankind into Hindu and Muslim categories, on the Upanishadic ground that the Self is beyond these superficial trappings (the Self being neti neti,? not this, not that?)-but that is a typically Hindu and decidedly un-Islamic position. To the Quran, group identity (being a member of the Muslim ummah or not) is everything, is laden with far-reaching consequences including an eternity in heaven or in hell. To Hindu society, it is also undeniably important; but to Hindu spirituality, it is not. Likewise, another verse of the same poem, 'I will not pray to idols nor say the Muslim prayer', is more anti-Islamic than anti-Hindu: it rejects a duty binding every single Muslim (prayer) and a practice common among Hindus (idol-worship) but by no means obligatory.”

Guru Arjan (1563–1606) The fifth Guru of Sikhism

Elst, K. (2002). Who is a Hindu?: Hindu revivalist views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other offshoots of Hinduism. Ch. 8.

Hell, Business, Reading

“Strong joy and grief depend upon the treatment this rudimentary social self receives.”

Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American sociologist

Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. p. 166

Strong, Joy, Dependency

“MISPENDING a Man's time is a kind of self-homicide, it is making Life to be of no use.”

George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax (1633–1695) English politician

Political, Moral, and Miscellaneous Reflections (1750), Miscellaneous Thoughts and Reflections

Life, Time

“Never make unsupportable assumptions about your enemies, Martin. It can be a fatal self-indulgence.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 3 (p. 49)

“A man who crosses the street must be careful not to be hit by a car, even if the car is an automatic vehicle without a driver, because the car is stronger than a man. We should be afraid of devices that function in a dangerous way for us. The robot will become such a device if we manage to equip it not so much in intelligence as in mechanisms imitating the effects of a certain human functionality. I mean equipping robots with mechanisms that function in a similar way to consciousness of existence and the instinct of self-preservation of a human being. I do not mean to say that the device will be conscious, but that its behavior will be similar to the behavior of a rational unit, such as a man aware of his existence. The machine will not receive consciousness, but it will behave as if it did.”

Zygmunt Vetulani (1950) Polish mathematician

Tumiłowicz, Bronisław (February 2018): Zrób sobie mózg https://www.tygodnikprzeglad.pl/zrob-sobie-mozg/. Przegląd (6/2018): pp. 58–59.

Cars, Way, Behavior, Intelligence

“The psyche is awareized energy, in a state of constant creativity; a psychic pattern of multidimensionally expressed; each point within it changing in relationship to all other points, and thus altering the entire pattern or model. Each self is immersed in the psyche, yet immersed in its own individuality simultaneously, experiencing reality in time and out of it at once.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 166

Reality, Change, Time

“As you love your own body, so regard everyone as equal to your own body. When the Supreme Experience supervenes, everyone's service is revealed as one's own service. Call it a bird, an insect, an animal or a man, call it by any name you please, one serves one's own Self in every one of them.”

Sri Anandamoyi Ma (1896–1982) Hindu saint

Anandamayi Ma, Ananda Varta Quarterly
By herself

Love, Bird, Animals

“[Number is] the commanding and self-begotten container of the eternal duration of mundane concerns.”

Philolaus (-470–-390 BC) ancient greek philosopher

Quoted by Aristotle, Metaphysics (ca. 350 BC) Tr. Thomas Taylor, The Philosophical and Mathematical Commentaries of Proclus on the First Book of Euclid's Elements (1792) Vol. 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=AD1WAAAAYAAJ, p. xix.

“In any creative field--any creative field--you must first understand that you have no value whatsoever. Your work has no value whatsoever. You are completely worthless. Whatever potential you have is just that--potential--and when you are discussing self-publishing a comic book, you have about the same chance of success as 10 thousand others.”

