Human Activity Quotes - Page 8

• Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however, from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new.

  Gregory Bateson

  Art, Sleep, Goal

  "Mind and Nature - a Necessary Unity". Book by Gregory Bateson, new edition, 1988.

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• Either the State for ever, crushing individual and local life, taking over in all fields of human activity, bringing with it its wars and its domestic struggles for power, its palace revolutions which only replace one tyrant by another, and inevitably at the end of this development there is ... death! Or the destruction of States, and new life starting again in thousands of centers on the principle of the lively initiative of the individual and groups and that of free agreement.The choice lies with you!

  Peter Kropotkin

  Crush, War, Lying

  "Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal". Book by Peter Kropotkin, 1896.

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• Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?

  Haruki Murakami

  Goes On, Assumption, Humans

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• When you decide 'to be a writer,' you don't have the faintest idea of what the work is like. When you begin, you write spontaneously out of your limited experience of both the unwritten world and the written world. You're full of naïve exuberance. 'I am a writer!' Rather like the excitement of 'I have a lover!' But working at it nearly every day for fifty years – whether it is being the writer or being the lover – turns out to be an extremely taxing job and hardly the pleasantest of human activities.

  Philip Roth

  Jobs, Writing, Years

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• Literature remains an indispensable human activity, in which the reader and the writer are engaged of their own volition. Hence, literature has no duty to the masses or society, and ethical or moral pronouncements added by busybody critics are of no concern to the writer.

  Gao Xingjian

  Literature, Moral, Ethical

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• Learning, like love, death and eating, are fundamental human activities. It's at the core of human existence and its character has a resilience of continuity that is part of what makes up human nature. That is not fundamentally going to change.

  Leon Botstein

  Character, Like Love, Resilience

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• No longer can we consider what the artist does to be a self-contained activity, mysteriously inspired from above, unrelated and unrelatable to other human activities. Instead, we recognize the exalted kind of seeing that leads to the creation of great art as an outgrowth of the humbler and more common activity of the eyes in everyday life. Just as the prosaic search for information is "artistic" because it involves giving and finding shape and meaning, so the artist's conceiving is an instrument of life, a refined way of understanding who and where we are.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Art, Eye, Self

  Rudolf Arnheim (2004). “Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye”, p.5, Univ of California Press

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• Order generally was a product of human activity. Chaos existed as a raw material from which to create order.

  Frank Herbert

  Order, Raw Materials, Chaos

  Frank Herbert (1987). “Chapterhouse: Dune”, p.349, Penguin

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• Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.

  Jean Piaget

  Art, Philosophy, History

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• Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.

  H. L. Mencken

  Spiritual, Branches, Poverty

  "A Book of Prefaces". Book by H. L. Mencken, 1917.

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• Business is a creative and therefore spiritual endeavor. Great entrepreneurs enter the field of business in the same way great artists enter the field of art. With their business creation, entrepreneurs express their spiritual desire for self-realization, evolutionary passion for self- fulfillment, and creative vision of a new world. The entrepreneur's business is their artwork. The creation of business is as creative as any creation in art. In fact, building a business may be the most creative human activity.

  Yasuhiko Kimura

  Spiritual, Art, Passion

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• If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society - it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Secular Society, Tasks

  "Styles of Radical Will" by Susan Sontag, (p. 45), 1966.

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• There are always meaningful songs for somebody. People are doing their courting, people are finding their wives, people are making babies, people are washing their dishes, people are getting through the day, with songs that we may find insignificant. But their significance is affirmed by others. There’s always someone affirming the significance of a song by taking a woman into his arms or by getting through the night. That’s what dignifies the song. Songs don’t dignify human activity. Human activity dignifies the song.

  Leonard Cohen

  Meaningful, Song, Baby

  "My favourite word in songwriting history is 'that" by Laura Barton, www.theguardian.com. May 31, 2007.

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• In a free society, a large degree of human activity is none of the government's business. We should make criminal what's going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices.

  Barney Frank

  Hurt, Government, People

  "CNN Newsroom" with Don Lemon, Kyra Phillips, transcripts.cnn.com. July 30, 2008.

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• Science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practise it. Science is an art form and not a philosophical method. The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines. ... Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature's imagination is richer than ours.

  Freeman Dyson

  Nature, Art, Philosophy

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• The real danger from advertising is that it helps to shatter and ultimately destroy our most precious non-material possessions: the confidence in the existence of meaningful purposes of human activity and respect for the integrity of man.

  Paul Sweezy

  Confidence, Meaningful, Integrity

  "The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas". Book by Robert W. McChesney, May 1, 2008.

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• Architecture is a social act and the material theater of human activity.

  Spiro Kostof

  Architecture, Social, Theater

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• Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. The body of positive knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.

  Edwin Powell Hubble

  Knowledge, Science, Generations

  Norriss S. Hetherington, Edwin Powell Hubble (1996). “Hubble's Cosmology: A Guided Study of Selected Texts”

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• The reproaches against science for not having yet solved the problems of the universe are exaggerated in an unjust and malicious manner; it has truly not had time enough yet for these great achievements. Science is very young--a human activity which developed late.

  Sigmund Freud

  Science, Achievement, Unjust

  Sigmund Freud, Angela Richards (1964). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”

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• Scientists are also unnerved by the summer's implications for the future...proof that human activities are propelling a slide toward climate calamity...humans may have tipped the balance...a particularly harsh jolt to polar bears.

  Andrew Revkin

  Summer, Balance, May

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• Peace and the survival of life on earth as we know it are threatened by human activities which lack a commitment to humanitarian values. Destruction of nature and nature's resources result from ignorance, greed and lack of respect for the earth's living things.

  Dalai Lama

  Ignorance, Commitment, Greed

  Dalai Lama XIV (1995). “My Tibet”, p.80, Univ of California Press

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• Sex is a fact of life...and while it may lead to abuses...no words need be spoken...for people to know that the subject is one pleasantly interwoven in all human activities and involves the very substance of creation itself.

  Hugo Black

  Sex, People, Abuse

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• Suffering is just about the easiest of all human activities; being happy is just about the hardest. And happiness requires, not surrender to guilt, but emancipation from guilt.

  Nathaniel Branden

  Suffering, Guilt, Surrender

  Nathaniel Branden (2011). “How to Raise Your Self-Esteem: The Proven Action-Oriented Approach to Greater Self-Respect and Self-Confidence”, p.83, Bantam

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• There is no significant difference between human activities and those by amoebas and even bacteria, well, on the GRAND SCALE.

  Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov

  Science, Differences, Bacteria

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• The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities-perhaps the only one-in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there. In most other fields of human endeavour there is change, but rarely progress ... And in most fields we do not even know how to evaluate change.

  Karl Popper

  Dream, Mistake, Learning

  1960 Conjectures and Refutations (published1963), ch.10.

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