Quotes about source
page 5

Miguel de Unamuno photo
Maimónides photo
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan photo

“My ambition is to unfold the sources of India in the profound plane of human nature.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology http://resourcecentre.daiict.ac.in/eresources/iresources/quotations.html,

Dhirubhai Ambani photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

The Natural History of Intellect (1893) http://www.rwe.org/natural-history-of-intellect.html

Revilo P. Oliver photo

“In 1945 I really believed that by the year 1952 no American could hear the name of Roosevelt without a shudder or utter it without a curse. You see; I was wrong. I was right about the inevitability of exposure. Like the bodies of the Polish officers who were butchered in Katyn Forest by the Bolsheviks (as we knew at the time), many of the Roosevelt regime's secret crimes were exposed to the light of day. The exposures were neither so rapid or so complete as I anticipated, but their aggregate is far more than should have been needed for the anticipated reaction. Only about 80 per cent of the secret of Pearl Harbor has thus far become known, but that 80 per cent should in itself be enough to nauseate a healthy man. Of course I do not know, and I may not even suspect, the full extent of the treason of that incredible administration. But I should guess that at least half of it has been disclosed in print somewhere: not necessarily in well-known sources, but in books and articles in various languages, including publications that the international conspiracy tries to keep from the public, and not necessarily in the form of direct testimony, but at least in the form of evidence from which any thinking man can draw the proper and inescapable deductions. The information is there for those who will seek it, and enough of it is fairly well known, fairly widely known, especially the Pearl Harbor story, to suggest to anyone seriously interested in the preservation of his country that he should learn more. But the reaction never occurred. And even today the commonly used six-cent postage stamp bears the bloated and sneering visage of the Great War Criminal, and one hears little protest from the public.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"What We Owe Our Parasites", speech (June 1968); Free Speech magazine (October and November 1995)
1960s

Thomas Tredgold photo

“Engineering is the art of directing the great sources of power in nature for the use and convenience of man.”

Thomas Tredgold (1788–1829) engineer

Thomas Tredgold (1828), used in the Royal Charter of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) published in: The Times, London, article CS102127326, 30 June 1828.

Lawrence H. Summers photo

“…it’s important to remember how fortunate we are as a country to have a currency and a bond market that is seen in every way as a source of strength and it’s a huge responsibility for us to keep it that way.”

Lawrence H. Summers (1954) Former US Secretary of the Treasury

Tom Braithwaite (April 9, 2009) "Summers sees end to ‘sense of free-fall’" http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f4f1ac1c-2537-11de-8a66-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1, Financial Times
2000s

George Carlin photo
George Horne photo

“Among the sources of those innumerable calamities which from age to age have overwhelmed mankind, may be reckoned as one of the principal the abuse of words.”

George Horne (1730–1792) English churchman, writer and university administrator

Olla Podrida, No. 7 http://books.google.com/books?id=JSkTAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA133, Saturday, August 18. 1787
Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay, 1880

Didier Sornette photo
Aron Ra photo
Leszek Kolakowski photo

“Dialectical logic is loyal to the contradictions, not by the reasoning of “on the one hand and the other” but by tracing the contradictions to their fractured source.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 60

H. G. Wells photo
Mitt Romney photo

“I think we ought to have more oil. We ought to develop more sources of oil so that we can increase our supply. But the last thing I want to do is suck it all dry as quickly as we can. I want to use less of it.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

Interview on Hardball with Chris Matthews, December 2005.
2003–2007 Governor of Massachusetts

Anna Quindlen photo
Robert Charles Wilson photo

“Those who wish, in the interest of morality, to reduce Leonardo, that inexhaustible source of creative power, to a neutral or sexless agency, have a strange idea of doing service to his reputation.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: Leonardo da Vinci (1939), Ch. Two: 1481-1490

Kapila photo

“According to Dr. Ambedkar, Kapila is the source of one of Buddhism's most fundamental concepts, causality, and also of the related Buddhist rejection of the belief in a personal Creator of the universe: 'His next tenet related to causality-creation and its cause. Kapila denied the theory that there was a being who created the universe.”

Kapila Vedic sage, of the Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy

Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2002). Who is a Hindu?: Hindu revivalist views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other offshoots of Hinduism. ISBN 978-8185990743, with quote from Ambedkar: The Buddha and his Dhamma, 1:5:2.

