Quotes about text (530 quotes, page 5) | Quotes of famous people

“As a scholar I have been shaped by a monastic traditions and by the interpretation of medieval texts. Early on I took it for granted that the principal condition for an atmosphere that is propitious to independent thought is the hospitality cultivated by the host: a hospitality that excludes condescension as scrupulously as seduction; a hospitality that by its simplicity defeats the fear of plagiarism as much as that of clientage; a hospitality that by its openness dissolves intimidation as studiously as servility; a hospitality that exacts from the guests as much generosity as it imposes on the host. I have been blessed with a large portion of it, with the taste of a relaxed, humorous, sometimes grotesque fit among mostly ordinary but sometimes outlandish companions who are patient with one another.”

Ivan Illich (1926–2002) austrian philosopher and theologist

The Cultivation of Conspiracy (1998)

Fear

“For example, Monstuart Elphinstone, a Governor of Bombay, suggested in his Minute dated 14 May 1859: “Divide et Impera was the old Roman motto, and it should be our”. Given the circumstances, it would have been foolish of any imperialist power not to follow such a policy. But for achieving this aim there was no need for them to distort Indian history. British historians had just to reiterate what the Muslim chroniclers themselves had written about the “glorious achievements” of their kings and conquerors. Their stories needed no proof: they stood confirmed by the hundreds of vandalised medieval monuments. The mistake lay with the misjudgement of our Congress-culture Government and the so-called secularist and Stalinist historians. They chose to treat history as a handmaid of politics to please the Muslim minority. They instructed their text-book writers to eschew mention of unpalatable historical facts like destruction of temples and forced conversions by Muslims in history, language and social science. But perpetration of lies has proved counter-productive. It has encouraged Muslims to ask for proof as to when Babur or Aurangzeb broke this or that temple, knowing full well that such shrines were actually vandalised and razed.”

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 8

Books , History , Science

“The truth was that Emerson did not often refer to Scripture (after he announced the text, which was invariably from the Bible) because the Bible was no longer for him an object of study; it was an example for him for emulation. He was interested in his own primary, personal religious experience and that of his parishioners, not in repeating and deferring to the reported religious experiences of long departed historical personages. When he studied, say, the Book of Proverbs, he no longer thought of himself as a commentator, but as the potential author of a similar book.”

Robert D. Richardson (1934) American historian

Source: Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), p. 90

Truth , Books , Study , Personality

“I am turned off when I see only formulas and symbols, and little text.”

Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 275

“Watch for slanted passages in text books. Socialist authors have invaded the textbook field. So have some with even more radical views.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Books

“The text of the Bible is but a feeble symbol of the Revelation held in the text of Men and Women.”

H. Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer

Impressions and Comments http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8ells10.txt (1914)

Women , Men

“Europe is not really even a geographic entity; it is separated from Asia only at one point, the Bosphorus, by a small stretch of water. North of that there is continuity over the russians steppes, a complete terrestrial flow. I suggest that is also true of culture, and indeed of social organization. Indeed Europe has never been purely isolated, purely Christian. Instead of Christian Europe, one has to see the continent as penetrated by the three world religions that originated in the Near East and which indeed had a common mythology or sacred text; in order of arrival these were Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (…) All have equal entitlements to be present, and in this general ('objective') sense none can be considered only as the Other; they are part of Europe, part of our heritage.”

Jack Goody (1919–2015) British anthropologist

Jack Goody, Islam in Europe, Polity, 2004, p.14

World , Religion , Sense , Water

“To read is not a fair use; it's an unregulated use. To give it to someone is not a fair use; it's unregulated. To sell it, to sleep on top of it, to do any of these things with this text is unregulated. Now, in the center of this unregulated use, there is a small bit of stuff regulated by the copyright law; for example, publishing the book — that's regulated. And then within this small range of things regulated by copyright law, there's this tiny band before the Internet of stuff we call fair use: Uses that otherwise would be regulated but that the law says you can engage in without the permission of anybody else.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

OSCON 2002
Context: Here's a simple copyright lesson: Law regulates copies. What's that mean? Well, before the Internet, think of this as a world of all possible uses of a copyrighted work. Most of them are unregulated. Talking about fair use, this is not fair use; this is unregulated use. To read is not a fair use; it's an unregulated use. To give it to someone is not a fair use; it's unregulated. To sell it, to sleep on top of it, to do any of these things with this text is unregulated. Now, in the center of this unregulated use, there is a small bit of stuff regulated by the copyright law; for example, publishing the book — that's regulated. And then within this small range of things regulated by copyright law, there's this tiny band before the Internet of stuff we call fair use: Uses that otherwise would be regulated but that the law says you can engage in without the permission of anybody else. For example, quoting a text in another text — that's a copy, but it's a still fair use. That means the world was divided into three camps, not two: Unregulated uses, regulated uses that were fair use, and the quintessential copyright world. Three categories.
Enter the Internet. Every act is a copy, which means all of these unregulated uses disappear. Presumptively, everything you do on your machine on the network is a regulated use. And now it forces us into this tiny little category of arguing about, "What about the fair uses? What about the fair uses?" I will say the word: To hell with the fair uses. What about the unregulated uses we had of culture before this massive expansion of control?

Books , Law , Sleep , Reading

“But the amateur who reads poetry from love or curiosity does have at least one advantage over the trained specialist who reads it from professional obligation. Amateurs have not learned to shut off parts of their consciousness to focus on only the appropriate elements of a literary text. They respond to poems in the sloppy fullness of their humanity”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

19
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Love , Learning , Reading , Parting

“Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes — even in a scientific text.”

Abraham Pais (1918–2000) American Physicist

Prologue, p. xv
A Tale of Two Continents (1997)

Books

“ Every individual word in a passage or poetry can no more be said to denote some specific referent than does every brush mark, every line in a painting have its counterpart in reality. The writer or speaker does not communicate his thoughts to us; he communicates a representation for carrying out, this function under the severe discipline of using the only materials he has, sound and gesture. Speech is like painting, a representation made out of given materials -- sound or paint. The function of speech is to stimulate and set up thoughts in us having correspondence with the speaker's desires; he has then communicated with us. But he has not transmitted a copy of his thoughts, a photograph, but only a stream of speech -- a substitute made from the unpromising material of sound. The artist, the sculptor, the caricaturist, the composer are akin in this [fact that they have not transmitted a copy of their thoughts], that they express (make representations of) their thoughts using chosen, limited materials. They make the "best" representations, within these self-imposed constraints. A child who builds models of a house, or a train, using only a few colored bricks, is essentially engaged in the same creative task.* Metaphors can play a most forceful role, by importing ideas through a vehicle language, setting up what are purely linguistic associations (we speak of "heavy burden of taxation," "being in a rut"). The imported concepts are, to some extent, artificial in their contexts, and they are by no means universal among different cultures. For instance, the concepts of cleanliness and washing are used within Christendom to imply "freedom from sin." We Westerners speak of the mind's eye, but this idea is unknown amongst the Chinese. that is, we are looking at it with the eyes of our English-speaking culture. A grammar book may help us to decipher the text more thoroughly, and help us comprehend something of the language structure, but we may never fully understand if we are not bred in the culture and society that has modeled and shaped the language. (p. 74)”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

See Gombrich in reference 348
On Human Communication (1957), Language: Science and Aesthetics

Books , Color , Communication , Idea

“A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love. It was by no means his first romantic dropkick, but it was the first to have been conveyed by way of a five-line text, the fifth line of which was a crushingly corporate wish for good luck in the future, followed by three lowercase xxx’s.”

