Quotes about thought
page 61

“Our experiments [the artists of 'Cobra'] the aim at letting thought express itself spontaneously without the control which reason represents. By means of this irrational spontaneity we get closer tot the vital source of life. Our goal is to liberate ourselves from the control of reason which has been and still is the thing which the bourgeoisie has idealized to seize control of life.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

1949 - 1958, Speech to the Penguins' (1949)

Life

“There was a story that some EMI execs had come down to see you and you'd said something like: "Here's what I've been working on," and then produced some cakes from your oven. True?
"No! I don't know where that came from. I thought that was quite funny actually. It presents me as this homely creature, which is all right, isn't it?"”

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

MOJO interview (2005)

Home

“ACCORDING TO the numerous deductions and conclusions made by me during experimental elucidations concerning the productivity of the perception by contemporary people of new impressions from what is heard and read, and also according to the thought of one of the sayings of popular wisdom I have just remembered, handed down to our days from very ancient times, which declares: “Any prayer may be heard by the Higher Powers and a corresponding answer obtained only if it is uttered thrice:
:Firstly—for the welfare or the peace of the souls of one’s parents.
:Secondly—for the welfare of one’s neighbor.
:And only thirdly—for oneself personally.”

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

"Friendly Advice [Written impromptu by the author on delivering this book, already prepared for publication, to the printer" (1949)
All and Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (1950)

Wisdom, People, Peace, Soul

“On a point of order, I thought I was in Seanad Éireann, but it appears I have inadvertently wandered into a meeting of Donegal County Council.”

David Norris (1944) Irish scholar, independent Senator, and gay and civil rights activist

4 July 2013 http://www.kildarestreet.com/sendebates/?id=2013-07-04a.7&s=speaker%3A210#g55

Appearance

“[ Folk art, consists of] work done by ordinary people in the course of their lives, work seldom thought of by those who make or use it as art at all.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Art Worlds (1982), p. 245 as quoted in: John Ross Hall, Mary Jo Neitz, Marshall Battani (2003) Sociology On Culture. p. 196.

People, Art

“To some this may appear to be a small matter, but to Mr. Harry Hook, it is very important. He is a street trader in the Barnsley Market. He has been trading there for some six years without any complaint being made against him; but, nevertheless, he has now been banned from trading in the market for life. All because of a trifling incident. On Wednesday, October 16, 1974, the market was closed at 5:30. So were all the lavatories, or 'toilets' as they are now called. They were locked up. Three quarters of an hour later, at 6:20, Harry Hook had an urgent call of nature. He wanted to relieve himself. He went into a side street near the market and there made water, or 'urinated' as it is now said. No one was about except one or two employees of the council, who were cleaning up. They rebuked him. He said: 'I can do it here if I like'. They reported him to a security officer who came up. The security officer reprimanded Harry Hook. We are not told the words used by the security officer. I expect they were in language which street traders understand. Harry Hook made an appropriate reply. Again, we are not told the actual words, but it is not difficult to guess. I expect it was an emphatic version of 'You be off'. At any rate, the security officer described them as words of abuse. Touchstone would say that the security officer gave the 'reproof valiant' and Harry Hook gave the 'counter-check quarrelsome'; As You Like It, Act V, Scene IV. On Thursday morning the security officer reported the incident. The market manager thought it was a serious matter. So he saw Mr. Hook the next day, Friday, October 18. Mr. Hook admitted it and said he was sorry for what had happened. The market manager was not satisfied to leave it there. He reported the incident to the chairman of the amenity services committee of the Council. He says that the chairman agreed that 'staff should be protected from such abuse.”

Alfred Denning, Baron Denning (1899–1999) British judge

That very day the market manager wrote a letter to Mr. Hook, banning him from trading in the market.
Ex Parte Hook [1976] 1 WLR 1052 at 1055.
Judgments

Life, Understanding, Nature, Water

“Those thoughts that come to us suddenly and that are not yet ours.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“(…) To take the world as real and one’s self as unreal is ignorance, the cause of sorrow. To know the self as the only reality and all else as temporal and transient is freedom, peace and joy. It is all very simple. Instead of seeing things as imagined, learn to see them as they are. When you can see everything as it is, you will also see yourself as you are. It is like cleansing a mirror. The same mirror that shows you the world as it is, will also show you your own face. The thought ‘I am’ is the polishing cloth. Use it.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Reality
Source: "I am That." P.29.

World, Peace, Imagination, Reality

“You who have died on Eastern hills
Or fields of France as undismayed,
Who lit with interlinked wills
The long heroic barricade,
You, too, in all the dreams you had,
Thought of some thing for Ireland done.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

To the Memory of Some I knew Who are Dead and Who Loved Ireland (1917)

Dreams

“The painting will not be looked at passively, not embraced all at once by an observer's immediate gaze. But relived in its elaboration, remade by thought and if I dare say reacted... All the gestures made by the painter, he [the observer] feels them reproduced in him.”

Jean Dubuffet book Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Source: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 75

Feeling, Painting

“As the world changed, we reverted to social divisions that we'd thought were obsolete. The egalitarian pretenses of the high-octane decades had dissolved and nobody even debated it anymore, including the women of our town. A plain majority of the townspeople were laborers now, whatever in life they had been before. Nobody in town called them peasants, but in a effect that's what they'd become. That's just the way things were.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 21, p. 101

Life, Women, World, Way

“Like a human thought in quest
Of a future hour.”

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

(1838 2) (Vol 53) Subjects for Pictures - Ariadne Watching the Sea after the Departure of Theseus
The Monthly Magazine

Future

“Oh I’m on my way I know I am,
But times there were when I thought not
Bleeding half my soul in bad company,
I thank the moon I had the strength to stop”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Sitting
Song lyrics, Catch Bull at Four (1972)

Way, Soul, Time

“From when Oasis first started I thought, "Thank Christ someone has picked up on that simple technique of saying they're the best thing on the planet and just fronting it." Liam is a part of a great ancestry of lippy, insecure bastard frontmen.”

