Quotes about transition

A collection of quotes on the topic of transit, transition, time, timing.

Quotes about transition

“The past year and a half has been really transitional for me, just personally, as well as transitioning into becoming a woman.”

Selena Gomez (1992) American singer and actress

Past, Personality

“The kabalists say that a man is not dead when his body is entombed. Death is never sudden; for, according to Hermes, nothing goes in nature by violent transitions. Everything is gradual, and as it required a long and gradual development to produce the living human being, so time is required to completely withdraw vitality from the carcass. "Death can no more be an absolute end, than birth a real beginning. Birth proves the preexistence of the being, as death proves immortality," says the same French kabalist”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Eliphas Levi
Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter XIII

Death, Birth, Nature, Time

“Capitalism in its imperialist stage arrives at the threshold of the most complete socialization of production. In spite of themselves the capitalists are dragged, as it were, into the new social order, which marks the transition from complete free competition to complete socialization. Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The framework of formally recognized free competition remains, but the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter One
Source: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Full Text of 1916 Edition

Time

“The day of resurrection is determined in this manner. The first Sunday after the full moon in Aries is celebrated as Easter. Aries begins on the 21st day of March and ends approximately on the 19th day of April. The sun’s entry into Aries marks the beginning of Spring The moon in its monthly transit around the earth will form sometime between March 21st and April 25th an opposition to the sun, which opposition is called a full moon, The first Sunday after this phenomenon of the heavens occurs Is celebrated as Easter; the Friday preceding this day is observed as Good Friday. This movable date should tell the observant one to look for some interpretation other than the one commonly accepted. These days do not mark the anniversaries of the death and resurrection of an individual who lived on earth.”

Neville Goddard (1905–1972) American author and lecturer

Source: Your Faith is Your Fortune

Death, Spring, Sun

“This book raises issues that might not be apparent from the table of contents.
It sketches some of the difficulties faced by our civilization — a civilization which might be perhaps described as aiming at humanness and reasonableness, at equality and freedom; a civilization which is still in its infancy, as it were, and which continues to grow in spite of the fact that it has been so often betrayed by so many of the intellectual leaders of mankind. It attempts to show that this civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tribal or "enclosed society," with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man. It attempts to show that the shock of this transition is one of the factors that have made possible the rise of those reactionary movements which have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilization and to return to tribalism.”

Karl Popper book The Open Society and Its Enemies

Introduction; part of this has sometimes been paraphrased : Our civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tribal or 'closed society', with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man.
The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)

Books, Birth, Freedom

“The view of science is that all processes ultimately run down, but entropy is maximized only in some far, far away future. The idea of entropy makes an assumption that the laws of the space-time continuum are infinitely and linearly extendable into the future. In the spiral time scheme of the timewave this assumption is not made. Rather, final time means passing out of one set of laws that are conditioning existence and into another radically different set of laws. The universe is seen as a series of compartmentalized eras or epochs whose laws are quite different from one another, with transitions from one epoch to another occurring with unexpected suddenness.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

True Hallucinations http://www.matrixmasters.com/takecharge/consciousness/mckenna2.html (1993)

Law, Idea, Universe, Science

“The environment around us is constantly changing, including innovations, friends, employment and moving to a different location; those who accept and excel at adaptation have smoother transitions, while others struggle.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

2016

Change

“The transition of the subject-object relation to that of the I-Thou implies a passage of consciousness to a new sphere of existence, viz, the interval, betweenness or Zwichen; and this is a passage from thought to Umfassung.”

Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) French philosopher

The Levinas reader by Levinas, Emmanuel p. 73

Relation ships

“At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Books, World

“The significant relationships of early adulthood are thus construed as the means to an end of individual achievement, and these "transitional figures" must be cast off or reconstructed following the realization of success. If in the process, however, they become, like Dido, an impediment to the fulfillment of the Dream, then the relationship must be renounced, "to allow the developmental process" to continue. This process is defined by Levinson explicitly as one of individuation: "throughout the life cycle, but especially in the key transition periods… the developmental process of individuation is going on." The process refers "to the changes in a person's relationships to himself and to the external world," the relationships that constitute his "Life Structure" (p. 195).

If in the course of "Becoming One's Own Man," this structure is discovered to be flawed and threatens the great expectations of the Dream, then in order to avert "serious Failure or Decline," the man must "break out" to salvage his Dream. This act of breaking out is consummated by a "marker event" of separation, such as "leaving his wife, quitting his job, or moving to another region" (p. 206). Thus the road to mid-life salvation runs through either achievement or separation.”

Carol Gilligan (1936) American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist

Source: In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development

Life, World, Dreams, Failure

“I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Death

“The proletarian state must effect the transition to collective farming with extreme caution and only very gradually, by the force of example, without any coercion of the middle peasant.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 31, pp. 152–64.
Collected Works

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Eight (12 August 1904)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Life, Fate, Sadness, Way

“And as I said last night, my number one priority in the coming two months is to try to facilitate a transition that ensures our president-elect is successful.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, Presidential transition of Donald Trump (November 2016)

Success, Night

“It seems to me that this last piece, The Poet Speaks, which is the title Schumann gave to this immortal work, should be a transition into a kind of intimate reverie. It is not just about making a beautiful sound and expressive phrasing. You also need to create a sense of dreaming. The truth is, you need to dream this piece, rather than play it.
Will you allow me to take your place? These two phrases are not connected. They are two different elements… of the same musical state. Here, like a question… And here again, another, tenderly asking the way. And from this moment, you should convey the music not just through the notes but through some kind of inspiration drawn from its immortal spirit. Now the sonorities should fade away…grow fainter and dimmer…and you are left simply in the presence of a reminiscent dream.”

