Philosophers

"They dwell altogether in the face, their endeavors are meer titillations, & their acquaintance with Nature is not at the heart."

"Hence it is that his followers, notwithstanding the assistance of so many ages, can fetch nothing out of him but notions: And these indeed they use, as he sayeth Lycophron did his epithets, (Non ut Condimentis, sed ut Cibis) not as spices but as food. Their compositions are a meer tympany of terms."

"If thou wilt not quit thy Aristotle, let not any prejudice hinder thy further search."

"He is said to have been buried on March 1 in the church of Albury village by the care and charge of the said Sir Robert Murray... But the letter of Henry Vaughan to John Aubrey says only that his brother died "upon an employment for His Majesty.""

"Now if I should question any sect (for there is no Communion in Christendom) whither these later intimations drive? They can but return me to the first rudiments, or produce some empty pretense of Spirit."

"It is an age of intellectual slaveries; If they meet any thing extraordinary, they prune it with distinctions, or daub it with false glosses, til it looks like the traditions of Aristotle. His followers are so confident of his principles they seek not to understand what others speak, but to make others speak what they understand."

"That I should profess magic in this discourse and justify the professors of it withal is impiety with many but religion, with me. It is a conscience that I have learned from authors greater than myself and scriptures greater than both."

"Hence thou mayst see what my conceptions were, when I began to write; and now I must tell thee, they are still the same, nor hath my long experience weakened them at all, but invincibly confirmed them."

"To reconcile this science and the Masters of it to the world is an attempt more plausible than possible, the prejudice being so great that neither reason nor authority can balance it."

"As I ever disclaimed alchemy in the vulgar sense, so I thought fit to let the alchemists know it, lest — in the perusal of my writings — they should fix a construction to some passages which cannot suit with the judgment of their author."

"It was well that I quitted it at last and walked again into that clear light which I had foolishly forsaken."

"I have, Reader — and, I suppose, it is not unknown to thee — within these few years, in several little treatises, delivered my judgment of philosophy. I say, of philosophy, for alchemy — in the common acceptation, and as it is a torture of metals — I did never believe: much less did I study it."

"She hath several ways to break up house, but her best is without a disease. This is her mystical walk, an exit only to return."

"Audi Ignis Vocem."

"Great is their number who perhaps had attained to perfection, had they not already thought themselves perfect."

"Magic is nothing but the wisdom of the Creator revealed and planted in the creature. It is a name — as Agrippa saith — "not distasteful to the very Gospel itself.""

"The Author to the reader:"

"Ignorance gave this release the name of death, but properly it is the soul's birth and a charter that makes for her liberty."

"Look on this life as the Progress of an Essence Royale. The Soul but quits her court to see the country. Heaven hath in it a scene of earth; and had she had bin contented with ideas, she had not travelled beyond the map."

"Magicians were the first attendants our Saviour met withal in this world, and the only philosophers who acknowledged Him in the flesh before that He Himself discovered it. I find God conversant with them, as He was formerly with the patriarchs. He directs them in their travels with a star, as He did the Israelites with a pillar of fire. He informs them of future dangers in their dreams (129)"

"I take love as my religion wherever its caravans lead, for love is my religion and my faith."

"Every self-manifestation bestows a new creation and removes a pre-ceding creation. Its removal is the essence of annihilation (fanaa) in the passing self-manifestation and subsistence (baqaa) in the bestowal of the following self-manifestation."

"His is the wisdom of singularity because he is the most perfect existent in the human species. That is why the whole affair began with him and is sealed with him. For he was a prophet while Adam was between water and clay. Then, in his elemental configuration, he was the Seal of the Prophets. And three is the first of the singulars. Every singular beyond one derives from it."

"The worst punishment from God is the separation from Him."

"The genuine mystic dwells in the state of unity."

"O God! Whatever punishment you inflict upon me, do not punish me with the humiliation of being veiled from Thee."

"You know the Devil is your enemy but you do not deal with him as such."

"You do not so act as to avoid Hell and enter Heaven."

"You know death must overtake you but you make no preparation for it."

"In his youth he would say: "One should worship Him in his youth.""

