Quotes about something (10000 quotes, page 67)

“My friends are all broad-minded, and well educated, but we do not keep a record of our conversations. The reason for this is (1) we are too lazy, and do not aspire to fame; (2) to talk gives us pleasure, but to write would give trouble; (3) none of us would be able to read it again after our deaths, so why worry; (4) if we wrote something this year we should probably find it all wrong the next year.”

Shi Nai'an (1296–1372) Chinese writer

Preface to Water Margin

Death , Pleasure , Education , Reading

“Do we function in sets of ten in the wilderness? How do we know how long we will have to do something?”

Erwan Le Corre (1971)

“Look,” I said. “Something that needs your attention. Over there. Away from here.”

John Scalzi The Last Colony

Source: The Last Colony (2007), Chapter 15 (p. 306)

“Sometimes it feels like you’re losing, but even when you’re losing, you’re getting something.”

Eliza Dushku (1980) American actress

Eliza Dushku on Wrong Turn, Tru Calling and Buffy Your Guide, Fred Topel

Feeling

“Scientology, the word means study of life, study of knowledge, and that's where it is. It takes up all areas of life itself, things that are integral and maxims that are related to life and very existence. Let me give you an example. It's better if I take that, because it is such a broad-ranging subject covering so many different areas, the subject of communication. This is something that major breakthroughs exist in Scientology, being able to communicate in the world around you. And I think everybody would agree that this is an important subject. Well, there's an actual formula for communication which can be understood.”

David Miscavige (1960) leader of the Church of Scientology

Scientology Leader Gave ABC First-Ever Interview: David Miscavige, Scientology Leader and Best Man at Tom Cruise's Wedding, Spoke to ABC News' 'Nightline' in 1992, ABC News, November 18, 2006, 2010-07-03 http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=2664713,.

Life , World , Communication , Knowledge

“The worst speak something good; if all want sense,
God takes a text, and preacheth Pa-ti-ence.”

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

The Temple (1633), The Church Porch

God , Sense

“I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored. I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving also something of their virtues.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Summing Up

Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 71

Men , Thinking

“I think I had been badly affected by.... the romance of Abstract Expressionism... particularly as it filtered out to places like Princeton and around the country, which was the idea of the 'artist as a terrifically sensitive ever-changing, ever ambitious person', particularly [described] in magazines like 'Art News' and 'Arts', which I read religiously.. I began to feel very strongly about finding a way that wasn't so wrapped up in the hullabaloo.... something that stable in a sense, something that wasn't constantly a record of your sensitivity, a record of flux.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

reacting on a question about 'gesture' panting
Quote in: Frank Stella, William S. Rubin, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970, p. 13
Quotes, 1960 - 1970

Art , Way , Feeling , Idea

“Perhaps the greatest change that industrialism (along with Protestantism and rationalism) has made in daily life is to separate work from leisure in a radical and almost absolute way. Once the efficacy of work began to be more clearly and fully appreciated, work had to become more efficacious in itself — that is, more efficient. To this end, it had to be more sharply separated from everything that was not work; it had to be made more concentratedly and purely itself — in attitude, in method and, above all, in time. Moreover, under the rule of efficiency, seriously purposeful activity in general tended to become assimilated to work. The effect of all this has been to reduce leisure to an occasion more exclusively of passivity, to a breathing spell and interlude; it has become something peripheral.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

"The Plight of Culture" (1953), p. 31
1960s, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, (1961)

Life , Way , Change , Time

“As for a few others, the vital task was a wedding of abstraction and surrealism. Out of these opposites something new could emerge, and Gorky’s work is a part of the evidence that this is true. What he felt, I suppose, was a sense of polarity, not of dichotomy; that opposites could exist simultaneously within a body, within a painting or within an entire art... These are the opposites poles in his work. Logic and irrationality; violence and gentleness; happiness and sadness, surrealism and abstraction. Out of these elements I think Gorky evolved his style.”

Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) American artist

Arshile Gorky Adolph Gottlieb in exhibition catalogue Kootz Gallery New York, 1950; as quoted in Abstract Painting in America, W.C, Seitz p. 104.
1950s

Sadness , Art , Thinking , Sense

“Do not be cross with the child; you cannot afford it. If you are cultivating a plant, developing it into something finer and nobler, you must love it, not hate it; be gentle with it, not abusive; be firm, never harsh. I give the plants upon which I am at work in a test, whether a single one or a hundred thousand, the best possible environment. So should it be with a child, if you want to develop it in right ways. Let the children have music, let them have pictures, let them have laughter, let them have a good time; not an idle time but one full of cheerful occupation. Surround them with all the beautiful things you can. Plants should be given sun and air and the blue sky; give them to your boys and girls. …for all the years. We cannot treat a plant tenderly one day and harshly the next; they cannot stand it. Remember that you are training not only for to-day, but for all the future, for all posterity.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

Love , Hate , Children , Beauty

“But why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or that or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that, and watch him (her husband, former president George H. W. Bush) suffer?”