Alfred Cortot (1877–1962) Franco-Swiss pianist and conductor

Alfred Cortot: Master Class on Schumann Kinderszenen (1953) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNUNNNNj_Qw

Truth, Beauty, Dreams, Music

“And in the meantime, Michelle has had a chance to greet the incoming First Lady. And we had an excellent conversation with her as well. And we want to make sure that they feel welcome as they prepare to make this transition.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, Presidential transition of Donald Trump (November 2016)

Feeling, Chance

“Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognise them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale which cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Letter to his wife, reprinted in Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne (1952, trans. 1985). (October 21, 1907)
Rilke's Letters

Beauty, Waiting

“For reasons mentioned at the beginning of this section, we cannot offer here a precise structural definition of semantical category and will content ourselves with the following approximate formulation: two expressions belong to the same semantical category if (I) there is a sentential function which contains one of these expressions, and if (2) no sentential function which contains one of these expressions ceases to be a sentential function if this expression is replaced in it by the other. It follows from this that the relation of belonging to the same category is reflective, symmetrical and transitive. By applying the principle of abstraction, all the expressions of the language which are parts of sentential functions can be divided into mutually exclusive classes, for two expressions are put into one and the same class if and only if they belong to the same semantical category, and each of these classes is called a semantical category. Among the simplest examples of semantical categories it suffices to mention the category of the sentential functions, together with the categories which include respectively the names of individuals, of classes of individuals, of two-termed relations between individuals, and so on. Variables (or expressions with variables) which represent names of the given categories likewise belong to the same category.”

Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) Polish-American logician

Source: The Semantic Conception of Truth (1952), p. 45; as cited in: Schaff (1962) pp. 36-37.

Parting

“The concept-systems of antithesis are concepts that are indeed thoroughly determined by negative predicates but are not positively representable.
Just because a precise and complete representation of these concept-systems is impossible, they are inaccessible to direct investigation and elaboration by our reflection. They may, however, be regarded as lying at the limit of the representable, i. e., we can form a concept-system lying within the representable, which passes over into the given system by simple change of magnitude ratio. By abstracting from the ratios of the quantities, the concept-system remains unchanged in case of transition to the limit. At the limit itself, however, some of the correlative concepts of the system lose their susceptibility of being represented, and those, indeed, that mediate the relation between other concepts.”

Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) German mathematician

General Relation of the Concept System of Thesis and Antithesis
Gesammelte Mathematische Werke (1876)

Lying, Change

“The first economic revolution was not a revolution because it shifted man's major economic activity from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture. It was a revolution because the transition created an incentive change for mankind of fundamental proportions. The incentive change stems from the different property rights under the two systems. When common property rights over resources exist, there is little incentive for the acquisition of superior technology and learning. In contrast, exclusive property rights which reward the owners provide a direct incentive to improve efficiency and productivity, or, in more fundamental terms, to acquire more knowledge and new techniques. It is this change in incentive that explains the rapid progress made by mankind in the last 10,000 years in contrast to his slow development during the long era as a primitive hunter/gatherer.”

Douglass C. North (1920–2015) American Economist

Source: The rise of the western world, 1973, p. 240-1, as cited in: Thrainn Eggertsson (1990), Economic behavior and institutions. p. 255-6

Knowledge, Learning, Change

“And we did so based on the belief that while these transitions will be hard and take time, societies based upon democracy and openness and the dignity of the individual will ultimately be more stable, more prosperous, and more peaceful.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks by President Obama in Address to the United Nations General Assembly (24 September 2013) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/09/24/remarks-president-obama-address-united-nations-general-assembly 2013

Peace, Democracy, Time

“In order to bring about the transition from the condition of the present to another newly resolved on, every reform should be allowed to proceed as much as possible from men’s minds and thoughts.”

Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767–1835) German (Prussian) philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the University of Berlin

Source: The Limits of State Action (1792), Ch. 16

Men

“Many think that Cubism is an art of transition, an experiment which is to bring ulterior results. Those who think that way have not understood it. Cubism is not either a seed or a foetus, but an art dealing primarily with forms, and when a form is realized it is there to live its own life. A mineral substance, having geometric formation, is not made so for transitory purposes, it is to remain what it is and will always have its own form.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Source: 1920s, "Picasso Speaks" (1923), p. 323.

Life, Art, Way, Thinking

“The institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life.”

Thorstein Veblen book The Theory of the Leisure Class

Source: The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), p. 5

Life

“The idea of a God was not a lie but a device of the unconscious which needed to be decoded by psychology. A personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever. God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshiped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind.”

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

Summary of Freud's view found in Karen Armstrong's 'A History of God' (1993), p. 409
Misattributed

Life, God, Lie, Age

“I believe that we have to strive for a transition to a socialist society … all the way to communism. I mean I think we should, uh, I think we should all study what the word means and I believe that if everyone knew what the word meant we would all be on our knees praying that we would, as soon as possible, be able to live under, uh, within a communist structure.”

Jane Fonda (1937) American actress and activist

Reported by Jesse Helms on WRAL-TV as remarks made at Duke University, quoted in The News and Courier (29 December 1970) "Freedom Hoax" http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=RchJAAAAIBAJ&sjid=vgwNAAAAIBAJ&pg=4424,7008512 Disputed

Way, Communication, Thinking, Study

“At the core, eating other creatures doesn't appeal to me. … Finally after seeing Forks Over Knives, I decided it was time to cut out all dairy and eggs as well. Being a decade long vegetarian at the time, the transition was much easier. … I also hope to use my platform to educate and transform people's perceptions on plant based diets, what plant based athletes look like, and can achieve, and to just encourage everyone, no matter what your lifestyle is, to be more mindful of the choices we have when it comes to diet and the impact those choices have on ourselves, our culture, and the environment. … I just encourage everyone, especially parents and kids, to really get educated on the corporate food system currently in place. It's causing an epidemic of sick people. Take the power back, and put the nourishment of your body, mind, and soul back into your own hands. Every little step you make to eliminate animal products in your meals is a one step closer to the big leap we all could benefit from taking.”