Ian McCulloch (1959) singer, musician

Q magazine (1998)

Christ, Parting

“I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets.”

Elizabeth Warren (1949) 28th United States Senator from Massachusetts

As quoted in The Unwinding, an inner history of the New America https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9780374102418 (2013), by George Packer, New York: Farrar, Straus, and giroux. p. 345. 2013

People, Support

“[Regarding Flashdance-related fame] It was very clear to me that it’s not real. It’s not real…I was never the little girl who thought I wanted to be famous. My first real quest that I can recall…other than wanting to be a jockey…was trying to figure out who or what God was. That really drove me for quite some time…I had a notion that there was this mystery that I didn’t really know anything about, and I wanted to try to figure it out…. so fame was not my driving force.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Interview with Jian Gomeshi, CBC Radio Q (16 February 2011) http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/Shows/QTV_on_bol...2/ID=1886977325/

God, Girl, Time

“She kissed me, her mouth tasting of liverwurst on rye. She sat back, breathing with relief. I took out my handkerchief and wiped the sweat from my forehead…She pulled me down and her arms went around me and we fought until I thought it was absurd. I sat back and tried to think of another escape.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Kiss, Thinking

“And I thought that were we now to obtain political liberty, of which we talk so much, while engaged in biting one another, we should not know what to do with it, we should waste it in accusing one another in the newspapers of being spies and money-grubbers, we should frighten society with the assurance that we have neither men, nor science, nor literature, nothing! Nothing!”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

Men, Money, Literature, Science

“Management is the activity which plans, organizes, and controls the operations of the basic elements of men, materials, machines, methods, money, and markets, providing direction and coordination, and giving leadership to human efforts, so as to achieve the thought objectives of the enterprise.”

George R. Terry (1909–1979)

As cited in Wren & Bedeian (1972;411)
Principles of Management, 1960

Men, Money, Effort

“Certainly we tend to be resistant to change, on the whole, but that is because we have learned the hard way that change for its own sake is not a good idea, and that if something works more or less satisfactorily, it is best not to alter it without long and careful thought.”

George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008) English-born author of Scottish descent

Source: The Light's On At Signpost (2002), p. xx.

Way, Idea, Learning, Change

“The sixth pre-Christian century—the miraculous century of Buddha, Confucius and Lâo-Tse, of the Ionian philosophers and Pythagoras—was a turning point for the human species. A March breeze seemed to blow across the planet from China to Samos, stirring man into awareness, like the breath of Adam's nostrils. In the Ionian school of philosophy, rational thought was emerging from the mythological dream-world. …which, within the next two thousand years, would transform the species more radically than the previous two hundred thousand had done.”

Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) Hungarian-British author and journalist

The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)

World, School, Dreams

“Decisions should be based on facts, objectively considered — what I call the fact-founded, thought-through approach to decision making.”

Marvin Bower (1903–2003) American business theorist

Source: The Will to Manage (1966), p. 24

Decision

“The way change occurs to begin with, if you come up with a good idea, like heathcare, you're ignored. If you go on you must be mad, absolutely stark-staring bonkers. If you go on after that you're dangerous. Then, if the pressure keeps up there's a pause. And then you can't find anyone at the top who doesn't claim to have thought of it in the first place. That's how progress is made.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

Interview with Michael Moore in the movie Sicko (2007) Probably derived from older version:
2000s

Way, Idea, Change, Madness

“T'riss sat down opposite the Warden, her expression thoughtful. 'Is civilisation nothing but an illusion, then?'
'Crowd control.'
'Excuse me?'
'That's all civilisation is, T'riss. A means by which we manage the proliferation of our kind. It increases in complexity the more of us there are. Laws keeps us muzzled and punishment delivers the necessary message when those laws are broken. Civilizations in decline are notable when certain of their members escape justice, and do so with impunity.”

Steven Erikson book Forge of Darkness

Forge of Darkness (2013)

Justice, Law

“Wizards was about the creation of the state of Israel and the Holocaust, about the Jews looking for a homeland, and about the fact that fascism was on the rise again, I thought. That was way before the Right Wing made their appearance again, and I felt that things were shifting back. So on that level, Wizards was a very personal film.”

Ralph Bakshi (1938) Animator, filmmaker

Way, Appearance, Personality

“We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there's a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thought we'd have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better.”

Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer

Generation X (1991)

Silence, Night

“In recent times, we are becoming increasingly more aware of the cosmic dimension of salvation. The destiny of humankind and that of the cosmos are inextricably intertwined. In the past, Christians often thought of their relationship to the world in terms of domination, possession, use and enjoyment. There was little awe and wonder before the mystery of the universe. This arrogant and irreverent attitude to creation is largely responsible for the serious ecological crisis was are facing today.”

