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1 " The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth. "
― Slavoj Žižek
2 " Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes. "
― Kahlil Gibran , The Prophet
3 " Time can be as fluid as water, and never in the way you'd like; it slows down to a standstill when you wish you could get things over with, and rushes by in a blur when you wish things would last. "
― Nenia Campbell , Cease and Desist (The IMA, #4)
4 " JAMIE'S SONG 'August and November':They say it was a beautiful summer.I say I felt so cold the whole short while.I heard that it rained for days,Between August and November.Well I didn’t see it rain on the enslaved river.I am the river no more (x2)And the rain is just acid water from their cloudy black smoke.And now I’m at a standstill on the streets, That are lit up like a funfair from some forgotten dream.Yet faces, headlights, and the whole world passes by me. Without taking a step, I’m down in the hole too.And if it rains this comingDark and lonely December,I will never watch it fall on the entrapped river.I am the river no more (x2)And the rain is acid water from their cloudy black smoke. "
― Neha Yazmin , Every Little Piece of You (Soulmates Saga, #1)
5 " One of the most interesting histories of what comes of rejecting science we may see in Islam, which in the beginning received, accepted, and even developed the classical legacy. For some five or six rich centuries there is an impressive Islamic record of scientific thought, experiment, and research, particularly in medicine. But then, alas! the authority of the general community, the Sunna, the consensus—which Mohammed the Prophet had declared would always be right—cracked down. The Word of God in the Koran was the only source and vehicle of truth. Scientific thought led to 'loss of belief in the origin of the world and in the Creator.' And so it was that, just when the light of Greek learning was beginning to be carried from Islam to Europe—from circa 1100 onward—Islamic science and medicine came to a standstill and went dead.... "
― Joseph Campbell , Myths to Live By
6 " It is certain that the labors of these early workers in the field of natural knowledge were brought to a standstill by the decay and disruption of the Roman Empire, the consequent disorganisation of society, and the diversion of men's thoughts from sublunary matters to the problems of the supernatural world suggested by Christian dogma in the Middle Ages. And, notwithstanding sporadic attempts to recall men to the investigation of nature, here and there, it was not until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that physical science made a new start, founding itself, at first, altogether upon that which had been done by the Greeks. Indeed, it must be admitted that the men of the Renaissance, though standing on the shoulders of the old philosophers, were a long time before they saw as much as their forerunners had done. "
― Thomas Henry Huxley , The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century