Quotes about vision (1494 quotes, page 7)

“I think my parents had visions of me being found in the Thames with six illicit foetuses in my womb and needle marks up my arm.”

Fenella Fielding (1927–2018) English actress

Why her parents did not want her to be an actress.
Interview: Independent, Sunday 24 February 2008 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/the-lady-vanishes-what-ever-happened-to-fenella-fielding-785265.html

Thinking , Parent

“At this exquisite vision Tip's old comrades stared in wonder for the space of a full minute, and then every head bent low in honest admiration of the lovely Princess Ozma. The girl herself cast one look into Glinda's bright face, which glowed with pleasure and satisfaction, and then turned upon the others. Speaking the words with sweet diffidence, she said: "I hope none of you will care less for me than you did before. I'm just the same Tip, you know; only — only — "
"Only you're different!"”

L. Frank Baum book The Marvelous Land of Oz

said the Pumpkinhead; and everyone thought it was the wisest speech he had ever made.
The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904)
Later Oz novels

Love , Pleasure , Hope , Girl

“This obligation to move can be a burden to a player without strategic vision.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

Part I, Chapter 3, Strategy And Tactics At Work, p. 36
2000s, How Life Imitates Chess (2007)

“For a soul to fly out, is for it to obtain the vision of God, which can be hindered by no interruption, therefore he errs who says that the soul cannot fly out before the coin can jingle in the bottom of the chest.”
Animam purgatam evolare, est eam visione dei potiri, quod nulla potest intercapedine impediri. Quisquis ergo dicit, non citius posse animam volare, quam in fundo cistae denarius possit tinnire, errat.

Johann Tetzel (1460–1519) German Dominican friar and seller of indulgences

Theses nos. 55 and 56 of the One Hundred and Six Theses drawn up by Konrad Wimpina. The reformation in Germany, Henry Clay Vedder, 1914, Macmillan Company, p. 405. http://books.google.com/books?id=JQ4QAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA405&dq=%22For+a+soul+to+fly+out,+is+for+it+to+obtain+the+vision+of+God%22&hl=en&ei=1nAnTeHnNcOblgfCmPHeAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22For%20a%20soul%20to%20fly%20out%2C%20is%20for%20it%20to%20obtain%20the%20vision%20of%20God%22&f=false Latin in: D. Martini Lutheri, Opera Latina: Varii Argumenti, 1865, Henricus Schmidt, ed., Heyder and Zimmer, Frankfurt am Main & Erlangen, vol. 1, p. 300. (Reprinted: Nabu Press, 2010, ISBN 1142405516 ISBN 9781142405519. http://books.google.com/books?id=qB8RAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA300&dq=%22Animam+purgatam+evolare,+est+eam%22&hl=en&ei=PrIsTf-rJsGBlAfMjO2LDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Animam%20purgatam%20evolare%2C%20est%20eam%22&f=false
Thesis 56 often abbreviated and translated as:
As soon as a coin in the coffer rings / the soul from purgatory springs. CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Johann Tetzel http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14539a.htm
Alternate translation of no. 56:
He errs who denies that a soul can fly as quickly up to Heaven as a coin can chink against the bottom of the chest. In “Luther and Tetzel,” Publications of the Catholic Truth Society, Catholic Truth Society (Great Britain), 1900, Volume 43, p. 25. http://books.google.com/books?id=uosQAAAAIAAJ&pg=RA1-PA25&dq=%22He+errs+who+denies+that+a+soul+can+fly+as+quickly+up+to+Heaven%22&hl=en&ei=hrEsTfmlNcWclge525mxCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22He%20errs%20who%20denies%20that%20a%20soul%20can%20fly%20as%20quickly%20up%20to%20Heaven%22&f=false

God , Soul , Flying

“Even in the act of composition, the poet is in a state in which the reflective elements are subordinated to the intuitive. The vision, however, is not operative for so long as it continues, its very stress acts as a check on expression.”

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

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

“An order must first of all be clear. A meditation may be vague, a scheme always has something of the vision in it, but an order must be precise. All order can be misunderstood; an obscure one will never be understood. "To do a thing well," said Napoleon, "one must do to oneself." This is not always true, but the prudent leader will admit that few people understand and that almost everyone forgets. It is therefore not enough to give an order; one must see to its execution and, when giving it, anticipate anything that may nullify its effectiveness. The stupidity of human beings and the malevolence of chance are limitless. The unexpected always happens. The leader who endeavors to frustrate the onset of ill luck and who strengthens the weak points in his schemes against stupidity is more apt to impose his will than one who does not take these measures.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Leadership

People , Stupidity , Understanding , Chance

“Vision without action which fails to touch the lives of the poor is not vision, but self delusion.”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

Changing the World

“To the degree that a man possesses a vivid ideal of the good life, submerges himself in the sea of human misery and endeavors to alleviate suffering, kindles imagination in hours of silence and by visions of beauty, and follows the noblest personality into the presence of a loving, suffering Father—to the extent that he lives meaningfully, he will be convinced of sin and cry aloud for deliverance.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

"Penitence and Social Progress" World Tomorrow 15 (May, 1932)

Love , Life , Beauty , Imagination

“A man should never be appointed into a managerial position if his vision focuses on people's weaknesses rather than on their strengths.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, The Practice of Management (1954), p. 157

People

“Often we were joined by Maurice Princet. Although very young, he held an important post in an insurance company which he owed to his knowledge of mathematics. But outside his profession it was as an artist that he thought of mathematics, as a specialist in aesthetics that he evoked continuities in n dimensions. He liked to interest painters in the new visions of space that had been opened up by Victor Schlegel and several others. He succeeded. After having heard him by chance, Henri Matisse was caught reading an essay on hyperspace. Oh! it was only a potboiler [un ouvrage de vulgarisation]! but at least that shows that for the great 'fauve' the days of the painter who knows nothing, who runs towards a pretty subject with his beard blowing in the wind, was passed.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

Mathematics , Knowledge , Chance , Reading

“Artists encounter the landscape they propose to paint — they look at it, observe it from this angle and that. They are, as we say, absorbed in it. Or, in the case of abstract painters, the encounter may be with an idea, an inner vision, that in turn may be led off by the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Ch 2 : The Nature of Creativity, p. 41
The Courage to Create (1975)

Color , Idea , Painting

“The vision I would like to see here is the entrenching of the Jewish and the Zionist state. I very much favor democracy, but when there is a contradiction between democratic and Jewish values, the Jewish and Zionist values are more important.”