Kurien Kunnumpuram (1931–2018) Indian theologian

Kunnumpuram, Kurien, 2011 “Theological Exploration,” Jnanadeepa: Pune Journal of Religious Studies 14/2 (July-Dec 2011)
On the Church

World, Universe, Time, Past

“Before we try to destroy someone else, we should first pass judgment on ourselves. Before finding fault with others, we must first pass judgment upon ourselves. Before we backbite others, we must first pass judgment upon our selves. Before we lie about others, we must first judge ourselves. Before we hurt the heart of another, we must first pass judgment on ourselves. Like that, we have to pass judgment on our thoughts and on all actions done by our eyes, ears, nose, hands, and mouth. The guilty ones are within our own body and mind. These are our qualities which exist in our actions. All these qualities exist within us, do they not? So we have to pass judgment on them. That is the state of Iman-Islam. That is what is called Islam. To first see the fault in yourself and then to pass judgment and correct yourself is true justice. Those who perform that justice are in the religion of truth. They are the leaders of the religion of truth. They are in the state of Iman-Islam. They are the true believers.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

Benefit to All (undated)

Truth, Lie, Religion, Justice

“Simply because I liked it so much I saw it in Venice and thought: I'd like to have that for myself. To start with I only meant to make a copy, so that I could have a beautiful painting at home and with it a piece of that period, all that potential beauty and sublimity... Then my copy went wrong, and the pictures that finally emerged went to show that it just can't be done any more, not even by way of a copy. All I could do was to break the whole thing down and show that it's no longer possible”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Richter's quote refers to his 'Annunciation after Titian', he made in 1973
Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 104, note 52

Beauty, Way, Quotes, Home

“I don't want to change my music, but I like to play around with my style of music. I've always been a big fan of guitars. The beats are still quite hard and the riffs are still Basshunter, but I wanted to do something special. The lyrics are from a true story as well. It's based on me dating a girl who I thought was the one, but it didn't work out. I woke up one morning and she was doing something in the kitchen and then came through with a cup of coffee for me. I just went, 'Wow! I have to write a song now!”

Basshunter (1984) Swedish singer, record producer and DJ

Bass Generation

Music, Girl, Coffee, Change

“I'm tired of living, tired of living here in this land of small dogs, small feelings, small pleasures, small thoughts. One has to be satisfied, but I don't want to be satisfied. I won't be satisfied like a little dog, there's nothing more repulsive that small dogs when they come home frightened and satisfied from their small doggy adventures. I myself have been a big dog, but I won't be a big dog either, even if it is better to be a big dog than a little one. There's nothing between being a big dog and being a little one.I have been a big dog because I have deceived you all. I have also been a little dog because I have deceived myself. In the land of small dogs we all deceives ourselves, we all dream of small doggy adventures, but we are afraid of the greatest adventure of all. The small dogs have a panic-stricken horror of living a pure life, for the only adventure which is not small, because they think the only things worth living for are the moderately dirty ones. In the land of small dogs indecency is worse than immorality, people there don't know that only one thing is immoral: consciously wanting to hurt somebody. In the land of small dogs, therefore passive evil is more respected than active goodness.”

Stig Dagerman book A Burnt Child

Source: A Burnt Child (1948), p. 257

Life, People, Pleasure, Dogs

“Second, I use inference from technical studies and theories in order to provide practical information for therapists. Those thoughts are several steps removed from scientific validity.”

Virgil Miller Newton (1938) American priest

Miller Newton (1995). Adolescence: Guiding Youth Through the Perilous Ordeal. W.W. Norton and Company, NY, NY, pg 7.
Treatment Approach

Study

“Fascism itself was a variant of Sorelian syndicalism which advertized itself as voluntaristic, neo-idealist and elitist socialism. This current of socialist thought neither Fascism nor Gentile ever rejected. ‘Fascism,’ Gentile insisted, ‘as a consequence of its Marxian and Sorelian patrimony... conjoined with the influence of contemporary Italian idealism, through which Fascist thought attained maturity, conceives philosophy as praxis.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 317

“I think actors look for good material and I had heard about this script by Aaron and I read it and thought I had to come back to television. I'm here mostly because of how good the script is and how bad The Whole 10 Yards was.”

Matthew Perry (actor) (1969) American actor

On joining the NBC program Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip – Kevin D. Thompson (September 18, 2006) "'Studio 60' Is Best Show of the Fall", Palm Beach Post, Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc., p. 1D.

Thinking, Reading

“I do not understand these men who tell me that the prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part I do not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith and my reason — I wish rather that there should be war between them.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VI : In the Depths of the Abyss

Death, Men, War, Peace

“Jesus is said to have said on the cross, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" Because Jesus was insane and the God he thought would rescue him did not exist. And he died on that cross like a fool. He fancied himself the son of God and he could barely convince twelve men to follow him at a time when the world was full of superstition.”

Cenk Uygur (1970) Turkish-American online news show host

"If You're a Christian, Muslim or Jew - You are Wrong", The Huffington Post (23 October 2005) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/if-youre-a-christian-musl_b_9349.html

Men, God, World, Fools

“A buzzard took the monkey for a ride in the air
The monkey thought that everything was on the square
The buzzard tried to throw the monkey off his back
But the monkey grabbed his neck and said — "Now listen, Jack…"
"Straighten up and fly right
Straighten up and fly right
Straighten up and fly right
Cool down, papa, don't you blow your top."”

Nat King Cole (1919–1965) American singer and jazz pianist

"Straighten Up And Fly Right" (1937) written with Irving Mills.

Flying

“They thought I was an Icelander! But I'm no Icelander, s'help me!”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Pétur Pálsson
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Three: The House of the Poet

“It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in—glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! what a Revolution! And what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Volume iii, p. 331
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Love, Life, Men, Age

“He (Wells) closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother's face, his First Communion, women he had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men (2005)

Love, Women, Men, Dead

“If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order. Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.”

Stuart Kauffman (1939) American biophysicist

Source: At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (1996), p.112

Life, Understanding, Nature, Thinking

“I LOVED her! ay, I would have given
A death-bed certainty of heaven
If I had thought it could confer
The least of happiness on her!”

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

Canto III
The Troubadour (1825)

Love, Death, Happiness

“I supported her [Indira Gandhi] when I thought she was right in imposing the emergency. With some reservations, I supported the Emergency proclaimed by Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975. Let me explain why. I concede that the right to protest is integral to democracy. You can have public meetings to criticize or condemn government actions. You can take out processions, call for strikes and closure of businesses. But there must not be any coercion or violence. If there is any, it is the duty of the government to suppress it by force, if necessary.”