Barbara Bush (1925–2018) former First Lady of the United States

Addressing the question of how much television news she'd recently been watching, in light of the enormous media attention given to likely outcomes in a U.S. war with Iraq. The interview took place two days prior to the start of the Iraq War, Good Morning America (18 March 2003)

Death , Beauty , Suffering

“You know, joining a gang is like having a family. It's feeling like you're part of something bigger than yourself. So we're either going to have gangs that murder and rob and do the things that are so destructive to the gang members and to the community. Or, we're going to have positive gangs. We're going to have positive alternatives for young people.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Clinton: We Need Positive Gangs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVD0pvWL6R4; as quoted in * 2016-04-21
Clinton: We Could Have Positive Gangs
Chandler Gill
Free Beacon
http://freebeacon.com/culture/clinton-need-positive-gangs/.
Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016)

People , Family , Feeling , Communication

“But the dwellers in the country have little understanding of, and therefore little sympathy with, the longing for green fields which haunts the dweller in towns. The secret dream of almost every inhabitant in those dusky streets where even a fresh thought would scarcely seem to enter, is to realise an independence, and go and live in the country. Where is every holiday spent but in the country! What do the smoky geraniums, so carefully tended in many a narrow street and blind alley attest, but the inherent love of the country! To whom do the blooming and sheltered villas, which are a national feature in English landscape, belong, but to men who pass the greater part of their lives in small dim counting-houses! This love of nature is divinely given to keep alive, even in the most toiling and world-worn existence, something of the imaginative and the apart. It is a positive good quality; and one good quality has some direct, or indirect tendency to produce another.”

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

The Monthly Magazine

Love , Men , Secret , World

“Philosophy, like speaking prose, is something have to do all our lives, well or badly, whether we notice it or not.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Introduction, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979).

“To say that a thing "wholly pertains" to something else, or "does not pertain to it in any way," and that something "is predicated in a universal way" of something else, or "is completely alien to it" amount to the same thing. Nevertheless, while one form of expression is [now] in frequent use, the other has become practically obsolete, except so far as it may occasionally be admitted through mutual agreement. In Aristotle's day it was perhaps customary to use both of these forms of expression, but now one has replaced the other [simply] because usage has so decreed. p. 168”

John of Salisbury English philosopher and theologian

The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury (1159)

Way , Universe

“I learnt the true meaning of what was euphemistically described as close-quarters combat. No line-of-sight particle-beam weapons now; no delayed-detonation nano-munitions. What close-quarters combat meant was something which would have been infinitely more recognisable to a soldier of a thousand years earlier: the screaming fury of human beings packed so close together that the only effective way to kill each other was with sharpened metal weapons: bayonets and daggers, or with hands around each other’s throats; fingers pressed into each other’s eye-sockets. The only way to survive was to disengage all higher brain-functions and regress to an animal state of mind.
So I did. And in doing so, I learned a deeper truth about war. She punished those who flirted with her by making them like herself. Once you opened the door to the animal, there was no shutting it.”

Alastair Reynolds book Chasm City

Source: Chasm City (2001), Chapter 7 (p. 108).

War , Truth , Way , Learning

“I believe that the situation has now gone so far that it is impossible to conceive of an effective long-term solution in which the agenda at least does not include consideration of, and which is not in some way directed to finding a means of achieving, the aspirations envisaged half a century ago, of progress towards a united Ireland…A substantial term of years will be required before any concept of unification could become a reality, but the dream must be there. If men of moderation have nothing to hope for, men of violence will have something to shoot for.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1971/nov/25/northern-ireland-1 in the House of Commons (25 November 1971)
Leader of the Opposition

Men , Dreams , Hope , Way

““You’ll never get it to follow orders.”
“Slaves follow orders, Colonel. You want something done a slave can’t, you don’t ask for a slave to do it.””

Gregory Benford (1941) Science fiction author and astrophysicist

Part 2 “Aleph”, Chapter 3 (p. 68)
Against Infinity (1983)

“Most often it is the case that people know that something big can be manipulated with it [i. e., the screw], but not how and in what way it is connected to time, and that untold time, and finally such force of machines, wheels, and shafts is necessary as cannot be produced nor be had.”

Jacob Leupold (1674–1727) German multidisciplinary scientist

Jacob Leupold (1724); as cited in: Helmut Müller-Sievers (2012) The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century. p. 146

People , Way , Time

“In any art there are a lot of technical things that you can get to like. Building is just skilled labor, I suppose. It's a lot of work. I don't mind other people building them, but the way things go together and are made is interesting to me; I like that a lot. I pay a lot of attention to how things are done and the whole activity of building something is interesting.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

1960s, "Oral history interview with Donald Judd," 1965

People , Art , Way

“Thinking in time is not relativism but a form of relationalism… the truest description of something consists of specifying its relationships to other parts of the system it is part of.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2013)

Thinking , Time , Parting

“He waited, but nothing happened.
"Boom? Was something suppose to happen there?"”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Jace to Imogen, pg. 303
The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

Waiting

“Belief is not a merely intellectual process, belief is not a mere persuasion of the mind, belief is something that is in our heart, and what you believe, you must do, because belief is from God. It is to the heart that God speaks, it is in the heart that God resides…. Here is a work that you have undertaken, a work so gigantic, so stupendous, the means for which are so poor, the resistance to which will be so strong, so organised … and what means have you with which to carry out this tremendous work of yours? If you look at it intellectually, it is hopeless…. This intellectual process, if it is used honestly, if it is followed to the very end, leads you to despair. It leads you to death.”