Walter Wink photo
Jesse Ventura photo
Immanuel Jakobovits photo

“In all "benedictions", be they expressing plea or thanksgiving, we affirm that God is the "source" of every bounty we enjoy and of every favour we seek.”

Immanuel Jakobovits (1921–1999) British rabbi

Source: The Authorised Daily Prayer Book, Centenary Edition 1990, p. 12.

Helen Nearing photo
J. B. Bury photo
Ervin László photo

“The description of the evolutionary trajectory of dynamical systems as irreversible, periodically chaotic, and strongly nonlinear fits certain features of the historical development of human societies. But the description of evolutionary processes, whether in nature or in history, has additional elements. These elements include such factors as the convergence of existing systems on progressively higher organizational levels, the increasingly efficient exploitation by systems of the sources of free energy in their environment, and the complexification of systems structure in states progressively further removed from thermodynamic equilibrium.
General evolution theory, based on the integration of the relevant tenets of general system theory, cybernetics, information and communication theory, chaos theory, dynamical systems theory, and nonequilibrium thermodynamics, can convey a sound understanding of the laws and dynamics that govern the evolution of complex systems in the various realms of investigation…. The basic notions of this new discipline can be developed to give an adequate account of the dynamical evolution of human societies as well. Such an account could furnish the basis of a system of knowledge better able to orient human beings and societies in their rapidly changing milieu.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

E. Laszlo et al. (1993) pp. xvii- xix; as cited in: Alexander Laszlo and Stanley Krippner (1992) " Systems Theories: Their Origins, Foundations, and Development http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resourcesPDFs/SystemsTheory.pdf" In: J.S. Jordan (Ed.), Systems Theories and A Priori Aspects of Perception. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1998. Ch. 3, pp. 47-74.

J.M. Coetzee photo
Jane Roberts photo
Richard Stallman photo
Nicholas of Cusa photo

“Most games that we are approached with are too close to existing open source games for us to publish… we have no real desire to compete with open source products.”

Michael Simms (software developer) (1973) Video game programmer

Quoted in "Linux Game Publishing: An Interview With Michael Simms" http://web.archive.org/web/20050712080821/http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/10249 Linux Gazette (2005-06-03)

Michel Foucault photo
Martin Heidegger photo
C. V. Raman photo
Arun Shourie photo

“Furthermore, we are instructed, when we do come across instances of temple destruction, as in the case of Aurangzeb, we have to be circumspect in inferring what has happened and why…. the early monuments – like the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in Delhi – had to be built in ‘great haste’, we are instructed…Proclamation of political power, alone! And what about the religion which insists that religious faith is all, that the political cannot be separated from the religious? And the name: the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, the Might of Islam mosque? Of course, that must be taken to be mere genuflection! And notice: ‘available materials were assembled and incorporated’, they ‘clearly came from Hindu sources’ – may be the materials were just lying about; may be the temples had crumbled on their own earlier; may be the Hindus voluntarily broke their temples and donated the materials? No? After all, there is no proof they didn’t! And so, the word ‘plundered’ is repeatedly put within quotation marks!
In fact, there is more. The use of such materials – from Hindu temples – for constructing Islamic mosques is part of ‘a process of architectural definition and accommodation by local workmen essential to the further development of a South Asian architecture for Islamic use’. The primary responsibility thus becomes that of those ‘local workmen’ and their ‘accommodation’. Hence, features in the Qutb complex come to ‘demonstrate a creative response by architects and carvers to a new programme’. A mosque that has clearly used materials, including pillars, from Hindu temples, in which undeniably ‘in the fabric of the central dome, a lintel carved with Hindu deities has been turned around so that its images face into the rubble wall’ comes ‘not to fix the rule’. ‘Rather, it stands in contrast to the rapid exploration of collaborative and creative possibilities – architectural, decorative, and synthetic – found in less fortified contexts.’ Conclusions to the contrary have been ‘misevaluations’. We are making the error of ‘seeing salvaged pieces’ – what a good word that, ‘salvaged ’: the pieces were not obtained by breaking down temples; they were lying as rubble and would inevitably have disintegrated with the passage of time; instead they were ‘salvaged ’, and given the honour of becoming part of new, pious buildings – ‘seeing salvaged pieces where healthy collaborative creativity was producing new forms’.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia photo
Will Eisner photo
Muhammad bin Qasim photo
Daniel Barenboim photo