Khushwant Singh (1915–2014) Indian novelist and journalist

On Indira Gandhi.
Khushwant Singh in Sikh Philosophy Network

Democracy, Business, Support

“The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.”

Norman Mailer book Barbary Shore

Source: Barbary Shore (1951), Ch. 18

World

“He was picking speed as the city spread its twinkling lights below him.
But he paid no heed as the shivering thoughts of the nights
delights went through him.
His foot nudged the brakes to slow him down.
But the pedal floored easy without a sound.
He said "Christ!"
It was funny how he had named the only man who could save him now.
He was trapped inside a dead-end hellslide,
riding on his fear-hunched back
was every one of those yellow green
I'm telling you thirty thousand pounds of bananas.
Yes, there were thirty thousand pounds of bananas.”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

30,000 Pounds of Bananas
Song lyrics, Verities & Balderdash (1974)

Fear, Light, Christ, Speed

“To deal with the problems of modern society, hard thought, confrontation with an often unpleasant reality, and moral courage are needed, for which a vague and self-congratulatory broadmindedness is no substitute.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

An imaginary “scandal” http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/may05/dalrymple.htm (May 2005). New Criterion (2000 - 2005)

Courage, Problem, Reality

“In this excessive display of armorial bearings — for the two Roses above are crowded with them — one likes to think that these great princes had in their minds not so much the thought of their own importance — which is a modern sort of religion,— as the thought of their devotion to Mary. The assertion of power and attachment by one is met by the assertion of equal devotion by the other, and while both loudly proclaim their homage to the Virgin, each glares defiance across the church.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Religion, Thinking

“According to … the French counterrevolutionaries and German Romantics, … the corpus of prejudices was a country’s cultural treasure, its ancient and tested intelligence, present as the consciousness and guardian of its thought. Prejudices were the “we” of every “I”, the past in the present, the revered vessels of the nation’s memory, its judgements carried from age to age. Pretending to spread enlightenment, the philosophes had set out to extirpate these precious residua. … The result was that they had uprooted men from their culture at the very moment when they bragged of how they would cultivate them. … Convinced that they were emancipating souls, they succeeded only in deracinating them. These calumniators of the commonplace had not freed understanding from its chains, but cut it off from its sources. The individual who, thanks to them, must now cast off childish things, had really abandoned his own nature. … The promises of the cogito were illusory: free from prejudice, cut off from the influence of national idiom, the subject was not free but shrivelled and devitalised. … Everyday opinion should therefore be regarded as the soil where thought was nourished, its hearth and sanctuary, … and not, as the philosophes would have it, as some alien authority which overwhelmed and crushed it. … The cogito needed to be steeped in the profundities of the collective mind; the broken links with the past needed repairing; the quest for independence should yield to that for authenticity. Men should abandon their scepticism and give themselves over to the comforting warmth of majoritarian ideas, bowing down before their infallible authority.”

Alain Finkielkraut (1949) French essayist, born 1949

Source: The Undoing of Thought (1988), pp. 25-26.

Men, Age, Soul, Intelligence

“If I had thought thou couldst have died,
I might not weep for thee;
But I forgot, when by thy side,
That thou couldst mortal be.”

Charles Wolfe (1791–1823) Irish poet

To Mary.

“Yet there is no gainsaying but that it must have been somewhat sweeter in that dewy morning of creation, when it was young and fresh, when the feet of the tramping millions had not trodden its grass to dust, nor the din of the myriad cities chased the silence forever away. Life must have been noble and solemn to those free-footed, loose-robed fathers of the human race, walking hand in hand with God under the great sky. They lived in sunkissed tents amid the lowing herds. They took their simple wants from the loving hand of Nature. They toiled and talked and thought; and the great earth rolled around in stillness, not yet laden with trouble and wrong. Those days are past now. The quiet childhood of Humanity, spent in the far-off forest glades and by the murmuring rivers, is gone forever; and human life is deepening down to manhood amid tumult, doubt, and hope. Its age of restful peace is past. It has its work to finish and must hasten on. What that work may be—what this world's share is in the great design—we know not, though our unconscious hands are helping to accomplish it. Like the tiny coral insect working deep under the dark waters, we strive and struggle each for our own little ends, nor dream of the vast fabric we are building up for God.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love, Life, God, Age

“A massive turquoise glacier feeds into Magdalenefjord, with chunks of ice as big as buildings breaking off and landing in the water to float away as icebergs. As I swam past them, with my head in the water, I heard a tantalising sound: a snap-crackle-pop, just like Rice Krispies in milk. It was the sound of tiny air bubbles being released from the ice – air that had been trapped there as much as 3,000 years ago. To swim through this sound, I thought, is to swim in history.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

p 61, describing his swim in the Svalbard archipelago (2005)
21 Yaks And A Speedo (2013)

History, Water, Past

“I must tell you that I was always afraid of the fury with which I loved you. It overwhelmed me. I thought it beyond comprehension, therefore my silence.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Solipsist (1998)

Love, Silence

“We used to laugh a lot
But only because we thought
That everything good always would remain
Nothing's gonna change there's no need to complain.”

Jack Johnson (musician) (1975) American musician

Mudfootball.
Song lyrics, Brushfire Fairytales (2001)

Change

“As I climbed the steps that went alongside a sort of lumberyard, a man was coming down the steps toward me. He was short and rather old, and he had a slight limp. He took my hand, and at first I was really frightened, but I began to look at him. He said, "I thought you would come with me; don't you want to?" I said, with a kind of fear (was it good to say No to a poor person?): "No, Sir, but merry Christmas." He let go of my hand immediately; I thought he looked a little sad. I continued on my way, and throughout the days that followed I said to myself: "Perhaps I should have said Yes, but I really had to say No."”

Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967) Swiss doctor and mystic

Meeting Saint Ignatius, pp. 32-33
My Early Years (1968)

Sadness, Fear, Way, Christmas

“When I was about thirteen years old, and had succeeded in learning to read, every increase of knowledge, especially anything respecting the free states, was an additional weight to the almost intolerable burden of my thought, 'I am a slave for life'. To my bondage I could see no end. It was a terrible reality, and I shall never be able to tell how sadly that thought chafed my young spirit.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Source: 1880s, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881), pp. 102–103.

Life, Knowledge, Reality, Learning

“This pursuit of security in the past, this attempt to find a haven in a fixed dogma and an organizational hierarchy as substitutes for creative thought and praxis is bitter evidence of how little many revolutionaries are capable of 'revolutionizing themselves and things,' much less of revolutionizing society as a whole. The deep-rooted conservatism of the People's Labor Party 'revolutionaries' is almost painfully evident; the authoritarian leader and hierarchy replace the patriarch and the school bureaucracy; the discipline of the Movement replaces the discipline of bourgeois society; the authoritarian code of political obedience replaces the state; the credo of 'proletarian morality' replaces the mores of puritanism and the work ethic. The old substance of exploitative society reappears in new forms, draped in a red flag, decorated by portraits of Mao (or Castro or Che) and adorned with the little 'Red Book' and other sacred litanies.”

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher

"Listen, Marxist!" (May 1969); also available in Post Scarcity Anarchism (1971).
Listen, Marxist!

People, Books, School, Past

“My father was a really good craftsman – he was a silversmith – so I grew up understanding how things were made. That’s something that’s easy to take for granted, but everything that has been made has been thought about, designed, and I think that growing up with an appreciation of the nature of objects was hugely influential to me.”

Jonathan Ive (1967) English designer and VP of Design at Apple

Vogue: "Quiet By Design: Naomi Campbell Interviews Jony Ive" (2 April 2018)

Understanding, Nature, Thinking

“the phrases that I write on this paper are sensations, perceptions, images, etcetera, which flare up and die down here, in front of my eyes, the verbal residuum:
the only thing that remains of the felt, imagined, thought, perceived, and vanished realities, the only reality that these evaporated realities leave behind, a reality that, even though it is merely a combination of signs, is no less real than they are:
the signs are not presences but they configure another presence, the phrases fall into line one after the other on the page and as they advance they open up a path toward a temporarily final end,
the phrases configure a presence that disappears, they are the configuration of the abolition of presence,
yes, it is as though all these presences woven by the configurations of the signs were seeking its abolition in order that there might appear those inaccessible trees, immersed in themselves, not said, that are beyond the end of this phrase,
on the other side, there where eyes read what I am writing, and on reading it, dissipate it”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 9

Imagination, Reality, Tree, Appearance

“If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness amid the changing vicissitudes of life, and it guides their thoughts and motions by means of precepts which are backed by the whole force of its authority.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

A Philosophy of Life (Lecture 35) 1930s, "New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis" https://books.google.com/books/about/New_Introductory_Lectures_on_Psycho_anal.html?id=hIqaep1qKRYC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false (1933)

Life, Men, Happiness, Religion

“Now there was a young gentleman which had married a merchant's wife. And having a little wanton money, which him thought burned out the bottom of his purse, in the first year of his wedding took his wife with him and went over sea, for none other errand but to see Flanders and France and ride out one summer in those countries.”

Thomas More (1478–1535) English Renaissance humanist

Works (c. 1530)
Sometimes paraphrased "A little wanton money, which burned out the bottom of his purse."

Money, Wedding, Summer, Sea

“Laying here in the dark you're like an angel on my chest,
Just another tramp of hearts crying tears of faithlessness.
Remember all the movies, Terry, we'd go see?
Trying to learn how to walk like heroes we thought we had to be.
And after all this time to find we're just like all the rest,
Stranded in the park and forced to confess
To hiding on the backstreets, hiding on the backstreets.
We swore forever friends on the backstreets until the end,
Hiding on the backstreets, hiding on the backstreets.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Backstreets"
Song lyrics, Born to Run (1975)

Angels, Tear, Learning, Time

“Never say to yourself, "I am their Lord, their ruler and all in all over them and that I must be obeyed submissively and humbly" because such a thought will unbalance your mind, will make you vain and arrogant, will weaken your faith in religion and will make you seek support of any power other than that of Allah.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha, Letter 53: An order to Malik Al-Ashtar

Faith, Religion, Support

“I was very, very surprised. I never thought I would be that loved or respected.”

Brian Wilson (1942) American musician, singer, songwriter and record producer

CNN interview (2004)

Love

“One day, thought Stone, there will be a war and when you get to the front you will last five minutes before someone puts a bullet in your back.”

Christopher Wood (writer) (1935–2015) English writer

Wood, Christopher. "Terrible Hard", Says Alice. London: Constable. 1970. (chapter 1)

War

“The juniper-scented liquor had volatilized his thoughts; he should be thinking that madness caused this man to call himself a king, but was thinking rather that kingship had driven this man mad.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, City of Illusions (1967), Chapter 5

Thinking, Madness

“I woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of heavy explosion. It was deep at night. I do not remember what time it was. I just remember the sound was so heavy and so very shocking. Everything in my room was shaking -- my heart, my windows, my bed, everything. I looked out the windows and I saw a full half-circle of explosion. I thought it was just like the movies, but the movies had not conveyed them in the powerful image that I was seeing full of bright red and orange and gray, and a full circle of explosion. And I kept on staring at it until it disappeared. I went back to my bed, and I prayed, and I secretly thanked God that that missile did not land on my family's home, that it did not kill my family that night. Thirty years have passed, and I still feel guilty about that prayer, for the next day, I learned that that missile landed on my brother's friend's home and killed him and his father, but did not kill his mother or his sister. His mother showed up the next week at my brother's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son, for she had lost everything.”