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

January 19, 1908
India's Rebirth

Death , God , Strong , Heart

“Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

9 May 1830
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Sense , Housing

“Electricity, n. The cause of all natural phenomena not known to be caused by something else. It is the same thing as lightning, and its famous attempt to strike Dr. Franklin is one of the most picturesque incidents in that great and good man's career.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Nature

“A lot of people wouldn't believe me now if I told them I used to down pints of beer with friends, loitering on the banks of the Nainital Lake while at Sherwood College. Something I would be embarrassed to admit now, but that still was youthful joie de vivre. Later in the film industry it became a kind of social compulsion to be seen at parties holding a wine glass in one hand and a cigarette in another, looking all classy and affluent. There was a certain artificiality about it I couldn't fathom. Maybe that's what gradually led me to become a teetotaler.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

People , Youth , Beer , Wine

“Do I think that we should work with the community or the police or the medical people down there to work out what to do if there’s another Scientologist who needs care and we want to avoid psychiatric treatment? Yes I do. And why is that? No matter what the circumstance … anybody would want to do something to avoid someone dying.”

David Miscavige (1960) leader of the Church of Scientology

Discussing the death of Scientologist Lisa McPherson in Clearwater, Florida — [Thomas C., Tobin, The Man Behind Scientology, http://www.sptimes.com/TampaBay/102598/scientologypart1.html, St. Petersburg Times, October 25, 1998, 2010-07-03].

People , Communication , Thinking

“"Is our strategy when we actually see him still 'trust me,' by the way?"
"It's still 'trust me.'"
"Oh, good. For a second there I was worried there was going to be an actual plan with, like, steps we could follow. You know, something reassuring."”

Cassandra Clare The Mortal Instruments

Isabelle Lightwood and Jace Herondale, about Sebastian/Jonathan Morgenstern, pg. 539
The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)

Way

“It should be a good story— speak about a time and place that is permanent. It should capture something wonderful with some great characters whether it's set in the past or in the future.”

Ismail Merchant (1936–2005) Indian-born film producer and director

On the making of good films. Interview with the Associated Press (2004).

Time , Past , Future

“Only you can do something about it.
There's no-one there, my friend, any better.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, 50 Words for Snow (2011)

“To an atheist […], there is no all-seeing all-loving god to keep us free from harm. But atheism is not a recipe for despair. I think the opposite. By disclaiming the idea of the next life, we can take more excitement in this one. The here and now is not something to be endured before eternal bliss or damnation. The here and now is all we have, an inspiration to make the most of it. So atheism is life-affirming, in a way religion can never be. Look around you. Nature demands our attention, begs us to explore, to question. Religion can provide only facile, ultimately unsatisfying answers. Science, in constantly seeking real explanations, reveals the true majesty of our world in all its complexity. People sometimes say "There must be more than just this world, than just this life". But how much more do you want? We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they’re never going to be born. The number of people who could be here, in my place, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. If you think about all the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here, the number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist. We are privileged to be alive and we should make the most of our time on this world.”

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

End of the part 2: "The Virus of Faith" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMUG6qd98wc
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

Love , Life , God , People

“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”

Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893–1986) Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937

Attributed to Szent-Györgyi in: IEEE (1985) Bridging the present and the future: IEEE Professional Communication Society conference record, Williamsburg, Virginia, October 16-18, 1985. p. 14.

Thinking

“There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? Obligative scientists must be very rare, and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

"Hypothesis and Imagination" (Times Literary Supplement, 25 Oct 1963)
1960s

People , Way

“Look at Mother Teresa. She spent her whole life being holy. She didn't benefit anyone in any real sense. She didn't work on stopping disease, helping poverty, doing anything that would relieve the condition of her countrymen. She just went around the city, picked up dying people, and took care of them while they died. It was a good thing, no doubt, but it meant no betterment, no progress, no help, no relief from pain. She longed to be holy. She wanted to be a saint. Now she's a saint.
Salk isn't a saint. But he did more for the human race than Mother Teresa did. He didn't long to be holy, which meant having faith, not asking questions, doing something unpleasant without thought or complaint. He longed to do good, which meant finding things out, asking hard questions, and thinking hard, deep thoughts. Goodness and holiness are two different things, unfortunately.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Strange Horizons interview (2008)

Life , Pain , People , Disease

“Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.”

Tom Peters (1942) American writer on business management practices

Tom Peters in: " The Best Corporate Strategy? None, Of Course http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1994-07-11/business/9407110026_1_silicon-graphics-customers-richard-branson." Chicago Tribune, July 11, 1994.

Life

“There is no fair use to take something that doesn't belong to you. That's not fair use.”

Jack Valenti (1921–2007) President of the MPAA

In response to the question "Do consumers have a fair use right to remix a few seconds of a Hollywood movie into a home movie project?"
Engadget interview (2004)

“A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meets the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative.”

