Agnostics

"Applying here Brahms' contributions to an unrestricted musical language will enable the opera composer to overcome the metrical handicaps of his libretto's prose; the production of melodies and other structural elements will not depend on the versification, on the meter, or on the absence of possibilities for repetitions. There will be no expansion necessary for mere formal reasons and changes of mood or character will not endanger the organization. The singer will be granted the opportunity to sing and to be heard; he will not be forced to recite on a single note, but will be offered melodic lines of interest; in a word, he will not be merely the one who pronounces the words in order to make the action understandable. He will be a singing instrument of the performance. It seems-if this is not wishful thinking-that some progress has already been made in this direction, some progress in the direction toward an unrestricted musical language which was inaugurated by Brahms the Progressive."

"He came as a true friend, to share with me all my sorrow; he strengthened my heart as it was about to break, he lifted my thoughts, lightened, when it was possible, my spirits. In short, he was my friend in the fullest sense of the word. I can truly say, my children, that I have never loved a friend as I loved him; it is the most beautiful mutual understanding of two souls. I do not love him for his youthfulness, nor probably for any reason of flattered vanity. It is rather his elasticity of spirit, his fine gifted nature, his noble heart that I love... Joachim, too, as you know, was a true friend to me, but... it was really Johannes who bore me up... Believe all that I, your mother, have told you, and do not heed those small and envious souls who make light of my love and friendship, trying to bring up for question our beautiful relationship, which they neither fully understand nor ever could."

"If there is any one here tonight whom I have not offended, I apologize!"

"I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius."

"High on the mountain, deep in the valley, I greet you a thousandfold."

"I wish I could write to you as tenderly as I love you and tell you all the good things that I wish you. You are so infinitely dear to me, dearer than I can say... If things go on much longer as they are at present I shall have sometime to put you under glass or to have you set in gold. If only I could live in the same town with you and my parents... Do write me a nice letter soon. Your letters are like kisses."

"There is so much that is true in your letter — if not all— and I must confess that with remorse and regret; but with pleasure and satisfaction I realise how kind it is — only an angel like you could have written so kindly... Life is a wild polyphony, but often a good woman like you can bring about some exquisite resolution of its discords."

"On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind."

"It always saddens me to think that after all I am not yet a proper musician; but I have more aptitude for the calling than probably many of the younger generation have as a rule. It gets knocked out of you. Boys should be allowed to indulge themselves in jolly music; the serious kind comes of its own accord, although the lovesick does not. How lucky is the man who, like Mozart and others, goes to the tavern of an evening and writes some fresh music. For he lives while he is creating."

"Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality."

"I have seen you grow brutal under a vocabulary of love. If you wanted to thieve, your code would expand to embrace the act of thieving. Feeling no need to drink, you will promptly despise a drunkard."

"I felt that the man who strove for dignity, nobility, and honour should have his task made as difficult and as hazardous as possible, and that in particular he should be forgiven no lapses in style."

"When finding that people held the same views as I, I persuaded myself that I held them differently."

"As for bravery: dead on the fields are millions who would have feared to wear a hat in inappropriate season, so I judged that brave warriors are dirt cheap as compared with untimid civilians."

"You moralistic dog—admitting a hierarchy in which you are subordinate, purely that you may have subordinates; licking the boots of a superior, that you may have yours in turn licked by an underling."

"In confessing a reprehensible act, I would sometimes add a still more reprehensible interpretation—and whereas I might forget my own judgments upon myself, those in whom I had confided would carefully store them against me."

"Upon my enquiring as to what he feared most of the future, he answered: “Destitution. Destitution of finances, destitution of mind, destitution of love. The inability to retort. The need of possessing one’s opposite in years, sex, and texture of the skin; and the knowledge that by this need one has been made repugnant. The replacing of independence by solitude.”"

"We would not deny the mind; but merely remember that as the corrective of wrong thinking is right thinking, the corrective of all thinking is the body."

"God pity the man or the nation wise in proverbs, I told myself, for there is much misery and much error gone into the collecting of such a store."

"Any performance is discussible either from the standpoint of what it attains or what it misses. Comprehensiveness can be discussed as superficiality, intensiveness as stricture, tolerance as uncertainty—and the poor pedestrian abilities of a fish are clearly explainable in terms of his excellence as a swimmer. A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing—a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B."