Michael Cunningham (1952) American novelist and screenwriter

The Snow Queen (2014)

Love , Way , Light , Appearance

“The cultural revolution of the later twentieth century can thus best be understood as the triumph of the individual over society, or rather, the breaking of the threads which in the past had woven human beings into social textures. For such textures had consisted not only of the actual relations between human beings and their forms of organization but also of the general models of such relations and the texted patterns of people's behaviour towards each other; their roles were prescribed, though not always written. Hence the often traumatic insecurity when older conventions of behaviour were either overturned or lost their rationale, or the incomprehension between those who felt this loss and those too young to have known anything but anomic society.”

Eric Hobsbawm book The Age of Extremes

Source: The Age of Extremes (1992), Chapter Eleven, Cultural Revolution, p. 335

People , Loss , Past

“The present volume to this point might be regarded as a gloss on a single text of Harold Innis: "The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century."”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 216; McLuhan here quotes "Minerva's Owl" (1947), by Innis, an address to the Royal Society of Canada, published in The Bias of Communication (1951)

War , Communication

“There is no definition of cults in law. on the other hand, these organizations know perfectly evade justice by hiding their true nature, since you are aware that freedom of conscience in France is a fundamental freedom enshrined in all our principles and our texts.”

Manuel Valls (1962) French Socialist Party (PS) politician

Justice , Law , Nature , Freedom

“This shared concern with continuity accounts for a good part of the affinity I feel with Schoenberg, an affinity I have openly claimed in drawing from him both the title and the subtitle of the present volume. To me, as to Schoenberg, such continuity constitutes important evidence that the essentially aesthetic act of constructing a 'text,' whether on paper or in one's professional life, has been subjected to rational restraints, in all the Kantian senses of 'rationality.' From this viewpoint, continuity is valued as a sign that a text has been carefully constructed to meet rigorous standards not only of formal coherence but also of logical precision and, espeically crucial, of moral scrupulousness.”

Rose Rosengard Subotnik (1942) American musicologist

Subotnik, Rose Rosengard (1991). Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music, p.xx. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. .

Life , Feeling , Sense , Parting

“The pathfinders of modern thought did not derive what is good from the law. … Their role in history was not that of adapting their words and actions to the text of old documents or generally accepted doctrines: they themselves created the documents and brought about the acceptance of their doctrines.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 33.

Law , History

“.. Since I myself needed a year to discover the significance of this strange work, many of the texts and tunes, particularly in the first paintings, elude my memory and must - like the creation as a whole so it seems to me - remain shrouded in darkness.”

Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) German painter

Charlotte's 4th introduction page, related to image JHM no. 4155-4 https://charlotte.jck.nl/detail/M004155-d: 'What is man, that thou art mindful..', p. 44
the quote is written in brush, combined with one rough painted figure
Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?

Memory , Painting

“The first was the classical line, which could be traced back to my early childhood and the Beethoven sonatas I heard my mother play. This line takes sometimes a neo-classical form (sonatas, concertos), sometimes imitates the 18th century classics (gavottes, the Classical symphony, partly the Sinfonietta). The second line, the modern trend, begins with that meeting with Taneyev when he reproached me for the “crudeness” of my harmonies. At first this took the form of a search for my own harmonic language, developing later into a search for a language in which to express powerful emotions (The Phantom, Despair, Diabolical Suggestion, Sarcasms, Scythian Suite, a few of the songs, op. 23, The Gambler, Seven, They Were Seven, the Quintet and the Second Symphony). Although this line covers harmonic language mainly, it also includes new departures in melody, orchestration and drama. The third line is toccata or the “motor” line traceable perhaps to Schumann’s Toccata which made such a powerful impression on me when I first heard it (Etudes, op. 2, Toccata, op. 11, Scherzo, op. 12, the Scherzo of the Second Concerto, the Toccata in the Fifth Concerto, and also the repetitive intensity of the melodic figures in the Scythian Suite, Pas d’acier[The Age of Steel], or passages in the Third Concerto). This line is perhaps the least important. The fourth line is lyrical; it appears first as a thoughtful and meditative mood, not always associated with the melody, or, at any rate, with the long melody (The Fairy-tale, op. 3, Dreams, Autumnal Sketch[Osenneye], Songs, op. 9, The Legend, op. 12), sometimes partly contained in the long melody (choruses on Balmont texts, beginning of the First Violin Concerto, songs to Akhmatova’s poems, Old Granny’s Tales[Tales of an Old Grandmother]). This line was not noticed until much later. For a long time I was given no credit for any lyrical gift whatsoever, and for want of encouragement it developed slowly. But as time went on I gave more and more attention to this aspect of my work. I should like to limit myself to these four “lines,” and to regard the fifth, “grotesque” line which some wish to ascribe to me, as simply a deviation from the other lines. In any case I strenuously object to the very word “grotesque” which has become hackneyed to the point of nausea. As a matter of fact the use of the French word “grotesque” in this sense is a distortion of the meaning. I would prefer my music to be described as “Scherzo-ish” in quality, or else by three words describing the various degrees of the Scherzo—whimsicality, laughter, mockery.”

Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) Ukrainian & Russian Soviet pianist and composer

Page 36-37; from his fragmentary Autobiography.
Sergei Prokofiev: Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences (1960)

Age , Dreams , Music , Search

“I heard one of the teaching pastors at Willow Creek speak on the rich young ruler text that Rich (Mullins) had talked about in Wheaton's chapel. The teaching pastor had said, "now this doesn't mean you have to go sell your rollerblades and golf clubs," and he went on to "contextualize" the teaching to show that we just need to be careful not to make idols of our things. I wasn't so sure about that. Jesus doesn't tell the man to be a better steward, or to treat his workers fairly, or not to make money an idol. He tells this highly educated and devoutly religious young man that he lacks one thing: giving up everything he owns to give the poor.”

Shane Claiborne The Irresistible Revolution

Source: The Irresistible Revolution (2006), p. 103

Money , Education

“Those humble but indomitable workers, to whom later generations referred by the collective name of Baale Masorah, Masters of Tradition, performed in obscurity their Herculean task of guarding the Biblical Text against loss or variation.”

Robert Gordis (1908–1992) American rabbi and theologian

"The Biblical Text in the Making", p. 1

Loss

“Around late 1961 to 1962, right around there, somewhat unevenly and sort of spottily, I began to do pieces that were based upon a short text of actions that only involved a handful of friends or students at some specific site — a site that was not marked as an art site, a ravine somewhere, or a roadway, or somebody's apartment, or the telephone, that is, the places of everyday life, not designated as sites of art. And the work itself, the action, the kind of participation, was as remote from anything artistic as the site was.... I chose the word Happening from its normal language usage somewhat earlier for that philosophical reason, but I didn't categorize that as lifelike until much later. But in fact, looking back, that's exactly what Happening meant.”

Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) American artist

In an interview with Robert C. Morgan, 1991; in the 'Journal of Contemporary Art, 4', no. 2, p. 56-69

Life , Art

“In the religious traditions of the Hindus, the most important author of sacred texts is Krishna Dvaipayana Vyasa. He is traditionally credited with the arrangement of the Veda into four texts as well as the composition of the epic Mahbharata (Mbh), many Puranas, and other works. Vyasa, however, has been described as mythical as his existence is impossible to prove except in myths and legends such as are preserved in the epic.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

In p. 1.
Sources, Seer of the Fifth Veda: Kr̥ṣṇa Dvaipāyana Vyāsa in the Mahābhārata

“Even where it is manipulated by major talents, deconstruction tends to bear either on marginal texts (Sade, Lautréamont), or on secondary work by a great writer (Barthes on Balzac's Sarrazine). The classics of deconstruction, in Jacques Derrida or Paul De Man, are "misreadings" not of literature but of philosophy; they address themselves to philosophical linguistics and the theory of language. The masks they seek to strip off are those worn by Plato, by Hegel, by Rousseau, by Nietszche or Saussure. Deconstruction has nothing to tell us of Aeschylus or Dante, of Shakespeare or Tolstoy.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 8 (p. 128).