Dave Sim (1956) Canadian cartoonist, creator of Cerebus

Source: Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing (1997), p. 21

Books, Understanding, Chance, Success

“Thus the theme of Personal Idealism — of an eternal world of many rational beings, all self-active, all arbiters of their own destiny and so alike morally responsible, yet, in the vast round of their combinative being, all harmonised by their coexistence with God and their native attracting apprehension of God's nature — grows from one to another of the ascending evidences for it, as the book advances from the first essay to the last.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), Appendix A: The Essays in their Systematic Connexion, p.387-8

God, Books, World, Nature

“There is a danger and a most serious one in corrupt morals. A people without good morals is incapable of self-government. At the basis of the proper exercise of the suffrage lie unselfishness and the spirit of sacrifice. A corrupt man is selfish; an appeal to duty finds no response in his conscience; he is incapable of the high- mindedness and generous acts which are the elements of patriotism; he is ready to sell the country for pelf or pleasure. Patriotism takes alarm at the spread of intemperance, lasciviousness, dishonesty, perjury; for country’s sake it should arm against those dire evils all the country’s forces, its legislatures, its courts, and, above all else, public opinion. Materialism and the denial of a living, supreme God annihilate conscience, and break down the barriers to sensuality; they sow broadcast the seeds of moral death : they are fatal to liberty and social order. A people without a belief in God and a future life of the soul will not remain a free people. The age of the democracy must, for its own protection, be an age of religion.”

John Ireland (bishop) (1838–1918) Catholic bishop

1894 speech on patriotism to Union veterans of the Civil War, [McClarey, Donald R, Father John Ireland and the Fifth Minnesota, The American Catholic, 2012-08-23, https://the-american-catholic.com/2012/08/23/father-john-ireland-and-the-fifth-minnesota/, 2018-02-04]

Life, Death, God, People

“Our point of departure is to serve the people whole-heartedly and never for a moment divorce ourselves from the masses, to proceed inall cases from the interests of the people and not from one's self-interest or from the interests of a small group, and to identify our responsibility to the people with out responsibility to the leading organs of the Party.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Coalition Government (1945)

People, Departure

“Yoga is about the will, working with intelligence and self-reflexive consciousness, can free us from the inevitability of the wavering mind and outwardly directed senses.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p. 13

Intelligence, Sense

“I present, for what it is worth, and may prove to be worth, the following bill of axioms or aphorisms on public administration, as fitting this important occasion.
# The continuous and fairly efficient discharge of certain functions by government, central and local, is a necessary condition for the existence of any great society.
# As a society becomes more complicated, as its division of labor ramifies more widely, as its commerce extends, as technology takes the place of handicrafts and local self-sufficiency, the functions of government increase in number and in their vital relationships to the fortunes of society and individuals.
# Any government in such a complicated society, consequently any such society itself, is strong in proportion to its capacity to administer the functions that are brought into being.
# Legislation respecting these functions, difficult as it is, is relatively easy as compared with the enforcement of legislation, that is, the effective discharge of these functions in their most minute ramifications and for the public welfare.
# When a form of government, such as ours, provides for legal changes, by the process of discussion and open decision, to fit social changes, then effective and wise administration becomes the central prerequisite for the perdurance of government and society — to use a metaphor, becomes a foundation of government as a going concern.
# Unless the members of an administrative system are drawn from various classes and regions, unless careers are open in it to talents, unless the way is prepared by an appropriate scheme of general education, unless public officials are subjected to internal and external criticism of a constructive nature, then the public personnel will become a bureaucracy dangerous to society and to popular government.
# Unless, as David Lilienthal has recently pointed out in an address on the Tennessee Valley Authority, an administrative system is so constructed and operated as to keep alive local and individual responsibilities, it is likely to destroy the basic well-springs of activity, hope, and enthusiasm necessary to popular government and to the following of a democratic civilization.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

Administration, A Foundation of Government (1940)

Education, Hope, Way, Spring

“I'm not a brave man. My self-image is of a very small and weak person. In point of fact, I'm almost six feet, and solidly built. But I was a late bloomer. I spent those formative early high-school years as a pudgy little science whimp. I'm still scared of big men with deep voices.”

Rudy Rucker (1946) American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 13

Men, School, Science, Personality

“No, not one little song,' replied the Rat firmly, though his heart bled as he noticed the trembling lip of the poor disappointed Toad. 'It's no good, Toady; you know well that your songs are all conceit and boasting and vanity; and your speeches are all self-praise and — and — well, and gross exaggeration and — and — '
'And gas,' put in the Badger, in his common way.”

