Focal Quotes - page 2
I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, I become the very thing I look at, and experience the kind of consciousness it has; I become the inner witness of the thing. I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousness, love; you may give it any name you like. Love says 'I am everything'. Wisdom says "I am nothing'. Between the two, my life flows. Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond both.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
The university is being called upon to educate previously unimagined numbers of students; to respond to the expanding claims of national service; to merge its activities with industry as never before. Characteristic of this transformation is the growth of the knowledge industry, which is coming to permeate government and business, and to draw into it more and more people raised to higher and higher levels of skill. The production, distribution and consumption of knowledge is said to account for 29 percent of gross national product, and knowledge production is growing at about twice the rate of the rest of the economy. What the railroads did for the second half of the last century, and the automobile for the first half of this century, may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry; and that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth.
Clark Kerr
Yom HaShoah is a vital day in the Jewish calendar, providing us with a focal point for our remembrance. We cannot bring the dead back to life, but we can bring their memory back to life and ensure they are not forgotten. We can undertake in our lives to do what they were so cruelly prevented from doing in theirs.
Jonathan Sacks
Roger: Umm.. I couldn't tell you! I don't really know what the secret is. I've never been in any other situation. For us, we just really try to really deliver when we play and make that the focal point of what's going on. And then there's the live show. We try to be really good to our fans in the way of musically by having things up. Fans that have been fans of our records will always have something to relate and not have a record that is completely different ever, but also not doing the same thing over and over and over again. Trying to have a steady change on what kind of music we're writing and stuff like that. I think touring is the key to it. We've always been a touring based band. We play a lot, a lot of shows and that's what keeps us fresh in peoples' minds.
Roger Manganelli
The cultural tradition of which the Greek language is the focal point has the longest unbroken history of any in Europe. The Greek state, however, was newly born out of the conflict of 1821-8 and was without precedent in the history of the Greeks. The newly defined nation therefore had, as a matter of urgency, to create its own past, that is, to select and endorse those elements of earlier Greek history which retrospectively could claim to have made the present existence and future aspirations of the nation inevitable. Since the state itself was in many ways the creation of European Romanticism, it was only natural that the means to hand for defining and justifying its existence should derive from the same source.
Roy Porter
The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers. Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility they avoided specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social, political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their intellectual discourse.
Dana Gioia
I'm reading Günther Anders' Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Antiquity of Man)..That bit about Promethean shame impressed me..observations about the shame of being oneself, the reluctance at stepping out of line, of being forward, of being looked at. This is entirely true to life...Yet it's just as natural to man to want to be seen, to want to be outstanding, to be regarded, as to want to hide - and both these instincts - for that's what they are - clash, often with equal force...How clearly I see the Little Flower in this light: from earliest days the focal point for her whole family, yet on the other hand sincerely desiring to be hidden, taking the veil - and so wonderfully unveiled to posterity, revealed to the world, set up as an image, i.e. to be looked at!
Ida Friederike Görres