Avigdor Lieberman (1958) Israeli politician

Quoted in Ben Lynfield, "The Rise of Avigdor Lieberman", http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070101/lynfield The Nation (2006-12-14)

Democracy

“I had auditory sensory problems and touch sensitivity problems, I had no problems with my vision. Other people absolutely cannot stand fluorescent lighting and they're sometimes helped by a thing called the Irlen colored glasses where you try on all kinds of different pale colored glasses until it's easier to read. It stops the problem of the print jiggling on the page.”

Temple Grandin (1947) USA-american doctor of animal science, author, and autism activist

in "A Conversation with Temple Grandin" January 20, 2006 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5165123

People , Color , Problem , Light

“The new vision…. does not proceed from a fixed point. Its viewpoint is everywhere, and not limited to any one position [in space]. Nor is it bound by space or time (in accordance with the theory of relativity) [of Einstein ]. In practice, the viewpoint is in front of the plane… Thus this new vision sees architecture as a multiplicity of planes; again flat. This multiplicity composes itself (in an abstract sense) into a flat image [in contrast to Theo van Doesburg who emphasized the dynamic position of the viewer – a central idea of Futurism in 1919].”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote, 1919, as cited in Mondrian, -The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 148
1910's

Idea , Sense , Time , Future

“I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this purely aesthetic, Cubist's-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers—back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

describing his experiment with mescaline, p. 22
The Doors of Perception (1954)

World , Flowers , Reality , Light

“For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel - a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance - and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in de facto way for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. This last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or difused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects; for they are themselves, consciously or unconsciously seeking to fit them into or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete at times fanatical, military inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.”

Isaiah Berlin book The Hedgehog and the Fox

The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953). Editor Henry Hardy. Collaborator Michael Ignatieff. Editorial Princeton University Press, 2013. ISBN 1400846633, p. 2.

Way , Feeling , Idea , Understanding

“Believing that the government knows what's best is an argument that barely merits a serious discussion. Any high school history student can come up with hundreds of examples of when a king, dictator, or elected official followed a destructive, foolish policy. Democracy doesn't protect our leaders from having a limited, parochial vision. A politician's true priority is career self-preservation.”

John Twelve Hawks American writer

How We Live Now (2005)

School , Democracy , History

“First, the physicists in the persons of Faraday and Maxwell, proposed the "electromagnetic field" in contradistinction to matter, as a reality of a different category. Then, during the last century, the mathematicians, … secretly undermined belief in the evidence of Euclidean Geometry. And now, in our time, there has been unloosed a cataclysm which has swept away space, time, and matter hitherto regarded as the firmest pillars of natural science, but only to make place for a view of things of wider scope and entailing a deeper vision. This revolution was promoted essentially by the thought of one man, Albert Einstein.”

Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

Introduction
Space—Time—Matter (1952)

Nature , Reality , Science , Time

“United States can't impose peace. We can encourage the development of a state…. We can facilitate that. But we can't force people to make hard decisions. They're gonna have to do that themselves…. Gotta ask yourselves, why don't they want there to be a democracy. The answer is, because it doesn't fit in with their ideological vision.”

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

Oct. 17, 2007 press conference, talking about the Palestinians (not the Iraqis)
2000s, 2007

People , Peace , Democracy , Decision

“All men, rich and poor, must aid one another materially and personally. The rules vary in detail, but they all maintain the principle of universal mutual aid in the Muslim fraternity. This fraternity is absolute, and it comprises men of all colours and all races… all are the sons of Adam in the flesh and all carry in them spark of the Divine Light. Everyone should strive his best to see that this spark be not extinguished but rather developed to that full "Companionship-on-High" which was the vision expressed in the last words of the Prophet [Muhammad] on his deathbed, the vision of that blessed state which he saw clearly awaiting him.”

Aga Khan III (1877–1957) 48th Imam of the Nizari Ismaili community

Memoirs of Aga Khan: World Enough & Time (1954)

Men , Light , Universe , Personality

“Men have their choice in this world. They can be angels, or they may be demons. In the apocalyptic vision, John describes a war in heaven. You have only to strip that vision of its gorgeous Oriental drapery, divest it of its shining and celestial ornaments, clothe it in the simple and familiar language of common sense, and you will have before you the eternal conﬂict between right and wrong, good and evil, liberty and slavery, truth and falsehood, the glorious light of love, and the appalling darkness of human selﬁshness and sin. The human heart is a seat of constant war… Just what takes place in individual human hearts, often takes place between nations, and between individuals of the same nation.”

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

As quoted in Maurice S. Lee (2009), The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass. Cambridge University Press, p. 50; Thomson, Conyers & Dawson (2009). The Frederick Douglass Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. p. 84

Love , Men , War , Truth

“Although the backlash is not a movement, that doesn't make it any less destructive. In fact, the lack of orchestration, the absence of a single string-puller, only makes it harder to see — and perhaps more effective. A backlash against women's rights succeeds to the degree that it appears not to be political, that it appears not to be a struggle at all. It is most powerful when it goes private, when it lodges in a woman's mind and turns her vision inward, until she imagines the pressure is all in her head, until she begins to enforce the backlash, too — on herself.”