“The Declaration of Independence was a source of inspiration to believe in ideals that transformed us from Jews to Israelis. … I am asking today with deep sorrow: Can we, despite all our achievements, ignore the intolerable gap between what the Declaration of Independence promised and what was fulfilled, the gap between the idea and the realities of Israel? Does the condition of occupation and domination over another people fit the Declaration of Independence? Is there any sense in the independence of one at the expense of the fundamental rights of the other? Can the Jewish people whose history is a record of continued suffering and relentless persecution, allow themselves to be indifferent to the rights and suffering of a neighboring people? Can the State of Israel allow itself an unrealistic dream of an ideological end to the conflict instead of pursuing a pragmatic, humanitarian one based on social justice. I believe that despite all the objective and subjective difficulties, the future of Israel and its position in the family of enlightened nations will depend on our ability to realize the promise of the founding fathers as they canonized it in the Declaration of Independence. I have always believed that there is no military solution to the Jewish Arab conflict, neither from a moral nor a strategic one and since a solution is therefore inevitable I ask myself, why wait?”

Daniel Barenboim (1942) Israeli Argentine-born pianist and conductor

Statement at the Knesset upon receiving the Wolf Prize, May 9, 2004, transcript online https://electronicintifada.net/content/daniel-barenboims-statement-knesset-upon-receiving-wolf-prize-may-9-2004/5080 (16 May 2004) at The Electronic Intifada.

Heather Brooke photo
Marcus Aurelius photo

“Whatever is in any way beautiful hath its source of beauty in itself, and is complete in itself; praise forms no part of it. So it is none the worse nor the better for being praised.”

Variant: That which is really beautiful has no need of anything. (trans. George Long)
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV, 20

John Constable photo
George W. Bush photo
Roland Barthes photo

“Secondly, the student is trained to accept historical mis-statements on the authority of the book. If education is a pre- paration for adult life, he learns first to accept without question, and later to make his own contribution to the creation of historical fallacies, and still later to perpetuate what he has learnt. In this way, ignorant authors are leading innocent students to hysterical conclusions. The process of the writers' mind provides excellent material for a manual on logical fallacies. Thirdly, the student is told nothing about the relationship between evidence and truth. The truth is what the book ordains and the teacher repeats. No source is cited. No proof is offered. No argument is presented. The authors play a dangerous game of winks and nods and faints and gestures with evidence. The art is taught well through precept and example. The student grows into a young man eager to deal in assumptions but inapt in handling inquiries. Those who become historians produce narratives patterned on the textbooks on which they were brought up. Fourthly, the student is compelled to face a galling situation in his later years when he comes to realize that what he had learnt at school and college was not the truth. Imagine a graduate of one of our best colleges at the start of his studies in history in a university in Europe. Every lecture he attends and every book he reads drive him mad with exasperation, anger and frustration. He makes several grim discoveries. Most of the "facts", interpretations and theories on which he had been fostered in Pakistan now turn out to have been a fata morgana, an extravaganza of fantasies and reveries, myths and visions, whims and utopias, chimeras and fantasies.”

Khursheed Kamal Aziz (1927–2009) historian

The Murder of History, critique of history textbooks used in Pakistan, 1993

William O. Douglas photo

“The right to revolt has sources deep in our history.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

An Almanac of Liberty (1954), p. 107
Other speeches and writings

Nigel Rees photo
Mr. T photo
George Holmes Howison photo
Larry Wall photo

“You have to admit that it's difficult to misplace the Perl sources.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[1992Aug26.184221.29627@netlabs.com, 1992]
Usenet postings, 1992

