Quotes about witness
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“The basis of correct knowledge is correct perception, correct deduction and correct witness (or accurate evidence).
One of the most revolutionary realizations to which the occult student has to adjust himself is the appreciation that the mind is a means whereby knowledge is to be gained...”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect: a paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with commentary by Alice A. Bailey, (1927)

Knowledge

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Source: The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect: a paraphrase of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with commentary (1927)

Knowledge

“And the world said, Child, you will not be missed.
You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road;
Your death is a table in a book.
You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you:
Man is the judgment of the world.”

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

"Variations," lines 40-44
Blood for a Stranger (1942)

World, Death, Heart, Books

“Some, in their discourse, desire rather commendation of wit, in being able to hold all arguments, than of judgment, in discerning what is true; as if it were a praise, to know what might be said, and not, what should be thought.”

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

The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans (1625), Of Discourse

“Dissimulations is but a faint kind of policy, or wisdom; for it asketh a strong wit, and a strong heart, to know when to tell truth, and to do it. Therefore it is the weaker sort of politics, that are the great dissemblers.”

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

The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans (1625), Of Simulation And Dissimulation

Truth, Strong, Wisdom, Heart

“The study and practice of poetry can equip you to 'boldly go where no man has gone before,' but it's not enough to go there—you have to be able to bear witness. Without witnessing, experience dissolves into nothing.”

Ariana Reines (1982) American writer

On the practice of poetry in “Ariana Reines Knows That Not All Surrender Is Bad” https://nylon.com/ariana-reines-sand-book-interview in Nylon Magazine (2019 Oct 15)

Study

“It is, of course, men who are more likely to inhibit themselves for the sake of appearing to be sensible and dependable.[…] If pressed, I will agree that more women than men wish to appear wonderfully sensitive and intuitive, and may stop being realistic […] in order to deceive themselves and other people. On the other hand, women in general tend to be more realistic and yet in certain matters more open-minded than men, more ready to resist that pressure of opinion. They are less likely to be put into blinkers by ideas.
Moreover […] as a rule the average woman notices far more than the average man; she has a better eye for detail than he has; she makes a more alert witness.”

J.B. Priestley (1894–1984) English writer

Source: Man and Time (1964), Ch. 8, p. 182

Dependency, People, Appearance, Idea

“What is new today is not globalization as such—we are too late for that. Rather, what is unique to our times is the widespread awareness of global processes among increasingly fragmented populations. That awareness grows everywhere, largely because of the increase in both the size and the velocity of global flows. Capital, populations, and information move in much greater mass and at increasing speed. At the same time, most human beings continue to act locally.

Thus, we are witnessing the rise of what I call "a fragmented globality."”

Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949–2012) Haitian academic and anthropologist

World histories and local histories are at once becoming both increasingly intertwined and increasingly contradictory. The twenty-first century is likely to be marked by the speed and brutality of these contradictions.
Theorizing a Global Perspective (1996)

Time, Speed

“O witness of the soul naturally Christian.”

Tertullian (155–220) Christian theologian

Original: (la) O testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae
Source: Apologeticus pro Christianis, Chapter 17

Soul, Nature

“When day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry. A sea we must wade.
We’ve braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace.
In the norms and notions of what "just is" isn’t always justice.
And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.”

Amanda Gorman The Hill We Climb

The Hill We Climb (2020)

Peace, Loss, Justice, Light

“Persons whom I saw thirty years ago and with whom I was intimate now appear on the page, and this compels me to declare that The Story of the Stone is a book of the deepest feelings and the truest words. Unless, however, one has in fact experienced such events or been deluded by such feelings, reading it is like "chewing wax" absentmindedly, never understanding the miraculous wonders of what one has witnessed.”

Zhiyanzhai

Comment in the 1760 manuscript of Dream of the Red Chamber, as quoted by Anthony C. Yu in Rereading the Stone (Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 7

Reading, Understanding, Personality, Appearance

“All of us are responsible for the communication we make, for the information we share, for the control that we can exert over fake news by exposing it. All of us are to be witnesses of the truth: to go, to see and to share.”

Felix Femi Ajakaye (1962) Nigerian catholic priest

National Unrest: Address the nation now – Catholic Bishop tells Buhari https://dailypost.ng/2021/05/16/national-unrest-address-the-nation-now-catholic-bishop-tells-buhari/ (May 16, 2021)

Truth, Making love, Communication

“Sometimes in our activist and production-oriented American society and culture we succumb to pragmatism looking at the Christian life and our sharing in the apostolic mission of the Church as a matter being able to “do” things for Christ, the Church or others. In fact, the Christian life is a gift and a call to truth and love given to us by God. It is first a matter of "being," of simply existing as a person created by God and redeemed by him in Christ. We live out this truth and love in specific ways according to our age, talents, and unique vocation. At no point are the sacraments about what we have done or promise to do for God. They are God's free gift of grace to us. At the same time, these gifts of love entail an obligation to bear witness to God's love in word and deed by our collaboration in freedom with the grace given.”