Susan Faludi book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

Page 16.
Backlash (1992)

Women , Imagination , Appearance

“Already, in the decades before Independence our people were giving thought to their vision of an Independent India. Pandit Motilal Nehru drafted the well-known Nehru Report on the Constitution of free India. The Karachi Session of the Indian National Congress held in March, 1931 adopted the famous Resolution moved by Mahatma Gandhi which contained our charter on Fundamental Rights. It is against this historical backdrop of a long and arduous struggle and the crystallization of our vision of a sovereign, democratic nation that the first session of the Constituent Assembly was held in 1946, when, as Panditji said, we embarked on `the high adventure of giving shape, in the printed and written word, to a nation's dream and aspiration.”

Shankar Dayal Sharma (1918–1999) Indian politician

Address By Dr. Shanker Dayal Sharma President Of India On The Occasion Of The 50th Anniversary Of The First Sitting Of The Constituent Assembly

People , Dreams

“Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. […] You are not taught—and it is a disgrace that you aren't—that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.”

Naomi Wolf (1962) American writer

In The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/1603580115, Wolf, Chelsea Green Publishing (2007), Chapter One, 'The Founders and the Fragility of Democracy,' p. 27

Women , Men , God , People

“Nearly every day on the television set the hero cop breaks into the bad guy’s house and beats a confession out of him and we cheer on the cop. Propaganda smears our clear vision. It causes us to accept the diminishment of our constitutional protections as something to be lauded — after all, the cop was protecting us.”

Gerry Spence (1929) American lawyer

Source: Give Me Liberty! (1998), Ch. 20 : The Media : The Perpetual Voice of the Master, the Abiding Ear of the Slave, p. 236

Guy , Housing

“Hindu society has grown and shaped itself in the vision of Vyasa and Valmiki, Manu and Yajnavalkya, Narada and Vasistha, and a hundred other exponents of Sanãtana Dharma in all its dimensions and dynamics. Hindu society has been inspired through the ages by such mighty šãtras as the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita, the Jainagama, the Tripitaka, the various Yogasastras, the Vani of Siddhas and Sants, and the devotional outpourings of Alvars and Nayanars. Hindu society has been defended, during its days of distress, by such high-souled heroes as Chandragupta, Skandagupta, Vikramaditya, Yasodharman, Bapa Rawal, Jayapala, Bhojadeva, Prithiviraj, Prataparudra, Vir Pandya, Harihara and Rana Sanga. Hindu society has fought a long-drawn-out struggle for freedom against Islamic invaders under the leadership of such veterans as Maharana Pratap, Shivaji, Maharaja Surajmal, Banda Bairagi, Lokmanya Tilak, Veer Savarkar, Mahatma Gandhi, and Sardar Patel.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Defence of Hindu Society (1983)

Age , Soul , Freedom

“There is, I venture to think, no ground for the ordinarily accepted statement of the relation of philosophy to theology and religion. It is usually said that while^hilosophy is the creation of an individual mind, theology or religion is, like folk-lore and language, the product of the collective mind of a people or a race. This is to confuse philosophy with philosophies, a conmion and, it must be admitted, a not unnatural confusion. But while a philosophy is the creation of a Plato, an Aristotle, a Spinoza, a Kant, or a Hegel, ^hilosophy itself is, like religion, folk-lore and language, a product of the collective mind of humanity. It is advanced, as these are, by individual additions, interpretations and syntheses, but it is none the less quite istinct from such individual contributions. philosophy is humanity's hold on Totality, and it becomes richer and more helpful as man's intellectual horizon widens, as his intellectual vision grows clearer, and as his insights become more numerous and more sure. Theology is philosophy of a particular type. It is an interpretation of Totality in terms of God and His activities. In the impressive words of Principal Caird, that philosophy which is theology seeks "to bind together objects and events in the links of necessary thought, and to find their last ground and reason in that which comprehends and transcends all— the nature of God Himself." Religion is the apprehension and the adoration of the Grod Whom theology postulates.
If the whole history of philosophy be searched for material with which to instruct the beginner in what philosophy really is and in its relation to theology and religion, the two periods or epochs that stand out above all others as useful for this purpose are Greek thought from Thales to Socrates, and that interpretation of the teachings of Christ by philosophy which gave rise, at the hands of the Church Fathers, to Christian theology. In the first period we see the simple, clear-cut steps by which the mind of Europe was led from explanations that were fairy-tales to a natural, well-analyzed, and increasingly profound interpretation of the observed phenomena of Nature. The process is so orderly and so easily grasped that it is an invaluable introduction to the study of philosophic thinking. In the second period we see philosophy, now enriched by the literally huge contributions of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, intertwining itself about the simple Christian tenets and building the great system of creeds and thought which has immortalized the names of Athanasius and Hilary, Basil and Gregory, Jerome and Augustine, and which has given color and form to the intellectual life of Europe for nearly two thousand years. For the student of today both these developments have great practical value, and the astonishing neglect and ignorance of them both are most discreditable.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

" Philosophy" (a lecture delivered at Columbia University in the series on science, philosophy and art, March 4, 1908) https://archive.org/details/philosophyalect00butlgoog"

Life , God , People , Religion

“You may claim that [Paul] merely saw a vision of Jesus. Not so. He met the Lord and came 'to know Him, and the power of His resurrection.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Source: You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)

“One of the loveliest daughters of that land,
Divinest Greece! that taught the painter's hand
To give eternity to loveliness;
One of those dark-eyed maids, to whom belong
The glory and the beauty of each Song
Thy poets breathed, for it was theirs to bless
With life the pencil and the lyre's dreams,
Giving reality to visioned gleams
Of bright divinities.”

