Quotes about whole
page 18

“[W]hen a body has experienced any changes, and when after a certain number of transformations it returns to precisely its original state, that is, to that state considered in respect to density, to temperature, to mode of aggregation—let us suppose, I say, that this body is found to contain the same quantity of heat that it contained at first, or else that the quantities of heat absorbed or set free in these different transformations are exactly compensated. This fact has never been called in question. It was first admitted without reflection, and verified afterwards in many cases by experiments with the calorimeter. To deny it would be to overthrow the whole theory of heat to which it serves as a basis. For the rest, we may say in passing, the main principles on which the theory of heat rests require the most careful examination. Many experimental facts appear almost inexplicable in the present state of this theory.”

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) French physicist, the "father of thermodynamics" (1796–1832)

Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)

Question, Appearance, Change

“The cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centers of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single spirit of the whole; and each mirrored in itself aspects of all the others throughout all the cosmical space and time.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 162)

Memory, Time

“The house kept its own time, like the old-fashioned grandfather clock in the living room. People who happened by raised the weights, and as long as the weights were wound, the clock continued ticking away. But with people gone and the weights unattended, whole chunks of time were left to collect in deposits of faded life on the floor.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 32, An Unlucky Bend in the Road

Life, People, Fashion, Time

“He and Marilyn were lovers, but this was never said in so many words. Explicitness about one’s romantic arrangements had apparently been deemed gauche. In my middle-class teen-age world, the whole apparatus of going steady, exchanging ID bracelets, smooching at dances, fighting, breaking up, submitting to the arbitration of friends — that was the point, the public drama.”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

My Women, The New Yorker, 6 June 2005
Articles and Interviews

Age, World, Lovers, Dance

“Forcible marriages, euphemistically called matrimonial alliances, were common throughout the medieval period. Only some of them find mention in Muslim chronicles with their bitter details. Here is one example given by Shams Siraj Afif (fourteenth century). The translation from the original in Persian may be summarised as follows. Firoz Shah was born in the year 709 H. (1309 C. E.). His father was named Sipahsalar Rajjab, who was a brother of Sultan Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq Ghazi. The three brothers, Tughlaq, Rajjab, and Abu Bakr, came from Khurasan to Delhi in the reign of Alauddin (Khalji), and that monarch took all the three in the service of the Court. The Sultan conferred upon Tughlaq the country of Dipalpur. Tughlaq was desirous that his brother Sipahsalar Rajjab should obtain in marriage the daughter of one of the Rais of Dipalpur. He was informed that the daughters of Ranamall Bhatti were very beautiful and accomplished. Tughlaq sent to Ranamall a proposal of marriage. Ranamall refused. Upon this Tughlaq proceeded to the villages (talwandi) belonging to Ranamall and demanded payment of the whole year’s revenue in a lump sum. The Muqaddams and Chaudharis were subjected to coercion. Ranamall’s people were helpless and could do nothing, for those were the days of Alauddin, and no one dared to make an outcry. One damsel was brought to Dipalpur. Before her marriage she was called Bibi Naila. On entering the house of Sipahsalar Rajjab she was styled Sultan Bibi Kadbanu. After the lapse of a few years she gave birth to Firoz shah. If this could be accomplished by force by a regional officer, there was nothing to stop the king.”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

Shams Siraj Afif cited in Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 12

Marriage, People, Beauty, Birth

“First off, the whole point of airborne troops is surprise: you don't know they're coming until they're there. But because Cain arrived 24 hours after the first wave, the surprise was gone. And to make matters worse, the landing zone was some eight miles from the bridge. So, thanks to some incompetent planning by the top brass in England, the Germans knew that Cain and his men were coming, they knew where he landed, they knew where he was going, and they had the wherewithal to do something about it.”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

The Victoria Cross: For Valour (2003)

Men

“Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world. By this view the universe of man-made things simply coincides with the history of art. It then becomes urgent to devise better ways to devise better ways of considering everything men have made. This we may achieve sooner by proceeding from art rather than from use, for if we depart from use alone, all useless things are overlooked, but if we take the desirableness of things as our point of departure, then useful objects are properly seen as things we value more or less dearly.”

George Kubler (1912–1996) American art historian

Source: The Shape of Time, 1982, p. 1

Men, World, Beauty, Art

“John Desmond Bernal (1901-1971) was undoubtedly the most important of the "Western" scientists who, during the twentieth century, accepted the Marxist view of social development. He did more than "accept" it: he tried to sketch the whole history of science from a Marxist viewpoint; he wrote a number of articles explicitly expounding his view of the relation of Marxism to science; and from his student days he played an active role in Communist politics. He has been criticised: during his lifetime, for too readily accepting official Soviet policy, whether relating to society or to science; since his death, for having been too ready to hope that his vision of the use of science for human ends could be implemented by capitalist societies; and at all times, for an allegedly simplistic faith in science as the salvation of mankind.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Brian Vickery (2006) " J.D.Bernal: science and social development http://web.archive.org/web/20100202233156/http://www.lucis.me.uk/bernal.htm" on lucis.me.uk, 2006.

Death, Faith, Hope, History

“If the student got little from his mates, he got little more from his masters. The four years passed at college were, for his purposes, wasted. Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom what the boy disliked most was any school at all. He did not want to be one in a hundred — one per cent of an education. He regarded himself as the only person for whom his education had value, and he wanted the whole of it.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Education, School, Boy, Personality

“When the wicked have power to blow out the sun, that it shines no more; when they have power to bring to a conclusion the operations of the elements, suspend the whole system of nature, and make a footstool of the throne of the Almighty, they may then think to check “Mormonism” in its course, and thwart the unalterable purposes of heaven. Men may persecute the people who believe its doctrines, report and publish lies to bring tribulation upon their heads, earth and hell may unite in one grand league against it, and exert their malicious powers to the utmost, but it will stand as firm and immovable in the midst of it all as the pillars of eternity. Men may persecute the Prophet, and those who believe and uphold him, they may drive the Saints and kill them but this does not affect the truths of “Mormonism” one iota, for they will stand when the elements melt with fervent heat, and the heavens are wrapt up like a scroll and the solid earth is dissolved. “Mormonism” stands upon the eternal basis of omnipotence. Jehovah is the “Mormonism” of this people, their Priesthood and their power; and all who adhere to it will, in the appointed day, come up into the presence of the King Eternal, and receive a crown of life.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 1:88 (June 13, 1852)
1850s

Life, Men, People, Truth

“The interest capitalistic inflation however is like a devouring fire which is not extinguished until it has consumed all the treasures of the world and made the whole of mankind interest-slaves of international finance—or until the interest slavery is broken.”

