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Post by Tamrin on Dec 31, 2013 7:57:41 GMT 10
Tuesday’s Quotes:We concern ourselves with the verities that are, and leave aside the errors which arise from speculation on matters which are not
Already a third and more of England is in the hands of the Pope. There cannot be two temporal sovereigns in one country; either Edward is King or Urban is king. We make our choice. We accept Edward of England and refute Urban of Rome
Even though there were a hundred popes and though every mendicant monk were a cardinal, they would be entitled to confidence only insofar as they accorded with the Bible
Our clerics neither evangelize like the apostles, nor go to war like the secular lords, nor toil like laborers
Crown and cloth maken no priest, nor emperor's bishop with his words, but power that crist giveth; and thus by life have been priests known
The higher the hill, the stronger the wind: So the loftier the life, the stronger the enemy's temptations
This Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the PeopleJohn Wycliffe (Doctor Evangelicus & “Morning Star of the Reformation”) English religious reformer and bible translator (Died this day 1384 — in 1428 his remains were exhumed, burned as a heretic, and the ashes cast into the River Swift) I believe that in the end the truth will conquer
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 31, 2013 7:59:52 GMT 10
It is my intent to beget a good understanding between the chymists and the mechanical philosophers who have hitherto been too little acquainted with one another's learning
I am not ambitious to appear a man of letters: I could be content the world should think I had scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature
The Requisites of a good Hypothesis are: That It be Intelligible. That It neither Assume nor Suppose anything Impossible, unintelligible, or demon- strably False. That It be consistent with Itself. That It be lit and sufficient to Explicate the Phaenomena, especially the chief. That It be, at least, consistent, with the rest of the Phaenomena It particularly relates to, and do not contra- dict any other known Phaenomena of nature, or manifest Physical Truth
The Qualities and Conditions of an Excellent Hypothesis are: That It be not Precar- ious, but have sufficient Grounds In the nature of the Thing Itself or at least be well recommended by some Auxiliary Proofs. That It be the Simplest of all the good ones we are able to frame, at least containing nothing that is superfluous or Impertinent. That It be the only Hypothesis that can Explicate the Phaenomena; or at least, that do's Explicate them so well. That it enable a skilful Naturailst to foretell future Phaenomena by the Congruity or Incongruity to it; and especially the event of such Experlm'ts as are aptly devis'd to examine It, as Things that ought, or ought not, to be consequent to It
As rivers, when they overflow, drown those grounds, and ruin those husbandmen, which, whilst they flowed calmly betwixt their banks, they fertilized and enriched; so our passions, when they grow exorbitant and unruly, destroy those virtues, to which they may be very serviceable whilst they keep within their bounds
Divers of Hermetic Books have such involv'd Obscuritys that they may justly be compar'd to Riddles written in Cyphers. For after a Man has surmounted the difficulty of decyphering the Words and Terms, he finds a new and greater difficulty to discover ye meaning of the seemingly plain Expression
In an arch each single stone which, if severed from the rest, would be perhaps defenceless is sufficiently secured by the solidity and entireness of the whole fabric, of which it is a partRobert Boyle, FRS (declined the RS Presidency, 1680) Anglo-Irish physicist, chemist (Boyle's law), philosopher and author (The Sceptical Chymist) (Died this day 1691) And I might add the confidence with which distracted persons do oftentimes, when they are awake, think, they see black fiends in places, where there is no black object in sight without them
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 31, 2013 8:00:36 GMT 10
What I am after, above all, is expression
I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me
You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté
For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself
There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted
Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality
I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have the light joy- ousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost meHenri MatisseFrench artist, ( Woman with a Hat) (Born this day 1869) I wouldn't mind turning into a vermilion goldfish
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 31, 2013 8:02:17 GMT 10
Don't fight the problem, decide it
If man does find the solution for world peace it will be the most revolutionary reversal of his record we have ever known
It is not enough to fight. It is the spirit which we bring to the fight that decides the issue. It is morale that wins the victory
The refusal of the British and Russian peoples to accept what appeared to be inevitable defeat was the great factor in the salvage of our civilization
The time has come when we must proceed with the business of carrying the war to the enemy
The great lesson to be learned in the battered towns of England and the ruined cities of Germany is that the best way to win a war is to prevent it from occurring
When a thing is done, it's done. Don't look back. Look forward to your next objectiveBro. George C. MarshallUS 5 star General, eponymous Marshall Plan Nobel laureate (Peace, 1953) (Born this day 1880) Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desper- ation, and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 31, 2013 8:06:38 GMT 10
When history looks back I want people to know the Nazis weren't able to kill millions of people and get away with it
Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived
None of my "clients" — not Eichmann, not Stangl, not Mengele, and not even Hitler or Stalin — was born a criminal. Somebody had to teach them to hate: maybe the society, maybe the politics, maybe just a Jewish prostitute
We are living in a time of the trivialization of the word 'Holocaust,' What happened to the Jews cannot be compared with all the other crimes. Every Jew had a death sentence without a date
The most important thing I have done is to fight against forgetting and to keep remem- brance alive. It is very important to let people know that our enemies are not forgotten
Any political party in a democracy that uses the word 'freedom' in its name is either Nazi or Communist
There is no denying that Hitler and Stalin are alive today… they are waiting for us to forget, because this is what makes possible the resurrection of these two monstersSimon WiesenthalAustrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter (Born this day 1908) I have survived them all. If there were any left, they'd be too old and weak to stand trial today. My work is done(Wiesenthal on his retirement)
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 31, 2013 8:13:48 GMT 10
Why do only the awful things become fads? I thought. Eye-rolling and Barbie and bread pudding. Why never chocolate cheesecake or thinking for yourself?