Austin Aries (1978) professional wrestler

" Austin Aries, vegan wrestler http://www.greatveganathletes.com/austin-aries-vegan-wrestler" by Cris Iles-Wright. Interview for greatveganathletes.com, 2014.

People, Education, Food, Hope

“On this seat — where she came to me for the first time, which was once so important to us that it seemed as if the background of things all about us had been created by us — we sit down to-day, after we have vainly sought in nature the traces of our transit.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XIX - Ghosts
Context: On this seat — where she came to me for the first time, which was once so important to us that it seemed as if the background of things all about us had been created by us — we sit down to-day, after we have vainly sought in nature the traces of our transit.
The landscape is peaceful, simple, empty; it fills us with a great quivering. Marie is so sad and so simple that you can see her thought.
I have leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. I have contemplated the gravel at my feet; and suddenly I start, for I understand that my eyes were looking for the marks of our footsteps, in spite of the stone, in spite of the sand.
After the solemnity of a long silence, Marie's face takes on a look of defeat, and suddenly she begins to cry. The tears which fill her — for one always weeps in full, drop on to her knees. And through her sobs there fall from her wet lips words almost shapeless, but desperate and fierce, as a burst of forced laughter.
"It's all over!" she cries.

Nature, Time

“Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life.”

Salvador Allende (1908–1973) Chilean physician and politician

Final address (1973)
Context: Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seeds which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever. They have force and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.

Life, People, Loyalty

“Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.”

Alan Kay (1940) computer scientist

ACM Queue A Conversation with Alan Kay Vol. 2, No. 9 - Dec/Jan 2004-2005 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523 2000s, A Conversation with Alan Kay, 2004–05 Context: Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.” Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in — the one that we think is reality.

“The reason passes, like the heart, through certain epochs and transitions, but its development is not so often portrayed.”

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright

Prefatory Remarks
The Philosophical Letters
Context: The reason passes, like the heart, through certain epochs and transitions, but its development is not so often portrayed. Men seem to have been satisfied with unfolding the passions in their extremes, their aberration, and their results, without considering how closely they are bound up with the intellectual constitution of the individual.

Heart

“I am an optimist and I believe that together we shall be able now to make the right historical choice so as not to miss the great chance at the turn of centuries and millenia and make the current extremely difficult transition to a peaceful world order.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Nobel Address (1991)
Context: I am an optimist and I believe that together we shall be able now to make the right historical choice so as not to miss the great chance at the turn of centuries and millenia and make the current extremely difficult transition to a peaceful world order. A balance of interests rather than a balance of power, a search for compromise and concord rather than a search for advantages at other people's expense, and respect for equality rather than claims to leadership — such are the elements which can provide the groundwork for world progress and which should be readily acceptable for reasonable people informed by the experience of the twentieth century.
The future prospect of truly peaceful global politics lies in the creation through joint efforts of a single international democratic space in which States shall be guided by the priority of human rights and welfare for their own citizens and the promotion of the same rights and similar welfare elsewhere. This is an imperative of the growing integrity of the modern world and of the interdependence of its components.

World, Peace, Chance

“I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world.”

Ronald David Laing book The Divided Self

Source: The Divided Self (1960), Ch. 1 : The existential-phenomenological foundations for a science of persons
Context: Existential phenomenology attempts to characterize the nature of a person's experience of his world and himself. It is not so much an attempt to describe particular objects of his experience as to set all particular experiences within the context of his whole being-in-his-world. The mad things said and done by the schizophrenic will remain essentially a closed book if one does not understand their existential context. In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world. Although retaining the terms schizoid and schizophrenic for the sane and psychotic positions respectively, I shall not, of course, be using these terms in their usual clinical psychiatric frame of reference, but phenomenologically and existentially.

World, Way

“The only hope for developing a new civilization is to accept responsibility for improving our lives through knowledge, understanding, and a deeper comprehension of humanity’s relationship to natural processes of evolution. Our future is determined by effort we put forth to achieve this transition.”

Jacque Fresco (1916–2017) American futurist and self-described social engineer

Understanding, Future, Hope, Nature

“In this derivation Bohr had relied on the old idea of classical radiation theory, that the frequencies of spectral lines should agree with the frequency of the electron’s orbital motion, but he had assumed this only for the largest orbits, with large n. The light frequencies he calculated for transitions between lower states, such as n=2 → n=1, did not at all agree with the orbital frequency of the initial or final state. So Bohr’s work represented another large step away from classical physics.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

Source: Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012, 2nd ed. 2015), Ch. 1: Historical Introduction

Light, Idea

“Quality leadership always contains a vision for the organization that displays the transition from the present into the future. The transition shall include plans of action and goals to reach the vision.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1984

Future

“Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Dreams, Loss, Birth

“How would you describe your transition from teenager to adult? The truth is that I barely notice it, I spend all my time between studies and filming, I live between Madrid and Barcelona, I barely have time to think about it, I think I lived more as an adult than as a teenager, but very happy.”

Berta Castañé (2002) Spanish actress and model

¿Cómo describirías tu paso de adolescente a adulta? La verdad es que apenas me estoy dando cuenta, paso todo el tiempo entre los estudios y los rodajes, viviendo entre Madrid y Barcelona, casi no tengo tiempo de pensar en ello, creo que llevo más vida de adulta que de adolescente, pero muy feliz. From the interview Hablamos con Berta Castañé, la estrella en ascenso de la pequeña pantalla https://www.marie-claire.es/moda/modelos/fotos/entrevista-a-berta-castane-241588061091, marie-claire.es, 28 July 2020.

Study, Time, Happiness, Truth

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Life, Death, Peace

“Hodie mihi cras tibi, said the inscription. Sic transit gloria mundi. My turn today, yours tomorrow. And thus passes away the glory of the world.”

Diana Gabaldon book Dragonfly in Amber

Source: Dragonfly in Amber

World

“For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Nostalgia

“Listen, every object's in flux. The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith, justice, evil-they're all fluid and in transition. They don't stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 30, Colonel Sanders

Love, Life, Faith, Justice

“Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.”