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

Leander and Hero from The London Literary Gazette (22nd February 1823)
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Life , Beauty , Dreams , Reality

“Initially I observed, in sweeping, panoramic vision, a perpetually metamorphosing Persian rug. A few minutes later these patterns segued into cinematic images from childhood—it was kind of like watching home movies.”

David Woodard (1964) American writer, conductor and businessman

LA Weekly (Jul. 26 - Aug. 1, 1996)

Home , Childhood

“It requires commitment, vision and will. Differences of ethnicity and multi-culturalism have to be managed and accommodated. It is a difficult balancing act, which must take account of the interests of all communities.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Excerpts from an address to the Commonwealth Workshop in Nadi, 29 August 2005

Communication

“Cicero bent Greek ideas to his vision of the idealized Roman Republic, and his understanding of the mores—the morality and social attachments—of the gentlemanly statesmen who would hold power in a just republic. Readers familiar with Machiavelli’s Prince will hear curious echoes of that work in Cicero’s advice; curious because the pieties of Cicero’s advice to the would-be statesman were satirized by Machiavelli sixteen hundred years later. If his philosophy was Greek and eclectic, Cicero owed his constitutional theory to Polybius; he was born soon after Polybius died, and read his history. And Cicero greatly admired Polybius’s friend and employer Scipio the Younger. There are obvious differences of tone. Polybius celebrated Rome’s achievement of equipoise, while Cicero lamented the ruin of the republic. Cicero’s account of republican politics veers between a “constitutional” emphasis on the way that good institutions allow a state to function by recruiting men of good but not superhuman character, and a “heroic” emphasis on the role of truly great men in reconstituting the state when it has come to ruin. Cicero’s vanity was so notorious that everyone knew he had himself in mind as this hero—had he not saved the republic before when he quelled the conspiracy of Catiline?”

Alan Ryan (1940) British philosopher

On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present (2012), Ch. 4 : Roman Insights: Polybius and Cicero

Men , Way , History , Idea

“In June, 1829, the Lord called Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, and myself as the three witnesses, to behold the vision of the Angel, as recorded in the fore part of the Book of Mormon, and to bear testimony to the world that the Book of Mormon is true. I was not called to bear testimony to the mission of Brother Joseph Smith any farther than his work of translating the Book of Mormon, as you can see by reading the testimony of us three witnesses.”

David Whitmer (1805–1888) Book of Mormon witness

An Address to All Believers in Christ, page 32 (1887)

Books , World , Angels , Reading

“I never thought before my death to see
Youth's vision thus made perfect.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Epipsychidion

Source: Epipsychidion (1821), l. 41

Death , Youth , Perfection

“In the whole range of human vision, nothing is more attractive than to see a young^ man full of promise and of hope, bending all his energies in the direction of truth and duty and God, his soul pervaded with the loftiest enthusiasm, and his life consecrated to the noblest ends. To be such a young man is to rival the noblest and best of men in heroic valor and Christian chivalry. Nay, to be such a young man is to be like Christ, the highest type, the most illustrious example of enthusiasm the world has ever seen.”

John McClellan Holmes (1834–1911) US Christian minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 208.

Life , Men , God , Truth

“If it recedes one day, leaving behind its works and signs on the shores of our civilization, the structuralist invasion might become a question or the historian of ideas, or perhaps even an object. But the historian would be deceived if he came to this pass: by the very act of considering the structuralist invasion as an object he would forget its meaning and would forget that what is at stake, first of all,, is an adventure of vision, a conversion of the way of putting questions to any object posed before us, to historical objects-his own- in particular. And, unexpectedly among these, the literary objects.”

Jacques Derrida book Writing and Difference

Force and Signification
Writing and Difference (1978)

Way , Idea , Question , Forgetting

“A while ago there was an article in the New York Times about some women in Tennessee who wanted the middle grade text books removed from the school curriculum, not because they were inadequate educationally, but because these women were afraid that they might stimulate the childrens' imaginations.
What!?!
It was a good while later that I realized that the word, imagination, is always a bad word in the King James translation of the Bible. I checked it out in my concordance, and it is always bad.
Put them down in the imagination of their hearts. Their imagination is only to do evil.
Language changes. What meant one thing three hundred years ago means something quite different now. So the people who are afraid of the word imagination are thinking about it as it was defined three centuries ago, and not as it is understood today, a wonderful word denoting creativity and wideness of vision.
Another example of our changing language is the word, prevent. Take it apart into its Latin origin, and it is prevenire. Go before. So in the language of the King James translation if we read, "May God prevent us," we should understand the meaning to be, "God go before us," or "God lead us."
And the verb, to let, used to mean, stop. Do not let me, meant do not stop me. And now it is completely reversed into a positive, permissive word.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Acceptance Speech for the Margaret Edwards Award (1998)

Women , God , Children , People

“I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it. These, Govinda, are some of the thoughts in my mind.”

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) German writer

Siddhartha (1922)

Love , World , Learning , Perfection

“When the Sachar Committee members met and asked me, “Mr. Modi what have you done for Muslims in Gujarat?” I told them: Nothing, I have done nothing for Muslims. But please go on to note that I have done nothing for Hindus or Jains or Sikhs either. I am responsible for 5.5 crore Gujaratis and whatever I do, is aimed at serving the interests of all these 5.5 crore people of my state. When the pure waters of Narmada flow into Sabarmati on account of our river linking project, do you expect me to measure how many litres are consumed by Hindus and how much water goes to Muslim households? My job is to ensure that every person, every household gets adequate supplies of clean drinking water. Please don’t expect me to adopt your divisive terminology and vision.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

Narendra Modi in interview, 2013, p75, quoted in Kishwar, Madhu (2014). Modi, Muslims and media: Voices from Narendra Modi's Gujarat. p.75
2013

People , Drink , Water , Personality

“Our great string of successes had married my vision to his unmatched aptitude for business.”