Zainab Salbi (1969) Iraqi American author, women's rights activist

Speech at TEDGlobal 2010

God, Family, Feeling, Home

“As I understand it, your policemen are chosen by their height and weight; they must meet certain requirements as to heft—as thought the only crimes they had to cope with were riots and gang feuds. Bulk—the great American ideal, whether in art, architecture, table d‘hôte meals, or detectives. An entrancin‘ notion.”

S. S. Van Dine book The Benson Murder Case

Ch 25
The Benson Murder Case (1926)

Art, Understanding

“Animals who die for your dinner table die alone, in terror, in sadness and in pain. The killing is merciless and inhumane. … Animals suffer from pain and fear just as much as you do. Most spend their last hours locked in a truck, packed into a cage with hundreds of other terrified animals and then cruelly pushed into a blood soaked death chamber. Animals which are a year old are often far more rational – and capable of logical thought – than six-week-old babies. Pigs and sheep are far more intelligent than small children.”

Vernon Coleman (1946) British doctor

"Twenty One Reasons For Being A Vegetarian" (2007), in vernoncoleman.com http://www.vernoncoleman.com/twentyoner.htm.

Death, Pain, Children, Sadness

“We must resist wandering thoughts in prayer. Raising our hands reminds us that we need to raise up our minds to God, setting aside all irrelevant thoughts.”

John Calvin book Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book III Ch. 20 First Rule, para. 1 and 2.
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

God

“I have often wondered how different Zionism might have been if Herzl had not been a Viennese journalist but a shopkeeper in a Damascus bazaar. Would Zionism have realized that Palestine was a part of a big area inhabited by Arabs? Might some solution have been found at the very beginning to the problem of co-existence with the people who considered Palestine their own homeland? But these are, of course idle thoughts. Herzl could not have been anything but a European Jew, because his whole idea was a response to a specific challenge posed by European conditions.”

Uri Avnery (1923–2018) Israeli writer

Israel without Zionism (1971) – page 50

People, Idea, Problem, Parting

“Michelle was so mature beyond her years, so thoughtful and perceptive. She really prodded me about what the job would be like because she had lots of choices. I offered it to her on the spot, which was totally inappropriate because I should have talked to the mayor first. But I just knew she was really special.
Barack never grills. That's part of what is so effective about him: He puts you completely at ease, and the next thing you know he's asking more and more probing questions and gets you to open up and reflect a little bit. That night we talked about his childhood compared to my childhood and realized we both had rather…unusual childhoods.
Married in 1983, separated in 1987, and divorced in 1988. Enough said. He was a physician. He passed away. I want to say in about 1991.
We grew up together. We were friends since childhood. In a sense, he was the boy next door. I married without really appreciating how hard divorce would be.
I have to tell you: My daughter is in seventh heaven about me being in Vogue. Nothing else I have done has fazed her at all. But this! She's like, 'Oh, Mom. You don't understand. This is really big.'
I have never heard him yell, Ever. Not once in seventeen years. He's not a yeller.
Because my dad worked at the university, he could swing by and take Laura to school and pick her up from her first day of nursery school until the day she graduated from high school. They would often have breakfast and have these wonderful conversations.”

Valerie Jarrett (1956) Chicago lawyer, businesswoman, civic leader; senior advisor to U.S. Senator Barack Obama

September 2008 interview with Vogue https://web.archive.org/web/20080930190831/http://www.style.com/vogue/feature/2008_Oct_Valerie_Jarrett//

School, Boy, Moms, Understanding

“The death of Black Jade coincided with the wedding hour of Pao-yu and Precious Virtue. Shortly after Snow Duck was taken to the wedding chambers, Black Jade had regained consciousness. During this lucid moment, which was not unlike the afterglow of the setting sun, she took Purple Cuckoo's hand and said to her with an effort, "My hour is here. You have served me for many years, and I had hoped that we should be together the rest of our lives… but I am afraid…"
The effort exhausted her and she fell back, panting. She still held Purple Cuckoo's hand and continued after a while, "Mei-mei, I have only one wish. I have no attachment here. After my death, tell them to send my body back to the south––"
She stopped again, and her eyes closed slowly. Purple Cuckoo felt her mistress' hand tighten over hers. Knowing this was a sign of the approaching end, she sent for Li Huan, who had gone back to her own apartment for a brief rest. When the latter returned with Quest Spring, Black Jade's hands were already cold and her eyes dull. They suppressed their sobs and hastened to dress her. Suddenly Black Jade cried, "Pao-yu, Pao-yu, how––" Those were her last words.
Above their own lamentations, Li Huan, Purple Cuckoo, and Quest Spring thought they heard the soft notes of an ethereal music in the sky. They went out to see what it was, but all they could hear was the rustling of the wind through the bamboos and all they could see was the shadow of the moon creeping down the western wall.”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), p. 307

Death, Hope, Music, Spring

“And truly, I to hope that I have made this thing somewise clear unto you; for, indeed, it doth be something hard to set out; for every Age hath the subtleties peculiar to that Age; and these to be hard to the understanding of other Ages, but yet to seem plain and utter natural, even without thought, unto the Peoples of the Age.”

William Hope Hodgson book The Night Land

Source: The Night Land (1912), Chapter 13

People, Age, Hope, Understanding

“The origin of corruption in politics is surely in the thought that you are the bearer of ultimate virtue.”