David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) American painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and AIDS activist

Source: Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

Death, Way, Freedom

“It seems that the rebels found the chaos of transition more difficult to accept than the tyranny they had known before. They joyfully welcomed back authority-even oppressive authority-for it was less painful for them than uncertainty.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Well of Ascension

Pain

“Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality. That is what we both certainly are.”

Osamu Dazai book The Setting Sun

Source: The Setting Sun

“It was a time of transition, which few recognized, and glutting national satisfaction. Students and scholars were silent.”

Roger Kahn (1927–2020) American baseball writer

Source: The Boys Of Summer, Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 6

Time

“The transition to a GUI, and eventually to one close to a Macintosh, was a far greater step than refinements since. Some of these are just simple alternatives, which can't be over-valued due to increasing the complexity of having less consistency in how things are done. Others of these are more akin to rearranging the furniture. The great change was in becoming a modern GUI machine. In that sense, virtually every machine is a 'Macintosh' now.”

Steve Wozniak (1950) American inventor, computer engineer and programmer

Explaining his comment that now "Every PC is a Macintosh", "Letters-General Questions Answered" p. 105 http://www.woz.org/letters/general/105.html Woz.org files

Guy, Sense, Change

“Australia's place on new trade routes was decisive in its early history. It aided the convict settlement. It prompted the rise of a new free group of Australian traders who did not depend heavily on the favours of governors, who were alert for new ways of making money, and who were eventually to hasten Australia's transition from a gaol to a series of free colonies.”

Geoffrey Blainey book The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History

The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History (1966)

Money, Way, History, Decision

“There was no last animal I treated. When young farm lads started to help me over the gate into a field or a pigpen, to make sure the old fellow wouldn't fall, I started to consider retiring. The great moment was one day when I was stitching up a cow's teats--they often get cut, you know--and my glasses were sliding down my nose. Suddenly I thought, Wight, you're too old for this. But it was a gradual transition. I just did less and less. It must be terrible to have a job you very much love chopped off.”

James Herriot (1916–1995) veterinary surgeon and writer

Love, Help, Animals

“Without getting complicated let me recapitulate my art training in the following way: the Academy first, the break with the Academy when I hit the Hofmann School which is Cubist. The next real break follows when I see Pollock’s work [1940-41] and once more another transition occurs... It was a force [Pollock’s work], a living force, the same sort of thing I responded to in Matisse, in Picasso, in Mondrian. Once more, I was hit that hard with what I saw… I began feeling the need to break with what I was doing and to approach something else.”

Lee Krasner (1908–1984) American artist

Source: Art Talk, Conversations with 15 woman artists 1975, p. 74.

School, Art, Way, Feeling

“Conflicting intellectual positions may actually come to supplement one another.
It is imperative in the present transitional period to make use of the intellectual twilight which dominates our epoch and in which all values and points of view appear in their genuine relativity. We must realize once and for all that the meanings which make up our world are simply an historically determined and continuously developing structure in which man develops, and are in no sense absolute.”

Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) Hungarian sociologist

Ideology and Utopia (1929)

World, Sense, Appearance

“There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents, each link of which hangs upon the former. The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace. Evil may at some future period bring forth good; and good may bring forth evil, both equally unexpected.”

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

Very often attributed to Addison, this is in fact by Hugh Blair, published in Blair's Sermons (1815), Vol. 1, pp. 196-197.
Misattributed

Life, Secret, Evil, Future

“Shall we go, you and I, while we can? Through… the transitive nightfall of diamonds”

Robert Hunter (1941–2019) American musician

"Dark Star"
Song lyrics, (1969)

“Since we cannot completely eliminate existential risk — at any moment, we might be tossed into the dustbin of cosmic history by the advancing front of a vacuum phase transition triggered in some remote galaxy a billion years ago — the use of maximin in the present context would entail choosing the action that has the greatest benefit under the assumption of impending extinction. Maximin thus implies that we ought all to start partying as if there were no tomorrow. That implication, while perhaps tempting, is implausible.”

Nick Bostrom (1973) Swedish philosopher

Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority http://www.existential-risk.org/concept.html (2012)

History

“I wasn't very happy with the way the music for Battra turned out. It was hard to tell whether it was a motif or just transitional material. So, I tried to avoid having that happen again.”

Akira Ifukube (1914–2006) Japanese composer

As quoted by David Milner, "Akira Ifukube Interview III" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/ifukub3.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1995)

Music, Way, Happiness

“The tendency was to sell families as units, if for no other reason [than] to keep the slaves contented. The gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains. At the other extreme, when the Central of Georgia railroad company in 1858 equipped a Negro sleeping car to assist in the slave trade it set a standard not always maintained in a later generation. When on the block, the slave was as likely to hinder as to help in his sale. Some, out of a vain conceit in bringing a high price, would boast of their physical prowess, in which case an unwary purchaser would likely be cheated. Others would malinger, because of a grudge against owners or traders or in order to bring a low price and be put at less tiring labor. Dealers, also, adopted the tricks of horse traders to make their merchants more attractive -- the greasiest Negro was generally considered the healthiest.”

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

The Making of America (1986)

Family, Cars, Sleep, Help

“Fine colour implies a unified relationship, in which each part is subordinate to the whole, and the transitions between them are felt to be as precious and beautiful as the colours themselves. In fact, the colours themselves must be continuously modified and broken as part of the transition. Ruskin said in his Elements of Drawing, "Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel-pit, a little whitening, and some coal dust, and I will paint you a luminous picture, if you give me time to gradate my mud, and subdue my dust."”