Literature

“The aim of the scholarly editor is not to produce the the easiest text for the reader, but to get as near as he can to the text of the author.”

Frederic G. Kenyon (1863–1952) British palaeographer and biblical and classical scholar

Source: The Story Of The Bible, Chapter X, The Position Today, p. 142

“He then goes a step further and briefly imposes a Freudian reading on the text, a reading outdated and crude even in the current Western context of cultural criticism. He says the depiction of 'the other' in Ramayana can be understood as a projection of the unfulfilled sexual desires of traditional Indians. …. The motive of applying a totally alien framework, viz., the Freudian one, to a traditional Hindu text is something that is questionable.”

Rajiv Malhotra book The Battle for Sanskrit

The Battle for Sanskrit (2016)

Motivation , Question , Reading

“This text is oriented toward human organizations since this has been the emphasis in the practice of O. R. in business and industry.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1940s - 1950s, Introduction to Operations Research (1957), p. 7

Business

“The average man, if he meddles with criticism at all, is a conservative critic. His opinions are determined not by his reason -- 'the bulk of mankind' says Swift 'is as well qualified for flying as for thinking' -- but by his passions; and the faintest of all human passions is the love of truth. He believes that the text of ancient authors is generally sound, not because he has acquainted himself with the elements of the problem, but because he would feel uncomfortable if he did not believe it; just as he believes, on the same cogent evidence, that he is a fine fellow, and that he will rise again from the dead.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

Introduction to Astronomicon of Manilius, Lib I. (Cambridge University Press, [1903] 1937) p. xliii.

Love , Truth , Feeling , Problem

“Many security texts decompose the security of an information system in three components: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Together, they are often referred to as "CIA". [They] constitute the core security properties that we must protect against attackers and eavesdroppers—such as the (other) CIA.”

Andrew S. Tanenbaum book Modern Operating Systems

Modern Operating Systems (with co-author Herbert Bos), 4th ed, p. 596

“No text in the tradition seems as lucid concerning the way in which the political is becoming worldwide. concerning the irreducibility of the technical and the media in the current of the most thinking thought-and this goes beyond the railroad and the newspapers of the time whose powers were analyzed in such an incomparable way in the Manifesto. And few texts have shed so much light on law. international law. and nationalism.”

Jacques Derrida book Specters of Marx

Injunctions of Marx
Specters of Marx (1993)

Law , Way , Thinking , Light

“The pages of most books were of mottled parchment, that is, dried sheepskin, which was universally available—and nowhere more abundant than in Ireland, whose bright green fields still host each April an explosion of new white lambs. Vellum, or calfskin, which was more uniformly white when dried, was used more sparingly for the most honored texts.”

Thomas Cahill book How the Irish Saved Civilization

Source: How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995), Ch. VI What Was Found

Books , Universe

“SEVENTH, the text of a newspaper must tell the news.
The headlines must tell the news.
The pictures must tell the news.
The subheads and subtitles must tell the news.
Please see that the newspapers perform this function.”

William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) American newspaper publisher

Instructions to E.D. Coblentz (March 1, 1938)

“In fact, I would argue that these mythic modes are more easily identifiable in historiographical than they are in ‘literary’ texts. For historians usually work with much less linguistic(and therefore less poetic) self-consciousness than writers of fiction do. They tend to treat language as a transparent vehicle of representation that brings no cognitive baggage of its own into the discourse.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

“For Muslims the Quran is the Word of God; it is sacred scripture, not a work of "literature," a manual of law, or a text of theology, philosophy or history although it is of incomparable literary quality, contains many injunctions about a Sacred Law, is replete with verses of metaphysical, theological, and philosophical significance, and contains many accounts of sacred history. The unique structure of the Quran and the flow of its content constitute a particular challenge to most modern readers. For traditional Muslims the Quran is not a typical "read" or manual to be studied. For most of them, the most fruitful way of interacting with the Quran is not to sit down and read the Sacred Tex from cover to cover (although there are exceptions, such as completing the whole text during Ramadan). it is, rather, to recite a section with full awareness of it as the Word of God and to meditate upon it as one whose soul is being directly addressed, as the Prophet's soul was addressed during its revelation. … In this context it must be remembered that the Quran itself speaks constantly of the Origin and the Return, of all things coming from God and returning to Him, who himself has no origin or end. As the Word of god, the Quran also seems to have no beginning and no end. Certain turns of phrase and teachings about the Divine Reality, the human condition, the life of this world, and the Hereafter are often repeated, but they are not mere repetitions. Rather each iteration of a particular word, phrase, or verse opens the door of a hidden passage to other parts of the Quran. Each coda is always a prelude to an as yet undiscovered truth.”

Seyyed Hossein Nasr book The Study Quran

The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary https://books.google.com/books?id=GVSzBgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover (2015)

Life , God , Truth , World

“He who studies a text or microbes or stars must have nothing to do with his subjectivity… that is an ideal that one must try to find by a certain practice. Let us say that objectivity is a virtue, and a very difficult one to practice.”

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) French historian and philosopher

Celui qui étudie un texte ou des microbes ou les étoiles doit se défaire de sa subjectivité... c'est là un idéal qu'il faut essayer de rejoindre par une certaine pratique. Disons que l'objectivité est une vertu, d'ailleurs très diffice à pratiquer.
La Philosophie comme manière de vivre (2001)

Star , Study

“This is not genuine scholarship! Real research is a coming-to-grips with phenomena. This, as a transcription of the ocean’s infinitely various text, is a fraud, an egregious counterfeit, which patly reduces the Primary Sea’s endlessness to a cozy finitude, such as it pleased this puny entity to regard it, for he must have had but a feeble stomach for enterprise of a dark or difficult kind.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 3, Chapter 11 (p. 168)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

Fraud , Sea

“I consider the Fourth a patriotic holday more than a nationalist one. We are celebrating the signing of a text, the establishment of a set of laws and principles on the Fourth of July. The Fourth is about political liberty and national independence. It is, for all its pomp and circumstance, a fairly secular and rational holiday. Meanwhile, Thanksgiving plays upon the mystic chords of memory and is prior to and independent of many of things we celebrate on the Fourth. Anyway, I agree its a fair criticism and probably just highlights different perspectives. And, yes, the food on the Fourth of July is really, really good. I am all about hotdogs, beer and barbecue.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

November 2004 http://web.archive.org/web/20040421/www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/04_11_24_corner-archive.asp
2000s, 2004

Law , Food , Beer , Memory

“Protocols
Number 20, paras. 26-32
The budgets of income and expenditure will be carried out side by side that they may not be obscured by distance one to another.
…The first irregularity, as we shall point out, consists in their beginning with drawing up a single budget which year after year grows owing to the following cause: this budget is dragged out to half the year, ten they demand a
Graves: Clearly, the “Protocols” author adapts the text of “Dialogues” so carelessly in his hasty attempt to Prove a Jewish conspiracy!”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.83

Drawing

“Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there — which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

“The point of one of [Rawls’] main constructions—the introduction of the “veil of ignorance”—is precisely to exclude from consideration empirical information that might prejudice the overriding normative force of the outcome. It is, then, extremely striking, not to say astounding, to the lay reader that the complex theoretical apparatus of Theory of Justice, operating through over 500 pages of densely argued text, eventuates in a constitutional structure that is a virtual replica (with some extremely minor deviations) of the arrangements that exist in the United States.”