Gottfried Feder (1883–1941) German economist and politician

Source: The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation (1923), pp. 117-118

World

“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

“The system problem is essentially the problem of the limitation of analytical procedures in science. This used to be expressed by half-metaphysical statements, such as emergent evolution or ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts,’ but has a clear operational meaning.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 2. The Meaning of General Systems Theory, p. 18

Problem, Science, Parting

“You should never eat when you're on the toilet. "But I'm lactose-intolerant, and I've always wanted to enjoy a bowl of Puffins with whole milk!" That's more of an almond milk cereal, but live your dream.”

Daniel Tosh (1975) American stand-up comedian

Happy Thoughts (2011)

Dreams

“Actually, like the vast majority of Australians, I had been born and raised in a city, but in the British imagination at that time the whole of Australia was still the outback, which was somehow equipped with a beach. Later on, this outback beach acquired an Opera House and a row of brick bungalows, one of them occupied by Kylie Minogue.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Source: Memoirs, North Face of Soho (2006), p. 165

Imagination, Time, Housing

“My first encounter with the concept of "information service" came with the reading of The Social Function of Science by Desmond Bernal, first published in 1939-a work that stimulated a whole generation of young scientists to think about the role of science in society, its organisation, its future. In it, he wrote that in every laboratory "there should be someone deputed to watch the whole of current literature for items which might be relevant to the work of the laboratory, and to be able to indicate without loss of time where such items are likely to be found." Such a person "would have to be chosen partly for his comprehensive scientific interests, which need to be much greater than those of the other laboratory workers, and partly for his inclination to systematic thinking." Already I felt that I might be suited to such a role.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 4.

Literature, Thinking, Science, Loss

“Our life is all one human whole, and if we are to have any real knowledge of it we must see it as such. If we cut it up it dies in the process: and so I conceive that the various branches of research that deal with this whole are properly distinguished by change in the point of sight rather than by any division in the thing that is seen. Accordingly, in a former book (Human Nature and Social Order), I tried to see society as it exists in the social nature of man and to display that in its main outlines. In this one the eye is focussed on the enlargement and diversification of intercourse which I have called Social Organization, the individual, though visible, remaining slightly in the background.”

Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American sociologist

Source: Social Organization: a Study of the Larger Mind, 1909, p. vii, Preface , lead sentece

Life, Books, Nature, Knowledge

“But I am no longer trying to formulate a stylised version of anxiety such as we find in the Laocoon group and in so many other sculptures of the Silver Age of antiquity. I feel that these works are always a bit too melodramatic. If you really want to find the sources of my present style [1958] in antiquity, I must confess that you will find them in the remains of the life of the past rather than in those of its art. The fossilized corpses that have been unearthed in Pompeii.... if the whole earth is destroyed in our atomic age, I feel that the human forms which may survive as mere fossils will have become sculptures similar to mine.”

Marino Marini (1901–1980) Italian sculptor

Source: Interview with Edouard Roditi' (1958), p. 88

Life, Age, Art, Feeling

“The idea that an aim can be reasonable for its own sake—on the basis of virtues that insight reveals it to have in itself—without reference to some kind of subjective gain or advantage, is utterly alien to subjective reason, even where it rises above the consideration of immediate utilitarian values and devotes itself to reflection about the social order as a whole.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 4.

Idea

“The philosophical anthropologist … can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

Source: Between Man and Man (1965), p. 148

Personality

“In the past the mood of the comic postcard could enter into the central stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill's could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare's tragedies. That is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn postcards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers' windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them vanish.”

Donald McGill (1875–1962) British artist

George Orwell "The Art of Donald McGill", in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1984) Vol. 2, pp. 194-5.
Criticism

Literature, Mood, Past, Heart

“Psychology is familiar with the “eternal victim,” who exploits this position for disguised aggressions. Also belonging to this category, in a broader sense, are those permanent losers as well as medical and political hypochondriacs who lament that conditions are so terrible that it is a great sacrifice on their part not to kill themselves or emigrate. On the German Left, not least of all under the influence of the sociologized schema of the victim, a certain type of renegade has emerged who feels that it is a dirty trick to have to live in this land without summer and without oppositional forces. Nobody can say that such a viewpoint does not know what it is talking about. Its mistake is that it remains blind to itself. For the accusation becomes bound to misery and magnifies it under the subterfuge of unsuspecting critical observations. With the obstinacy of a Sophist, in aggressive self-reification, many a “critical” consciousness refuses to become healthier than the sick whole.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 58

Feeling, Sense, Summer, Parting

“The state, [Kierkegaard] argues, bears a direct relation to numbers. When a state decays, numbers decline and the state disappears. The whole concept is void. The relation of Christianity to numbers is different. A single Christian gives it reality. Christianity bears indeed an inverse relation to numbers. When all become Christians, the concept of Christianity is void. The concept is indeed a polemical one. One can be a Christian only in opposition. When opposition is suppressed, there is no more sense in saying “Christian.” Christendom has astutely abolished Christianity by making us all Christians. … In Christendom there is not the slightest idea of what Christianity is. People cannot see or understand that Christianity has been abolished by its propagation. Again, history probably does not offer any other example of a religion being abolished by reason of its success.”

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

Source: The Subversion of Christianity (1984), pp. 35-36

People, Religion, History, Idea

“Gravitational force is simple, and a thing by itself, as also are electric and magnetic forces as long as the electric and magnetic poles stand at rest. But as soon as motion comes into the picture, the whole situation is changed. Forces of new kinds come into play, for moving electric charges exert magnetic forces in addition to the electric forces they exert when at rest, while moving magnets exert electric forces in addition to the magnetic forces they exert while at rest. When the exact laws governing these intricate laws had been discovered by a great number of experimenters, Clerk Maxwell succeeded in expressing them in a mathematical form which was both simple and elegant.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Law, Mathematics, Change

“The mass-man has very little spare time, does not live a life that appertains to a whole, does not want to exert himself except for some concrete aim which can be expressed in terms of utility; he will not wait patiently while things ripen; everything for him must provide some immediate gratification; and even his mental life must minister to his fleeting pleasures. That is why the essay has become the customary form of literature, why newspapers are taking the place of books… People read quickly and cursorily.”