H.L. Mencken book The American Language

Source: The American Language (1919), Ch. 5

Imagination

“The construction of hypotheses is a creative act of inspiration, intuition, invention; its essence is the vision of something new in familiar material. The process must be discussed in psychological, not logical, categories; studied in autobiographies and biographies, not treatises on scientific method; and promoted by maxim and example, not syllogism or theorem.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

"The Methodology of Positive Economics" (1953)

Study

“…the policy of separate development can be tested by any unprejudiced person against the requirements of Christianity and morality, and it will be found to meet all those requirements. … for conditions such as those in South Africa there is no other policy[, for without it] you will have chaos and ultimately bring about the downfall of all population groups here in South Africa. South Africa's problems are unique and South Africa has chosen its solution. …we, the Whites, the Coloureds, the Asians and the Bantu, will work out our own solutions here in South Africa. …we instituted the policy of separate development, not because we considered ourselves better than others, not because we considered ourselves richer or more educated than others. We instituted the policy of separate development because we said we were different from others. We prize that otherness and are not prepared to relinquish it. … We have our land and we and we alone will have authority over it. We have our Parliament and in that Parliament we and we alone will be represented; that is why [during] this past session it was my pleasant privilege to … abolish Coloured representation in Parliament; and it has been abolished once and for all. … but one should also put something in its place. That is why the National Party … for the first time [has given] the Coloureds in the Republic a Coloured Persons Representative Council in their own political area [where they] can exercise their political rights in their own way and by their own people. That is morality, that is policy, that is standpoint. … We said you may not attend my university, but we did not leave it at that. We said we shall give you a university of your own. We said you may not attend my school but we said we shall give you a school of your own. That is morality, that is Christianity …”

John Vorster (1915–1983) politician from South Africa and seventh Prime Minister of South Africa

John Vorster in his Heilbron speech http://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/extract-speech-made-heilbron-16-august-1968 on 16 August 1968, as quoted in sahistory.org.za

People , Education , School , Way

“Never confuse someone else's inability to do something with its inability to be done.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 16

“A subject may be said to be in such a state if he (it) wants something and has unequally efficient alternative ways of trying to get it.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1970s, On purposeful systems., 1972, p. 39, as cited in: Jacob Hendrik Galjaard (2009) De droom van mijnheer Ariyoshi. p. 89:

Way

“The belief that the body of the Virgin was not interred on earth, but was taken to heaven, has deprived them of all pretext for manufacturing any relics of her remains, which otherwise might have been sufficiently abundant to fill a whole churchyard; yet in order to have at least something belonging to her, they sought to indemnify themselves for the absence of other relics with the possession of her hair and her milk. The hair is shown in several churches in Rome, and at Salvatierra in Spain, at Macon, St Flour, Cluny, Nevers, and in many other towns. With regard to the milk, there is not perhaps a town, a convent, or nunnery, where it is now shown in large or small quantites. Indeed, had the Virgin been a wet-nurse her whole life, or a dairy, she could not have produced more than is shown as hers in various parts.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Johnstone and Hunter edition (1854), p. 248
A Treatise of Relics (1543)

Life , Parting

“As I thought about this, I noted that the bacterium is just a physical system; it's just a bunch of molecules that hang together and do things to one another. So, I wondered, what characteristics are necessary for a physical system to be an autonomous agent? After thinking about this for a number of months I came up with a tentative definition.
My definition is that an autonomous agent is something that can both reproduce itself and do at least one thermodynamic work cycle. It turns out that this is true of all free-living cells, excepting weird special cases. They all do work cycles, just like the bacterium spinning its flagellum as it swims up the glucose gradient. The cells in your body are busy doing work cycles all the time.”

Stuart Kauffman (1939) American biophysicist

The Adjacent Possible: A Talk with Stuart Kauffman, 2003

Business , Thinking , Time

“You see something faraway & it looks beautiful & very seductive; but as you go closer you realize it's actually bugs crawling over a corpse.”

Frances Bean Cobain (1992) American artist

6 December 2014 https://twitter.com/alka_seltzer666/status/541373309490044928
Twitter https://twitter.com/alka_seltzer666 posts

Beauty

“Well they're breaking down doors in foreign countries,
Everybody thinks somebody's hiding something.
There's talk on the street and the nation is worried.
But you can't talk back when you're dead, when you're dead and buried.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Restless
Song lyrics, Breaking Hearts (1984)

Thinking , Dead , Country

“I think people tend to forget that as celebrities we are still human. We have the same emotions - we cry, we have fun, we laugh, we get sad, and we get hurt. When something is written about you, which millions of people are reading, and it is not true, imagine how hurtful it can be.”

Sania Mirza (1986) Indian tennis player

Source: Garima Sharma My husband is very calm and that is very annoying, says Sania Mirza http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/tennis/interviews/My-husband-is-very-calm-and-that-is-very-annoying-says-Sania-Mirza/articleshow/17533676.cms, The Times of India, 8 December 2012

People , Sadness , Imagination , Thinking

“The only place Al Gore conserves energy these days is on the treadmill. I don't want to suggest that Al's getting big, but the last time I saw him on TV I thought, "That reminds me — we have to do something about saving the polar bears."
Never mind his carbon footprint — have you seen the size of Al Gore's regular footprint lately? It's almost as deep as Janet Reno's.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"The Coming Ass Age" (21 March 2007) http://www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/article.cgi?article=175.
2007

Time

“It was difficult to believe these things had taken place such a very long time ago. The events seemed distant, as though he had only read about them and not experienced them at all. He knew that at this point his death was far closer, far more tangible. That was something he could almost touch. One could feel one’s mortal form progressing slowly to ruin, like that old abbey—the signs were undeniable. Things went wrong inside a man and did not come right again. That was the truth that hung over one’s head like a blade. Injuries and illnesses were no longer easily repaired. And as with some part of a painting that he could never get right, the great danger was to see nothing but what was wrong. The trap of age.”