Raymond Geuss (1946) British philosopher

“Liberalism and its Discontents,” p. 22.
Outside Ethics (2005)

Justice

“The papists abuse this text, not only to the end they may commend feigned miracles, which they say are done at the graves of martyrs, but also that they may try and sell us their relics. Why, say thy, shall not the grave, or garment, or the touching of the bones of Peter have as much power to heal, as his shadow had?”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Commentary on Acts CR 48 104; as quoted in War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin by Carlos M. N. Eire p.222

“There are some silly canards that die hard and some that should have been buried long ago such as 'Those that can, do; those as cannot, teach," or the definition of a Professor as a man whose job is to tell students how to solve the problem of life, which he himself has tried to avoid by becoming a Professor; or the more hurtful one that a Professor is a text book wired for sound.”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Teachers & Education

Life , Books , Problem , Hurt

“On the subject of biblical texts and examples to why you can't do certain things with your body that you wish to, I find that absolutely absurd. I've always been extremely uncomfortable with the idea in any society that the belief is based on revealed truth, that's to say on a text like a Bible or a Qur'an, or whatever it is. It seems to me that the greatness of our culture, for all its incredible faults, is that we have grown up on the Greek ideal of discovering the truth, discovering by looking around us, by empirical experiment, by the combination of the experience of generations of ancestors who have contributed to our sum knowledge of the way the world works, and so on. And to have that snatched away and to be told what to think by a book, however great it may be in places, this is a book that says you can sell your daughter into slavery, it's a book that bans menstruating women from within miles of temples. The fact that it also says that for one man to lie with another man is an abomination, is no more made relevant or important than the fact that you can't eat shellfish.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

Interview with Simon Callow.[citation needed]
2000s

Women , Truth , Lie , Books

“This is generally true: any sizeable piece of program, or even a complete program package, is only a useful tool that can be used in a reliable fashion, provided that the documentation pertinent for the user is much shorter than the program text. If any machine or system requires a very thick manual, its usefulness becomes for that very circumstance subject to doubt!”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra, "On the reliability of programs" https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD303.html (EWD 303).
Unknown date

Fashion

“You shall see them on a beautiful quarto page, where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin.”

Richard Brinsley Sheridan The School for Scandal

Act I, sc. i.
The School for Scandal (1777)

Beauty

“As long as the activity of linguists was limited to comparing one language with another, this general utility cannot have been apparent to most of the general public, and indeed the study was so specialised that there was no real reason to suppose it of possible interest to a wider audience. It is only since linguistics has become more aware of its object of study, i. e. perceives the whole extent of it, that it is evident that this science can make a contribution to a range of studies that will be of interest to almost anyone. It is by no means useless, for instance, to those who have to deal with texts. It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.”

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) Swiss linguist

Ferdinand de Saussure (1910), Saussure's Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics (1910-1911) https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/saussure.htm, Pergamon Press, 1993.

Study , Science , Change , Time

“I must treat with reverence everything which Lord Kenyon has said: but not everything which text writers have represented him to have said, which he did not say.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

Lefroy, C.J., Persse v. Kinneen (1859), (Lr. Rep.) L. T. Vol. 1 (N. S.), 78.
About

“From lower to the higher next,
Not to the top, is Nature’s text;
And embryo Good, to reach full stature,
Absorbs the Evil in its nature.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Festina Lente, Moral

Nature , Evil

“This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.”

Doug McIlroy (1932) American computer scientist, mathematician, engineer, and programmer

Doug McIlroy (2003). The Art of Unix Programming: Basics of the Unix Philosophy http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html

Universe

“As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

The Translator As Reader, p. 276.
A History of Reading (1996)

Reading

“The Judge has not organs to know and to deal with the text of the foreign law, and therefore requires the assistance of a foreign lawyer who knows how to interpret it.”

Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux (1778–1868) English barrister, politician, and Lord Chancellor of Great Britain

Sussex Peerage Case (1844), 11 Cl. & F. 115.

Law

“Nehamas invokes Nietzsche’s talk of the “eternal basic text of homo natura” (BGE 230, quoted above) as evidence of aestheticism--the view, recall, that “texts can be interpreted equally well in vastly different and deeply incompatible ways” (p. 3). But the talk of “text” in this passage is actually incompatible with aestheticism. For in this passage, as we have seen, Nietzsche asserts that prior claims to “knowledge” have been superficial precisely because they have ignored the “eternal basic text”— ewigen Grundtext—of man conceived as a natural organism. That this text is eternal and basic implies not that it “can be interpreted equally well in vastly different and deeply incompatible ways” but just the opposite: readings which do not treat man naturalistically misread the text—they “falsify” it. It is these misreadings, of course, that Nietzsche, ever the “good philologist,” aims to correct.”

Brian Leiter (1963) American philosopher and legal scholar

"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud"

Way , Quotes , Nature , Knowledge

“As public discourses… cultural texts can be addressed in terms of how they are constituted as objects that gain their relevance through their relationship to other social institutions, resources, and non-discursive practices.”

Henry Giroux (1943) American academic

Henry Giroux . Breaking in to the Movies: Film and the Culture of Politics (2002), p. 81

“The long-form endings have pushed away the short-form endings completely in the oblique cases. In the last few years, there are attempts in Croatia to bring back again the short forms in the usage. This attempts are the part of the new sociolinguistic politics to bring back the archaic words and forms in the usage and to construct new words, neologisms, in place of customary words - all that with the aim to make the language in the west of the Serbo-Croatian language community as different as possible from the language in the east of the Serbo-Croatian language community. Leaders of the new language politics proclaim as incorrect what was customary, and as correct what was rare, archaic or even did not exist in the usage, and then they carry it out in practice through the control of the media, text-books etc. Such inversion of the criteria for what is correct and what is not correct in the language usage makes the native speakers unsure and frustrated.”

Snježana Kordić (1964) Croatian linguist

[Kordić, Snježana, w:Snježana Kordić, Snježana Kordić, Serbo-Croatian, Languages of the World/Materials 148, Munich & Newcastle, Lincom Europa, 1997, 18, 3-89586-161-8, 37959860]

Books , Communication , Parting

“And once again I am I will not say alone, no, that's not like me, but, how shall I say, I don't know, restored to myself, no, I never left myself, free, yes, I don't know what that means but it's the word I mean to use, free to do what, to do nothing, to know, but what, the laws of the mind perhaps, of my mind, that for example water rises in proportion as it drowns you and that you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

Law , Business , Water

“All meaning is intertextual. No text is complete or autonomous in itself; it needs to be read, and it is read, in relation to other texts.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 35

Reading

“Quite distinct from the theoretical question of the manner in which mathematics will rescue itself from the perils to which it is exposed by its own prolific nature is the practical problem of finding means of rendering available for the student the results which have been already accumulated, and making it possible for the learner to obtain some idea of the present state of the various departments of mathematics…. The great mass of mathematical literature will be always contained in Journals and Transactions, but there is no reason why it should not be rendered far more useful and accessible than at present by means of treatises or higher text-books. The whole science suffers from want of avenues of approach, and many beautiful branches of mathematics are regarded as difficult and technical merely because they are not easily accessible…. I feel very strongly that any introduction to a new subject written by a competent person confers a real benefit on the whole science. The number of excellent text-books of an elementary kind that are published in this country makes it all the more to be regretted that we have so few that are intended for the advanced student. As an example of the higher kind of text-book, the want of which is so badly felt in many subjects, I may mention the second part of Prof. Chrystal’s “Algebra” published last year, which in a small compass gives a great mass of valuable and fundamental knowledge that has hitherto been beyond the reach of an ordinary student, though in reality lying so close at hand. I may add that in any treatise or higher text-book it is always desirable that references to the original memoirs should be given, and, if possible, short historic notices also. I am sure that no subject loses more than mathematics by any attempt to dissociate it from its history.”