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) German psychiatrist and philosopher

Der Massenmensch hat wenig Zeit, lebt kein Leben aus einem Ganzen, will nicht mehr die Vorbereitung und Anstrengung ohne den konkreten Zweck, der sie in Nutzen umsetzt; er will nicht warten und reifen lassen; alles muß sogleich gegenwärtige Befriedigung sein; Geistiges ist zu den jeweils augenblicklichen Vergnügungen geworden. Daher ist der Essay die geeignete Literaturform für alles, tritt die Zeitung an die Stelle des Buches... Man liest schnell.
Man in the Modern Age (1933)

Life, People, Pleasure, Books

“Could you imagine if I said that “I short circuited”? They would be calling for my execution, — electric chair. They’d bring back the electric chair. It would be a whole different ball game if I said it, believe me.”

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

2010s, 2016, August, Speech at rally in Wilmington, North Carolina (August 9, 2016)

Imagination, Game

“Punk: Tonight, the Straight-edge Society becomes the first ever Straight-edge World Unified Tag Team Champions. I came out here for a reason, I came out with a purpose. I'm here to lead my crusade, [Crowd chants you suck] and I've brought my disciples, Luke Gallows and the beautiful Serena with me.
Triple H: Punk, I have been watching Smackdown. And I gotta say, while I'm relieved to know that your straight, this whole I don't drink thing, I don't think anybody really gives a crap, do you know what I mean? [Crowd cheers]
Punk: You're looking at three people who give a crap, and don't try to pretend you know anything about me, or you know anything about Straight-edge, or you know anything about my society at all.
Triple H: No, no, no, no, you're right. I don't know anything about it, I don't get it, Punk, that's the thing. I don't get it, I mean you don't drink, you don't do drugs, you don't smoke. Okay, neither do I. But then again, I don't look like I've been on a week long crack binge with Amy Winehouse! [Serena shakes her head, Punk looks pissed] I'm just saying, have a little pride, man. Pick yourself up, clean yourself off. Maybe take them clippers out of the bag, shave that squirrel off you got on your chin. [Punk grabs his beard and mouths off] Hey, do yourself a favor. Grab a shower, cause I don't know if it's you, Lobotomy Man, or Britney Spears right there, but one of you's got a bad case of swamp butt!
Punk: Alright, are you done? Is amateur comedy hour over? Because I came here to claim those tag titles!”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

January 29, 2010
Friday Night SmackDown

People, World, Beauty, Drink

“My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions. As soon as men will find that in one instant, whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they surely will abide by golden peace.”

Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) Swedish chemist, innovator, and armaments manufacturer

As quoted in The Military Quotation Book (2002) by James Charlton, p. 114.

Men, World, Peace

“Value innovation requires companies to orient the whole system toward achieving a leap in value for both buyers. The simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost.”

W. Chan Kim book Blue Ocean Strategy

Source: Blue Ocean Strategy, 2005, p. 17-18 (2016 extended edition)

“On this level of legitimation, the reflective integration of discrete institutional processes reaches its ultimate fulfilment. A whole world is created. All the lesser legitimating theories are viewed as special perspectives on phenomena that are aspects of this world. Institutional roles become modes of participation in a universe that transcends and includes the institutional order. In our previous example, the 'science of cousinhood' is only a part of a much wider body of theory, which, almost certainly, will contain a general theory of the cosmos and a general theory of man.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

1991, 114
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

World, Universe, Science, Parting

“In the year 1660 being importuned by some friends of his, I undertook so to teach Mr. Daniel Whalley of Northampton, who had been Deaf and Dumb from a Child. I began the work in 1661, and in little more than a year's time, I had taught him to pronounce distinctly any words, so as I directed him… and in good measure to understand a Language and express his own mind in writing; And he had in that time read over to me distinctly (the whole or greatest part of) the English Bible; and did pretty well understand (at least) the Historical part of it. In the year 1662 I did the like for Mr. Alexander Popham… I have since that time (upon the same account) taught divers Persons (and some of them very considerable) to speak plain and distinctly, who did before hesitate and stutter very much; and others, to pronounce such words or letters, as before they thought impossible for them to do: by teaching them how to rectify such mistakes in the formation, as by some natural impediment, or acquired Custome, they had been subject to.”

John Wallis (1616–1703) English mathematician

p, 125
Dr. Wallis's Account of some Passages of his own Life (1696)

Understanding, Nature, Time, Reading

“If species had really arisen by the natural selection for impalpable differences, intermediate forms should abound, and the limits between species should be on the whole indefinite. As this conclusion follows necessarily from the premisses, the selectionists believe and declare that it represents the facts of nature. Difference between species being by axiom indefinite, the differences between varieties must be supposed to be still less definite. Consequently the conclusion that evolution must proceed by insensible transformation of masses of individuals has become an established dogma.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Source: Mendel's Principles of Heredity (1913), p. 3

Nature

“Americans cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die,… They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight. An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on; he will plant a garden and rent it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he will clear a field and leave others to reap the harvest; he will take up a profession and leave it, settle in one place and soon go off elsewhere with his changing desires. If his private business allows him a moment’s relaxation, he will plunge at once into the whirlpool of politics. Then, if at the end of a year crammed with work he has a little spare leisure, his restless curiosity goes with him traveling up and down the vast territories of the United States. Thus he will travel five hundred miles in a few days as a distraction from his happiness. Death steps in in the end and stops him before he has grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes him. At first sight there is something astonishing in this spectacle of so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance. But it is a spectacle as old as the world; all that is new is to see a whole people performing in it.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Two, Chapter XIII.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Two

Death, Men, People, Age

“Behold me, Lucius; moved by thy prayers, I appear to thee; I, who am Nature, the parent of all things, the mistress of all the elements, the primordial offspring of time, the supreme among Divinities, the queen of departed spirits, the first of the celestials, and the uniform manifestation of the Gods and Goddesses; who govern by my nod the luminous heights of heaven, the salubrious breezes of the ocean, and the anguished silent realms of the shades below: whose one sole divinity the whole orb of the earth venerates under a manifold form, with different rites, and under a variety of appellations.”
En adsum tuis commota, Luci, precibus, rerum naturae parens, elementorum omnium domina, saeculorum progenies initialis, summa numinum, regina manium, prima caelitum, deorum dearumque facies uniformis, quae caeli luminosa culmina, maris salubria flamina, inferum deplorata silentia nutibus meis dispenso: cuius numen unicum multiformi specie, ritu vario, nomine multiiugo totus veneratus orbis.