B. W. Powe (1955) Canadian writer

A Prayer For Canada, p. 13
Towards a Canada of Light (2006)

“We hold that the greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong, that in the exercise thereof people have an inviolable right to express their unbridled thoughts on all topics and personalities, being liable only for the abuse of that right.”

William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) American newspaper publisher

Platform, Independent League; N.Y. Journal (February 1, 1924)your mom stinks

People, World, Exercises, Personality

“Much of the skill of the true mathematical physicist and of the mathematical astronomer consists in the power of adapting methods and results carried out on an exact mathematical basis to obtain approximations sufficient for the purposes of physical measurements. It might perhaps be thought that a scheme of Mathematics on a frankly approximative basis would be sufficient for all the practical purposes of application in Physics, Engineering Science, and Astronomy, and no doubt it would be possible to develop, to some extent at least, a species of Mathematics on these lines. Such a system would, however, involve an intolerable awkwardness and prolixity in the statements of results, especially in view of the fact that the degree of approximation necessary for various purposes is very different, and thus that unassigned grades of approximation would have to be provided for. Moreover, the mathematician working on these lines would be cut off from the chief sources of inspiration, the ideals of exactitude and logical rigour, as well as from one of his most indispensable guides to discovery, symmetry, and permanence of mathematical form. The history of the actual movements of mathematical thought through the centuries shows that these ideals are the very life-blood of the science, and warrants the conclusion that a constant striving toward their attainment is an absolutely essential condition of vigorous growth. These ideals have their roots in irresistible impulses and deep-seated needs of the human mind, manifested in its efforts to introduce intelligibility in certain great domains of the world of thought.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), pp. 285-286; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 229): Mathematics and Science.

Life, World, History, Intelligence

“I've been studying radical Islamic thought—specifically, the thinkers who have influenced contemporary radical Muslims. When you read their work, you find that there are no denunciations of modernity, no condemnations of science, no condemnations of freedom. In fact, their whole argument seems to be that the United States—through our support of secular dictators in the region—is denying Muslims freedom and control over their own destiny.”

Dinesh D'Souza (1961) Indian-American political commentator, filmmaker, author

Interview https://www.catholicity.com/commentary/saint-paul/00041.html for CatholiCity (31 January 2007).

Support, Study, Freedom, Science

“To state the obvious, I thought it was wrong at the time… those statements and comments did not comport with the facts on the ground. … But do I blame [the President] for that specific banner? I can't blame him for that.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

1 May 2008; Fox News http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/05/01/candidates-weigh-in-on-5th-anniversary-of-mission-accomplished-banner/ 2000s, 2008

Time

“But evil is wrought by want of thought,
As well as want of heart.”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

The Lady's Dream http://www.gerald-massey.org.uk/eop_hood_poetical_works_7.htm#246, st. 16 (1827). 1820s

Evil, Heart

“Thankfully, life is a university. Everything that you do or experience can teach you something, triggering inside you new thoughts, insights and realizations. You might be inclined to forget or ignore experiences that did not go well. Don’t. Learning from your mistakes and things that cause you pain is invaluable. The greatest lessons can come from the lowest moments in your life.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

Life, Pain, Learning, Universe

“I am beginning to feel that I am growing old; soon, I shall have to eat mush like children. I shall no longer be able to speak, which will be a rather great advantage for others and but a small inconvenience for myself. … The time in which I count in years is gone; that in which I count in days is here. … I had thought that the fibers of the heart would grow callous with age, it's not at all the case. I am not sure that my sensitivity hasn't increased; everything moves me, affects me. … To fade out between a man feeling your pulse and another bothering your head; not to know where one comes from, why one came, where one is going …”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

Letter to his sister Denise, as quoted in Diderot, Reason and Resonance (1982) by Élisabeth de Fontenay, pp. 270–271

Children, Age, Feeling, Time

“Whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition; whenever we start insisting too hard upon "operationalism" or symbolic logic or any other of these very essential systems of tramlines, we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science.”

Gregory Bateson book Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Gregory Bateson (1935) "Culture Contact and Schismogenesis" in: Man, Vol. 35 (Dec., 1935), pp. 178-183. Republished in: Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972, p. 75)

Way, Idea, Thinking, Science

“In all things there must be order, but it must of such a kind as is possible to observe … to see a man burnt for doing as he thought right, harms the people, for this is a matter of conscience.”

William the Silent (1533–1584) stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht, leader of the Dutch Revolt

William at a meeting about Philips actions (1566), as quoted in William the Silent, William of Nausau, Prince of Orange, 1533-1584 (1944), p. 78

People

“I am not a big fan of meaning. Logic is also another nebulous thought. I attempt to bring threads of subjects, however shaggy, to my work and inject little suggesters to the picture itself, and this often puts a smile on my face.”

Edward Ruscha (1937) American artist and photographer

Edward Ruscha in: " Me, you, us: Anthony d'Offay and others on ARTIST ROOMS http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/me-you-us," at tate.org.uk. 1 May 2009

Smile

“He Thought Positively till he became a euphemism for himself.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

Aphorism #98
Interglacial (2004)

“Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

essay, first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (November, 1945)
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

Life, Men, Dreams, Thinking

“You say I look goofy? OK, great. You say it's comedy? Great. Whatever anyone thought, I didn't care. Could be goony, could be sexy, could be stupid, could be cool. I didn't know, but as long as it was something, you know?”

Iggy Pop (1947) American rock singer-songwriter, musician, and actor

On his performances
Rolling Stone interview (2003)

Stupidity

“From the day the President announced my nomination as the Attorney General of the United States three months ago, I have thought often about how to best prepare to meet the awesome responsibilities of this office. Outside these walls, the cries of those powerless souls who are injured, disenfranchised or otherwise aggrieved may indeed be faint. But those same pleas for help echo powerfully within the Department of Justice. Every day, like a steady drumbeat we are asked to provide an answer to a problem, to secure a remedy, to be a champion — and every day this Department responds as it has done so time and time again throughout the history of our beloved America.”