Paul Allen (1953–2018) American inventor, investor and philanthropist

Idea Man (2012)

Business , Success

“We began talking about the characters and he opened up about his vision. He's extremely thoughtful and sees grand issues both social and political in an interesting way. Quite honestly, I wasn't certain how some of his ideas were applicable to the screenplay, but he was heartfelt and adamant about them. And I remember completely going with it.”

Madeleine Stowe (1958) American actress

On talking with Michael Mann about his screenplay for Last of the Mohicans.
Mohican Press interview (2005)

Way , Idea

“Dots are just one example of an element in Lascaux art, and in all cave art… This is a profusion of nonrepresentational, geometric patterns. In addition to dots, there are grids and chevrons, curves and zigzags, and more. …The coincidence of these geometric motifs with representational images is one of the most puzzling aspects of Upper Paleolithic art. …images, six different kinds in all, are shimmering, incandescent, mercurial—and powerful. Called entoptic images—which means "within vision"—these phenomena are products of the basic neural architecture of the human brain.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1992)

Art

“Life of Paul of the Cross, founder of the Passionists. Astonishing really that he should be so little known, should have left so little impression.. Strangely thrilling that St Paul - end of the eighteenth century! - should have prayed all his life for the conversion of England, pledging his sons to do likewise. Once, during Mass, he had a vision of my sons in England. But only in 1841, almost seventy years after his death, did they actually set foot on English soil - through Fr Dominic Barberi. It was he who received Newman into the Church..”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1957-59.

Life , Death

“We [The Futurists] stand for a use of colour free from the imitation of objects and things as coloured objects. We stand for an aerial vision in which the material of colour is expressed in all of the manifold possibilities our subjectivity can create.”

Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) Italian painter

Carlo Carrà's art statement on Futurism in 1913, as quoted in Abstract Art Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson 1990, p. 26
1910's

“Ordinary human motives will appeal in vain to the ears which have heard the tones of the heavenly music; and all the pomp of life will show poor and tawdry to the sight that has gazed on the vision of the great white throne and the crystal sea.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 104.

Life , Music , Motivation , Sea

“So, of course, the visions are painted in the colours of the rainbow, and the reality is sketched in duller tones of black and white and grey. But I ask you to accept one thing. Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. I may have been wrong. That is your call. But believe one thing, if nothing else. I did what I thought was right for our country.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

" Full text of Tony Blair's resignation speech http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/the_blair_years/article1772414.ece", Times Online, 10 May 2007.
Announcing his impending resignation, Trimdon Labour Club, 10 May 2007.
2000s

Reality , Heart , Painting , Country

“Love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it gives birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties.”

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American playwright and novelist

As quoted in "The Notation of the Heart" by Edmund Fuller, in The American Scholar Reader (1960) edited by Hiram Hayden and Betsy Saunders

Love , Birth , Loyalty

“Life should be a constant vision of God's presence. Here is our defense against being led away by the gauds and shows of earth's vulgar attractions.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 277.

Life , God

“The basic paradox about sex is that it always seems to be offering more than it can deliver. A glimpse of a girl undressing through a lighted bedroom window induces a vision of ecstatic delight, but in the actual process of persuading the girl into bed, the vision somehow evaporates.”

Colin Wilson book The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders

Source: The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988), p. 16

Sex , Girl , Light

“They've created ISIS. Hillary Clinton created ISIS with Obama; created with Obama. But I love predicting because you know, ultimately, you need somebody with vision.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

At a rally, as quoted in "TRUMP: 'Hillary Clinton created ISIS with Obama'" http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-created-isis-obama-2016-1 by Colin Campbell, Business Insider (3 January 2016)
2010s, 2016, January

Love

“This moment in American history is what Antonio Gramsci called the “interregnum”—the period when a discredited regime is collapsing but a new one has yet to take its place. There is no guarantee that what comes next will be better. But this space, which will close soon, offers citizens the final chance to embrace a new vision and a new direction.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

"Welcome to 1984," May 14, 2016 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/welcome_to_1984_20160514

History , Chance

“The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life.”

Angus Wilson (1913–1991) british author

The Wild Garden (London: Secker & Warburg, 1963) p. 149.

Life

“Socialism, wherever it actually had the means to plan a society, to pursue efficaciously its vision of the abolition of private property, economic inequality, and the allocation of capital and goods by free markets, culminated in the crushing of individual, economic, religious, associational, and political liberty. Its collectivization of agriculture alone led to untold suffering, scarcity, and contempt for property as the fruit of labor.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2000s, Can There Be an "After Socialism"? (2003)

Suffering

“Without once compromising his artistic integrity, Fellini imagined a body of work -- as opposed to a suite of spin-offs, remakes, potboilers and so on -- where each production can be ranked as among the finest of experimental films ever to reach and influence an international public. There is a breathtaking scope to that achievement and great courage in the process: surmounting unbelievable resistance from producers, enemies of all kinds and jealous colleagues, career reversals, and poor health, Fellini held true to his own vision of cinema forged in the smithy of his soul.”

Damian Pettigrew Canadian filmmaker

On Fellini's artistic integrity, in Indiewire (April, 2003)

Health , Soul , Imagination , Courage

“I want to write — I want to write — I want to write and never never never will. I know it and I am so unhappy and it seems as though nothing else mattered. Whatever I'm doing, it's always there, an ultimate longing there saying, "Write this — write that — write —" and I can't. Lack ability, time, strength, and duration of vision. I wish someone would tell me brutally, "You can never write anything.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

Take up home gardening!"
Bring Me a Unicorn (1971)

Home , Time

“While many of the conflicting claims can be reconciled in terms of the short-run and long-run orientation of Keynesians and monetarists, respectively, and in terms of their contrasting philosophical orientations, neither vision takes into account the workings or failings of the market mechanisms within the investment aggregate.Austrian macroeconomics is set apart from both Keynesianism and monetarism by its attention to the differential effects of interest rate changes within the investment sector, or—using the Austrian terminology—within the economy's structure of production.”