"O God, thou knowest that is my eyes the eight Paradises have a little worth when they are compared with that honour which thou hast shown me in giving Thy love or that familiarity which Thou hast given me by he commemoration (dhikr) of Thy Name or that freedom from all else which Thou hast granted me when I meditate on the greatness of Thy Glory."

"If you like to be saint of God, then desire not the things of this world or the next. Empty yourself for God. Turn your face to Him so that He may turn to you and make you His saint."

"The entire world is worthless excepting five things: to eat for survival, to take water in order to slake thirst, clothes to cover body, house to dwell in, knowledge just to act upon."

"Sinning upto necessity might be pardonable but for self-conceit and pride it is unpardonable since sin of Adam was the accomplishment of desire and sin of Satan self-conceit."

"Three veils must be removed from the traveler's heart so that the door of happiness is opened to him. First, should the dominion of both worlds is offered to him as eternal gift, he should not rejoice. The second veil is that if he possesses the dominion of both worlds, and should it be taken from him, he should not feel sorry for his poverty. The third is that he should not be misguided by any praise or favour, for one who is misguided like this, is a low person and the low person is veiled."

"One should avoid rich neighbour, rich savant, and Quran reader on payment."

"Gnostic gets peace after annihilation in Him."

"To meet people with hypocrisy separates one from God."

"Every nearest to Divine presence is given spiritual acumen in proportion to his proximity to Divine sanctuary."

"He who cannot bridle his own lower soul, how can he purify the same of others."

"He who meditates into the mysteries of the Holy Quran is sagacious in true sense."

"Gnostic has an elevated spiritual rank. He eats less, sleeps less and repose less. He is like shinning moon who radiates others and bears the burden of everything on earth, shows right path like light and saturates the heart like water giving it new life."

"This does not mean that we must adhere to all social conventions, some are arguably dumb, while others act like the cohesion of our society. One of the best pieces of advice I can offer ... is to be simply authentic, be the person that you would be if you are speaking to the person face to face"

"The point of technology is to make our lives easier; as a tool for progressive change. However, using technology as an avenue through which you are able to engage in anti-social behavior without criticism is against our very nature."

"A little bit of empathy goes a long way"

"novel technologies present us with possible worlds that ultimately involve significant and fundamental changes to society. I see no reason to be overly optimistic nor pessimistic. A cautious optimism that we will find the means to adapt and deal with transformative technologies will most likely prevail given the amount of resources and attention on the topic at a global level, but this should not make us complacent to any idea of certainty of beneficial outcomes. Similarly, imagining how the future will be is only useful in that it helps us to speculate about ethics and impacts, although making any strong predictions about our relationships with technologies ultimately is contingent on what those technologies are, how they were designed, for whom they were designed, how they function in different sociocultural contexts and why we built them in the first place."

"This is a general gap between the ivory tower and the public at large. The motivations are varied ranging from personal disinterest by scholars of public perception or awareness to the capitalization of scholarship by large publishers making research inaccessible to the public, if not to other scholars more generally. There are both personal and economic barriers to the dissemination of scholarship that would otherwise change public perception and understanding of these issues, which is quite important since the publics that typically engage in these issues tend to be direct stakeholders and thus of central value to the design of these systems."

"When I engage in any conversation, virtual or otherwise, I am entering into a social construct. These social constructs have social mores that are associated with them, most implicit and unsaid. For example, how often does one meet a person, begin talking to them, and mid-conversation turn around and leave without any antecedent reason? Naturally, their interlocutor will most likely be confused at this awkward social circumstance. It is simply something that defies social convention."

"We want to promote AI for doing good. The design requirements should operationalize AI not only to avoid doing harm but also to actively do good. For that, we use the UN Sustainable Development Goals as one of the higher-level sources of values for designing artificial intelligence"

"Progress is progress no matter how small. But small and slow it is. The primary difficulty with AI ethical development, as has been true of ethical progress in any form over the millennia is ethical agreement. Although it is almost universally accepted at the EU, if not global level, the social/economic/legal/cultural impacts of AI, the problem is the next step. A failure to translate ethics into practice is quite dangerous given the impacts that recalcitrant AI can have, if not simply misused AI systems."