George William Curtis photo

“A few years after the Constitution was adopted Alexander Hamilton said to Josiah Quincy that he thought the Union might endure for thirty years. He feared the centrifugal force of the system. The danger, he said, would proceed from the States, not from the national government. But Hamilton seems not to have considered that the vital necessity which had always united the colonies from the first New England league against the Indians, and which, in his own time, forced the people of the country from the sands of a confederacy to the rock of union, would become stronger every year and inevitably develop and confirm a nation. Whatever the intention of the fathers in 1787 might have been, whether a league or confederacy or treaty, the conclusion of the children in 1860 might have been predicted. Plant a homogeneous people along the coast of a virgin continent. Let them gradually overspread it to the farther sea, speaking the same language, virtually of the same religious faith, inter- marrying, and cherishing common heroic traditions. Suppose them sweeping from end to end of their vast domain without passports, the physical perils of their increasing extent constantly modified by science, steam, and the telegraph, making Maine and Oregon neighbors, their trade enormous, their prosperity a miracle, their commonwealth of unsurpassed importance in the world, and you may theorize as you will, but you have supposed an imperial nation, which may indeed be a power of evil as well as of good, but which can no more recede into its original elements and local sources than its own Mississippi, pouring broad and resistless into the Gulf, can turn backward to the petty forest springs and rills whence it flows. 'No, no', murmurs the mighty river, 'when you can take the blue out of the sky, when you can steal heat from fire, when you can strip splendor from the morning, then, and not before, may you reclaim your separate drops in me.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

'Yes, yes, my river,' answers the Union, 'you speak for me. I am no more a child, but a man; no longer a confederacy, but a nation. I am no more Virginia, New York, Carolina, or Massachusetts, but the United States of America'.
1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Thomas Kuhn photo
Walt Whitman photo

“We Americans have yet to really learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Thus far, impress'd by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States has been fashion'd from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only — which is a very great mistake.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

"The Spanish Element in Our Nationality," http://www.bartleby.com/229/5004.html letter to the Philadelphia Press (20 July 1883), later published in The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman (1892), part V: November Boughs

Alfred Horsley Hinton photo
Upton Sinclair photo
Nur Muhammad Taraki photo
Martin Firrell photo

“I want to live in a city where immigration is seen as a new source of strength.”

Martin Firrell (1963) British artist and activist

"I Want to Live in a City Where..." (2006)

Amory B. Lovins photo

“If you ask me, it'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it.”

Amory B. Lovins (1947) American physicist

The Plowboy Interview with Amory Lovins, November/December 1977, Mother Earth News, 2010-01-05 http://www.motherearthnews.com/Renewable-Energy/1977-11-01/Amory-Lovins.aspx?page=14, (1977)

Ben Jonson photo
Edmund White photo

“It seemed strange to me that someone who painted big, scary abstractions should have been so commonsensical in her literary tastes, though later I would discover that twelve-tone composers read Keats just as experimental poets listened to Glenn Miller — few people are avant-garde outside their own domain.I suppose that as Midwesterners, the children of chemical engineers and homemakers, we experienced the arts as so foreign, even so preposterously unreasonable, that once we’d decided to embrace them we did so with lots of conviction and little discrimination. Surely it was no accident that T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the two great poetic synthesists of our day, the very men who had ransacked all of world culture and could refer in the same poem to the Buddha and to Sophocles or to Confucius and to Jefferson — it was no accident that they were both from the heartland. Public-library intellectuals, magpies of knowledge, like most autodidacts we were incapable of evaluating our sources. As a teen-ager, I tried to write verse like Milton’s; later, I wanted to write novels like Nabokov’s. In a novel I wrote in college, I imitated Evelyn Waugh. If someone had said to me, "But do you, the graceless son of a Cincinnati broker of chemical equipment, do you seriously imagine that you can just write a Renaissance Christian epic or something in the style of a Cambridge-educated Russian aristocrat or of the spokesman of the Bright Young Things of London circa 1925?"”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

if someone had spoken like this to me, I wouldn’t even have understood his point.
My Women.The New Yorker https://archive.is/20121204150452/www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050613fa_fact 6 June 2005
Articles and Interviews

Gancho Tsenov photo
Max Scheler photo

“These two characteristics make revenge the most suitable source for the formation of ressentiment. The nuances of language are precise. There is a progression of feeling which starts with revenge and runs via rancor, envy, and impulse to detract all the way to spite, coming close to ressentiment. Usually, revenge and envy still have specific objects. They do not arise without special reasons and are directed against definite objects, so that they do not outlast their motives. The desire for revenge disappears when vengeance has been taken, when the person against whom it was directed has been punished or has punished himself, or when one truly forgives him. In the same way, envy vanishes when the envied possession becomes ours. The impulse to detract, however, is not in the same sense tied to definite objects—it does not arise through specific causes with which it disappears. On the contrary, this affect seeks those objects, those aspects of men and things, from which it can draw gratification. It likes to disparage and to smash pedestals, to dwell on the negative aspects of excellent men and things, exulting in the fact that such faults are more perceptible through their contrast with the strongly positive qualities. Thus there is set a fixed pattern of experience which can accommodate the most diverse contents. This form or structure fashions each concrete experience of life and selects it from possible experiences. The impulse to detract, therefore, is no mere result of such an experience, and the experience will arise regardless of considerations whether its object could in any way, directly or indirectly, further or hamper the individual concerned. In “spite,” this impulse has become even more profound and deep-seated—it is, as it were, always ready to burst forth and to betray itself in an unbridled gesture, a way of smiling, etc. An analogous road leads from simple *Schadenfreude* to “malice.””