Roger Garrison (1944) American economist

Page 136.
"Is Milton Friedman a Keynesian?" (1992)

Change

“Five lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage as a matter of constitutional law… Just who do we think we are?”

John Roberts (1955) Chief Justice of the United States

Dissent on Supreme Court same-sex marriage ruling — Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. ___ (2015)

Marriage , Law , Thinking

“No vision issue today is bigger than the question of efficiency versus some combination of innovation and customer service.”

John P. Kotter (1947) author of The heart of Change

Step 3, p. 69
The Heart of Change, (2002)

Question

“My eight years in Brooklyn gave me a new vision of America, or rather America gave me a new vision of a part of itself, Brooklyn. They were wonderful years. A community of over three million people, proud, hurt, jealous, seeking geographical, social, emotional status as a city apart and alone and sufficient. One could not live for eight years in Brooklyn and not catch its spirit of devotion to its baseball club, such as no other city in America equaled. Call it loyalty, and so it was. It would be a crime against a community of three million people to move the Dodgers. Not that the move was unlawful, since people have the right to do as they please with their property. But a baseball club in any city in America is a quasi-public institution, and in Brooklyn the Dodgers were public without the quasi.”

Branch Rickey (1881–1965) American baseball player and coach

On the relocation of the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles; quoted in Bob McGee, <i>The Greatest Ballpark Ever: Ebbets Field and the Story of the Brooklyn Dodgers</i> (Rutgers University Press, 2005, ISBN 0813536006), p. 294 http://books.google.ca/books?id=BOZyd7v1cDAC&pg=PA294&dq=%22public+without+the+quasi

People , Communication , Parting , Hurt

“In a vision I beheld the fullness of God in which I beheld and comprehended the whole creation, that is, what is on this side and what is beyond the sea, the abyss, the sea itself, and everything else. And in everything that I saw, I could perceive nothing except the presence of the power of God, and in a manner totally indescribable. And my soul in an excess of wonder cried out: "This world is pregnant with God!" Wherefore I understood how small is the whole of creation -- that is, what is on this side and what is beyond the sea, the abyss, the sea itself, and everything else -- but the power of God fills it all to overflowing.”

Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) Italian saint

Source: The Memorial and Instructions, pp. 169-170

God , World , Soul , Sea

“Only those who have experienced the elation and despair which comes from the attempt to express their feelings about vision in oil paint will know that it is impossible to speak with complete impartiality about art.”

Roger Fry (1866–1934) English artist and art critic

Characteristics of French Art' 1931.
Art Quotes

Art , Feeling , Painting , Despair

“The Dyer backed away from him another step and stood watching him, the exaltation in his face clouding slowly over until it was replaced by a strange, heavy look; it was as if reasoning thought were laboring to break through the storm of words and feelings and visions that confused him. Finally he turned around without a word and began to run back down the road, into the haze of dust that had not yet settled on his tracks.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 6, "Lorbanery"

Feeling

“All routinized religions today (including the Native American Church, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity) are successful descendents of what originated as messianic movements—that is, the vision of a new way of life for a culture under extreme stress.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

p, 125
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Life , Religion , Way , Success

“I was... questioning the students when something else caught my attention. First, dimly, then more vividly, I began to sense the presence of an invisible personality beside me. That is, I didn't see him, but felt his emotional reality quite as strongly as physical vision could ever show it. I'd "met" this same person in several previous classes when he told me mentally that he represented a past life of mine. Then, supposedly, I'd been some kind of jealous leader, demanding utmost loyalty. My friend Sue had been one of my followers. Now he wanted to confront her, feeling that she was going her own way this time and not following in her footsteps, as he thought she should have.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Adventures In Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology (1975), p. 8

Life , Way , Feeling , Question

“I have a definite feeling for the West, the vast horizontality of the land, for instance... I have always been very impressed with the plastic qualities of American Indian art. The Indians have the true painter's approach in their capacity to get hold of appropriate images, and in their understanding of what constitutes painterly subject-matter. Their colour is essentially Western, their vision has the basic universality of all real art. Some people find references to American Indian art and calligraphy in parts of my pictures. That wasn't intentional; probably [it] was the result of early memories and enthusiasm.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Quote of Pollock, from Twentieth-century American painting, Gail Levin, The Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. London, 1987, p. 267
1940's, Art and Architecture (1944)

People , Art , Feeling , Understanding

“The vision for Europe needs to renew its commitment to true subsidiarity. Having structures of economic, political and social relationships that liberate subsidiarity will make accepting complexity more realistic. It seems to me that current debates about what Europe is have fallen into the trap of equating strength and unity with simplicity. As I have just said, the opposite seems to be true. Attempts to explain European structures and identity with a single overarching story have ended in failure because they have not allowed sufficient flexibility for these structures to be lived out below the continental level.”

Justin Welby (1956) British Anglican bishop; the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury

Address to the Catholic Institute of Paris (November 19, 2016)

Failure

“Art serves to establish community. It links us with others and with the things around us, in a shared vision and effort.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

Art , Communication , Effort

“Auspicious Prince! at whose nativity
Some royal planet rul'd the southern sky;
Thy longing country's darling and desire;
Their cloudy pillar, and their guardian fire:
Their second Moses, whose extended wand
Divides the seas, and shows the promis'd land:
Whose dawning day, in very distant age,
Has exercis'd the sacred prophet's rage:
The people's pray'r, the glad diviner's theme,
The young men's vision, and the old men's dream!”

