Survey Quotes - page 4
A central thesis of this book is that the connection between thought and practice is most intimately and fully realized only when our minds are addressed to our own affairs-the concerns of humanity. When we direct our thoughts to nature, even if to see ourselves as fixtures of nature, we loosen the connection between thought and practice. When we loosen it, we are tempted to assume the posture I earlier called naturalism. We survey both the human and the nonhuman worlds from a supposedly godlike distance. We treat the achievement of such distance as the realization of our longing for transcendence.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
My equestrian figures are symbols of the anguish that I feel when I survey contemporary events. Little by little, my horses become more restless; their riders less and less able to control them. Man and beast are both overcome by a catastrophe similar to those that struck Sodom and Pompeii. So I am trying to illustrate the last stages of the disintegration of a myth, I mean the myth of the individual victorious hero, the 'uono di virtù' of the humanists..
Marino Marini
Piety practiced in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendor of beneficence.
Samuel Johnson
There wasn't, as a matter of fact, much of anything on this particular planet. It was strictly a low-grade affair and it wouldn't amount to much for another billion years. The survey, understandably, wasn't too interested in planets that wouldn't amount to much for another billion years.
Clifford D. Simak