Themes

"Me therefore studious of laborious ease."

"It is essential to every inquiry about duty that we keep before our eyes how far superior man is by nature to cattle and other beasts: they have no thought except for sensual pleasure and this they are impelled by every instinct to seek; but man's mind is nurtured by study and meditation."

"Exhausting thought, And hiving wisdom with each studious year."

"The seers of old had fully restrained selves, and were austere. Having abandoned the five strands of sensual pleasures, they practiced their own welfare. The brahmans had no cattle, no gold, no wealth. They had study as their wealth and grain. They guarded the holy life as their treasure."

"When night hath set her silver lamp on high, Then is the time for study."

"Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies, is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humour of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience. For natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies; simple men admire them; and wise men use them. For they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without [outside of] them, and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed digested. That is, some books are to be read only parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books: else distilled books are, like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit; and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not."

"And for to se, and eek for to be seye."

"Who can refute a sneer?"

"There was a laughing Devil in his sneer, That raised emotions both of rage and fear."

"Sapping a solemn creed with a solemn sneer."

"Don't ever curdle that creamy brow with lines of easy disdain, or curl those lips with a popular sneer."

"When you pull up your upper lip----when you show that one top tooth, the one the museum guard broke----this is your levator labii superioris muscle at work. Your sneer muscle. Let's pretend you smell some old stale urine. Imagine your husband's just killed himself in your family car. Imagine you have to go out and sponge his piss out of the driver's seat."

"Whoever attacks a custom or a creed, will be confronted with a list of the names of the dead who upheld the custom, or believed the creed. He is asked in a very triumphant and sneering way, if he knows more than all the great and honored of the past. Every defender of a creed has graven upon his memory the names of all "great" men whose actions or words can be tortured into evidence for his doctrine"

"While utterly discarding all creeds, and denying the truth of all religions, there is neither in my heart nor upon my lips a sneer for the hopeful, loving and tender souls who believe that from all this discord will result a perfect harmony... ."

"I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering."

"We sneered at each other across the desk for a moment. He sneered better than I did."

"Are they shadows that we see? And can shadows pleasure give? Pleasures only shadows be, Cast by bodies we conceive, And are made the things we deem In those figures which they seem.But these pleasures vanish fast Which by shadows are expressed: Pleasures are not, if they last, In their passing, is their best: Glory is most bright and gay In a flash, and so away.Feed apace then, greedy eyes, On the wonder you behold; Take it sudden as it flies, Though you take it not to hold: When your eyes have done their part, Thought must length it in the heart."

"Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum."

"He that had neither beene kithe nor kin, Might have seene a full fayre sight."

"Two men look out through the same bars: One sees the mud, and one the stars."

"For sight is woman-like and shuns the old. (Ah! he can see enough, when years are told, Who backwards looks)."

"And every eye Gaz'd as before some brother of the sky."

"Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don't complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy. Don't bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality. Wake Up and Live!"

"See and to be seen."

"The rarer sene, the lesse in mynde, The lesse in mynde, the lesser payne."

"The age, wherein he lived was dark; but he Could not want sight, who taught the world to see."

"No vision can grasp him, but His grasp is over all vision: He is above all comprehension, yet is acquainted with all things."

"Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he."

"Some feminist cultural theorists in France, Britain, and the United States have argued that visualization and objectification as privileged ways of knowing are specifically masculine (man the viewer, woman the spectacle). Without falling into such essentialism, we may suppose that the language, perceptions, and uses of visual information may be different for women, as pregnant subjects, than they are for men (or women) as physicians, researchers, or reporters."

"The "prevalence of the gaze," or the privileging of the visual, as the primary means to knowledge in Western scientific and philosophical traditions has been the subject of a feminist inquiry by Evelyn Fox Keller and Christine R. Grontkowski. In their analysis, stretching from Plato to Bacon and Descartes, this emphasis on the visual has had a paradoxical function. For sight, in contrast to the other senses, has as its peculiar property the capacity for detachment, for objectifying the thing visualized by creating distance between knower and known. (In modern optics, the eye becomes a passive recorder, a camera obscura.) In this way, the elevation of the visual in a hierarchy of senses actually has the effect of debasing sensory experience, and relatedness, as modes of knowing:" Vision connects us to truth as it distances us from the corporeal.""

"I spry my closed vision over the streets of this city and the shadows lurching within it."

"Then purg'd with euphrasy and rue The visual nerve, for he had much to see."

"In Nietzsche’s view nihilism is not a Weltanschauung that occurs at some time and place or another; it is rather the basic character of what happens in Occidental history."

"Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare."

"Not so many years ago this was a mistake that brain scientists actually made: they succumbed all too often to the temptation to treat vision as if it were television — as if it were simply a matter of getting "the picture" from the eyes to the screen somewhere in the middle where it could be handsomely reproduced so that the phenomena of appreciation and analysis could then get underway. Today we realize that the analysis — the whatever you want to call it that composes, in the end, all the visual understanding — begins right away, on the retina; if you postpone consideration of it, you misdescribe how vision works."

"The Greeks elaborated several theories of vision. According to the Pythagoreans, Democritus, and others vision is caused by the projection of particles from the object seen, into the pupil of the eye. On the other hand Empedocles, the Platonists, and Euclid held the strange doctrine of ocular beams, according to which the eye itself sends out something which causes sight as soon as it meets something else emanated by the object."

"You’re actually socially isolating yourself with your phone. I feel like it’s kind of emasculating. This Google Glass really takes away that excuse.… It really opened my eyes to how much of my life I spent secluded away in email or social posts. My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually you wouldn’t have to have a search query at all — the information would just come to you as you needed it. This is the first form factor that can deliver that vision."

"Do not complain and cry and pray, but open your eyes and see, for the light is all about you, and it is so wonderful, so beautiful, so far beyond anything of which men have ever dreamt, for which they have ever prayed, and it is for ever and for ever."

"I wanted to see, because I didn't believe what I'd been hearing."

"There's nothing you can know that isn't known Nothing you can see that isn't shown There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be It's easy.hello hello hello"

"Or shipwrecked, kindles on the coast False fires, that others may be lost."

"Apparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto."

"Improbe Neptunum accusat, qui iterum naufragium facit."

"Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But one of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks."

"But hark! what shriek of death comes in the gale, And in the distant ray what glimmering sail Bends to the storm?—Now sinks the note of fear! Ah? wretched mariners!—no more shall day Unclose his cheering eye to light ye on your way!"

"Through the black night and driving rain A ship is struggling, all in vain, To live upon the stormy main;— Miserere Domine!"

"Naufragium sibi quisque facit."

"A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigged, Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats Instinctively have quit it."

"O, I have suffer'd With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel, Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her, Dash'd all to pieces. O, the cry did knock Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perished."

"And fast through the midnight dark and drear, Through the whistling sleet and snow, Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept Towards the reef of Norman's Woe."