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

The latter, more detached than the former from definite objects, tries to bring about ever new opportunities for *Schadenfreude*.
Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Michael T. Flynn photo
Warren Farrell photo
Georgia O'Keeffe photo

“Artists and religionists are never far apart, they go to the sources of revelation for what they choose to experience and what they report is the degree of their experiences. Intellect wishes to arrange — intuition wishes to accept.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

A Second Outline in Portraiture (1936), as quoted in Marsden Hartley, Gail R. Scott - Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York, p. 167
1930s

Linus Torvalds photo
David Miscavige photo

“I have been advised that you have decided to move forward with your story without my interview. This, despite the fact confirmed more than three weeks ago that I would make myself available on a date certain (6 July), after you spoke to other relevant Church personnel and toured Church facilities, and that I would provide information annihilating the credibility of your sources including the fundamental crimes against the Scientology religion that were the reasons for their removal from post.”

David Miscavige (1960) leader of the Church of Scientology

June 2009 letter by Miscavige to journalists Thomas C. Tobin and Joe Childs, regarding investigation of accounts of abuse of Scientology staff members by Miscavige for "The Truth Rundown" series in the St. Petersburg Times —[Thomas C. Tobin, Joe Childs, A letter from David Miscavige, http://www.tampabay.com/news/article1012140.ece, St Petersburg Times, June 23, 2009, 2010-07-03].

“Hindus learn to look at themselves through borrowed eyes. The two approaches, that of self-discovery and creative response and that of self-alienation and imitation, were both inherited from the immediate history of the freedom struggle, though they derive their strength from the deeper sources in the psyche…. For one, the problem is of helping the society to find its roots, for the other to remake it in the image of a chosen pattern. The one serves; the other manipulates…. [The first approach] once formed a powerful current, and the freedom struggle was waged under its auspices. But increasingly its hold became weak, and in our own times it seems to have lost altogether…. Some see in this change a triumph of Nehru over Gandhi…. Nehru represented, in his own way, the response of a defeated nation trying to restore its self-respect and self-confidence through self-repudiation and identification with the ways of the victors. The approach was not altogether unjustified at one time. It had its compulsions and it also had a survival value for us. But its increasing influence can mean no good to us. We, however, believe that deeper Indian nationalism, which is also in harmony with deeper internationalism, may be weak just now, but it has the seed-power and it is bound to come up again under propitious circumstances”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Cultural Self-Alienation and Some Problems Hinduism Faces, 1987, p. 4-5

Edward Jenks photo

“The process of specialization tends, almost inevitably, to narrow the sources from which the rules of any science are drawn; and English law is no exception from this rule.”

Edward Jenks (1861–1939) British legal scholar

Source: A Short History Of The English Law (First Edition) (1912), Chapter XIII, Modern Authorities And The Legal Profession, p. 185

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz photo
William Pitt the Younger photo
Eric S. Raymond photo
Jerome Isaac Friedman photo
Alexander Bain photo
Richard Stallman photo

“The official definition of "open source software," as published by the Open Source Initiative, is very close to our definition of free software; however, it is a little looser in some respects, and they have accepted a few licenses that we consider unacceptably restrictive of the users.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

1990s, Why "Free Software" is better than "Open Source" (1998)