Sean Russell (1952) author

Source: Sea Without a Shore (1996), Chapter 7 (p. 89)

Death , Truth , Age , Feeling

“Most people might just as well buy a share of the whole market, which pools all the information, than delude themselves into thinking they know something the market doesn't.”

Merton Miller (1923–2000) American economist

Source: Investment Gurus: A Road Map to Wealth from the World's Best Money Managers. 1999, p. 269.

People , Thinking

“Wait, there is a light, there is a fire, illuminated attic. Fate or something better, I could care less, Just stay with me a while”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, Light Grenades (2006)

Fate , Light , Waiting

“There is a saying that great genius matures late. If something is not brought to fruition over a period of twenty to thirty years, it will not be of great merit. When a retainer is of a mind to do his work hurriedly, he will intrude upon the work of others and will be said to be young but able. He will become over-enthusiastic and will be considered rather rude.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto book Hagakure

Hagakure (c. 1716)

“Piglet looked up, and looked away again. And he felt so Foolish and Uncomfortable that he had almost decided to run away to Sea and be a Sailor, when suddenly he saw something.”

A.A. Milne book The House at Pooh Corner

Source: The House at Pooh Corner (1928), Chapter Three.

Sea

“I've never been passionate about acting, and I find more and more that I work to live the life I want to live. An actor like Al Pacino lives to act. I'm not sure though, there's something about the detachment I have, the feeling of the lack of importance about what I do, that is healthy.”

Jeremy Irons (1948) English actor

King of all his castles
The New Zealand Herald
2005-05-14
Elaine
Lipworth
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10125499
2011-08-11

Life , Feeling , Passion

“I reproach myself for a gross error. But I would reproach myself more if I had persisted in an error after observations revealed it clearly to be that. I made a deal of money in the late 1940s on the bull side, ignoring Satchel Paige’s advice to Lot’s wife, “Never look back.” Rather I would advocate Samuelson’s Law: “Always look back. You may learn something from your residuals. Usually one’s forecasts are not so good as one remembers them; the difference may be instructive.” The dictum “If you must forecast, forecast often,” is neither a joke nor a confession of impotence. It is a recognition of the primacy of brute fact over pretty theory. That part of the future that cannot be related to the present’s past is precisely what science cannot hope to capture. Fortunately, there is plenty of work for science to do, plenty of scientific tasks not yet done.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

February 1985, in William Breit and Roger W. Spencer (ed.) Lives of the laureates
1980s–1990s

Money , Law , Hope , Error

“I was just reading something last night from the state of California. And that the California universities — it's several, I think it's seven or eight of the California system of universities don't even teach an American history course. It's not even available to be taught. Just to tell you how bad it’s gotten in this country, where we're trying to disconnect the American people from the roots of who we are, so they have an understanding of what America should be.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

2012-04-02
Santorum Claims "Seven Or Eight" Univ. California Schools Don't Teach American History
Meenal
Vamburkar
Mediaite
http://www.mediaite.com/online/santorum-claims-seven-or-eight-univ-california-schools-dont-teach-american-history/
2012-04-10
2012-04-03
Rick Santorum Speaks from His Heart - California Colleges
The Colbert Report
Comedy Central
Television
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/411675/april-03-2012/rick-santorum-speaks-from-his-heart---california-colleges
2012-04-10

People , History , Understanding , Thinking

“Character is what you are. Reputation is what others think you are. The reason that some fail to climb the ladder of success, or of leadership if you want to call it that, is that there is a difference between reputation and character. The two do not always coincide. A man may be considered to have sterling character. Opportunity might come to that man; but if he has the reputation for something he is not, he may fail that opportunity. I think character is the foundation of successful leadership.”

Lucian Truscott (1895–1965) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

Quoted in Air Force Journal of Logistics, March 22, 2005, Notable quotes.(Lucien Truscott)(Brief Article)

Thinking , Success

“We form many of our political opinions through reading papers and unconsciously absorbing the rhetoric of the journalists. Later, we spout the same opinions as our own. This parallels the way we respond to any authority and it’s something politicians understand well.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Way , Understanding , Reading

“In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Learning To Read, p. 71.
A History of Reading (1996)

Communication , Learning , Reading , Dependency

“To cover up actual lack of knowledge, the tale develops an explanation which amounts to divine intervention. It is an easy and, to the primitive mind, a plausible and satisfactory way to explain something of which nothing at all is known.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Notes on the Third Tale (p. 69)
City (1952)

Way , Knowledge

“There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.”

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

Quoted in Kubrick : Inside a Film Artist's Maze (2000) by Thomas Allen Nelson, p. 10

Personality

“I am a police dog. A yapping dog. Detached post of the public opinion. My duty is to give a signal, if I detect something dangerous. If something is crappy, contemptible, tasteless, mendacious, clandestine, hypocritical, mess, duff, homely, abominable or unworthy of human dignity. That has been what I have been doing during my whole life, that has been what I have been representing.”