Apuleius book The Golden Ass

Bk. 11, ch. 5; p. 226.
Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass)

God, Nature, Parent, Appearance

“The strongest use of the symbol is to be found in its magical power of doubling the actual universe, and placing by its side an ideal universe, its exact counterpart, with which it can be compared and contrasted, and, by means of curiously connecting fibres, form with it an organic whole, from which modern analysis has developed her surpassing geometry.”

Benjamin Peirce (1809–1880) American mathematician

On the Uses and Transformations of Linear Algebra (1875)

Universe

“Grace and peace from God to you, respected, honoured, wise clement, gracious and beloved Masters: An exceedingly unfortunate affair has happened to me, in that I have been publicly accused before your worships of having reviled you in unseemly words and, be it said with all respect, of having called you heretics, my gracious rulers of the State. I am so far from applying this name to you, that I should as soon think of calling heaven hell. For all my life I have thought and spoken of you in terms of praise and honour, gentlemen of Abtzell, as I do to-day, and, as God favours me, shall do to the end of my days. But it happened not long ago when I was preaching against the Catabaptists that I used these words: 'The Catabaptists are now doing so much mischief to the upright citizens of Abtzell and are showing so great insolence, that nothing could be more infamous. You see, gentle sirs, with what modesty I grieved on your account, because the turbulent Catabaptists caused you so much trouble. Indeed I suspect that the Catabaptists are the very people who have set this sermon against me in circulation among you, for they do many of those things which do not become true Christians. Therefore, gentle and wise sirs, I beg most earnestly that you will have me exculpated before the whole community, and, if occasion arise, that you will have this letter read in public assembly. Sirs, I assure you in the name of God our Saviour, in these perilous times you have never been our of my thoughts and my solicitious anxiety; and if in any way I shall be able to serve you I will spare no pains to do so. In addition to the fact that I never use such terms even against my enemies, let me say that it never entered my mind to apply such insulting epithets to you, pious and wise sirs. Sufficient of this. May God preserve you in safety, and may He put a curb on these unbridled falsehoods which are being scattered everywhere, which is an evidence of some great peril - and may He hold your worships and the whole state in the true faith of Christ@ Take this letter of mine in good part, for I could not suffer that so base a falsehood against me should lie uncontradicted.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Letter to Abtzell February 12, 1526 (vi., 473), ibid, p.250-251

Life, God, Pain, People

“When I listen to this rock and roll and look at you kids, I don't think it's a whole lot different than the Charleston and the Varsity Drag.”

Helen Kane (1904–1966) American actress

1959 interview. https://archive.org/details/HelenKaneInterview

Thinking

“[T]he last 15 years have witnessed the ascent of an alternative view, that of embodied or enactive cognition. This new wave arose because the computationalist doctrine failed to account even for the most elementary coping with the world: walking, perceiving object in a natural setting, imagination. Slowly the cards turned into considering that the basis of mind is the body in coupled action, that is, the sensory-motor circuits establish the organism as viable in situated contexts. From this perspective the brain appears as a dynamical process (and not a syntactic one) of real time variables with a rich self-organizing capacity (and not a representational machinery). So in this sense the mind is not in the head since it is roots in the body as a whole and also in the extended environment where the organism finds itself.”

Francisco Varela (1946–2001) Chilean biologist

Varela (1998) " The Cosmos Letter http://www.expo-cosmos.or.jp/letter/letter12e.html", Expo'90 Foundation, Japan

World, Imagination, Nature, Sense

“There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself; it revolved around words like 'tortured', 'struggle'. 'pain'… I could never see these qualities in paint – I could see them in life and art that illustrates life. But I could not see such conflicts in the materials and I knew that it had to be in the attitude of the painter.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

Source: 21st Century, Robert Rauschenberg, Works, Writings and Interviews, 2006, p. 37

Life, Pain, Art, Painting

“In the midst of all my darkness, baby
You came along to guide me.
You took pity on a lonely man
When you said you'd stand beside me.
I'll never forget you
Or what you've done.
I'll never turn my back on you for anyone.I've got so much love to give you.
Baby, I've got so much love to give you.
Girl, there's more than enough to last a whole life through,
And it's all for you.”

Carole King (1942) Nasa

So Much Love (1966), co-written with Gerry Goffin, first recorded by Ben E. King
Song lyrics, Singles

Love, Life, Girl, Baby

“In approaching a problem a Marxist should see the whole as well as the parts. A frog in a well says, “The sky is no bigger than the mouth of the well.” That is untrue, for the sky is not just the size of the mouth of the well. If it said, “A part of the sky is the size of the mouth of a well”, that would be true, for it tallies with the facts.”

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

“On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism” (December 27, 1935)

Problem, Parting

“The social rootedness of science is often associated with the utility of applied science; this is an error and a dangerous error. But precisely the detachment of the theoretical scientist is rooted in the institutions of his society and in the evaluative choices which underlie those institutions. He can focus his whole attention, bringing every relevant clue to bear, on a problem wholly without appetitive or utilitarian implications, he can put his whole heart and mind into the search for understanding for the sake of understanding alone. How can he do this? First, because he himself has been nourished and disciplined by traditions cultivated within his society which have produced this kind of devoted attention to impersonal goals. And secondly, because the society itself, in its deepest foundations, respects those independently self-sustaining traditions of scientist or scholar.”

Marjorie Grene (1910–2009) American philosopher

The Knower and the Known (1974), pp. 180-181

Error, Search, Understanding, Problem

“Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.”