Álvaro Corrada del Río (1942) Puerto Rican Catholic bishop

Pastoral Reflection on the Sacrament of Confirmation http://www.americancatholicpress.org/Bishop_Corrada_Pastoral_Reflecton%20_on_Confirmation.html (October 7, 2005)

God, Time, Freedom, Personality

“The Gospel is, first of all, confirmed by the witness of life, the testimony of those who let themselves daily convert by the Lord. More than technics, it is the announcement of the infinite love of God’s mercy by concrete people. It is God, present in the person who announces and in the heart of the one who listens to the announcement, and that is where the Gospel draws its effectiveness.”

Nuno Brás (1963) Portuguese priest

Europe, Evangelization, and Civilizational Suicide https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2015/12/28/europe-evangelization-and-civilizational-suicide/ (December 28, 2015)

God, Drawing, Personality, People

“The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”

Eden Phillpotts (1862–1960) British author

Waiting, Universe

“It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit to forgive them for having witnessed your own.”

Jessamyn West (1902–1984) American author

Forgiveness

“A thing well said will be wit in all languages.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

“One of the effects, among others, of modern science has been that of mortally wounding religion by posing in concrete terms problems which esoterism alone can resolve and which remain unresolved because esoterism is not heeded and is heeded less now than ever. Faced by these new problems, religion is disarmed, and it borrows clumsily and gropingly the arguments of the enemy, and this obliges it to falsify its own perspective imperceptibly and disavow itself more and more; its doctrine is certainly not affected, but false opinions borrowed from its repudiators corrode it insidiously "from within", as witnessed by modernist exegesis, the demagogic leveling of the liturgy, Teilhardian Darwinism or the "sacred art" of surrealist and "abstract" persuasion.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

[2006, Light on the Ancient Worlds, World Wisdom, 27, 978-0-941532-72-3]
Miscellaneous, Religion

Falseness, Problem, Science, Religion

“The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I’m a parent. And I think anybody who has children, you come to this realization, you know—what’ll it be? Alienated, cynical intellectual? Or slack-jawed, half-wit consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high? There is not much choice in there, you see. And we all want our children to be well adjusted; unfortunately, there’s nothing to be well adjusted to!”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Thinking, Parent, Children, Stupidity

“The fact that Allah has blessed you to witness another Ramadan is proof that Allah wants to see you in His VIP list to enter Jannah.”

Yasir Qadhi (1975) Pakistani-American preacher and imam

“I was a witness of two civil wars and their ghastly and tragic consequences, and I learnt, as never before, to value the freedom of British political traditions.”

Hugh Gaitskell (1906–1963) British politician

Chatham News (28 December 1934), quoted in Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell: A Political Biography (1979), p. 59

Freedom, War

“We are witnessing the rebirth of nationalist ideology which violates human rights and international law under the cover of humanitarian slogans about protecting minorities. We recognize this all too well from the 1930s.”

Bronisław Komorowski (1952) Polish politician, president of Poland

"Polish president warns in Berlin of rebirth of 1930s nationalism" in Reuters https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-poland-president/polish-president-warns-in-berlin-of-rebirth-of-1930s-nationalism-idUSKBN0H51C420140910 (10 September 2014)

Law

“A warrior considers himself already dead, so there is nothing for him to lose. The worst has already happened to him, therefore he's clear and calm; judging him by his acts or by his words, one would never suspect that he has witnessed everything.”

Carlos Castaneda book The Wheel of Time

Source: The Wheel of Time: Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death and the Universe], (1998), Quotations from "Tales of Power" (Chapter 10)

Dead

“A warrior must learn to make every act count, since he is going to be here in this world for only a short while, in fact, too short for witnessing all the marvels of it.”

Carlos Castaneda book The Wheel of Time

Source: The Wheel of Time: Shamans of Ancient Mexico, Their Thoughts About Life, Death and the Universe], (1998), Quotations from "Journey to Ixtlan" (Chapter 8)

Learning, World

“The sworn enemies of Hindu society have taken advantage of this enervation of the Hindus. They feel instinctively that threats coupled with some show of violence are sure to frighten the Hindus out of their wits, and make them yield almost anything including precious parts of their homeland.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Source: Defence of Hindu Society (1983)

Feeling, Parting

“No one ever landed on English soil with more hatred in his heart for a race than I did for the English, and, on this platform, are present English friends who can bear witness to the fact, but the more I lived among them, saw how the machine is working, the English national life, mixed with them, found where the heart-beat of the nation was, the more I loved them. There is none among you here present, my brothers, who loves the English people more than I do. You have to see what is going on there, and you have to mix with them. As the philosophy, our national philosophy of the Vedanta, has summarised all misfortune, all misery from that one cause, ignorance, herein also we must understand that the difficulties that arise between us and the English people are mostly due to that ignorance; we do not know them, they do not know us.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Source: Spoken on his return to India from England, as recorded in From Colombo to Almora (1904), p. 221

Understanding, Love, Life, People

“Religious faith and its practice cannot be taken for granted and we must be resolved in our defense of our cherished freedom to practice our faith, especially in the context of a secular culture which many times is opposed to its basic beliefs. History has witnessed many instances of blatant disregard for religious liberty which has resulted in devastating persecution.”