One of the nastier trends in library management in recent years is the notion that libraries should be "responsive to their patrons." This means having dozens of copies of The Bridges of Madison County and Danielle Steele, and a consequent shortage of shelf space, to cope with which librarians have taken to purging books that haven't been checked out lately
Don't they know science doesn't work like that? You can't just order scientific break- throughs. They happen when you are looking at something you've been working on for years and suddenly see a connection you never noticed before, or when you're looking for something else altogether. Sometimes they even happen by accident. Don't they know you can't get a scientific breakthrough just because you want one?
The entire range of human experience is present in a church choir, including, but not restricted to jealousy, revenge, horror, pride, incompetence (the tenors have never been on the right note in the entire history of church choirs, and the basses have never been on the right page), wrath, lust and existential despair
A Grand Design we couldn't see because we were part of it. A Grand Design we only got occasional, fleeting glimpses of. A Grand Design involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog. And a hideous piece of Victorian artwork. And us
It was the Communists, it was the Mexicans, it was the government. And the only people who acknowledged their guilt weren't guilty at all
Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the centuryConnie WillisAmerican science fiction writer ( Doomsday Book) (Born this day 1945) Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 31, 2013 8:14:34 GMT 10
Every man has his excuses, and the more vile the man becomes, the more touching the story has to be. What is my story now, I wonder?
I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them
Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes
Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever
We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged
It's hard to be done a favor by a man you hate. It's hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing and enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you've had him for long enough
But you can't truly hate a man without loving him first, and there's always a trace of that love left overJoe AbercrombieBritish fantasy author & film editor ( The First Law trilogy) (Born this day 1974) Once you've got a task to do, it's better to do it than live with the fear of it
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 31, 2013 8:15:28 GMT 10
All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values
The medium is the message
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding
Affluence creates poverty
Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labor
I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviorMarshall McLuhan, Canadian cultural philosopher (Died this day 1980) I don't necessarily agree with everything I say
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 31, 2013 8:16:15 GMT 10
Nobody gets everything in this life. You decide your priorities and you make your choices. I'd decided long ago that any cake I had would be eaten
If Chester had a failing, it was that he believed people were what they thought they were
New York doesn't exactly have neighborhoods, the way most cities do. What it has is closer to distinct and separate villages, some of them existing on different continents, some of them existing in different centuries, and many of them at war with one another. English is not the primary language in many of these villages, but the Roman alphabet does still have a slight edge
Everybody in New York City is looking for something. Men are looking for women and women are looking for men. Down at the Trucks, men are looking for men, while at Bar- bara's and at the Lib women are looking for women. Lawyers' wives in front of Lord and Taylor are looking for taxis, and lawyers' wives' husbands down on Pine Street are looking for loopholes. The hookers in front of the Americana hotel are looking for johns, and the kids opening cab doors in front of the Port Authority are looking for tips. So are the riders on the Aqueduct Special. So are the cabbies, the bellboys, the waiters and the undercover narcs
The cops are after me, I'm on my way to join an organization of lunatics and bombers, I'm wired for sound, my necktie turns into a smokescreen, my handkerchief will make you throw up, my Diner's Club card explodes, I'm the leader of a subversive terrorist organizat- ion composed entirely of undercover federal agents, newspapers all over the country are say- ing I killed my girl, and I'm on my way to meet a twenty-five-year-old Nazi built like Bronco Nagurski. If relaxed means limp, don't worry about it. I'm relaxed. I'm relaxed all over
Life is a slow-motion avalanche, and none of us are steering
My mother believed in all superstitions, plus she made some upDonald E. WestlakeAmerican novelist & playwright ( The Hot Rock) (Died this day 2008) In order to hold your faith intact be sure it's kept unsullied by fact
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Post by Tamrin on Jan 1, 2014 20:37:12 GMT 10
Wednesday’s Quotes:By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life
If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto, Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus (Always, every- where, and by all), as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility
If we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter the Law of Contact or Contagion
In primitive society the rules of ceremonial purity observed by divine kings, chiefs, and priests agree in many respects with the rules observed by homicides, mourners, women in childbed, girls at puberty, hunters and fishermen, and so on. To us these various classes of persons appear to differ totally in character and condition; some of them we should call holy, others we might pronounce unclean and polluted. But the savage makes no such moral distinction between them; the conceptions of holiness and pollution are not yet differentiated in his mind. To him the common feature of all these persons is that they are dangerous and in danger, and the danger in which they stand and to which they expose others is what we should call spiritual or ghostly, and therefore imaginary. The danger, however, is not less real because it is imaginary; imagination acts upon man as really does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid
It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back; so if the man wakened without his soul, he would fall sick. If it is absolutely necessary to rouse a sleeper, it must be done very gradually, to allow the soul time to return
The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology
Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude philosophy of sympathy and resemblance … to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony, between its tides and the life of man ...The belief that most deaths happen at ebb tide is said to be held along the east coast of England from Northumberland to KentSir James G. Frazer, FRSBritish anthropologist and author ( The Golden Bough) (Born this day 1854) The world cannot live at the level of its great men
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