Alan Bennett (1934) English actor, author

Diary entry for June 27, 1988, p. 177.
Writing Home (1994)

Life, Housing

“People never stop to think about these basic facts when they watch wars and cop shows on the television. People take too much for granted. Each time a gun is fired the whole history of engineering comes into play. Of politics, too: war, assassination, revolution, terror. Guns aren't just history's props and agents: they're history itself, spinning alternate futures in their chamber, hurling the present from their barrel, casting aside the empty shells of the past.”

Tom McCarthy (writer) book Déjà vu

Source: Remainder (2005), Ch. 11.

War, People, History, Thinking

Chittaranjan Das (1870–1925) Indian politician and leader of the Swaraj Party

Speech in defence of Aurobindo Ghosh in the Maincktala Bomb Case. The judgement was issued in 1909. Source: Collected Works of Deshbandhu.
Legal

Life, Law, Dreams, Idea

“Contemporary art -- the field we are usually working in because there's money -- is mostly concerned with systems or systematic concepts. In the context of their work, artists adapt models of individual art-specific or economic or political systems like in a laboratory, to reveal the true nature of these systems by deconstructing them. So would it be fair to say that by their chameleon-like adaptation they are attempting to generate a similar system? Well… the corporate change in the art market has aged somewhat in the meantime and looks almost as old as the 'New Economy'. Now even the last snotty brat has realized that all the hogwash about the creative industries, sponsoring, fund-raising, the whole load of bullshit about the beautiful new art enterprises, was not much more than the awful veneer on the stupid, crass fanfare of neo-liberal liberation teleology. What is the truth behind the shifting spheres of activity between computer graphics, web design and the rest of all those frequency-orientated nerd pursuits? A lonely business with other lonely people at their terminals. And in the meantime the other part of the corporate identity has incidentally wasted whole countries like Argentina or Iceland. That's the real truth of the matter.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Interview on Furtherfield http://www.furtherfield.org/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-1

Money, People, Truth, Age

“When the brain is whole, the unified consciousness of the left and right hemispheres adds up to more than the individual properties of the separate hemispheres.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

New Mindset on Consciousness (1987)

“The whole history of Israel, its ritual and its government, is explicable only as it is typical of the spiritual Israel, of the sacrifice on Calvary, of the precious blood which alone can wash away sin.”

Abbott Eliot Kittredge (1834–1912) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 69.

History

“The Augustan constitution remains one of the major products of the human intelligence. It was a whole into which the parts fitted smoothly, but both whole and parts were elastic and capable of swift adaptation to unforeseen conditions. It was elaborate, but that was necessary, both because of its origin and its purpose.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Augustus (1937)

Intelligence, Parting

“God takes such great pleasure in the sanctity of His saints that in the interests of a few, He often allows the whole Church to suffer great loss.”

John of St. Samson (1571–1636)

From, Light on Carmel: An Anthology from the Works of Brother John of Saint Samson, O.Carm.

God, Pleasure, Suffering, Loss

“Look at Unix. It was essentially open source before anyone invented the term, and that caused a large number of ways to solve the same problem and left the market to sort them out, which they didn't (the market never will sort out bad quality in anything but the single most important property of the products), and Unix got itself into a position where some horribly demented crapware from Microsoft could compete with it and fool a whole bunch of people for a while.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: source access vs dynamism http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/e10a8b07a244d7fa (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People, Fools, Way, Problem

“All the absurdity and hope are the stimulants to create. You make art to find a little hole to go on. You go through the whole to find the world again, and the absurdity is that still, somehow it is the same... Hopelessness and hope are the same. It's a very thin line you don't see any more. I don't believe in that line between hopelessness and hope today.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

in 'The eye of the beholder', Carlo McCormick
Karel Appel – the complete sculptures,' (1990) not-paged

World, Hope, Art

““Do you actually hope to convert the whole of mankind?”
“Belay that! Anyhow, if you mean, Do we hope to make everybody into copies of us? The answer is, No. Mind, I’m not in Parliament or Admiralty, but I follow debates and I read the philosophers. One trouble with the old machine culture was that, by its nature, it did force people to become more and more alike. Not only did this fail in the end—disastrously—but to the extent it succeeded, it was a worse disaster.” Lohannaso smote the rail with a mighty fist. “Damnation, Thomas! We need all the diversity, all the assorted ways of living and looking and thinking, we can get!””

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 11 (p. 119)

People, Hope, Way, Nature

“May we all come to realize that education and the humanities should be valued for nurturing our minds and society as a whole, and not only as a means to build future careers.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

ACM Computers in Entertainment (Volume 5, Issue 2, May 2007)

Education, Future

“The whole idea of men creating perfect robot women for their own pleasure, it happens every day. The most "beautiful" women you see in public, none of them are for real. They're just men perpetuating their perverted stereotypes of women. Just the oldest story in the world. There's a penis on every page of Cosmopolitan magazine if you know where to look.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Source: Haunted (2005), Chapter 15, Speaking Bitterness, A Story by Comrade Snarky

Women, Men, Pleasure, World

“He wasn't just a genius, he had the genius's impatience with the whole idea of doing something again. He reinvented an art form, exhausted its possibilities, and just left it. There is always something frightening about that degree of inventiveness… He didn't lose his powers. He just lost interest in proving that he possessed them.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Vale, Peter Cook' ( The Pembroke College, Cambridge, Society Annuel Gazette http://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/odds+ends/petercook.html, September 1995) Essays and reviews

Art, Idea

“I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

As quoted in Ingmar Bergman Directs (1972) by John Simon

“In the whole period, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, the greatest American poet is Stuart Merrill.”

Stuart Merrill (1863–1915) American poet, who wrote mostly in the French language

Kenneth Rexroth, as quoted in Ramez Qureshi on Stuart Merrill's The White Tomb: Selected Writing http://home.jps.net/~nada/merrill.htm About

“Karma is simply the wholeness of a cause, or first action, and its effect, or fruition, which then becomes another cause. In fact, one karmic cause can have many fruitions, all of which can cause thousands more creations. Just as a handful of seed can ripen into a full field of grain, a small amount of karma can generate limitless effects.”