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher (1848–1928) English mathematician and astronomer

Source: "Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science," 1890, p. 466 : On the need of text-books on higher mathematics

Books , Beauty , Feeling , History

“Most men would never tell a girl her Pikachu smells like a crab cake. It's just not done. But they would have no qualms about telling their guy friends. Similarly, if you're a guy and you pull your pants down, and the girl you're with immediately starts text messaging her friends, you have a small penis.”

Chelsea Handler (1975) American comedian, actress, author and talk show host

Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea (2008)

Men , Guy , Girl

“In Europe, you do philosophy by performing discourse on another guy's text, and so Derrida will go over Heidegger, and Habermas will extend Marx's corpus; but in America you could never get away with kinky stuff like that, for you have to generate philosophy from real things—like computers or television. You need to look at Omni magazine to get a feel for this new kind of mail-order, Popular Mechanics science of mind. It's full of articles about meditation helmets and downloading the soul into computers so that when your body wears out you can live forever. What is completely missing in Europe is precisely what you will find in America: namely, an electronic Umwelt in which history is replaced with movies, education is replaced with entertainment, and nature is replaced with technology. This peculiar wedding of low kitsch and high tech generates a posthistoric world that no European literary intellectual can quite fathom.”

William Irwin Thompson (1938) American writer

Thompson (1991) Fast Foreword, from The American Replacement of Nature.

World , Education , Guy , Feeling

“It is universally held that the unicorn is a supernatural being and of auspicious omen; so say the odes, the annals, the biographies of worthies, and other texts whose authority is unimpeachable.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Book of Imaginary Beings (1957), as translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni
Context: It is universally held that the unicorn is a supernatural being and of auspicious omen; so say the odes, the annals, the biographies of worthies, and other texts whose authority is unimpeachable. Even village women and children know that the unicorn is a lucky sign. But this animal does not figure among the barnyard animals, it is not always easy to come across, it does not lend itself to zoological classification. Nor is it like the horse or bull, the wolf or deer. In such circumstances we may be face to face with a unicorn and not know for sure that we are. We know that a certain animal with a mane is a horse and that a certain animal with horns is a bull. We do not know what the unicorn looks like.

Universe

“There isn't a text in the Bible better worth keeping always in mind than that one, 'Judge not, that ye be not judged.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes book Elsie Venner

.
Elsie Venner (1859)

“Reading is an active and elusive experience. Every reader, reading exactly the same text, will have a slightly different reading experience depending on what s/he projects into the words s/he sees, what strings of meaning and association those words call up in his/her (always) private mind.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)
Context: Reading is an active and elusive experience. Every reader, reading exactly the same text, will have a slightly different reading experience depending on what s/he projects into the words s/he sees, what strings of meaning and association those words call up in his/her (always) private mind. One can never therefore, talk about the quality of a book separately from the quality of the mind that is creating it by reading it, in the only place books live, in the secret mind.

"'A Conversation With Lois McMaster Bujold", an interview with Lillian Stewart Carl, p. 52

Reading , Dependency

“The history of the Bible text is a romance of literature,”

Frederic G. Kenyon (1863–1952) British palaeographer and biblical and classical scholar

Source: The Story Of The Bible, Chapter I, The Bible And Recent Discoveries, p. 4
Context: The history of the Bible text is a romance of literature, though it is a romance of which the consequences are of vital import; and thanks to the succession of discoveries which have been made of late years, we know more about it than of the history of any other ancient book in the world.

History , Literature

“A procedure, which could only have some excuse, if these critics could first prove, that the apostle's text ought to be thus read, "The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life."”

William Law (1686–1761) English cleric, nonjuror and theological writer

¶ 129 - 130.
An Humble, Earnest and Affectionate Address to the Clergy (1761)
Context: What is the difference between man's own righteousness and man's own light in religion? They are strictly the same thing, do one and the same work, namely, keep up and strengthen every evil, vanity, and corruption of fallen nature. Nothing saves a man from his own righteousness, but that which saves and delivers him from his own light. The Jew that was most of all set against the gospel, and unable to receive it was he that trusted in his own righteousness; this was the rich man, to whom it was as hard to enter into the kingdom of heaven as for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. But the Christian, that trusts in his own light, is the very Jew that trusted in his own righteousness; and all that he gets by the gospel, is only that which the Pharisee got by the Law, namely, to be further from entering into the kingdom of God than publicans and harlots. … Nothing but God in man can be a godly life in man. Hence is that of the apostle, "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." But you will say, can this be true of the spiritual divine letter of the gospel? Can it kill, or give death? Yes, it kills, when it is rested in; when it is taken for divine power, and supposed to have goodness in itself; for then it kills the Spirit of God in man, quenches his holy fire within us, and is set up instead of it. It gives death, when it is built into systems of strife and contention about words, notions, and opinions, and makes the kingdom of God to consist, not in power, but in words. When it is thus used, then of necessity it kills, because it keeps from that which alone is life and can give life. … All the Law, the prophets, and the gospel are fulfilled, when there is in Christ a new creature, having life in and from him, as really as the branch has its life in and from the vine. And when all scripture is thus understood, and all that either Christ says of himself, or his apostles say of him, are all heard, or read, only as one and the same call to come to Christ, in hunger and thirst to be filled and blessed with his divine nature made living within us; then, and then only, the letter kills not, but as a sure guide leads directly to life. But grammar, logic, and criticism knowing nothing of scripture but its words, bring forth nothing but their own wisdom of words, and a religion of wrangle, hatred, and contention, about the meaning of them.
But lamentable as this is, the letter of scripture has been so long the usurped province of school-critics, and learned reasoners making their markets of it, that the difference between literal, notional, and living divine knowledge, is almost quite lost in the Christian world. So that if any awakened souls are here or there found among Christians, who think that more must be known of God, of Christ, and the powers of the world to come, than every scholar can know by reading the letter of scripture, immediately the cry of enthusiasm, whether they be priests, or people, is sent after them. A procedure, which could only have some excuse, if these critics could first prove, that the apostle's text ought to be thus read, "The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life."

Life , Reading

“The function of reciting (actually chanting—for Scripture and national epic were sung, not read) Pentateuch and Homer at national reunions is the same in both cases. The narrative knits the segments of the nation together telling how they achieved their place in history in the course of a great event (The Exodus or the Trojan War). All of the tribes and their leaders are heroic. The text brings in each tribe by name. …there must be an honoured place for all.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VIII Further Observations on the Bible

War , History , Reading

“This text is, in fact, a rerun of a great part of the substance of the constitutional treaty.”