Róbert Puzsér (1974) hungarian publicist

Én egy őrkutya vagyok. Egy csahos kutya. A közvélemény előretolt állása. Nekem az a feladatom, hogy jelezzem, ha valami veszélyt érzékelek. Ha valami silány, hitvány, ízléstelen, hazug, álságos, képmutató, szemét, ócska, igénytelen, förtelmes vagy emberhez méltatlan. Világ életemben ezt műveltem, ezt képviseltem. (Puzsér Róbert: "Én egy őrkutya vagyok"
Szily Nóra interjúja, life.hu, 2012. április 10.)
Quotes from him, Interviews

Life , Dogs , Home

“Oh, dear, it's quite true what Dr. Reilly said. How does one stop writing? If I could find a really good telling phrase… Like the one M. Poirot used. In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate… Something like that.”

Agatha Christie book Murder in Mesopotamia

Amy Leatheran
Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)

“Tell me how to be in this world
Tell me how to breathe in and feel no hurt
Tell me how 'cause I believe in something
I believe in us”

James Bay (1990) British singer-songwriter

Us
Lyrics

World , Feeling , Hurt

“I wanted to show that if you claim being trans is unacceptable in traditional Judaism, well, here is a community that is not just okay with accepting me as I am, but is celebrating with me, rejoicing with me. What I’m hoping is that by sharing my story, others in the same situation will realize that you can have your name changed in a synagogue. There are so many synagogues where you can’t, but there are also those where you can — the Jewish Reform movement, the Conservative movement. Within Orthodoxy, there’s still a long way to go. Every time something like this is done, it’s one step closer to acceptance for everyone.”

Abby Stein (1991) Trans activist, speaker, and educator

Huffington Post, June 9, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/abby-stein-judaism_us_57574cbfe4b08f74f6c08963
2016

Hope , Way , Communication , Change

“All who strive to live for something beyond mere selfish aims find their capacities for doing good very inadequate to their aspirations. They do so much less than they want to do, and so much less than they, at the outset, expected to do, that their lives, viewed retrospectively, inevitably look like failure.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

1860s
Source: Letter to John Fraser http://www.bartleby.com/66/71/12271.html (1868)

Failure , Selfishness

“It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of _island of the blessed_ where people are free to indulge and express their Individuality…this is not true…. i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until…i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories…by workers who were mostly exploited…. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to…and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment… [Cyberspace] is a black hole. It absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as an emotional spectacle.”

Carmen Hermosillo Community manager, essayist, poet, research analyst

"Pandora's Vox", as cited in Curtis, Adam, 2011, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, BBC.

Money , People , Fashion , Personality

“In principio it is impossible to prove from experiments that something is non-existent.”

Felix Ehrenhaft (1879–1952) Austrian physicist

The Magnetic Current http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1941Sci....94..232E, Science, Volume 94, Issue 2436, pp. 232-233 (September, 1941)

“We are always doing something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 587 (20 August 1714).
The Spectator (1711–1714)

“Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique is still heralded as having paved the way for contemporary feminist movement-it was written as if these women did not exist. Friedan's famous phrase, "the problem that has no name," often quoted to describe the condition of women in this society, actually referred to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle and upper class, married white women-housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life. Friedan concludes her first chapter by stating: "We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my house.'" That "more" she defined as careers. She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute, than to be a leisure class housewife. She made her plight and the plight of white women like herself synonymous with a condition affecting all American women. In so doing, she deflected attention away from her classism, her racism, her sexist attitudes towards the masses of American women. In the context of her book, Friedan makes clear that the women she saw as victimized by sexism were college-educated, white women who were compelled by sexist conditioning to remain in the home. … Specific problems and dilemmas of leisure class white housewives were real concerns that merited consideration and change but they were not the pressing political concerns of masses of women. Masses of women were concerned about economic survival, ethnic and racial discrimination, etc. When Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, more than one third of all women were in the work force. Although many women longed to be housewives, only women with leisure time and money could actually shape their identities on the model of the feminine mystique.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. 1-2 https://books.google.com/books?id=uvIQbop4cdsC&pg=PA1.
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory

Life , Women , Men , Money

“The Lost Music was his way of talking about the way he believed that old wives' tales and dance tunes and folktales were just the tangled echoes of something that's not quite of this world … something we all knew once, but have forgotten since.”

Charles de Lint (1951) author

Part One: The Hidden People, "The Quarrlsome Piper" p. 19
The Little Country (1991)

World , Music , Way , Dance

“What I'm suggesting is, stand for yourself, be for something and the hell with it. Because the hand-wringers and the editorialists and the sigh-and-pontificate crowd will be against you, whatever you do.”

James Carville (1944) political writer, consultant and United States Marine

March 11, 2002, interview with Joan Walsh http://dir.salon.com/people/feature/2002/03/11/carville/print.html

Hell

“People know that they can tune in to "60 Minutes" any Sunday and know that they're going to learn something by watching the broadcast. They may not like every piece, they may not agree with every piece, but they'll say, huh, I didn't know that about something in there.”