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

In many works by the greatest colourists — Rembrandt and Watteau are examples — there are very few identifiable colours.
Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 10: Turner II: The Liberation of Colour

Beauty, Time, Parting, Drawing

“Creating a modeling language that is also an executable language has long been a goal of the software community. Many years ago, in 1968 to be exact, while working with software components to successfully develop a telecommunications system, we created a modeling language that was the forerunner to UML. To model components we used sequence diagrams, collaboration diagrams, and state transition diagrams (a combination of state charts and activity diagrams). Our modeling language then seamlessly translated the component models into code. Each code component was in its turn compiled into an executable component that was deployed in our computer system. The computer system was a component management system—thus we had "components all the way down."”

Stephen J. Mellor (1952) British computer scientist

Source: Executable Uml: A Foundation for Model-Driven Architecture, 2002, p. xxiii: Foreword.

Way, Communication

“Syria has allowed its soil to be transited by foreign fighters who have come from a variety of source countries in the Gulf area and in the — in North African countries.
There are some signs that that may have been reduced somewhat in the last couple of months. We need to watch that a bit and see if that is the case.”

David Petraeus (1952) retired American military officer and public official

As quoted in "Ranking House Committee Members Grill Crocker and Petraeus on U.S. Progress in Iraq" in The Washington Post (10 September 2007) http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/ranking_committee_members_grill_petraeus_crocker_10.html

Country

“Ideally there should not be a men’s movement but a gender transition movement; only the power of the women’s movement necessitates the temporary corrective of a men’s movement. And this creates a special challenge for men: There are few political movements filled with healthy people, yet few healthy changes have occurred without political movements.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part IV: Where do we go from here, p. 356.

Women, Men, People, Change

“The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

“What Pragmatism Means,” Pragmatism, pp. 60–61 (1931); lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute, Boston, Massachusetts (December 1906) and at Columbia University, New York City, (January 1907)
1900s

Truth, History, Nature, Time

“A “shared choice” movement sees the fetus as the genes of a woman and the genes of a man; the flesh of the woman, the flesh of the man; the bone of a woman, the bone of a man; the responsibility of a woman, the responsibility of a man; the rights of a woman, the rights of a man. It desires a transition to equality.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 158.

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

Footnote - The very remarkable speeches of Mr. Garfield, afterward President of the United States, which had so great an influence on the settlement of the inflation question throughout the Union, were on the main lines laid down in Turgot's letter
Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 171

Fear, Time, Country

“Americans are everywhere very decent, magnificent and ignorant. They are generous and lovable; they hog the earth and blight the land. In every hill and holler, highland, forest, meadow and plain they will continue to mingle and to learn, by intelligent transition or headlong catastrophe, to bind their lives to the resources of the land.”

Paul Glover (1947) Community organizer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; American politician

http://www.paulglover.org/7812.html (“America the Hard Way”), The Grapevine, cover story, Walk Across the USA), 1979-01-10

Intelligence, Learning

“I think acting is something that I want to make sure that, if I do make that transition, I want to make sure that it's really dramatic, and put my energy into acting, you know, fully instead of trying to balance a whole lot of things at once, 'cause I really don't want to become one of those singer-trying-to-be-actor-but-didn't-really-work kind of thing.”

Skye Sweetnam (1988) Canadian singer-songwriter

On becoming a full-time actress

Thinking

“Before passing on, I will merely add this, that in some ways the evils attendant on slaughtering grow worse, and not better, as civilisation advances, because of the more complex conditions of town life, and the increasingly long journeys to which animals are subjected in their transit from the grazier to the slaughterman.”

Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939) British activist

The Humanities of Diet

Life, Way, Evil, Animals

“It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that revolution is in vain unless inspired by its ultimate ideal. Revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims. The means used to further the revolution must harmonize with its purposes. In short, the ethical values which the revolution is to establish in the new society must be initiated with the revolutionary activities of the so-called transitional period. The latter can serve as a real and dependable bridge to the better life only if built of the same material as the life to be achieved.”

Emma Goldman book My Disillusionment in Russia

My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

Life, Dependency

“In one ear and out the other: this would still make the head a transit station. What I hear has to go out the same ear.”

Karl Kraus (1874–1936) Czech playwright and publicist

Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

“In many of the cases of conceptual innovation, … creating the conceptual tools is a precondition to coming to a clear understanding of what the problem was in the first place. It is very difficult to describe the transition after it has taken place because it is difficult for us to put ourselves back into the situation of confusion, indeterminacy, and perplexity that existed before the new “tool” brought clarity and this means it is difficult for us to retain a vivid sense of what a difference having the concept made. We can just barely imagine ourselves in a world in which there are no states, as opposed to local barons, warlords, clans, primitive communal forms of village organisation, etc.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), p. 48.

World, Imagination, Communication, Understanding

“Barack and Michelle Obama arrived on the North Portico just before 10:00 a. m. Laura and I had invited them for a cup of coffee in the Blue Room, just as Bill and Hillary Clinton had done for us eight years earlier. The Obamas were in good spirits and excited about the journey ahead. Meanwhile, in the Situation Room, homeland security aides from both our teams monitored intelligence on a terrorist threat to Washington. It was a stark reminder that evil men still want to harm our country, no matter who is serving as president. After our visit, we climbed into the motorcade for the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue. I thought back to the drive I'd made with Bill Clinton eight years earlier. That day in January 2001, I could never have imagined what would unfold over my time in office. I knew some of the decisions I had made were not popular with many of my fellow citizens. But I felt satisfied that I had been willing to make the hard decisions, and I had always done what I believed was right. At the Capitol, Laura and I took our seats for the Inauguration. I marveled at the peaceful transition of power, one of the defining features of our democracy. The audience was riveted with anticipation for he swearing-in. Barack Obama had campaigned on hope, and that was what he had given many Americans. For our new president, the Inauguration was a thrilling beginning. For Laura and me, it was an end. It was another president's turn, and I was ready to go home.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

Source: 2010s, 2010, Decision Points (November 2010), p. 474

Men, Peace, Hope, Democracy

“In the mean time, synthetic organic methodology has experienced an explosive expansion, which is due to two fundamentally different types of developments: (i) theclassical reactionshave been modified to become regio-, diastereo-, and enantioselective, and to become catalytic (cf. organocatalysis). (ii) The—mostly catalytic—use of transition-metal derivatives has enriched organic synthesis withnew types of reactions(cf. metathesis), which can almost all be rendered enantioselective by employing chiral ligands on the metal centers. Many of the resulting procedures for carrying out certain transformations have turned out to be of broad scope and to be generally reliable, so that—for brevity—they were named after their inventor(s) in synthetic discussions, and that’s all about Name Reactions. It is, therefore, not surprising that several monographs on this subject have appeared and that new editions of books on Name Reactions are essential. (…)
Name Reactions are at the core of the art of organic synthesis!”