"… the pattern of embarrassment behind the contemporary ideal of a language that will best promote good action by entirely eliminating the element of exhortation or command. Insofar as such a project succeeded, its terms would involve a narrowing of circumference to a point where the principle of personal action is eliminated from language, so that an act would follow from it only as a non-sequitur, a kind of humanitarian after-thought."

"Love is not a feeling but rather a conscious state."

"Learning and enjoyment are the secret to a fulfilled life. Learning without enjoyment wears you down, enjoyment without learning dulls you."

"In one of the Cremona hospitals, an Italian doctor had said: "We keep the good things for our friends of the Allied Army, and give our enemies the bare necessities. If they die, so much the worse!" and he added, to excuse these barbarous words, that he had heard from some Italian soldiers who had returned from Verona and Mantua, that the Austrians allowed the wounded of the Franco-Sardinian army to die uncared for. A noble lady of Cremona, Countess..., who had heard the doctor's words and had been devoting herself to the hospitals with the utmost zeal, made haste to show her disapproval by declaring that she gave exactly the same attention to the Austrians as to the Allies, and made no difference between friends and enemies. "For, she said, "Our Lord Jesus Christ made no such distinctions between men in well doing.""

"Why could not advantage be taken of a time of relative calm and quiet to investigate and try to solve a question of such immense and worldwide importance, both from the humane and Christian stand-point?"

"By Thy power, let there be peace, O God!"

"I was a mere tourist with no part whatever in this great conflict; but it was my rare privilege, through an unusual train of circumstances, to witness the moving scenes that I have resolved to describe. In these pages I give only my personal impressions; so my readers should not look here for specific details, nor for information on strategic matters; these things have their place in other writings."

"It is as though a puzzle could be put together simply by shaking its pieces."

"According to Sir W. Thomson's theory of Vortex Atoms, the substance of which the molecule consists is a uniformly dense plenum, the properties of which are those of a perfect fluid, the molecule itself being nothing but a certain motion impressed on a portion of this fluid, and this motion is shewn, by a theorem due to Helmholtz, to be as indestructible as we believe a portion of matter to be."

"And we know what Helmholtz, the highest authority in Europe on the subject, has said about the human eye; that if an optician had sold him an instrument so carelessly made, he would have thought himself fully justified in returning it."

"The last decades of scientific development have led us to the recognition of a new universal law of all natural phenomena, which, from its extraordinarily extended range, and from the connection which it constitutes between natural phenomena of all kinds, even of the remotest times and the most distant places, is especially fitted to give us an idea of what I have described as the character of the natural sciences, which I have chosen as the subject of this lecture."

"The quantity of force which can be brought into action in the whole of Nature is unchangeable, and can neither be increased nor diminished."

"In speaking of the work of machines and of natural forces we must, of course, in this comparison eliminate anything in which activity of intelligence comes into play. The latter is also capable of the hard and intense work of thinking, which tries a man just as muscular exertion does."

"The external work of man is of the most varied kind as regards the force or ease, the form and rapidity, of the motions used on it, and the kind of work produced. But both the arm of the blacksmith who delivers his powerful blows with the heavy hammer, and that of the violinist who produces the most delicate variations in sound, and the hand of the lacemaker who works with threads so fine that they are on the verge of the invisible, all these acquire the force which moves them in the same manner and by the same organs, namely, the muscles of the arm. An arm the muscles of which are lamed is incapable of doing any work; the moving force of the muscle must be at work in it, and these must obey the nerves, which bring to them orders from the brain. That member is then capable of the greatest variety of motions; it can compel the most varied instruments to execute the most diverse tasks."

"The formation of scales and of the web of harmony is a product of artistic invention, and is in no way given by the natural structure or by the natural behaviour of our hearing, as used to be generally maintained hitherto."