Kenneth Grahame book The Wind in the Willows

Source: The Wind in the Willows (1908), Ch. 12

Disappointment, Way, Heart

“Neither the free will of the people nor the right of self-determination nor even the consent of a majority of convinced National-Socialists can be cited as justification for the obliteration of Austria after 1938.”

Kurt Schuschnigg (1897–1977) Chancellor of Austria

Source: The Brutal Takeover: The Austrian ex-Chancellor’s account of the Anschluss of Austria by Hitler, 1971, p. 209-210

People

“I now come to the third great obstacle to human self-knowledge, to the belief — deeply rooted in our western culture — that what can be explained in terms of natural science has no values. This belief springs from an exaggeration of Kant's values-philosophy, the consequence of the idealistic dichotomy of the world into the external world of things and the internal laws of human reason.”

Konrad Lorenz book On Aggression

Source: On Aggression (1963), Ch. XII : On the Virtue of Scientific Humility

World, Law, Spring, Nature

“That most risky and volatile of all things—a self-pitying majority.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"Appointment in Sarajevo" (1992).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

“The future is too good to waste on lies. And life is way too short to care for the damnation of others, as well as to spend it helping fools with their ideas that are wrong. I have seen their ideas and I am ashamed to even be American. The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting.”

Bowe Bergdahl (1986) American soldier captured by the Taliban in 2009 and released in 2014 as part of a prisoner swap

Last e-mail to parents (2009)

Life, Fools, Way, Idea

“You probably know that this week Britain has been terrorized by an underclass of welfare-dependent, drug-addled criminal scum who have been allowed to run riot in the streets because the police haven't been allowed to do their job and protect the public. The media is full of speculation about why it happened and what is the root cause. Well, that's easy. The root cause is stupidity. A complete lack of imagination. A stunted, feral view of the world that amounts to self-inflicted moral and mental disablement. And it's the direct product of an entitlement culture that rewards idleness, encourages victimhood, and compensates criminals.”

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

"Britain is a riot" (11 August 2011) http://youtube.com/watch?v=9pAC0YSmK0g 2011

Stupidity, World, Imagination, Dependency

““I wonder,” he thought, “is it worth getting myself crushed in that crowd just to save my life? Is it worth getting all frustrated and angry, lowering myself to their level, pushing and shoving with all the rest, fighting like a common animal, just to stay alive?” He smiled ruefully. “It always comes to the simple question: what is more important, life or self-respect?””

George Alec Effinger (1947–2002) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Relatives (1973)., Chapter 8 (p. 123).

Life, Smile, Question, Animals

“Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Section 8
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

“Tsai's Multi-kinetics were dynamically integrated multiple constructions, employing thirty-two kinetic units, each of which contains a configuration of multi-colored gyroscopic forms. With these elements he created an active environmental field that could, apparently, be infinitely extended. Each motorized unit was a self-sufficient entity, and when it was combined with other similar units produced a large-scale kinetic work that joined visual intensity with mechanical power. By controlling the time sequence of each unit in skillful compositions, Tsai used engineering principles to achieve aesthetic ends.”

Sam Hunter (1923–2014) American art historian

Source: The Cybernetic Sculpture of Tsai Wen-Ying, 1989, p. 66-67

Color, Time

“Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, “no epoch was more naturally mad.””

Barbara W. Tuchman book A Distant Mirror

Source: A Distant Mirror (1978), p. 332

Nature, Time, Madness

“Some people are prone to confuse Islam with its victims, that is, the Muslims, and condemn the latter at the same time as they come to know the crudities of the former. This is a very serious confusion, which should be avoided by all those who believe in building up a broad-based human brotherhood as opposed to narrow, sectarian, self-centred, and chauvinistic nationalism or communalism.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

People, Communication, Time

“The American people are doing their job today. They should be given a chance to show whether they wish to preserve the principles of individual and local responsibility and mutual self-help before they embark on what I believe to be a disastrous system. I feel sure they will succeed if given the opportunity.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

Press statement (3 February 1931)

People, Feeling, Chance, Help

“Your sense of volition, or the lack of it, is an illusion. Everything you’ve done needed doing and was set in motion long ago. Let go of your self-pity. Your feelings in these events matter no more than a leaf’s desire to steer the wind!”