Ed Bradley (1941–2006) News correspondent

[Larry King, Interview with Ed Bradley, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0402/08/lkl.00.html, February 8, 2004, Larry King Live, CNN]

People , Learning

“The Impressionists were the first [painters] to reject the absolute value of the subject and to consider its value to be merely relative... In Paul Cezanne's letters I notice ideas like these: 'Objects must turn, recede, and live. I wish to make something lasting from impressionism, like the art in the museums'....'For an impressionist, to paint after nature is not to paint the object, but to express sensations'....'After having looked at the old masters, one must take haste to leave them and to verify in one's self the instincts, the sensations that dwell in us.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote, 1914, in 'Functions of Painting by Fernand Leger'; p. 11
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1910's, Contemporary Achievements in Painting, 1914

Art , Idea , Nature , Painting

“Referring to a professor aboard ship: This passenger — the first and only one we had had, except to go from port to port on the coast — was no one else than a gentleman whom I had known in my smoother days, and the last person I should have expected to see on the coast of California — Professor Nuttall of Cambridge. I had left him quietly seated in the chair of the Botany and Ornithology Department at Harvard University, and the next I saw of him, he was strolling about San Diego beach, in a sailors' pea jacket, with a wide straw hat, and barefooted, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, picking up stones and shells… I was often amused to see the sailors puzzled to know what to make of him, and to hear their conjectures about him and his business… The Pilgrim's crew called Mr. Nuttall "Old Curious," from his zeal for curiosities; and some of them said that he was crazy, and that his friends let him go about and amuse himself this way. Why else would (he)… come to such a place as California to pick up shells and stones, they could not understand. One of them, however, who had seen something more of the world ashore said, "Oh, 'vast there!… I've seen them colleges and know the ropes. They keep all such things for cur'osities, and study 'em, and have men a purpose to go and get 'em… He'll carry all these things to the college, and if they are better than any that they have had before, he'll be head of the college. Then, by and by, somebody else will go after some more, and if they beat him he'll have to go again, or else give up his berth. That's the way they do it. This old covery knows the ropes. He has worked a traverse over 'em, and come 'way out here where nobody's ever been afore, and where they'll never think of coming."”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. book Two Years Before the Mast

This explanation satisfied Jack; and as it raised Mr. Nuttall's credit, and was near enough to the truth for common purposes, I did not disturb it.
Source: Two Years Before the Mast (1840), p. 267

Men , Truth , World , Way

“Mr. Llewellyn paused. Mr. Trout had begun to float about the room like something out of Swan Lake, and Mr. Llewellyn disapproved of this. He was apt to be a martinet in his dealings with his legal advisers, demanding that lawyers should behave like lawyers and leave eccentric dancing to the professionals. A man, he held, is either Fred Astaire or he is not Fred Astaire, and if he is not Fred Astaire he should not carry on like him.”

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

From P.G. Wodehouse's Bachelors Anonymous (1973).

Dance

“To do good is difficult. One who does good first does something hard to do. I have done many good deeds, and, if my sons, grandsons and their descendants up to the end of the world act in like manner, they too will do much good. But whoever amongst them neglects this, they will do evil. Truly, it is easy to do evil.”

Ashoka (-304–-232 BC) Indian emperor of the Maurya Dynasty

Edicts of Ashoka (c. 257 BC)

World , Evil

“Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said… was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?”

Willa Cather book A Lost Lady

A Lost Lady (1923), Part I, Ch. 7

Women , Secret , Beauty

“Prayer helped me with the loss of my wife to cancer and with a child who had fallen on tough times. Now prayer helps me to be a father, to be an actor and to be a man, it always helps to have a bit of prayer in your back pocket. At the end of the day, you have to have something and for me that is God, Jesus, my Catholic upbringing, my faith. In a way (my life) all leads back to a little boy in Navan, my home town on the banks of the Boyne. Sometimes, it has been painted in melodramatic tones but it was a fantastic way to be brought up. The Catholicism and the Christian brothers, those are deep-rooted images and the foundation for a person of some acting skill, God has been good to me. My faith has been good to me in the moments of deepest suffering, doubt and fear. It is a constant, the language of prayer… I might not have got my sums right from the Christian Brothers or might not have got the greatest learning of literature from them but I certainly got a strapping amount of faith. But there is one thing that the people of Ireland know how to do and that is to survive. You have to keep your faith and stay optimistic.”

Pierce Brosnan (1953) Irish-American actor, film producer, and environmentalist

Pierce Brosnan talks about his deep Catholic faith http://www.irishcentral.com/culture/entertainment/pierce-brosnan-talks-about-his-deep-catholic-faith-118983269-237736371 (March 31, 2011)

Life , God , People , Fear

“They [Americans] have something worth defending…they need to defend it properly from the foe that most people are afraid even to name. How can you possibly fight an enemy when you're afraid to identify him?”

Robert Spencer (1962) American author and blogger

Robert Spencer talking about identifying Islamic extremists, Michelle interviews Robert Spencer about Religion of Peace: Why Christianity is and Islam Isn’t, 2007-08-13 http://hotair.com/archives/2007/08/13/new-vent-michelle-interviews-robert-spencer-about-religion-of-peace-why-christianity-is-and-islam-isnt/,

People , Fight

“Married people pledge love for each other throughout eternity. Well, now, that is easy enough but does not mean very much, for if one is finished with time one is probably finished with eternity. If, instead of saying "throughout eternity," the couple would say, "until Easter, until next May Day," then what they say would make some sense, for then they would be saying something and also something they perhaps could carry out.”