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (1926–2020) President of France

On the Lisbon Treaty, in his blog, 25 June 2007, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing: Conclusions du Conseil européen de Bruxelles, 21 et 22 juin 2007 http://vge-europe.eu/index.php?post/2007/06/25/Conclusions-du-Conseil-europeen-de-Bruxelles-21-et-22-juin-2007, 25 June 2007.

Parting

“There is, I believe, a great deal to be learned from faith traditions – from the ordinary people who practice them today; from their sacred texts and writings and artefacts; and from their histories.”

Yakoub Islam

"Oh, God! It’s Religion!" (22 August 2011). 
Captain Jul's Mission Blog (2011 - 2013)
Context: There is, I believe, a great deal to be learned from faith traditions – from the ordinary people who practice them today; from their sacred texts and writings and artefacts; and from their histories. Faith traditions present a rich and diverse vein of human experience, and I am convinced that — as with other humanities — a serious interest in them is a cultural education in itself.

People , Faith , History , Learning

“"I texted you on a Monday,
But you did not get my text 'till the Tuesday,
Because of a network problem.
I texted you on a Wednesday,
But I did not know that you'd called
Because your SIM card was not correctly installed.
Oh no no no.
You texted me on a Thursday
To say that you would meet me at the Shopping Centre
And i texted you back and said
"Where should i meet you?"
And you said Dixons
But i did not know which Dixons you meant
Was it the one inside the door
Or was it the one further up by Currys
These are my worries.
You texted me on a Monday
To tell me it was over
But i did not understand
Because you used Predictive Text
And it was Jrrg gruuh nnmmg guu hmmg doo doo doo".”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Lyrics

Understanding , Problem

“Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 2, p. 64-65

“We had "suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole. We had seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders." We had reached the naked soul of man.”

Ernest Shackleton book South

Ch 10 : Across South Georgia; in this extract, Shackleton was paraphrasing the poem "The Call of the Wild" by Robert Service, published in 1907.
South (1920)
Context: At the bottom of the fall we were able to stand again on dry land. The rope could not be recovered. We had flung down the adze from the top of the fall and also the logbook and the cooker wrapped in one of our blouses. That was all, except our wet clothes, that we brought out of the Antarctic, which we had entered a year and a half before with well-found ship, full equipment, and high hopes. That was all of tangible things; but in memories we were rich. We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had "suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole. We had seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders." We had reached the naked soul of man.

God , Soul , Nature , Suffering

“The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist

Conclusion
From Work to Text (1971)
Context: The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

“The familiar text is followed by the very material promise of economic prosperity and the threat of continued war”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.1 The Historical Roots of Christianity the Hebrew Prophets, p. 10
Context: The words are part of the first chapter of Isaiah to which reference has been made. The prophet throughout the chapter deals with the national condition of the kingdom of Judah and its capital.... he urges... the abolition of social oppression and injustice as the only way of regaining God's favor for the nation. If they would vindicate the cause of the helpless and oppressed, then he would freely pardon; then their scarlet and crimson guilt would be washed away. The familiar text is followed by the very material promise of economic prosperity and the threat of continued war: "If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land; but if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword."

War

“What we proclaim is The Right to Well Being: Well Being for All!”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

The Conquest of Bread (1907), p. 14 http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/conquest/toc.html
Variant: All things for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men worked to produce them in the measure of their strength, and since it is not possible to evaluate everyone's part in the production of the world's wealth... All is for all!
This variant was probably produced by a combination of accidental as well as deliberate omission, rather than a separate translation.
Context: The means of production being the collective work of humanity, the product should be the collective property of the race. Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all. All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate every one's part in the production of the world's wealth.
All things are for all. Here is an immense stock of tools and implements; here are all those iron slaves which we call machines, which saw and plane, spin and weave for us, unmaking and remaking, working up raw matter to produce the marvels of our time. But nobody has the right to seize a single one of these machines and say, "This is mine; if you want to use it you must pay me a tax on each of your products," any more than the feudal lord of medieval times had the right to say to the peasant, "This hill, this meadow belong to me, and you must pay me a tax on every sheaf of corn you reap, on every rick you build."
All is for all! If the man and the woman bear their fair share of work, they have a right to their fair share of all that is produced by all, and that share is enough to secure them well-being. No more of such vague formulas as "The Right to work," or "To each the whole result of his labour." What we proclaim is The Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!

“And anything that would qualify as a god would clearly understand this, and if it wanted to convey this information to people in a way that was believable, would not be relying on text to do so”

Matt Dillahunty (1969) American activist

Episode 696: "Viewer Calls" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OCYhDFc42I, Channel Austin (February 13, 2011)
The Atheist Experience
Context: Your position is... one where there is a god who has an important message for mankind, and somehow he only reveals it to certain individuals who then write this down and thousands of years after this initial revelation, we have to rely on copies of copies of translations of copies by anonymous authors with no originals, and the textual testimony to a miracle, for example the loaves and fishes; there’s no amount of reports - anecdotal testimonial reports - that could be sufficient to justify that this event actually happened as reported. No amount. And anything that would qualify as a god would clearly understand this, and if it wanted to convey this information to people in a way that was believable, would not be relying on text to do so, and this for me is the nail in the coffin for Christianity. The god that Christians believe in is amazingly stupid if it wants to actually achieve its goal of spreading this information to humanity by relying on text; by relying on languages that die out; by relying on anecdotal testimony. That's not a pathway to truth! And anything that would qualify for a god should know this, which means either that God doesn’t exist or it doesn't care enough about those people who understand the nature of evidence to actually present it. Now which of those possibilities do you think is accurate?"... "Why would you believe anything on faith? Faith isn't a pathway to truth. Every religion has some sort of faith, people take things on, you know, - if faith is your pathway, you can't distinguish between Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, any of these others. How is it that you use reason as a path to truth in every endeavor of your life, and then when it comes to the ‘ultimate truth’ - the most important truth - you're saying that faith is required. And how does that reflect on a god (who supposedly exists and wants you to have this information); what kind of god requires faith instead of evidence?... I have reasonable expectations based on evidence. I have trust that has been earned. I will grant trust tentatively. I don't have faith. Faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have evidence.

God , People , Way , Understanding

“The text is really a comment on the limited nature of human language. Such language must by nature be diverse in its attempts to describe that which is One and finally indescribable.”

Anantanand Rambachan (1951) Hindu studies scholar

Source: The Nature and Authority of Scripture (1995), p. 20
Context: The famous Rgveda text, "One is the Truth, the sages speak of it differently" (1.64.46), is often employed to explain away doctrinal differences as merely semantic ones. The point of this text, as its context makes quite clear, is not really to dismiss the significance of the different ways in which we speak of the One or to see these ways as equally valid. The text is really a comment on the limited nature of human language. Such language must by nature be diverse in its attempts to describe that which is One and finally indescribable. The text, however, is widely cited in ways that seem to make interreligious dialogue redundant.

Nature

“The unlimitedness of the sense of a text is due to the free combinations of its signifiers, which in that text are linked together as they are only accidentally but which could be combined differently.”

Umberto Eco book Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

[4] Symbol, 4.4 : The symbolic mode, 4.4.4 : The Kabalistic drift
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Context: Scholem … says that Jewish mystics have always tried to project their own thought into the biblical texts; as a matter of fact, every unexpressible reading of a symbolic machinery depends on such a projective attitude. In the reading of the Holy Text according to the symbolic mode, "letters and names are not conventional means of communication. They are far more. Each one of them represents a concentration of energy and expresses a wealth of meaning which cannot be translated, or not fully at least, into human language" [On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (1960); Eng. tr., p. 36]. For the Kabalist, the fact that God expresses Himself, even though His utterances are beyond any human insight, is more important than any specific and coded meaning His words can convey.
The Zohar says that "in any word shine a thousand lights" (3.202a). The unlimitedness of the sense of a text is due to the free combinations of its signifiers, which in that text are linked together as they are only accidentally but which could be combined differently.

