objects QUOTES

41 " How they are all about, these gentlemen
In chamberlains' apparel, stocked and laced,
Like night around their order's star and gem
And growing ever darker, stony-faced,
And these, their ladies, fragile, wan, but propped
High by their bodice, one hand loosely dropped,
Small like its collar, on the toy King-Charles:
How they surround each one of these who stopped
To read and contemplate the objects d'art,
Of which some pieces still are theirs, not ours.

Whit exquisite decorum they allow us
A life of whose dimensions we seem sure
And which they cannot grasp. They were alive
To bloom, that is be fair; we, to mature,
That is to be of darkness and to strive. "

― Rainer Maria Rilke , The Best of Rilke: 72 Form-true Verse Translations with Facing Originals, Commentary and Compact Biography

42 " Although, I admit, I desire,Occasionally, some backtalkFrom the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:A certain minor light may stillLean incandescentOut of kitchen table or chairAs if a celestial burning tookPossession of the most obtuse objects now and then -- "

43 " It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine-- the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me. "

― Raymond Carver

44 " Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons. "

― Roman Payne

45 " What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue. "

46 " [Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography. "

― Roland Barthes , Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

47 " That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how should the faculty of knowledge be called into activity, if not by objects which affect our senses and which, on the one hand, produce representations by themselves or on the other, rouse the activity of our understanding to compare, connect, or separate them and thus to convert the raw material of our sensible impressions into knowledge of objects, which we call experience? With respect to time, therefore, no knowledge within us is antecedent to experience, but all knowledge begins with it.
But though all our knowledge begins with experience, is does not follow that it all arises from experience. For it is quite possible that even our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we perceive through impressions, and of that which our own faculty of knowledge (incited by sense impressions) supplies from itself, a supplement which we do not distinguish from that raw material until long practice and rendered us capable of separating one from the other.
It is therefore a question which deserves at least closer investigation and cannot be disposed of at first sight: Whether there is any knowledge independent of all experience and even of all impressions of the senses? Such knowledge is called 'a priori' and is distinguished from empirical knowledge, which has its source 'a posteriori', that is, in experience... "

― Immanuel Kant , Critique of Pure Reason

48 " Knowledge [savoir] in general cannot be reduced to science, nor even to learning [connaissance]. Learning is the set of statements which, to the exclusion of all other statements, denote or describe objects and may be declared true or false. Science is a subset of learning. It is also composed of denotative statements, but imposes two supplementary conditions on their acceptability: the objects to which they refer must be available for repeated access, in other words, they must be accessible in explicit conditions of observation; and it must be possible to decide whether or not a given statement pertains to the language judged relevant by the experts. "

― Jean-François Lyotard , The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge

49 " We spend so much of our time lost in thought, trying to label everything as isolated objects and events. Though we fail to realize that our thoughts are incapable of defining anything in its totality. We can think about a situation for as long as we want to, but our thoughts will never know the situation exactly as it exists. "

― Joseph P. Kauffman , Stillness: A Guide to Finding Your Inner Peace

50 " When, at a closer glance, so many objects are questionable, when all knowledge seems to be clothed in a kind of deep unknowing, why do we still place any trust at all in reality as it appears to us, in the world in which we seem to live? "

51 " The quest for knowledge is what makes humans survive, even if it hurts.” I have trouble imagining that this éminence grise was once a sixteen-year-old Hungarian boy in a death camp. “There’s a troublesome verse from Ecclesiastes about this,” he tells me. “It says that the more we know, the more pain we have. But because we are human beings, this must be. Otherwise we become objects rather than subjects.” He pauses for a moment to let this sink in. “Of course, it hurts when we see pictures of people throwing themselves out of windows, children who are orphaned, the widows,” Wiesel says. “But there is no way out of what we’ve seen.” “And how do we live with what we know?” I ask “How can we live with not knowing? "

52 " Knowledge of all living beings of the entire world is in only one Soul. But the knowledge that sees the ego and everything, as objects to be known (gneya); only that knowledge is called as the ‘Knowledge’. However, that is partial Knowledge but only from that moment it is regarded as real applied focused awareness. Where there is Knowledge, the focused applied awareness may be partial or complete. "

― Dada Bhagwan

53 " For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations....

Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle. "

― Alain de Botton , The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

54 " For thousands of years, the dumb, uncivilized, stone-age society has reduced women to mere prizes to be won, objects to be shown off, and playthings to be abused and toyed with. Now is the time to stop this primitive madness. "

― Abhijit Naskar , The Bengal Tigress: A Treatise on Gender Equality (Humanism Series)

55 " How shortsighted and how uncultured, then, are the efforts of believers in Christ when they seek for snatches of worldly culture for themselves by placing themselves, as they think, on common ground with those who are not believers in Christ. How dishonoring to their Christ if they allow that any culture endures unless it be because of the power of his resurrection in the world. If you have been taken out of the miry clay, do you jump back into it because of some glistening objects that you see in it? Do you run back into the house now almost burned to the ground in order to save your silverware? It is only those who are believers in Christ that will inherit the earth and all the fulness thereof. "

― Cornelius Van Til , Essays on Christian Education

56 " Buddhist teachings discourage us from clinging and grasping to those we hold dear, and from trying to control the people or the relationship. What’s more, we’re encouraged to accept the impermanence of all things: the flower that blooms today will be gone tomorrow, the objects we possess will break or fade or lose their utility, our relationships will change, life will end. "

― Sharon Salzberg , Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

57 " Once again, the world seems to be less about objects than about interactive relationships. "

― Carlo Rovelli , Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

58 " Inside me there was everything I had believed was outside. There was, in particular, the sun, light, and all colors. There were even the shapes of objects and the distance between objects. Everything was there and movement as well… Light is an element that we carry inside us and which can grow there with as much abundance, variety, and intensity as it can outside of us…I could light myself…that is, I could create a light inside of me so alive, so large, and so near that my eyes, my physical eyes, or what remained of them, vibrated, almost to the point of hurting… God is there under a form that has the good luck to be neither religious, not intellectual, nor sentimental, but quite simply alive. "

59 " The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future — must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm. "

― Hippocrates

60 " All objects exist in a moment of time. "

― Amy Tan , The Bonesetter's Daughter

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