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

Hong, 1987/2013. p. 296
1840s, Either/Or (1843)

Love , People , Sense , Time

“The 1960s revolutions against racism, sexism and classism nearly missed out the animals. This worried me. Ethics and politics at the time simply overlooked the nonhumans entirely. Everyone seemed to be just preoccupied with reducing the prejudices against humans. Hadn’t they heard of Darwin? I hated racism, sexism and classism, too, but why stop there? As a hospital scientist I believed that hundreds of other species of animals suffer fear, pain and distress much as I did. Something had to be done about it. We needed to draw the parallel between the plight of the other species and our own. One day in 1970, lying in my bath at the old Sunningwell Manor, near Oxford, it suddenly came to me: SPECIESISM!”

Richard D. Ryder (1940) British psychologist

" Speciesism Again: The Original Leaflet http://www.veganzetta.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Speciesism-Again-the-original-leaflet-Richard-Ryder.pdf", in Critical Society, Issue 2, Spring 2010.

Pain , Hate , Fear , Lying

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

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

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

“It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.”

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter I, Consolations For Unpopularity, p. 25.

Understanding

“Either you write songs or you don't. And if you do write songs like I do, I think there's a natural desire to want to make records. So, when I left Pink Floyd, I guess I had two, no three choices open to me: Not to do it anymore, which is daft as I was writing songs, although I suppose I could have written for other people, but I like making records; so I could either do it as Roger Waters or I could have got together with other people and said hey, why don't we start a band? But my view of bands had been jaundiced slightly by my previous experience, so I think that was something I never considered.”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

Gold, 1992
Music

People , Nature , Thinking , Water

“Some people believe that a person’s spirit is captured when they are photographed. I invite those of you who don’t believe that to take a photograph of someone you love a stab it repeatedly with a pair of scissors. Maybe they do capture something of the soul.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Love , People , Soul , Personality

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 13

People , Faith , Confidence , Sun

“Good or bad I propose to be something great!”

Arthur Desmond (1859–1929) New Zealnd writer

Rival Caesars (1903)

“The elucidation of the theory of centripetal and disturbing forces is necessarily less complete. Still… a general conception of the nature of the action of those forces… sufficient to preserve the student from the gross errors… may be obtained from explanations like those here offered. The methods of ascertaining the weight of the Earth and other bodies are… more difficult of explanation; yet… something may be done even in these.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Introduction
Popular Astronomy: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Ipswich (1868)

Error , Nature

“Just because something’s crazy, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

Gregory Benford Artifact

Part 5, Chapter 1 (p. 228)
Artifact (1985)

“But on the other hand, the understanding, reflection, is also a gift of God. What shall one do with it, how dispose of it if one is not to use it? And if one then uses it in fear and trembling not for one’s own advantage but to serve the truth, if one uses it that way in fear and trembling and furthermore believing that it still is God who determines the issue in its eternal significance, venturing to trust in him, and with unconditional obedience yielding to what he makes use of it: is this not fear of God and serving God the way a person of reflection can, in the somewhat different way than the spontaneously immediate person, but perhaps more ardently. But if this is the case, does not a maieutic element enter into the relation to other man or to various other men. The maieutic is really only the expression for a superiority between man and man. That is exists cannot be denied-but existence presses far more powerfully upon the superior one precisely because he is a maieutic (because he has the responsibility) than upon the other. As far as I am concerned, there has been no lack of witnesses. All my upbuilding discourses are in fact in the form of direct communication. Consequently there can be a question only about this, something that has occupied me for a long time (already back in earlier journals): should I for one definitely explain myself as author, what I declare myself to be, how I from the beginning understood myself to be a religious author. But now is not the time to do it; I am also somewhat strained at the moment, I need more physical recreation.”

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

JP VI 6234 (Pap. IX A 222 1848)
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

Men , God , Truth , Fear

“I was told once that I didn't play the Hollywood game, and that's why I wasn't a big star. What they meant when they said that was that I don't go to parties, and when I go to an audition and I don't like the script, they know it. I don't flirt and I don't play the people that I'm meeting with. In the next breath, this person said to me, ‘When you're passionate about a role, there's nobody that can touch you, but you have to learn to do this also…’ But I don't know how to sit there and pretend I love something when I don't!”

Sherilyn Fenn (1965) American actress

Sherilyn Fenn, quoted in "Fenntastic", by Jill Daniel. Orange Coast (USA). January 1999.

Love , People , Game , Star

“My strategy has always been do something that is hard to follow.”

Hari Punja (1936) Fijian businessman

Interview with the Fiji Times http://www.Fijitimes.com, 25 September 2005 (excerpts)

“In my opinion, it helps enormously to know why something is true, rather than being told it is true, for why should you believe me? Never believe anything on the authority of a single person but seek confirmation — and reason is the best confirmation.”

Dennis Lindley (1923–2013) British statistician

2. Stylistic Questions. p. 24–25.
Understanding Uncertainty (2006)

Help , Personality

“Something in the way she moves
attracts me like no other lover.”

George Harrison (1943–2001) British musician, former member of the Beatles

Something (1969)
Lyrics

Way , Lovers

“For us “immigration” is a proxy for race. In that way, immigration can be good or bad: it can be a conquest (as it seems now)… or a European in-gathering, something like White Zionism. It all depends on the immigrants. And we should open our minds to the positive possibilities of mass immigration from the White world.”

Richard Bertrand Spencer (1978) American white supremacist

World , Way , Dependency

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

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

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

Soul , Motivation , Idea , Question