John Dryden Absalom and Achitophel

Pt. I, lines 230–239.
Absalom and Achitophel (1681)

Men , People , Age , Dreams

“We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, children… Where nobody dies… In my worlds people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought I was being honest.”

Neil Gaiman book Signal to Noise

Signal to Noise (1992)

Women , Men , Children , People

“Remind yourself of your vision, keep your hopes close yo your heart, be passionate about them and always, always always be true to them”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

All Will be Well (2004)

Hope , Passion , Heart

“Democracy has failed to dampen the right/left ideological schism, which is historically rooted in the early years of separate state creation. And neither the right nor the left is fully able to provide a convincing alternative vision of how democracy in Korean society can robustly develop and thereby enhance its quality. The rightists/conservatives, who continue to retain their predominant power and influence over the state and civil society, still cling to an old-fashioned, outmoded black-and-white ideology derived from the Cold War period. That ideology can no longer provide a political vision and values and norms pertinent to the post-Cold War era as well as a democratized, highly modernized and globalized social environment. Thereby they have failed to play a leading role in enhancing autonomy of civil society vis-à-vis the state, respecting rule of law, and contributing to bringing social integration and inclusiveness.
On the other hand, the leftists have disappointed many people who expected that the entirely new generations which appeared on the political center stage in the course of democratization could play a decisive role in changing Korean politics. In recent years we have witnessed a growing disillusionment with the radical discourses and ideas as well as with their inability to develop a new type of party politics, deal with the socio-economic problems and provide a certain substantive model for ethical life.”

Choi Jang-jip (1943) South Korean political scientist

"The Fragility of Liberalism and its Political Consequences in Democratized Korea" (2009)

Life , War , People , Law

“A true visionary shows me their vision with their actions.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 46

“Poetry is the vision in a man's soul which he translates as best he can with all the means at his disposal.”

Paul Fort (1872–1960) French Poet

Preface to Some Imagist Poets, Constable, 1916

Soul

“We are confident that the normalization of Armenia-Turkey relations can become the greatest input of the recent decades in achieving peace and stability in the South Caucasus. With this vision, we have agreed to move forward without any preconditions, not making our relations contingent upon Turkey’s recognition of the Armenian Genocide. However, if, as many suspect, it is proven that Turkey’s goal is to protract, rather than to normalize relations, we will have to discontinue the process.”

Serzh Sargsyan (1954) Armenian politician, 3rd President of Armenia

Speech by President Serzh Sargsyan in the Chatham House British Royal Institute of International Affairs http://www.president.am/events/news/eng/?search=Chatham+House&id=898 (February 10, 2010)

Peace , Confidence

“The question becomes, I suppose, one of value. Knowing that the Vision’s complete personality/memory/intelligence was downloaded into a computer in Titan (was it Titan? Memory blurs) allowed me to scrape his brain in my VisionQuest story, since everything could be restored with a literal flip of a switch. Should something that can be so easily copied and retrieved be treated as having the same intrinsic value as a human being? Should any of the human Avengers, for instance, ever risk their lives on behalf of the Vision? My vote would be no (as some of you have probably already guessed)—but I would say that even if it were not possible to restore or “save” the Vision in any other way. He is a “toaster.””

John Byrne (1950) American author and artist of comic books

2006
http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=15591
The humanity of the Vision, an android hero whose body was once the original Human Torch

Way , Intelligence , Question , Memory

“Knowledge alone is the being of Nature,
Giving a soul to her manifold features,
Lighting through paths of the primitive darkness,
The footsteps of Truth and the vision of Song.”

Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) United States poet, novelist and travel writer

Kilimandjaro (1852), Stanza 2; later published in The Poetical Works of Bayard Taylor (1907), p. 73.

Truth , Soul , Nature , Knowledge

“A banal fever hallucination, soon obliterated and forgotten; it didn't reappear in M's memory until about thirty years later (on 10 August 1925), as he sat alone on a rainy day in a little inn by the seaside, staring at the wooden floor which had been scored by years of scrubbing, and noticed that the grain had started moving of its own accord (much like the lines on the [imitation] mahogany board of his childhood). As with the mahogany board back then, and as with visions seen between sleeping and waking, the lines formed shifting, changing images, blurred at first but then increasingly precise. Max {Ernst] decided to pursue the symbolism of this compulsory inspiration and, in order to sharpen his meditative and hallucinatory skills, he took a series of drawings from the floorboards. Letting pieces of paper drop at random on the floor, he rubbed over them with a black pencil. On careful inspection of the impressions made in this way, he was surprised by the sudden increase they produced in his visionary abilities. His curiosity was aroused. He was delighted, and began making the same type of inquiry into all sorts of materials, whatever caught his eye – leaves with their ribs, the frayed edges of sacking, the strokes of a palette knife in a 'modern' painting, thread rolling off a spool, and so forth. To quote 'Beyond Painting' These drawings, the first fruits of the frottage technique, were collected under the title 'Histoire Naturell.”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

Quote in 'Biographical Notes. Tissue of truth, Tissue of Lies', 1929; as cited in Max Ernst. A Retrospective, Munich, Prestel, 1991, pp.283/284
1910 - 1935

Way , Quotes , Sleep , Memory

“As long as ministers and laymen labor under the delusion that contemporary Christianity is the same religion that Jesus practiced they will remain immunized against his way of life and will lack the vision.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Source: Jesus or Christianity: A Study in Contrasts (1929), p. 2

Life , Religion , Way

“What the newer landscape artists see in a circle of a hundred degrees in Nature they press together unmercifully into an angle of vision of only forty-five degrees. And furthermore, what is in Nature separated by large spaces, is compressed into a cramped space and overfills and oversatiates the eye, creating an unfavorable and disquieting effect on the viewer.”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter

cited by Timothy Mitchell, (September 1984), in 'Caspar David Friedrich's Der Watzmann: German Romantic Landscape Painting and Historical Geology', 'The Art Bulletin', 66 (3), p. 452–464, doi:10.2307/3050447, JSTOR 3050447
undated

Nature

“Let your self go. If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things. Keeping that awestruck vision of the world ready to hand while dealing with the demands of daily living is no easy exercise, but it is definitely worth the effort, for if you can stay centered, and engaged, you will find the hard choices easier, the right words will come to you when you need them, and you will be a better person. That, I propose, is the secret to spirituality, and it has nothing at all to do with believing in an immortal soul, or in anything supernatural.”