Lawrence M. Schoen (1959) American writer and klingonist

Source: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard (2015), Chapter 18, “One-Sided Conversation” (p. 175)

Feeling, Sense

“The bible is a collective attempt by humanity to solve the deepest problems that we have. The deepest of all problems that we have is the problem of self-consciousness. The unique predicament of human beings is that we are self-conscious. Not only is it true that we are mortal and that we die, but most crucial is the reality that we know we will die. That's the unique predicament of human beings. And that's laid out in the story of Adam and Eve.”

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

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifi5KkXig3s "Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death"

Problem, Reality

“While slavery meant Egypt, and slavemasters meant Pharoah, America itself remained the promised land. The slaves knew that it was not in Africa, Europe, or anywhere else that a nation had been founded upon the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. It was their destiny to cross over jordan here, and to make their decisive contribution to the human story here, by partaking of that new birth of freedom that alone could vindicate the cause of all human beings everywhere.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 164

Men, Truth, Birth, Decision

“A central task of Christian theology is to interrogate the relationship between kerygma and culture, between what is reflectively normative for Christian faith and practice and what is prereflectively normative for one’s historical situation. We will identify those forms of Christian self-understanding that conflate these two norms as modes of constantinianism.”

Constantinianism Policies

David Congdon, The Mission of Demythologizing (2015), p. 532

Faith, Understanding

“This it is that gives a majesty so pure and touching to the historic figure of Christ; self-abandonment to God, uttermost surrender, without reserve or stipulation, to the guidance of the Holy Spirit from the Soul of souls; pause in no darkness, hesitation in no perplexity, recoil in no extremity of anguish; but a gentle unfaltering hold of the invisible Hand, of the Only Holy and All Good; — these are the features that have made Jesus of Nazareth the dearest and most sacred image to the heart of so many ages.”

James Martineau (1805–1900) English religious philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 61.

God, Age, Soul, Heart

“One of the more pretentious political self-descriptions is "libertarian". People think it puts them above the fray. It sounds fashionable and, to the uninitiated, faintly dangerous. Actually, it's just one more bullshit political philosophy.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Books, Napalm and Silly Putty (2001)

People, Fashion, Thinking

“Europe’s elites are characterised by cultural self-loathing, combined with a heavy dose of cowardice.”

Peter Whittle (politician) (1961) British author, politician, and journalist

“An efficient woman secretary is the perfect assistant. Her role is not confined to taking dictation and "tapping out" letters; she must also file letters and replies, memorize addresses, and turn herself into a walking index. She must possess all the virtues of a departmental head, as well as those of a woman. Being a woman, she has intuition; she can keep intact the self-esteem of her superiors, and she spreads and agreeable atmosphere about the office. At the same time she must not make her femininity obvious, for if one of her superiors should become too conscious of it, the work would suffer. A difficult balance, but one that can be maintained.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

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

Suffering, Time, Perfection

“There are as many Scottish roads to Socialism as there are predictions of Britain's economic doom - but most of them demand three things: a coherent plan for an extension of democracy and control in society and industry which sees every reform as a means to creating a socialist society; a harnessing of the forces for industrial and community self-management within a political movement; and a massive programme of education by the Labour Movement as a whole.

Gramsci's relevance to Scotland today is in his emphasis that in a society which is both mature and complex, where the total social and economic processes are geared to maintaining the production of goods and services (and the reproduction of the conditions of production), then the transition to socialism must be made by the majority of the people themselves and a socialist society must be created within the womb of existing society and prefigured in the movements for democracy at the grass roots. Socialists must neither place their faith in an Armageddon or of capitalist collapse nor in nationalisation alone. For the Jacobin notion of a vanguard making revolution on behalf of working people relates to a backward society (and prefigures an authoritarian and bureaucratic state), then the complexity of modern society requires a far reaching movement of people and existing conditions and as a co-ordinator for the assertion of social priorities by people at a community level and control by producers at an industrial level. In such a way political power will become a synthesis of – not a substitute for – community and industrial life.