"Now it is a universal law of the perceptions obtained through the senses that we pay only so much attention to the sensations actually experienced as is sufficient for us to recognise external objects. In this respect we are very one-sided and inconsiderate partisans of practical utility; far more so indeed than we suspect. All sensations which have no direct reference to external objects, we are accustomed, as a matter of course, entirely to ignore, and we do not become aware of them till we make a scientific investigation of the action of the senses, or have our attention directed by illness to the phenomena of our own bodies. Thus we often find patients, when suffering under a slight inflammation of the eyes, become for the first time aware of those beads and fibres known as mouches volantes swimming about within the vitreous humour of the eye, and then they often hypochondriacally imagine all sorts of coming evils, because they fancy that these appearances are new, whereas they have generally existed all their lives."

"As you are aware, no perceptions obtained by the senses are merely sensations impressed on our nervous systems. A peculiar intellectual activity is required to pass from a nervous sensation to the conception of an external object, which the sensation has aroused. The sensations of our nerves of sense are mere symbols indicating certain external objects, and it is usually only after considerable practice that we acquire the power of drawing correct conclusions from our sensations respecting the corresponding objects."

"Every great deed of which history tells us, every mighty passion which art can represent, every picture of manners, of civic arrangements, of the culture of peoples of distant lands or of remote times, seizes and interests us, even if there is no exact scientific connection among them. We continually find points of contact and comparison in our own conceptions and feelings; we get to know the hidden capacities and desires of the mind, which in the ordinary peaceful course of civilised life remain unawakened. It is not to be denied that, in the natural sciences, this kind of interest is wanting. Each individual fact, taken by itself, can indeed arouse our curiosity or our astonishment, or be useful to us in its practical applications. But intellectual satisfaction we obtain only from a connection of the whole, just from its conformity with law."

"There is a kind, I might almost say, of artistic satisfaction, when we are able to survey the enormous wealth of Nature as a regularly ordered whole — a kosmos, an image of the logical thought of our own mind."

"Nederland is een verdraagzaam land met respect voor elkaars mening. Die mag je bestrijden met woorden, niet met kogels."

"This notion of information being at the heart of life... is not restricted to me. I'm in good company. Sir Paul Nurse, former president of the Royal Society, in his visionary essay in Nature, "Life, Logic and Information", extols the virtues of thinking in an information, web-based way about life, and how, instead of worrying too much about what is going on at the molecular level, we should think of life as being a collection of logic modules... with information flowing between them, and control systems... a sort of engineering approach."

"Ever since Sir Isaac Newton's times, scientists have worked in the same sort of way:"

"DNA can act as a digital information storage device that can be precisely copied. Similarly, the mechanism of the lac operon... can be described in terms of molecular interactions between DNA, protein and s. But these interactions make sense only when they are translated into a negative loop..."

"We need to describe the molecular interactions and biochemical transformations that take place in living organisms, and then translate these descriptions into the logic circuits that reveal how information is managed. This analysis should not be confined to the flow of information from to , but should also be applied to all functions operating in cells and organisms, including chemical interactions and transformations as well as physical phenomena, such as electrical signalling and mechanical processes."

"Even at the level of the cell, phenomena such as general cellular homeostasis and the maintenance of cell integrity, the generation of spatial and temporal order, inter- and intracellular signalling, cell 'memory' and reproduction are not fully understood. ...This is also true for the levels of organization seen in tissues, organs and organisms, which feature more complex phenomena such as and operation of the immune and s."

"How scientists go about their job: and it's a process, it's a question of asking questions, respecting observation, respecting experiment, having tentative explanations and then testing them.... There is a problem sometimes with how we teach science at schools. Because we sometimes teach it as if it has been chiseled in stone."

"We need to focus more on how information is managed in living systems and how this brings about higher level biological phenomena... more investigation into how living systems gather, process, store and use information, as was emphasized at the birth of ."

"Innovation is everything. When you're on the forefront, you can see what the next innovation needs to be. When you're behind, you have to spend your energy catching up."

"There are some great men of science whose charm consists in having said the first word on a subject, in having introduced some new idea which has proved fruitful; there are others whose charm consists perhaps in having said the last word on the subject, and who have reduced the subject to logical consistency and clearness. I think by temperament Lord Rayleigh belonged to the second group."

"In science by a fiction as remarkable as any to be found in law, what once been published even though it be in the Russian language, is spoken of as known, and it is too often forgotten that the rediscovery in the library may be a more difficult and uncertain process than the first discovery in the laboratory."