“The manuscripts in which these early Greek treatises have been preserved to us seem to be derived from an encyclopaedia compiled during the tenth century, at Constantinople, from the works of various alchemists…. The Greek text. now published by M. Berthelot and M. [Ch. Em. ] Ruelle, custodian of the Library of Ste.-Geneviève, is derived from a careful collation of all these sources, and is accompanied with notes by M. Berthelot bringing light and order into the mystical obscurity in which from the beginning the alchemists enveloped their doctrines.
First among these is the 'Physica et Mystica,' ascribed to Democritus of Abdera, a collection of fragments, among which a few receipts for dyeing in purple may be genuine, while the story of magic and the alchemical teaching are evidently spurious. The philosopher is made to state that his studies were interrupted by the death of his master, Ostanes the Magian. He therefore evoked his spirit from Hades, and learned from him that the books which contained the secrets of his art were in a certain temple. He sought them there in vain, till one day, during a feast in the sanctuary, a column opened, and revealed the precious tomes, in which the doctrines of the Master were summed up in the mysterious words: 'Nature rejoices in Nature, Nature conquers Nature, Nature rules Nature.'
The unknown Alexandrian who wrote under the name of Democritus gives not only receipts for making white alloys of copper, but others which, he positively asserts, will produce gold. M. Berthelot, however, shows in his notes that they can only result in making amalgams for gilding or alloys resembling gold or varnishes which will give a superficial tinge to metals”

Osthanes (-500) pen-name used by several pseudo-anonymous authors of Greek and Latin works of alchemy

, Marcellin Berthelot, Ch. Em. Ruelle, "The Alchemists of Egypt and Greece," Art. VIII. (Jan. 1893) in The Edinburgh Review (Jan.-Apr. 1893) Vol. 177, pp. 208-209. https://books.google.com/books?id=GuvRAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA208

Francis Escudero photo
Manuel Castells photo
John Ruysbroeck photo

“And there you In a new embrace, with a new torrent of eternal love: all the elect, angels and men, from the last to the first are embraced It is a living and fruitful unity, which is the source and the fount of all life All creatures are there without themselves as in their eternal origin, One essence and one life with God These enlightened people are lifted up with free mind above reason…To the summit of their spirit Their naked understanding is penetrated with eternal clarity as the air is penetrated by the light of the sun. The bare elevated will is transformed and penetrated with fathomless love, just as iron is penetrated by the fire [God] gives Himself in the soul’s essence…Where the soul’s powers are unified…And undergo God’s transformation in simplicity. In this place all is full and overflowing, for the spirit feels itself as one truth and one richness. And one unity with God All spirits thus raised up Melt away and are annihilated by reason of enjoyment in God’s essence They fall away from themselves and are lost in a bottomless unknowingWith God they will ebb and flow, and will always be in repose…They are drunk with love and have passed away into God in a dark luminosity must accept that the Persons yield and lose themselves whirling in essential love, that is, in enjoyable unity; nevertheless, they always remain according to their personal properties In the working of the Trinity. You may thus understand that the divine nature is eternally at rest and without mode according to the simplicity of its essence. It is why all that God has chosen and enfolded with eternal personal love, he has possessed essentially, enjoyably in unity, with essential love.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Little Book of Enlightenment (c. 1364)

“Like Kant before him, Darwin insists that the source of all error is semblance. Analogy, he says again and again, is always a ‘deceitful guide’ (see pp. 61, 66, 473). As against analogy, or as I would say merely metaphorical characterizations of the facts, Darwin wishes to make a case for the existence of real ‘affinities’ genealogically construed. The establishment of these affinities will permit him to postulate the linkage of all living things to all others by the ‘laws’ or ‘principles’ of genealogical descent, variation, and natural selection. These laws and principles are the formal elements in his mechanistic explanation of why creatures are arranged in families in a time series. But this explanation could not be offered as long as the data remained encoded in the linguistic modes of either metaphor or synecdoche, the modes of qualitative connection. As long as creatures are classified in terms of either semblance or essential unity, the realm of organic things must remain either a chaos of arbitrarily affirmed connectedness or a hierarchy of higher and lower forms. Science as Darwin understood it, however, cannot deal in the categories of the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ any more than it can deal in the categories of the ‘normal’ and ‘monstrous.’ Everything must be entertained as what it manifestly seems to be. Nothing can be regarded as ‘surprising,’ any more than anything can be regarded as ‘miraculous.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

Nikolai Berdyaev photo
Lynn Margulis photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
Sir Alexander Cockburn, 12th Baronet photo
Pope Benedict XVI photo
Edward Young photo

“Ambition! powerful source of good and ill!”

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night VI, Line 399.

Jane Roberts photo
Tryon Edwards photo

“Temperance is to the body what religion is to the soul, the foundation and source of health and strength and peace.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 567.