This requires from the Labour Movement in Scotland today a postive commitment to creating a socialist society, a coherant strategy with rhythm and modality to each reform to cancel the logic of capitalism and a programme of immediate aims which leads out of one social order into another. Such a social reorganisation - a phased extension of public control under workers' sustained and enlarged, would in EP Thompson's words lead to "a crisis not of despair and disintegration but a crisis in which the necessity for a peaceful revolutionary transition to an alternative socialist logic became daily more evident."”

Gordon Brown (1951) British Labour Party politician

Introduction to "The Red Paper On Scotland", 1975.

Life, People, Education, Peace

“To love the carnal self means to love the body-mind. I cannot abuse my body with alcohol, stress, and self-indulgence and still claim to love my self.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 165

Love, Alcohol

“Cybernetics, based upon the principle of feedback or circular causal trains providing mechanisms for goal-seeking and self-controlling behavior.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory

Behavior, Training

“To one who had never made more than five thousand a year himself, it was inspiring to explain before dozens of popeyed and admiring morons how they could make ten thousand—fifty thousand—a million a year, and all this by the Wonder Power of Suggestion, by Aggressive Personality, by the Divine Rhythm, in fact by merely releasing the Inner Self-shine.”

Sinclair Lewis book Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry (1927)

Personality

“Struggle against capitalism must be also struggle against the 'we' who are not only against but also in capitalism. To criticise is to recognise that we are a divided self. To criticise society is to criticise our own complicity in the reproduction of that society.”

John Holloway book Change the World Without Taking Power

Change the World Without Taking Power (2002)

“In my opinion Mr. Moore is a greater poet than Mr. Yeats. He has lived obscurely, and has not displayed Mr. Yeats's talent for self-dramatization; for these reasons and others he has never become a public figure or a popular writer.”

Thomas Sturge Moore (1870–1944) British playwright, poet and artist

Yvor Winters Uncollected Essays and Reviews (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1973) p. 139.
Criticism

“Socialism is, among other things, the political habitat of low self-esteem, incompetence, self-loathing, and a willingness to steal – or have stolen for you — what you are unable or unwilling to work for. Socialism is a philosophy fit only for slugs, leaches, and mosquitoes.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Alice Shrugged," http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/?p=51 18 December 2008.

“Homo-Marxian puzzles all those who try to work with him because he seems irrational and therefore unpredictable. In reality, however, the Marxist Man has reduced his thinking to the lowest common denominator of values taken from nature in the raw. He lives exclusively by the jungle law of selfish survival. In terms of these values he is rational almost to the point of mathematical precision. Through calm or crisis his responses are consistently elemental and therefore highly predictable. Because Homo-Marxian considers himself to be made entirely of the dust of the earth, he pretends to no other role. He denies himself the possibility of a soul and repudiates his capacity for immortality. He believes he had no creator and has no purpose or reason for existing except as an incidental accumulation of accidental forces in nature. Being without morals, he approaches all problems in a direct, uncomplicated manner. Self-preservation is given as the sole justification for his own behavior, and "selfish motives" or "stupidity" are his only explanations for the behavior of others. With Homo-Marxian the signing of fifty-three treaties and subsequent violation of fifty-one of them is not hypocrisy but strategy. The subordination of other men's minds to the obscuring of truth is not deceit but a necessary governmental tool. Marxist Man has convinced himself that nothing is evil which answers the call of expediency. He has released himself from all the confining restraints of honor and ethics which mankind has previously tried to use as a basis for harmonious human relations.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Men, Truth, Stupidity, Law

“A man, engaged in his simple reflections in everyday life, will comprehend neither the possibility, nor the benefits of self-sacrifice, but, when given ("qu'on lui donne", Fr.) a great cause to defend, and he will find only natural to sacrifice oneself for it.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 53.