Sense

“And the parson made it his text that week, and he said likewise,
That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,
That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright,
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

" The Grandmother http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Alfred_Lord_Tennyson/14415", st. 8 (1864)

Truth , Lie , Fight , Parting

“The words in the traditional texts may sound different to us than they did to their authors, but they continue to resonate with our religious selves. We know what they are intended to mean.”

Ursula Goodenough book The Sacred Depths of Nature

Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 173
Context: I love traditional religions. Whenever I wander into distinctive churches or mosques or temples, or visit museums of religious art, or hear performances of sacred music, I am enthralled by the beauty and solemnity and power they offer. Once we have our feelings about Nature in place, then I believe that we can also find important ways to call ourselves Jews, or Muslims, or Taoists, or Hopi, or Hindus, or Christians, or Buddhists. Or some of each. The words in the traditional texts may sound different to us than they did to their authors, but they continue to resonate with our religious selves. We know what they are intended to mean.

“Art is the tree of life.
Science is the Tree of Death
Art is the Tree of Life
GOD is Jesus”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

The Laocoön

God

“And Rome – oh, the list is endless there, also - most of them were glorified harlots but better be a glorified harlot than a drab and moral drone, such as the text books teach us woman should be.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to Harold Preece (c. December 1928)
Letters
Context: I could name all day, those women I deem great in Greece alone and the records would scarcely be complete. And what of Joan of Arc and Emma Goldman? Kate Richards O’Hare and Sarah Bernhardt? Katherine the Great and Elizabeth Barrett Browning? H. D. and Sara Teasdale? Isibella of Spain who pawned her gems that Columbus might sail, and Edna St. Vincent Millay? And that queen, Marie, I think her name was, of some small province - Hungary I believe - who fought Prussia and Russia so long and so bitterly. And Rome – oh, the list is endless there, also - most of them were glorified harlots but better be a glorified harlot than a drab and moral drone, such as the text books teach us woman should be. Woman have always been the inspiration of men, and just as there are thousands of unknown great ones among men, there have been countless women whose names have never been blazoned across the stars, but who have inspired men on to glory. And as for their fickleness – as long as men write the literature of the world, they will rant about the unfaithfulness of the fair sex, forgetting their own infidelities. Men are as fickle as women. Women have been kept in servitude so long that if they lack in discernment and intellect it is scarcely their fault.

Books

“Most of the early Christian writers thought the text "I and my Father are one," was to be understood of an unity or harmony of disposition only.”

Joseph Priestley book An History of the Corruptions of Christianity

Part I : The History of Opinions Relating to Jesus Christ, § III : The Supremacy was always ascribed to the Father before the Council Of Nice
An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782)
Context: Most of the early Christian writers thought the text "I and my Father are one," was to be understood of an unity or harmony of disposition only. Thus Tertullian observes, that the expression is unum, one thing, not one person; and he explains it to mean unity, likeness, conjunction, and of the love that the Father bore to the Son. Origen says, "let him consider that text, 'all that believed were of one heart and of one soul,' and then he will understand this, 'I and my Father are one.'"

“The famous Rgveda text, "One is the Truth, the sages speak of it differently" (1.64.46), is often employed to explain away doctrinal differences as merely semantic ones.”

Anantanand Rambachan (1951) Hindu studies scholar

Source: The Nature and Authority of Scripture (1995), p. 20
Context: The famous Rgveda text, "One is the Truth, the sages speak of it differently" (1.64.46), is often employed to explain away doctrinal differences as merely semantic ones. The point of this text, as its context makes quite clear, is not really to dismiss the significance of the different ways in which we speak of the One or to see these ways as equally valid. The text is really a comment on the limited nature of human language. Such language must by nature be diverse in its attempts to describe that which is One and finally indescribable. The text, however, is widely cited in ways that seem to make interreligious dialogue redundant.

Truth

“Scholem … says that Jewish mystics have always tried to project their own thought into the biblical texts; as a matter of fact, every unexpressible reading of a symbolic machinery depends on such a projective attitude.”

Umberto Eco book Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

[4] Symbol, 4.4 : The symbolic mode, 4.4.4 : The Kabalistic drift
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Context: Scholem … says that Jewish mystics have always tried to project their own thought into the biblical texts; as a matter of fact, every unexpressible reading of a symbolic machinery depends on such a projective attitude. In the reading of the Holy Text according to the symbolic mode, "letters and names are not conventional means of communication. They are far more. Each one of them represents a concentration of energy and expresses a wealth of meaning which cannot be translated, or not fully at least, into human language" [On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (1960); Eng. tr., p. 36]. For the Kabalist, the fact that God expresses Himself, even though His utterances are beyond any human insight, is more important than any specific and coded meaning His words can convey.
The Zohar says that "in any word shine a thousand lights" (3.202a). The unlimitedness of the sense of a text is due to the free combinations of its signifiers, which in that text are linked together as they are only accidentally but which could be combined differently.

Reading , Dependency

“For he was of that stubborn crew
Of errant saints, whom all men grant
To be the true Church Militant;
Such as do build their faith upon
The holy text of pike and gun;
Decide all controversies by
Infallible artillery;
And prove their doctrine orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks;
Call fire and sword and desolation,
A godly thorough reformation,
Which always must be carried on,
And still be doing, never done;
As if religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended.”

Samuel Butler (poet) Hudibras

Canto I, line 189
Hudibras, Part I (1663–1664)
Context: For his Religion, it was fit
To match his learning and his wit;
'Twas Presbyterian true blue;
For he was of that stubborn crew
Of errant saints, whom all men grant
To be the true Church Militant;
Such as do build their faith upon
The holy text of pike and gun;
Decide all controversies by
Infallible artillery;
And prove their doctrine orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks;
Call fire and sword and desolation,
A godly thorough reformation,
Which always must be carried on,
And still be doing, never done;
As if religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended.
A sect, whose chief devotion lies
In odd perverse antipathies;
In falling out with that or this,
And finding somewhat still amiss;
More peevish, cross, and splenetick,
Than dog distract, or monkey sick.
That with more care keep holy-day
The wrong, than others the right way;
Compound for sins they are inclin'd to,
By damning those they have no mind to:
Still so perverse and opposite,
As if they worshipp'd God for spite.
The self-same thing they will abhor
One way, and long another for.
Free-will they one way disavow,
Another, nothing else allow:
All piety consists therein
In them, in other men all sin...

Men , Faith , Religion

“Should my notion be true, a vast mass of technicalities may be swept from our logical text-books, and yet the small remaining part of logical doctrine will prove far more useful than all the learning of the Schoolmen.”

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) English economist and logician

Preface
The Substitution of Similars, The True Principles of Reasoning (1869)
Context: The new and wonderful results of the late Dr. Boole's mathematical system of Logic appear to develop themselves as most plain and evident consequences of the self-same process of substitution, when applied to the Primary Laws of Thought. Should my notion be true, a vast mass of technicalities may be swept from our logical text-books, and yet the small remaining part of logical doctrine will prove far more useful than all the learning of the Schoolmen.