Khandro Rinpoche (1967) Buddhist lama

This Precious Life (2003), p. 95

“The question whether we have not some knowledge independent of any and all experience — whether there must not, unavoidably, be some knowledge a priori, some knowledge which we come at simply by virtue of our nature — is really the paramount question, around which the whole conflict in philosophy concentrates, and on the decision of which the settlement of every other question hangs. To cast the career of a philosophy upon a negative answer to it, as if this were a matter of course, — which the English school from Hobbes onward has continually done, — is to proceed not only upon a petitio, but upon a delusion regarding the security of the road.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Limits of Evolution, p.17

School, Question, Nature, Knowledge

“We agree to recognise Lithuanian independence on condition that the desire of the Lithuanians for a military convention and a customs, monetary and postal union with Germany, communicated to us some time ago by a Lithuanian delegation, still remains. For to be candid, the idea of full independence for these peripheral countries seems to me to be purely theoretical and impracticable…The whole development of world politics shows that we have not only great and powerful individual countries like Germany on the one hand and Britain and France on the other, but associations of States fighting against each other…I do not believe in Wilson's universal League of Nations, I think that after the peace it will burst like a soap bubble. Great and powerful complexes of nations with hundreds of millions of inhabitants, armies of millions of men and exports amounting to thousands of millions, will be confronting each other. In the circumstances such small fractional nationalities will not be able to exist in complete independence, without seeking to lean on one side or the other. Just as there is no independent Belgium in the sense that it gravitates towards one side or the other, so it is not possible to conceive of a completely independent Lithuania, Balticum or Poland without that provisio.”

Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

1910s, Speech in the Reichstag, 18 March 1918

Men, World, Peace, Communication

“The test of every act of creativity: Does it help you to enthusiastically, passionately, whole-heartedly and gratefully Embrace all your life? This, I believe, is the basic purpose of all the arts—and thus should be the basic Intention of every artist.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: A Few Words on Art (Just a Few) (2010), p. 2

Life, Art, Passion, Help

“The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.”

John Millington Synge (1871–1909) Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore

Pt. I.
The Aran Islands (1907)

Death, Pain, War, People

“Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law" because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Isaac H. Tiffany (4 April 1819)
1810s

Law

“I'd thought that what I'd like to do is to a translation where I don't have to think about academic considerations. Scholarly considerations. I'll just think about how to present – this is Penguins, after all – how to present this book in such a way that I do the whole of it but at the same time it's enjoyable for the English reader, if possible, and they can get some of the pleasure out of it that I got myself.”

David Hawkes (sinologist) (1923–2009) British sinologist

Source: Interview, 1998, p. 148

Pleasure, Books, Way, Thinking

“I think that there is a whole lot turning upside down at rock radio -- not -- excuse me, talk radio particularly. Radio as we know it is pretty much changing completely. You know, the diversity of the taste of the folks that are watching the show right now is way more than what is available in the little Motorola in your car today. And where are the new personalities? Where is the new Stern, somebody who has that much impact? Where is the new.”

David Lee Roth (1954) Rock vocalist; lead singer with Van Halen

Neil Cavuto (June 16, 2006) "Interview with David Lee Roth", Share Your World With Neil Cavuto, Fox News Network.

Cars, Way, Thinking, Change

“These computing machines had already been designed, and some built, by {[w|Vannevar Bush}}, Norbert Wiener, and others, and were almost ready-made for the job. These scientists, as well as others such as von Neumann, Shannon and Bigelow, were in a position to see that machines of an electronic kind were ideally suited to carry out the whole of the operations of range-finding and location without any human intervention whatever.
These electronic computing machines were already developed to a very high degree of efficiency for the solution of mathematical equations, and some technical difficulties had led to the suggestion that a process of scanning, similar to that used in television, might be incorporated into the computer. Another innovation was the use of binary notation rather than decimal notation as in the early Harvard Mark I computer.”

Frank Honywill George (1921–1997) British psychologist

Source: The Brain As A Computer (1962), p.18

Mathematics

“Those things, which are experienced to be in their whole nature, or in their most remarkable properties, so contrary to animal life, as in a small quantity to prove destructive to it, are called Poisons: whether they are hurtful by being taken inwardly at the mouth, or communicated to the body externally by a wound.”

Richard Mead (1673–1754) British physician

Source: A Mechanical Account of Poisons (1702), p. xxi

Life, Communication, Nature, Animals

“The words synergy (syn-ergy) and energy (en-ergy) are companions. Energy studies are familiar. Energy relates to differentiating out subfunctions of nature, studying objects isolated out of the whole complex of Universe—for instance, studying soil minerals without consideration of hydraulics or of plant genetics. But synergy represents the integrated behaviors instead of all the differentiated behaviors of nature's galaxy systems and galaxy of galaxies.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

105.00 http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s01/p0100.html 1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), "Synergy" onwards

Behavior, Nature, Study, Universe

“The business of art is no longer the communication of thoughts or feelings which are to be conceptually ordered, but a direct participation in an experience. The whole tendency of modern communication…is towards participation in a process, rather than apprehension of concepts.”

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

Letter to Harold Adam Innis (14 March 1951), published in Essential McLuhan (1995), edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, p. 73
1950s

Art, Feeling, Communication, Business

“If one perceives of it all – the entire War or even life as a whole – as a scene in the theater of 'infinity', many things are much easier to bear.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Beckmann's Diary, 12 September 1940, Amsterdam; as quoted on: 'Arts in exile' http://kuenste-im-exil.de 1940s

Life, War

“A woman's whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world: it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul on the traffic of affection; and if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless — for it is a bankruptcy of the heart.”

Washington Irving book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

"The Broken Heart".
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)

Life, World, Soul, History

“[R]adical Islam is heir, above all, to Nazism. The destruction of the World Trade Center was meant not only to wreak terror. Like the smashing of the Bamiyan Buddhas, it was meant to obliterate greatness and beauty, elegance and grace. These artifacts represented civilization embodied in stone or steel. They had to be destroyed. This worship of death and destruction is a nihilism of a ferocity unlike any since the Nazis burned books, then art, then whole peoples. Goebbels would have marvelled at the recruitment tape for al Qaeda, a two-hour orgy of blood and death: image after image of brutalized Muslims shown in various poses of victimization, followed by glorious images of desecration of the infidel-mutilated American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of the USS Cole, mangled bodies at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2000s, 2001, The Enemy is not Islam. It is Nihilism (2001)

Death, People, Books, World

“I think that if we would, every evening, come to our Master's feet, and tell Him where we have been, what we have done, what we have said, and what were the motives by which we have been actuated, it would have a salutary effect upon our whole conduct.”