Dieter Seebach (1937) German chemist

Foreword to A. Hassner and I. Namboothiri, Organic Syntheses Based on Name Reactions: A practical guide to 750 transformations Third Edition (2012)

Books, Art, Appearance, Time

“In brief, part of the need for funding comes from the need to create balance to a third of a century of funding an “attitude” toward men. And part comes from the need to study how both sexes can make a transition from those rigid roles to more flexible roads with a clear enough road map to not go over too many cliffs along the way…”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 241.

Men, Sex, Way, Study

“This new-democratic republic will be different from the old European-American form of capitalist republic under bourgeois dictatorship, which is the old democratic form and already out of date. On the other hand, it will also be different from the socialist republic of the Soviet type under the dictatorship of the proletariat which is already flourishing in the U. S. S. R., and which, moreover, will be established in all the capitalist countries and will undoubtedly become the dominant form of state and governmental structure in all the industrially advanced countries. However, for a certain historical period, this form is not suitable for the revolutions in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. During this period, therefore, a third form of state must be adopted in the revolutions of all colonial and semi-colonial countries, namely, the new-democratic republic. This form suits a certain historical period and is therefore transitional; nevertheless, it is a form which is necessary and cannot be dispensed with.”

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

On New Democracy (1940)
Original: (zh-CN) 这种新民主主义共和国，一方面和旧形式的、欧美式的、资产阶级专政的、资本主义的共和国相区别，那是旧民主主义的共和国，那种共和国已经过时了；另一方面，也和苏联式的、无产阶级专政的、社会主义的共和国相区别，那种社会主义的共和国已经在苏联兴盛起来，并且还要在各资本主义国家建立起来，无疑将成为一切工业先进国家的国家构成和政权构成的统治形式；但是那种共和国，在一定的历史时期中，还不适用于殖民地半殖民地国家的革命。因此，一切殖民地半殖民地国家的革命，在一定历史时期中所采取的国家形式，只能是第三种形式，这就是所谓新民主主义共和国。这是一定历史时期的形式，因而是过渡的形式，但是不可移易的必要的形式。

Country

“The new perspective also manifested itself in other ways: the shift of attention to sociologists such as Max Weber who were primarily concerned, not with overall 'development', but with the one specific development, that of modern society; the tendency to be concerned with those aspects of Marxism relevant to this one transition, and to ignore its Evolutionist aspects; and, recently and most characteristically, the concern with the notion of industrial society, and its antithesis, to the detriment of other classifications, oppositions and alternatives.”

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist

Thought and Change (1964)

Way

“In the psychological fields most fundamental to the whole behavior of living things the transition seems inevitable to a Galileian view of dynamics, which derives all its vectors not from single isolated objects, but from the mutual relations of the factors in the concrete whole situation, that is, essentially, from the momentary condition of the individual and the structure of the psychological situation. The dynamics of the processes is always to be derived from the relation of the concrete individual to the concrete situation, and, so far as internal forces are concerned, from the mutual relations of the various functional systems that make up the individual.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935, p. 41; partly cited in: Kay Deaux, Mark Snyder (2012) The Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology. p. 74

Behavior

“The major vehicle of for the transition to the capitalist mode of production was the textile industry of eighteenth - century England. In cloth production mercantile wealth was visibly transformed into capital, as it acquired the dual function of purchasing machines and raw materials, on the one hand, and buying human energy to power their operation on the other.”

Eric Wolf (1923–1999) American anthropologist

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 9, Industrial Revolution, p. 267.

Clothes, Wealth

“Is it possible or not, given the present conditions in our continent, to achieve it (socialist power, that is) by peaceful means? We emphatically answer that, in the great majority of cases, this is not possible. The most that could be achieved would be the formal takeover of the bourgeois superstructure of power and the transition to socialism of that government which, under the established bourgeois legal system, having achieved formal power will still have to wage a very violent struggle against all who attempt, in one way or another, to check its progress toward new social structures.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Tactics and Strategy of the Latin American Revolution (1962)

Peace, Way

“[P]roperty in slaves, recognized as such by the local law of any of the States of the Union, shall stand on the same footing in all constitutional and federal relations as any other species of property so recognized; and, like other property, shall not be subject to be divested or impaired by the local law of any other State, either in escape thereto or of transit or sojourn of the owner therein; and in no case whatever shall such property be subject to be divested or impaired by any legislative act of the United States, or of any of the Territories thereof.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Compromise proposal http://www.civilwarcauses.org/comp.htm#Jefferson%20Davis%20of%20Mississippi (24 December 1860) 1860s

Law

“The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"In a Post-Culture".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

“On January 3, 1992 a meeting of Russian and American scholars took place in the auditorium of a government building in Moscow. Two weeks earlier the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and the Russian Federation had become an independent country. As a result, the statue of Lenin which previously graced the stage of the auditorium had disappeared and instead the flag of the Russian Federation was now displayed on the front wall. The only problem, one American observed, was that the flag had been hung upside down. After this was pointed out to the Russian hosts, they quickly and quietly corrected the error during the first intermission.
The years after the Cold War witnessed the beginnings of dramatic changes in peoples’ identities and the symbols of those identities. Global politics began to be reconfigured along cultural lines. Upside-down flags were a sign of the transition, but more and more the flags are flying high and true, and Russians and other peoples are mobilizing and marching behind these and other symbols of their new cultural identities.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 1: The New Era in World Politics, § 1 : Introduction: Flags And Cultural Identity