Alberto Gonzales (1955) 80th United States Attorney General

Remarks at his installation as Attorney General http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/speeches/2005/02142005_aggonzales.htm (February 14, 2005).

Justice, Soul, History, Problem

“When I first came into the industry I thought, why do you need to know if I'm gay? Why do you need to have a definition of somebody before you find out who they are and what they are as a person and what they can do in the performance of their job? What they do in their bedroom or who they love does not define who they are as an individual or human being! Because we all love different people. There are so many young men and women in society at the moment who have that struggle. But not they are tormented inside; it is because of what they are hearing around them. And these people who claim to be Christians are telling these young men and women that they are wrong. That they are evil. That they should not love. That they were not made this way. How dare you make that judgement? It hurts me and it upsets me when I hear people who say they are Christians who aren't saying very nice things about other people”

John Barrowman (1967) Scottish-American actor, singer, dancer, musical theatre performer, writer and television personality

Fern Britton Meets John Barrowman BBC (2012)

Love, Women, Men, People

“[I]n the system of Copernicus there are found many and great inconveniences; for both the loading of the earth with triple motion is very incommodious, and the separation of the sun from the company of the planets, with which it has so many passions in common, is likewise a difficulty, and the introduction of so much immobility into nature, by representing the sun and stars as immovable, especially being of all bodies the highest and most radiant, and making the moon revolve about the earth in an epicycle, and some other assumptions of his, are the speculations of one who cares not what fictions he introduces into nature, provided his calculations answer. But if it be granted that the earth moves, it would seem more natural to suppose that there is no system at all, but scattered globes… than to constitute a system of which the sun is the centre. And this the consent of ages and of antiquity has rather embraced and approved. For the opinion concerning the motion of the earth is not new, but revived from the ancients… whereas the opinion that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable is altogether new… and was first introduced by Copernicus. …But if the earth moves, the stars may either be stationary, as Copernicus thought or, as it is far more probable, and has been suggested by Gilbert, they may revolve each round its own centre in its own place, without any motion of its centre, as the earth itself does… But either way, there is no reason why there should not be stars above stars til they go beyond our sight.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Descriptio Globi Intellectualis (1653, written ca. 1612) Ch. 6, as quoted in "Description of the Intellectual Globe," The Works of Francis Bacon (1889) pp. 517-518, https://books.google.com/books?id=lsILAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA517 Vol. 4, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, Douglas Denon Heath.

Age, World, Way, Star

“I would have to look, try to find a bridge that would make plausible what I knew but could scarcely prove. The standards of science are austere, unforgiving—and who would have it differently? I would have to hedge, to take one step back for each two forward, to compare and suggest and contrast, always sticking close to the data. And despite what I thought I knew now, the data would have to lead, they would have to show the way.”

Gregory Benford (1941) Science fiction author and astrophysicist

Exposures, p. 244
In Alien Flesh (1986)

Way, Science

“After death the sensation is either pleasant or there is none at all. But this should be thought on from our youth up, so that we may be indifferent to death, and without this thought no one can be in a tranquil state of mind. For it is certain that we must die, and, for aught we know, this very day. Therefore, since death threatens every hour, how can he who fears it have any steadfastness of soul?”
Post mortem quidem sensus aut optandus aut nullus est. Sed hoc meditatum ab adulescentia debet esse mortem ut neglegamus, sine qua meditatione tranquillo animo esse nemo potest. Moriendum enim certe est, et incertum an hoc ipso die. Mortem igitur omnibus horis impendentem timens qui poterit animo consistere?

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

section 74 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.01.0039%3Asection%3D74 Cato Maior de Senectute – On Old Age (44 BC)

Death, Youth, Fear, Soul

“A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.”

Beverly Sills (1929–2007) opera soprano

Lionel Trilling, in his introducton to Beyond Culture (1976) by Edward T. Hall
Misattributed

Art, Sense

“Dicko: You looked beautiful and I enjoyed that. I didn’t think that you over thought that at all.”

Hayley Jensen (1983) Australian singer

Australian Idol, Final Performances, Final 4

Beauty, Thinking

“I even thought her heart taught me something, in spite of its inexperience, or perhaps precisely because of it, for in matters of love one unlearns with practice, and the novice is the learned one.”

Machado de Assis (1839–1908) Brazilian writer

Creio até que o coração dela ensinou-me alguma coisa, embora noviço, ou por isso mesmo. Nesta matéria desaprende-se com o uso e o ignorante é que é douto.
"Primas de Sapucaia!" (1883), first collected in Histórias sem data (1884); Jack Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu (trans.) The Devil's Church, and Other Stories (London: Grafton, 1987) p. 19.

Love, Learning, Heart

“To hold vivisection to be never justified is a hard belief. But so is its opposite. I believe it is never justified because I can see nothing (except our being able to get away with it) which lets us pick on animals that would not equally let us pick on idiot humans (who would be more useful) or, for the matter of that, on a few humans of any sort whom we might sacrifice for the good of the many. If we do permit vivisection, here if anywhere we are under the most stringent minimum obligations. The very least we must make sure of is that no experiment is ever duplicated, or careless, or done for mere teaching's sake or as a substitute for thinking. Knowing how often, in every other sphere, pseudo-work proliferates in order to fill time and jobs, and how often activity substitutes for thought, and then reading the official statistics about vivisection, do you truly believe we do make sure?”

Brigid Brophy (1929–1995) novelist, essayist

Source: The Rights of Animals (1965), pp. 19-20

Thinking, Time, Reading, Animals