Edward Payson (1783–1827) American religious leader

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 466.

Motivation, Thinking

“For in the cross of Christ, as in a splendid theatre, the incomparable goodness of God is set before the whole world.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Re John 13:31 (Torrance 1959 edition).
St John

God, World, Christ

“The abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry – and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

Way

“… we have a situation in which millions of vehicles, each a miracle of often unnecssary complication, are hurtling in all directions under the impulse of anything up to 200 horsepower. Many of them are the size of small houses and contain a couple of tons of sophisticated alloys — yet often carry a single passenger. They can travel at a hundred miles an hour, but are lucky if they average forty. In one lifetime they have consumed more irreplaceable fuel than has been used in the whole previous history of mankind. The roads to support them, inadequate though they are, cost as much as a small war; the analogy is a good one, for the casualties are on the same scale.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

Source: 1970s, Chapter 3 (The Future of Transport) in Profiles of the Future (7th printing, 1972)

War, Travel, History, Support

“The fundamental thesis of ordinary conventionalism, represented for instance by Poincare, states that there are problems which cannot be solved by appeal to experience unless one introduces a certain convention, since only such a convention, together with experimental data, makes it possible to solve the problem in question. The judgements which combine to make up such a solution are thus not forced on us by empirical data alone, but their adoption depends partly on our recognition, since the said convention which co-determines the solution of the problem can be arbitrarily changed by us so that as a result we obtain different judgements.
In the present paper it is my intention to make that thesis of ordinary conventionalism more general and more radical. Namely, we want to formulate and to prove the theorem that not only some, but all the judgements which we accept and which combine to make up our image of the world are not univocally determined by empirical data, but depend on the choice of the conceptual apparatus by means of which we make mappings of those empirical data. We can, however, choose this or that conceptual apparatus, which will change our whole image of the world.”

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963) Philosopher, logician

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, "Das Weltbild und die Begriffsapparatur", in Erkenntnis, 1934, Vol. 4, p. 259; as cited in: Schaff (1962;81-82)

World, Question, Problem, Change

“There was this whole thing of ‘Jack's voice breaking’ about three or four months ago, and I think I sort of laughed at the whole thing, 'cause they sort of made out like I couldn't sing anymore, and my whole life was over, which it wasn't.”

Jack Vidgen (1997) Australian singer

Today Tonight, Jack Vidgen's rising star http://au.news.yahoo.com/today-tonight/celebrity/article/-/13385033/jack-vidgens-rising-star/, 10 April, 2012.

Life, Thinking, Singing

“Alas for poor Jadunath Sarkar, who must have turned in his grave if he were buried. For, after reading his History of Aurangzib, one would be tempted to ask, if the temple-breaking policy of Aurangzeb is a disputed point, is there a single fact in the whole recorded history of mankind which may be taken as undisputed? A noted historian has sought to prove that the Hindu population was better off under the Muslims than under the Hindu tributaries or independent rulers.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Calcutta Quran Petition

The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)

History, Reading

“I save myself in a church. Dark, empty. Lights flickering before icons. One sings everything that one has sung before in the past. Some black figures - and the heart is heavy. The tears take one's breath away and the past rises up again. Home.... in Peter's office [Marianne's brother, governor of Kovno Province, Lithuania], my entire soul starts to ache for him, for that battle for everything that is sweet and good, which is called Russian life. Empty, empty in the house, no one. Whoever comes - doesn't get his fill of him. And then such a heated rush of love rips out of the [visitor's] heart, begging one's pardon and forgetting the trouble behind, that the whole house swells.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

1906 - 1911 Source: a letter to Alexej von Jawlensky, between December 1909 and Spring 1910; as quoted in 'Ambiguity of Home: Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin's Return Home, c. 1909', Adrienne Kochman http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring06/52-spring06/spring06article/171-ambiguity-of-home-identity-and-reminiscence-in-marianne-werefkins-return-home-c-1909

Love, Life, Home, Soul

“From Taylor and his associates, on the one hand, and Allen, Bruere, and Cleveland, on the other, there extends a firm resolve to enlarge the domain of measurement, an unbroken missionary endeavor to extend the suzerainty of "the facts." The pioneers began with inquiries into the proper speed of cutting tools and the optimum height for garbage trucks; their followers seek to place large segments of social life or even the whole of it upon a scientific basis.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Source: The Administrative State, 1948, p. 182

Life, Speed

“I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.”

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) English writer and social critic and a Journalist

Comment while on an American tour (March 1842), as quoted in Dickens (1949) by Hesketh Pearson, Ch. 8

Idea

“Those who decry the rule of law as a Western principle or an imported construct, misunderstand the concept. It is about abiding by a set of standards for the well-being of society as a whole.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Speech to the Fiji Law Society, 2 July 2005.

Law

“There is a fundamental difference, however, between asking to be permitted to keep a vegetative relative on costly machinery, and asking the taxpayers or society as a whole to pay for such machinery.”

Jacob M. Appel (1973) American author, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic

"Rational Rationing vs. Irrational Rationing" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacob-m-appel/rational-rationing-vs-irr_b_622057.html, The Huffington Post (2010-06-23)

“But, good God, what is this when compared with that deep and true music of the wise, whereby the proportions of natural things are investigated, the harmonical concord and the qualities of the whole world are revealed, by which also connected things are bound together, peace established between conflicting elements, and whereby each star is perpetually suspended in its appointed place by its weight and strength, and by the harmony of its lucent spirit”

Robert Fludd (1574–1637) British mathematician and astrologer

Robert Fludd, cited in: Waite (1887, p. 291)

God, World, Peace, Music

“There had been fan clubs before. The Merry Marvel Marching Society shamelessly stole its name from the Mary Marvel Marching Society. I was, myself, a member of the Supermen of America. What was key to these, tho, was that the fans who belonged were not truly interconnected. There was a sense of being part of a greater whole, but the hobby itself remained largely solitary. Which, the history of the industry seems to teach, was a good thing.”