Daniel Dennett book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Breaking the Spell (2006)

Secret , World , Beauty , Exercises

“Mister Speaker, I am not able to understand the mental organization of the man who can consider this bill, and the subject of which it treats, as free from very great difficulties. He must be a man of very moderate abilities, whose ignorance is bliss, or a man of transcendent genius, whom no difficulties can daunt and whose clear vision no cloud can obscure.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1870s, Speech in the House of Representatives (1871)

Understanding

“Overhead, capricious spring clouds began to scud across the sky in mackerel shapes, promising more rain. Garraty turned up his collar and listened to the sound of his feet pounding the pavement. There was a trick to that, a subtle mental adjustment, like having better night vision the longer you were in the dark. This morning the sound of his feet had been lost to him. They had been lost in the tramp of ninety-nine other pairs, not to mention the rumble of the halftrack. But now he heard them easily. His own particular stride, and the way his left foot scraped the pavement every now and then. It seemed to him that the sound of his footfalls had become as loud to his ears as the sound of his own heartbeat. Vital, life and death sound.”

Stephen King book The Long Walk

The Long Walk (1979)

Life , Death , Way , Spring

“Actually Rogers Fry's Vision and Design [1920] was the most lucky discovery for me. I came on it by chance while looking for another book in the Leeds Reference Library. Fry in his essay on 'Negro Sculpture' stressed the 'three-dimensional realization' that characterized African art and its 'truth to material'. More, Fry opened the way to other books and to the realization of the British museum. That was really the beginning.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote of Moore in 'Partisan Review', New York, March-April 1947
1940 - 1955

Truth , Books , Art , Way

“The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Remarks at Amherst College (26 October 1963)
1963

Faith , Reality , Personality

“There is an enormous pressure placed on gay novelists because they are the only spokespeople. The novelist's first obligation is to be true to his own vision, not to be some sort of common denominator or public relations man to all gay people.”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

Quoted by William Goldstein, "Edmund White," Publishers Weekly, (24 September 1982)
Articles and Interviews

People

“Great artists are always far-seeing. They easily avoid the big stumbling blocks of fact. They rely on their own simplicity and vision. It is fact-fetichism that has given us those scores and scores of American books on America, the works of sociologists, anthropologists, topical "problem" hunters, working-parties and statisticians, which in the end leave us empty. Henry James succeeds because he rejects information. He was himself the only information he required.”

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) British writer and critic

"Henry James: Birth of a Hermaphrodite", p. 131
The Tale Bearers: English and American Writers (1980)

Books , Problem

“…As time passed I began to play a game with water's secret powers; I surrendered my so-called free consciousness and allowed the water to take possession of it for a while. Little by little this game turned into a profoundly earnest endeavour, because I realised that one could detach one's own consciousness from the body and attach it to that of the water. When my own consciousness was eventually returned to me, then the water's most deeply concealed psyche often revealed the most extraordinary things to me. As a result of this investigation, a researcher was born who could dispatch his consciousness on a voyage of discovery, as it were. In this way I was able to experience things that had escaped other people's notice, because they were unaware that a human being is able to send forth his free consciousness into those places the eyes cannot see. By practising this blindfolded vision, I eventually developed a bond with mysterious Nature, whose essential being I then slowly learnt to perceive and understand…”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Callum Coats: Living Energies - Viktor Schauberger's brilliant work with Natural Energies Explained (2002)

People , Secret , Way , Game

“Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent.”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

"John Singer Sargent" (1986)
Nothing If Not Critical (1991)

“The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time.”

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) writer and painter

"The Great God Flux".
Source: The Art of Being Ruled (1926), p. 336

People , World , Time , Forgetting

“With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America's exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

"To American Aims," http://books.google.com/books?id=7U4EAAAAMBAJ&q=%22With+the+supermarket+as+our+temple+and+the+singing+commercial+as+our+litany+are+we+likely+to+fire+the+world+with+an+irresistible+vision+of+America's+exalted+purposes+and+inspiring+way+of+life%22&pg=PA97#v=onepage Life magazine (30 May 1960)

Life , World , Way , Singing

“To explore the countercurrents of consciousness in a given circumstance—uncertain promises of other futures; to trace the struggle between spirit and structure in every domain of social and cultural life; to show how vision becomes embodied in institutions and practices and, in being embodied, is both undermined and corrected, but in any event transformed; to reveal how we forfeit our freedom to imagine and reconstruct, and then regain it, even against our will; to commandeer alien wisdom the better to criticize the established order and present experience; to give voice to what has lost a voice or not yet gained one; to display in every department of our experience, from the micro to the macro and from passion to calculation, the revolt of the infinite within us against the finite around us—all this is the work of the humanities when they recognize us for what we are and might become.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

124
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)

Life , Wisdom , Imagination , Freedom

“Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of the things that are to be.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

What I Think (1956), p. 142

Men , Age , Time

“My work embodies little visions of the great intangible.... Some will say he’s gone mad – others will look and say he’s looked in at the lattices of Heaven and come back with the madness of splendor on him.”

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) American artist

letter to Seumus O'Sheel, October 10, 1908, Hartley Archive, Archives of American Art; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 25
1908 - 1920

Madness