War, People, Error, Problem

“If the image was sketched onto the canvas and spontaneously drawn, colour would often be restrained and unfree... The most important and the most difficult liberation process we went trough, the one that has distinguished our art, was the freeing of colour, the transition to a painterly spontaneity.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

Statement (c. 1944), on automatic drawing, quoted in Asger Jorn (2002) by Arken Museum of Modern Art, p. 162
1940 - 1948, Various sources

Art

“We are perhaps too near the age of transition to see clearly the interplay of all that made for progress. Each of us has had his own peculiar training, his own personal contact with the mighty ones of the immediate past; and this forms as it were a telescopic tube determining limits to our field of vision. No doubt we may range the whole horizon; but after all we look from our own point of vantage.”

Cargill Gilston Knott (1856–1922) British mathematician and physicist

On the scientific revolution of the second half of the 19th century, in [Life and Scientific Work of Peter Guthrie Tait: supplementing the two volumes of Scientific papers published in 1898 and 1900, Cambridge University Press, 1911, 1]

Age, Past, Personality, Training

“The end of the Neolithic age betokens almost as universal a re-orientation of life, almost as profound a revolution of economy and society, as its beginning. Then the break was marked by the transition from mere consumption to production, from primitive individualism to co-operation, now it is marked by the beginning of independent trade and handicrafts, the rise of cities and markets, and the agglomeration and differentiation of the population.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter II. Ancient Oriental Urban cultures

Life, Age, Universe

“Philosophy … lost its prestige to the extent that it lost its evident advantage in cleverness to "normal life." In the transition from archaic teachings of wisdom to philosophy based on argument, it itself was engulfed in the twilight of alienation from life. It had to accept that the independent cleverness theories of pragmatics, economics, strategy, and politics proved themselves to be its better, until, with its logical niceties, it became infantile and academic, and stood there as the Utopian idiot with its reminiscences about great ideals. Today philosophy is surrounded on all sides by maliciously clever empiricisms and realistic disciplines that "know better."”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 536

Life, Wisdom

“It was a DJ style which helped to create the lifestyle which came to be known as hip hop. At the beginning of the disco era in the first half of the 1970s, regular disco jocks in clubs were most concerned with the blend between one record and the next - matching tempos to make a smooth transition which, at its best, could continually alter the mood on the dancefloor without breaking the flow.”

David Toop (1949) British musician

David Toop (1991). Rap Attack 2: African Rap To Global Hip Hop, p.12. New York. New York: Serpent's Tail. ISBN 1852422432.

Mood, Help

“It is advertising that enthrones the customer as king. This infuriates the socialist…[it is] the crossing of the boundary between West Berlin and East Berlin. It is Checkpoint Charlie, or rather Checkpoint Douglas, the transition from the world of choice and freedom to the world of drab, standard uniformity.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Attacking the Labour President of the Board of Trade, Douglas Jay, who wanted to standardise packaging for detergents. (The Daily Telegraph 29 April 1967); from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), p. 430
1960s

World, Freedom

“It is known that the mathematics prescribed for the high school [Gymnasien] is essentially Euclidean, while it is modern mathematics, the theory of functions and the infinitesimal calculus, which has secured for us an insight into the mechanism and laws of nature. Euclidean mathematics is indeed, a prerequisite for the theory of functions, but just as one, though he has learned the inflections of Latin nouns and verbs, will not thereby be enabled to read a Latin author much less to appreciate the beauties of a Horace, so Euclidean mathematics, that is the mathematics of the high school, is unable to unlock nature and her laws. Euclidean mathematics assumes the completeness and invariability of mathematical forms; these forms it describes with appropriate accuracy and enumerates their inherent and related properties with perfect clearness, order, and completeness, that is, Euclidean mathematics operates on forms after the manner that anatomy operates on the dead body and its members.
On the other hand, the mathematics of variable magnitudes—function theory or analysis—considers mathematical forms in their genesis. By writing the equation of the parabola, we express its law of generation, the law according to which the variable point moves. The path, produced before the eyes of the 113 student by a point moving in accordance to this law, is the parabola.
If, then, Euclidean mathematics treats space and number forms after the manner in which anatomy treats the dead body, modern mathematics deals, as it were, with the living body, with growing and changing forms, and thus furnishes an insight, not only into nature as she is and appears, but also into nature as she generates and creates,—reveals her transition steps and in so doing creates a mind for and understanding of the laws of becoming. Thus modern mathematics bears the same relation to Euclidean mathematics that physiology or biology … bears to anatomy. But it is exactly in this respect that our view of nature is so far above that of the ancients; that we no longer look on nature as a quiescent complete whole, which compels admiration by its sublimity and wealth of forms, but that we conceive of her as a vigorous growing organism, unfolding according to definite, as delicate as far-reaching, laws; that we are able to lay hold of the permanent amidst the transitory, of law amidst fleeting phenomena, and to be able to give these their simplest and truest expression through the mathematical formulas”

Christian Heinrich von Dillmann (1829–1899) German educationist

Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 37.

School, Law, Beauty, Mathematics

“Sic transit gloria mundi—Tuesday is usually worse.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Starman Jones

Source: Starman Jones (1953), Chapter 12, “Halcyon” (p. 135)

““Modern” poetry is, essentially, an extension of romanticism; it is what romantic poetry wishes or finds it necessary to become. It is the end product of romanticism, all past and no future; it is impossible to go further by any extrapolation of the process by which we have arrived, and certainly it is impossible to remain where we are—who could endure a century of transition?”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

transition [sic] was the avant-garde English-language magazine published in Paris 1927–1938; “A Note on Poetry”, p. 48
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Past, Future

“Of course it's easy to get on public transit! It's public transit.”