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

2007
http://www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=19499&PN=0&TPN=1
On the idea of comic fans utilizing the Internet to interact and share their hobby with each other

History, Sense, Parting

“Well, I stood dropping a coin into the pit of a well.
And I would throw my whole billfold if I thought it would help.”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)

Help

“Against all these assertions Grotius published to the world a demonstration that no such rights could exist. His whole argument was mainly a development of two postulates. The first of these was that the right of nations to communicate with one another had been universally recognized; that it was based on a fundamental law of humanity; that the liberty of the sea being necessary to enable nations to communicate with one another, it could not be taken away by any power whatever. The second was that every attempt to make an ocean highway a monopoly of any single nation is forbidden by the immensity of the sea, its lack of stability, its want of fixed limits. This argument in places seemed thin. The book [Mare Liberum], after the custom of the time, was filled with an array—far more than sufficient—of learned citations; but its most significant feature—that which went to make it the herald of a new epoch—was that it took its stand upon the inalienable rights of mankind,—that it mainly deduced these rights neither from revelation nor from national enactments, but from natural law as ascertained by human reason.”

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 61

Books, World, Law, Communication

“By promoting justice and thus the interests of the international community as a whole, a state will be able to make its influence over others sustainable and achieve its own national interest.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Neo-statecraft and Meta-geopolitics (2009), p.147

Justice, Communication

“Baseball players have to go in front of a grand jury and say, "Yeah, I did cocaine. Can you blame me? It's a slow goddamn game! Come on Jack! Standing out in left field for seven innings, and there's a long white line going down to home plate! I see the guy putting it out going "Heh heh heh heh!!!!" And that damn organ music too, the whole [does intro to "Charge!"]! Third base coach is always doing this…[wiping nose, fidgeting around]. When he's doing that, I don't know whether to slide or do a line! People sliding into home plate head first, umpire goes, "You're out!"”

Robin Williams (1951–2014) American actor and stand-up comedian

"No, baby, I'm up now! Ha ha ha!"
A Night at the Met (1986)

People, Music, Guy, Home

“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it — this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, "Write from experience, and experience only," I should feel that this was a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!"”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

The Art of Fiction http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html (1884)

Life, People, Education, Way

“It may seem sometimes that the whole world is against me and the reason I have failed in life is because of fate—that I was destined to fail, and there was nothing I could have done. But that's not true. There was plenty I could have done. Why didn't I do something?”

John S. Hall (1960) Poet, author, singer, lawyer

March 15
Quotes from Daily Negations (2007)

Life, Fate, World

“The art and mystery of banks… is established on the principle that 'private debts are a public blessing.' That the evidences of those private debts, called bank notes, become active capital, and aliment the whole commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of the United States. Here are a set of people, for instance, who have bestowed on us the great blessing of running in our debt about two hundred millions of dollars, without our knowing who they are, where they are, or what property they have to pay this debt when called on; nay, who have made us so sensible of the blessings of letting them run in our debt, that we have exempted them by law from the repayment of these debts beyond a give proportion (generally estimated at one-third). And to fill up the measure of blessing, instead of paying, they receive an interest on what they owe from those to whom they owe; for all the notes, or evidences of what they owe, which we see in circulation, have been lent to somebody on an interest which is levied again on us through the medium of commerce. And they are so ready still to deal out their liberalities to us, that they are now willing to let themselves run in our debt ninety millions more, on our paying them the same premium of six or eight per cent interest, and on the same legal exemption from the repayment of more than thirty millions of the debt, when it shall be called for.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

ME 13:420
1810s, Letters to John Wayles Eppes (1813)

People, Law, Art

“Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book Wakefield

"Wakefield" (1835) from Twice Told Tales (1837, 1851)

World, Fear

“A tiny remnant of a big thing is better than a whole little thing.”

Abraham Isaac Kook book Orot

Orot Hatchiah 14.
Orot

“The experience and ideas of contemporary science lead us to the only integral, the only monistic understanding of the universe. It appears before us as an in nitely unfolding fabric of all types of forms and levels of organization, from the unknown elements of ether to human collectives and star systems. All these forms, in their interlacement and mutual struggle, in their constant changes, create the universal organizational process, in nitely split in its parts, but continuous and unbroken in its whole.”

Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) Physician, philosopher, writer

Source: Essays in tektology, 1980, p. 6

Star, Idea, Understanding, Universe

“I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

“It was so frightening at the time to be seventeen and have heart monitors hooked up to you. That was the moment the songwriter in me was born. I discovered a whole other side of me. I came home that night and started writing lyrics. I discovered it all at once: It was like opening up a lockbox, and inside was a depth that I didn't even know I had as a person, or a writer — incredible creativity and vision and neurosis, complete neurosis. They all go together in a package.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

On the effects of having a critical cardiac arrhythmia at age 17 Hiatt, Brian (2006-09-21), "My Big Mouth Strikes Again" http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/11515443/john_mayer_speaks_listen_to_his_hilarious_takes_on_paris_hilton_brad__angelina_living_in_ny. Rolling Stone. (1009): 66-70

Home, Time, Heart, Personality

“Gently rising hills block the view into the distance; line the wishes and desires of the children, who enjoy the blissful moments of the present without wanting to know what lies beyond. Bushes in bloom, nourishing herbs, and sweet-smelling flowers surround the quiet clear stream in which the pure blue of the cloudless sky is reflected like the glorious image of God in the souls of the children... There is no stone to be seen here, no withered branch, no fallen leaves. The whole of nature breathes, peace, joy, innocence and life.”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter

Quote from Friedrich's Diary entry, written Aug. 1803 at Loschwitz; as cited in Religious Symbolism in Caspar David Friedrich, by Colin J. Bailey https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:1m2225&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS-DOCUMENT.PDF, paper; Oct. 1988 - Edinburgh College of Art, pp. 11-12 Friedrich is describing here his first composition of the painting 'Spring', 1803 (a later version he painted in 1808, viewed and described then by Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert) 1794 - 1840

Life, God, Children, Peace

Quotes about whole page 18

Quotes about whole
page 18