Books , Learning , Parting

“One is the struggle, and in One name —
Manhood — we battle to set men free.
"Uncurse us the Land!" burn the words of the Dead,
Written-in-red.”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

"Written-In-Red", last lines.
Context: Bear it aloft, O roaring flame!
Skyward aloft, where all may see.
Slaves of the World! Our cause is the same;
One is the immemorial shame;
One is the struggle, and in One name —
Manhood— we battle to set men free.
"Uncurse us the Land!" burn the words of the Dead,
Written-in-red.

Men , Dead

“This text is organized in the "spiral" for learning. A topic… is returned to again and again”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)
Context: This text is organized in the "spiral" for learning. A topic... is returned to again and again, each time higher up in the spiral. The first time around you may not be completely sure of what is going on, but on the repeated returns to the topic it should gradually become clear. This is necessary when the ideas are not simple but require a depth of understanding...

Learning

“I must confess that this is no personal achievement of mine; this attitude was never striven for.... [ellipsis is in original, unabridged text] I've been shaped to this mental stance by the kind of experiences that I have fallen heir to. I say this neither in a tone of apology nor to persuade the reader in my ideological direction, but to give him a hinting clue as to why certain ideas and values appeal to me more than others, and why certain perspectives are stressed in these speeches.”

Richard Wright (1908–1960) African-American writer

White Man, Listen! (1957)

Idea , Personality

“The ROK Army military schools system was patterned exactly after ours, as was their naval training system. The ROKs during the war developed a Korean West Point and a Korean Annapolis. They created their own war college to give their officers more education as they showed capacity for higher command. All the senior instructors and most of the junior instructors have been through our schools as well as their own. They taught by our American methods, with our American weapons and from translated versions of our American military texts and manuals.”

Mark W. Clark (1896–1984) American general

Source: From the Danube to the Yalu (1954), p. 176

War , Education , School , Training

“Studying texts and stiff meditation can make you lose your Original Mind.
A solitary tune by a fisherman, though, can be an invaluable treasure.”

Ikkyu (1394–1481) Japanese Buddhist monk

"A Fisherman" in Wild Ways : Zen Poems (2003), edited and translated by John Stevens, p. 37.
Context: Studying texts and stiff meditation can make you lose your Original Mind.
A solitary tune by a fisherman, though, can be an invaluable treasure.
Dusk rain on the river, the moon peeking in and out of the clouds;
Elegant beyond words, he chants his songs night after night.

Study

“In my field, Wikipedia is more reliable than the text-books.”

Harold Kroto (1939–2016) British chemist

Citation

Books

“The Ramayan, one of the most revered texts in Hinduism, tells the story of a prince called Ram. Dashrath, king of Ayodhya, had three wives but no children. So he conducted a yagna and invoked the gods who gave him a magic potion that was divided among his three queens. In time the queens gave birth to four sons. Ram was the eldest, born of the chief queen, Kaushalya, Bharat was the second born to Dasharath’s favourite queen Kaikeyi. Lakshman and Shatrughna were the twin sons of the third queen Sumitra.”

Devdutt Pattanaik (1970) Indian physician; leadership consultant, mythologist and author

Source: The Book of Ram, p. 3

God , Birth , Time , Children

“I think that the book has survived as a set text because teachers like using it. It has a lot of possibilities from a teaching point of view. Most kinds of children seem to identify with the story. Northanger Abbey it is not! It should really be out of date now after all these years. But sadly, it’s not. There are still a lot of kids like Billy around. Ken Loach’s film Kes is a sympathetic retelling of the book. It adds value to it. Ken is a wonderful director for any writer to work with. I was very lucky that Tony Garnett the producer and Ken discovered my little book.”

Barry Hines (1939–2016) British author

On A Kestrel for a Knave
Barry Hines Interview: Homecoming Hero

Books , Children , Thinking , Teachers

“It is because we know that we are going forward to life and resurrection that we must purify ourselves in order that we may be presented holy and faultless. This purification, of course, is not just ritual or moral. It is purification from the stains of the world. It will manifest itself in our freedom with regard to the things of the world. This is why hope and freedom are so often related in the texts. The hope which binds us to the risen Christ by a full and actual bond is precisely that which allows us to reject the validity of the secular powers.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Source: The Ethics of Freedom (1973 - 1974), p. 17

Freedom , Hope , Christ , Relation ships

“It can be considered by many to be foolhardy, especially when you’re messing with what’s considered a sacred text. But it’s also an irresistible challenge, isn’t it? It evokes so many different wild and outrageous and beautiful images that anyone who loves both novels and films can’t help but imagine what it would look like on the big screen. In this case I’m glad they took the challenge on. I think Marquez is glad too. Apparently he’s seen it and he’s responded favorably to it, he likes it. The trick is, as you aptly point out, is how to do it but how to do it well. Because it’s not an easy translation to make, and certainly nearly impossible when you’re talking about a great novel, which this is. The best you can hope for really is to capture the essence of the book, and I think the film has done that, which is good news.”

Benjamin Bratt (1963) American actor

On adapting a literary masterpiece for the big screen in “Interview: Benjamin Bratt” https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Interview-Benjamin-Bratt-6673.html in Cinema Blend

Imagination , Beauty , Hope , Help

“Buddhism, it may be said, finds religious authority not only in texts and institutions, but also in enlightened people. Certainly, those undersood as realized have occupied and important if not always well defined place within the early and developed tradition.”

Reginald Ray (1942) Buddhist teacher

[Buddhist Saints in India: A Study in Buddhist Values and Orientations, Oxford University Press, 1999, 9780195350616, Preface, http://www.ahandfulofleaves.org/documents/Buddhist%20Saints%20in%20India_A%20Study%20in%20Buddhist%20Values%20and%20Orientations_Reginald.pdf]

People

“So the novel is a race, and I can see the finish line from the first sentence: it’s an intuition that magnetizes the entire text. The closer I get to the goal, the faster I want to go. There’s even a sense of urgency, of hurrying, as though I was out of breath and had to, at all costs, finish before I ran out of strength. So I find that my endings are often too quick, not unfolded enough, not majestic enough…”

Maylis de Kerangal (1967) French writer

On the endings of her works in “Maylis de Kerangal by Jessica Moore” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/maylis-de-kerangal/ in Bomb Magazine (2015 Dec 15)

Sense

“The Great Flood in the Bible and other ancient texts is a grave warning to humankind, and yet very few people seem to care about global existential threat.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

The Transhumanism Handbook, 2019

People

“Thus the human element in the Old Testament is seen to be quite considerable. It is not difficult to understand why from version to version, and translation to translation, with all the corrections inevitably resulting, it was possible for the original text to have been transformed during the course of more than two thousand years.”

Maurice Bucaille (1920–1998) French physician and author

about Old Testament, p. 11

Understanding

“No one has officially told me that I have lost the Tory whip. The fault’s probably mine. I’m notorious for only using my mobile phone for outgoing calls: nobody knows my London number and I certainly don’t do anything online. So there may somewhere be an email or text message or something telling me, but I gather from the media that there’s no doubt that I’ve lost the whip. My status otherwise is completely unclear.”

Ken Clarke (1940) British Conservative politician

Said after Clarke voted against the government on the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 6) Bill 2017-19. Boris Johnson had promised to remove the Conservative whip from those who rebelled. Quoted by the Guardian. Ken Clarke: ‘I’m not sure yet, but I may protest and vote Lib Dem’ https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/sep/07/ken-clarke-interview-andrew-rawnsley-lost-tory-whip (7 September 2019)
2019

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Quotes about text
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