Ryan North (1980) Canadian webcomic writer and programmer

Blog post http://www.livejournal.com/users/qwantz/36998.html

“Looking at the contemporary world, two things are obvious: democracy is doing rather badly, and democracy is doing very well. New states are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains. Democracy is doing very badly in that democratic institutions have fallen by the wayside in very many of the newly independent 'transitional' societies, and they are precarious elsewhere. Democracy, on the other hand, is doing extremely well in so far as it is almost (though not quite) universally accepted as a valid norm.”

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist

Contemporary Thought and Politics (1974)

World, Democracy, Universe

“Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspicious to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the ancients). He is much more an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature, and the mother. Between the two forces his life hangs tremulous and resolute.”

Hermann Hesse book Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf (1927)

Life, Men, God, Nature

“I am growing fit, I hope, for a better world, of which light of the sun is but a shadow: for I doubt not but God's works here, are what comes nearest to his works there; and that a true relish of the beauties of nature is the most easy preparation and gentlest transition to an enjoyment of those of heaven; as on the contrary a true town life of hurry, confusion, noise, slander, and dissension, is a fort of apprenticeship to hell and its furies… The separation of my soul and body is what I could think of with less pain; for I sm very sure he that made it will take care of it, and in whatever state he pleases it shall be, that state must be right; but I cannot think without tears of beingseparated from my friends, when their condition is so douubtful, that they may want even such assistance as mine”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

In a 1715 letter (LXXVII), as found in Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope: And Several of His Friends. 1737.

Life, God, Pain, World

“Operational analysis … cannot raise the decisive question whether the consent itself was not the work of manipulation—a question for which the actual state of affairs provides ample justification. The analysis cannot raise it because it would transcend its terms toward transitive meaning—toward a concept of democracy which would reveal the democratic election as a rather limited democratic process. Precisely such a non-operational concept is the one rejected by the authors as “unrealistic” because it defines democracy on too articulate a level as the clear-cut control of representation by the electorate—popular control as popular sovereignty.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 116

Democracy, Question, Decision

“If the people vote for my party and parliament elects me as prime minister, it would be an honour for me to take up that role and General Musharraf would be there as president, so I think that a good working relationship between him and me would be a necessity for Pakistan. … I would have the choice of either respecting the will of the people and making it a success or being short-sighted and putting my personal feelings about past events ahead of the national interest, and what I want more than anything is for Pakistan to prosper as we make a transition to democracy”

Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007) 11th Prime Minister of Pakistan

Destiny’s daughter (2007)

People, Feeling, Democracy, Thinking

“There is no Death! What seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life elysian,
Whose portal we call Death.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Resignation

Resignation, st. 5.

Life, Death

“I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all—Depth beyond depth was revealed to me—the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus—or even the Lord Mayor's Show, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable: and how the one step involved all the others. It was like politics. But it was after dinner and I let it go!”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Source: My Early Life: A Roving Commission (1930), Chapter 3 (Examinations), p. 27.

Feeling, Mathematics, Change

“"This law of the release of tension through illusory valuation gains new significance, full of infinite consequences, for the ressentiment attitude. To its very core, the mind of ressentiment man is filled with envy, the impulse to detract, malice, and secret vindictiveness. These affects have become fixed attitudes, detached from all determinate objects. Independently of his will, this man's attention will be instinctively drawn by all events which can set these affects in motion. The ressentiment attitude even plays a role in the formation of perceptions, expectations, and memories. It automatically selects those aspects of experience which can justify the factual application of this pattern of feeling. Therefore such phenomena as joy, splendor, power, happiness, fortune, and strength magically attract the man of ressentiment. He cannot pass by, he has to look at them, whether he “wants” to or not. But at the same time he wants to avert his eyes, for he is tormented by the craving to possess them and knows that his desire is vain. The first result of this inner process is a characteristic falsification of the world view. Regardless of what he observes, his world has a peculiar structure of emotional stress. The more the impulse to turn away from those positive values prevails, the more he turns without transition to their negative opposites, on which he concentrates increasingly. He has an urge to scold, to depreciate, to belittle whatever he can. Thus he involuntarily “slanders” life and the world in order to justify his inner pattern of value experience.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Life, Secret, World, Law

“I shall present a theory - which I call "the theory of the managerial revolution." During the past century, dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of "theories of history" have been elaborated. All of the theories, with the exception of those few which approximate to the theory of the managerial revolution, boil down to two and only two. The first of these predicts that capitalism will continue for an indefinite, but long, time, if not forever:' that is, that the major institutions of capitalist society, or at least most of them, will not be radically changed. The second predicts that capitalist society will be replaced by socialist society. The theory of the managerial revolution predicts that capitalist society will be replaced by "managerial society," that, in fact, the transition from capitalist society to managerial society is already well under way.”

James Burnham (1905–1987) American philosopher

Source: The Managerial Revolution, 1941, p. 7, as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 12-13

Way, History, Change, Time

“I’m vegan in my fashion and vegetarian in my food. I don’t buy any leather goods or anything made from animal products – no down, nothing. It’s something people should be mindful of. … I think because I came to live in L. A. the transition was simple because vegetarianism is so common there. And I didn’t feel like I was missing that much by being a vegetarian. … I had a moment about 9 years ago. It was so odd. I was talking to my then-boyfriend and he was talking about a fishing trip and how he’d never had the experience of ‘killing’ his food. Even though I had fished my whole life, something just snapped in me and I said, I’m not eating this anymore. … Being vegan is more challenging, especially when it comes to going out to eat. But I found Chicago has great vegetarian and vegan restaurants. … Healthwise, I notice when I wasn’t eating meat anymore I felt so much lighter.”

Torrey DeVitto (1984) actress, model, violinist

"‘Chicago Med’ star Torrey DeVitto takes holistic approach to health, life" https://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment/chicago-med-star-torrey-devitto-takes-holistic-approach-to-health-life/, interview with Chicago Sun-Times (24 January 2018).

Life, People, Food, Feeling