Life, Nature

“I returned to school [after the bus accident], but I felt very sore and had little strength. I took my paintings to Diego [Rivera], and he liked them a lot, most of all the self-portrait. But of the rest he told me that I was influenced by Doctor Atl [a Mexican painter and revolutionary] and by Montenegro, and that I should try to paint whatever I wanted without being influenced by anyone else. That impressed me a lot, and I began to paint that I believed in. Then the friendship and almost courtship with Diego began. I would go to see him paint in the afternoon, and afterwards he would take me home by bus or in a Fordcito – a little Ford that he had – and he would kiss me.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

1950
Source: 1946 - 1953, "Song of herself"; interviews by Olga Campos, Sept. 1950, Chapter 'My Painting', p. 74

Friendship, School, Home, Kiss

“The preservation of game involves a list of evils to the farmer of which the loss of money is probably not the greatest. It destroys his self-respect and the independence of his character. He takes a farm and contracts to pay a rent; he stocks it with cattle and sheep; he ploughs and sows and reaps—his landlord also stocks the same farm with hares and rabbits and pheasants, and enjoys his battue, or sends to market the game which his tenant's produce has fed. The tenant has his servants, to superintend or conduct the operations on his farm, and to feed and protect his cattle and his flocks—the landlord has his keepers to secure his game, and these keepers are a spy upon the tenant himself, and traverse his field by day or night, as though superior to his servants and himself. In all this there is a fruitful source of depredation to the farmer. Men of capital and independent feeling will shun an occupation which involves so much humiliation.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech on the Game Laws (1843), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 125-126.
1840s

Men, Money, Feeling, Game

“Things are not quite so simple with 'pure' art as it is dogmatically claimed. In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better. In this sense I shall never be a pure artist as the dogma defines him. We higher creatures are also mechanically produced children of God, and yet intellect and soul operate within us in completely different dimensions.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (July 1905); from: Diari 1898-1918, 2012 (citato), paragrafo 660; as quoted by Francesco Mazzaferro, in 'The Diaries of Paul Klee Part Three', : 'Klee as a Secessionist and a Neo-Impressionist Artist' http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2015/05/paul-klee-ev.html 1903 - 1910

God, Children, Art, Soul

“1597. For whom does the blind Man's Wife paint her self?”

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

Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1736) : Why does the blind man's wife paint herself?
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Painting

“I felt a real Christian satisfaction in the fact that, if there were no other, there was one man who (several years before existence set the race another lesson to learn) made a practical effort on a small scale to learn the lesson of loving one’s neighbor and alas! Got at the same time a frightful insight into what an illusion Christendom is, and (a little later, to be sure) an insight also into what a situation the simpler classes suffered themselves to be seduced by paltry-newspaper writers, whose struggle or fight for equality (since it is in the service of a lie) cannot lead to any other result but to prompt the privileged classes in self-defence to stand proudly aloof from the common man, and to make the common man insolent in his forwardness.”

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

Source: 1840s, The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1848), p. 49

Love, Lie, Effort, Suffering

“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

"Black Matters" in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

Imagination

“Immoral to a degree — and probably more than a degree —
they certainly were. But they had the satisfaction that their life
was the notorious life of Antioch,
delectably sensual, in absolute good taste. To give up all this, indeed, for what? His hot air about the false gods,
his boring self-advertisement,
his childish fear of the theatre,
his graceless prudery, his ridiculous beard.”

Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933) Greek poet

Julian and the Antiochians http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=107&cat=1 Collected Poems (1992)

Life, God, Fear, Falseness

“The Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence that some truths are self-evident, and one of these is the fact that all men are created equal. Yet everyone knows that no two human beings are exactly alike in any respect. They are different when they are born. They plainly exhibit different natural skills. They acquire different tastes. They develop along different lines. They vary in physical strength, mental capacity, emotional stability, inherited social status, in their opportunities for self-fulfillment, and in scores of other ways. Then how can they be equal? The answer is, they can't, except in three ways. They can only be treated as equals in the sight of God, in the sight of the law, and in the protection of their rights. In these three ways all men are created equal. It is the task of society, as it is with God, to accept people in all their vast array of individual differences, but treat them as equals when it comes to their role as human beings. As members of society, all persons should have their equality guaranteed in two areas.”