Gerald Barbarito (1950) Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Palm Beach, Florida

Source: This 'Fortnight for Freedom' https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/column/52207/this-fortnight-for-freedom (28 June 2012)

History, Freedom, Faith, Time

“Nobody can educated by himself. Education is the transmission of tradition through a witness. And the educator should be a master. Should be someone with enough to authority, not to impose but propose. But if you are not convinced you are unable to propose.”

Christophe Pierre (1946) French nuncio

Source: A Global Perspective: a Conversation With the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Christophe Pierre https://www.thecatholictelegraph.com/a-global-perspective-a-conversation-with-the-apostolic-nuncio-archbishop-christophe-pierre/71427 (3 March 2021)

Education

“You can’t trust people in power, dearie. They’ll say whatever they want, all the witnesses will be paid to agree, and then you’re behind bars till the end of your days. Or worse.”

Genevieve Cogman (1972) novelist and game designer

Source: The Mortal Word (2018), Chapter 20 (p. 294)

People

“We are a periphery that bears witness to God's love for the whole world.”

José Luís Mumbiela Sierra (1969) Spanish bishop

The hopes of Catholics in Central Asia https://www.asianews.it/news-en/The-hopes-of-Catholics-in-Central-Asia-55808.html (15 May 2022)

God, World, Love

“I find it interesting how many of you, when watching a plan go awry, are so blinded by your frustration that you are unable to learn from what you have witnessed.”

Charles E. Gannon (1960) American novelist

Source: Trial by Fire (2014), Chapter 4 (p. 43)

Learning

“Dialogue enables us to appreciate the qualities of the other person and it's also a stimulus for us, for in dialogue we need to be consistent witnesses. Interreligious dialogue always begins with the profession of one's faith. This avoids relativism.”

Leo Boccardi (1953) Italian nuncio

Interview With Archbishop Leo Boccardi Apostolic Nuncio of the Holy See (Vatican Ambassador) to the Islamic Republic of Iran https://en.shafaqna.com/63185/interview-with-archbishop-leo-boccardi-apostolic-nuncio-of-the-holy-see-vatican-ambassador-to-the-islamic-republic-of-iran-2/ (28 May 2018)

Personality, Faith

“O witness of the soul naturally Christian.”

Tertullian (155–220) Christian theologian

Original: O testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae <br class="br">Source: The Apology https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0301.htm, Chapter 17

Soul, Nature

“We are called to be witnesses to Jesus; if we are witnesses we are missionaries. To be witnesses we must learn to live with Christ who is always with us.”

Jesús Gervasio Pérez Rodríguez (1936–2021) Spanish priest (1936-2021)

“Month of the Bible ” in Latin America helps Catholics become more familiar with the Word of God in order to be true witnesses to Christ for the world (14 September 2006) Fides News Agency http://www.fides.org/en/news/8049-AMERICA_Month_of_the_Bible_in_Latin_America_helps_Catholics_become_more_familiar_with_the_Word_of_God_in_order_to_be_true_witnesses_to_Christ_for_the_world

Learning, Christ

“We cannot renounce our faith and not give a reason for it to those who wish to hear us. We need not hide our faith in Jesus Christ out of fear, nor should we keep quiet when there is an opportunity to bear witness to it.”

Antonio Dorado Soto (1931–2015) Spanish bishop

Bishop tells Spanish Catholics not to fear “psychological torture” (15 June 2005), Catholic News Agency https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/4164/bishop-tells-spanish-catholics-not-to-fear-psychological-torture

Fear, Faith, Christ

“Cooperation for development has now become the major trend of our contemporary world. We have clearly witnessed that diverse forms and scope of cooperation have taken place within and among the regions thus providing a strong boost to the world economic growth.”

Bounnhang Vorachit (1937) former General Secretary of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party (2016-2021)

"Keynote Address by H.E. Mr. Bounnhang Vorachith Prime Minister of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic" https://asean.org/keynote-address-by-h-e-mr-bounnhang-vorachith-prime-minister-of-the-lao-peoples-democratic-republic-2/ (26 July 2005)

Strong, World