W. Cleon Skousen (1913–2006) ex FBI agent, conservative United States author and faith-based political theorist

The 5,000 Year Leap (1981)

Men, God, People, Truth

“Scientific inventions, at all conceivable levels should enrich human life, not threaten existence. Science should be the greatest ally, not the worst enemy of mankind. Only so can the world, not only respond to the worthy efforts of Nobel, but also ensure itself against self-destruction. Indeed the challenge is for us to ensure the world from self-destruction. In our contribution to peace we are resolved to end such evils as oppression, white supremacy and race discrimination, all of which are incompatible with world peace and security. There is indeed a threat to peace.”

Albert Lutuli (1898–1967) South African politician

Lutuli's Acceptance Speech http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1960/lutuli-acceptance.html of the Nobel Peace Prize (December 10, 1961). Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1961)

Life, World, Peace, Effort

“Disciple: The truth be praised! Dear Lord, tell me, does anything (of this self) still remain in the happy, detached person?
Truth: Without a doubt it happens that, when the good and loyal servant is led into the joy of his Lord, he becomes drunk from the limitless overabundance of God's house. What happens to a drunken man happens to him, though it cannot really be described, that he so forgets his self that he is not at all his self and consequently has got rid of his self completely and lost himself entirely in God, becoming one spirit in all ways with him, just as a small drop of water does which has been dropped into a large amount of wine. Just as the drop of water loses itself, drawing the taste and colour of the wine to and into itself, so it happens that those who are in full possession of blessedness lose all human desires in an inexpressible manner, and they ebb away from themselves and are immersed completely in the divine will. Otherwise, if something of the individual were to remain of which he or she were not completely emptied, scripture could not be true in stating that God shall When the good and loyal servant is led into the joy of his Lord, he becomes drunk from the limitless overabundance of God's house. What happens to a drunken man happens to him, though it cannot really be described, that he so forgets his self that he is not at all his self become all things in all things. Certainly one's being remains, but in a different form, in a different resplendence, and in a different power. This is all the result of total detachment from self.”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Little Book of Truth

God, Happiness, Truth, Way

“André Weil suggested that there is a logarithmic law at work: first-rate people attract other first-rate people, but second-rate people tend to hire third-raters, and third-rate people hire fifth-raters. If a dean or a president is genuinely interested in building and maintaining a high-quality university (and some of them are), then he must not grant complete self-determination to a second-rate department; he must, instead, use his administrative powers to intervene and set things right. That's one of the proper functions of deans and presidents, and pity the poor university in which a large proportion of both the faculty and the administration are second-raters; it is doomed to diverge to minus infinity.”

Paul R. Halmos (1916–2006) American mathematician

I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)

People, Law, Universe

“As I've always said, the sun is the "Big Kahuna" of climate change on Earth. Everything else is secondary, even though man's opinion of his own self importance in the scheme of things often dictates otherwise.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

The Sun has a dimmer switch? http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/02/06/the-sun-has-a-dimmer-switch/, wattsupwiththat.com, February 6, 2007. 2007

Change, Sun

“We could not even see Hitler or the destructively daimonic reality he represented. Human beings just couldn't be that cruel in the our civilized twentieth century — the accounts in the papers must be wrong. Our error was that we let our convictions limit our perceptions. We had no place for the daimonic; we believed that the world must somehow fit our convictions, and the whole daimonic dimension was ruled out of our perception. Not to recognize the daimonic itself turns out to be daimonic, it makes us accomplices on the side of the destructive possession.
The denial of the daimonic is, in effect, a self-castration in love and a self-nullification in will. And the denial leads to the perverted forms of aggression we have seen in our day in which the repressed comes back to haunt us.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), p. 131

Love, World, Error, Reality

“Charlie interrupts impatiently, "Pain is where it's at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill."”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Pain, World, Beauty, Way

“The right of self-determination must be implemented through specific measures.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order on the right of self determination http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/Reports.aspx. 2015, Report submitted to the UN General Assembly

“Vehemence is the expression of a blind effort to support and uphold something that can never stand on its own… Whether it our own meaningless self we are upholding, or some doctrine devoid of evidence, we can do it only in a frenzy of faith.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

Faith, Support, Effort