Elements Quotes - Page 24

• The social dynamics of human history, even more than that of biological evolution, illustrate the fundamental principle of ecological evolution - that everything depends on everything else. The nine elements that we have described in societal evolution of the three families of phenotypes - the phyla of things, organizations and people, the genetic bases in knowledge operating through energy and materials to produce phenotypes, and the three bonding relations of threat, integration and exchange - all interact on each other.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Organization, People, Energy

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• Then there's politics. Just imagine politics with its dumbbell element subtracted. There would be no Republican candidates. There would be no Democratic voters. The whole system would collapse.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Stupidity, Would Be, Voters

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• The whole question of pornography seems to me a question of secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things. Secrecy has always an element of fear in it, amounting very often to hate. Modesty is gentle and reserved. Today, modesty is thrown to the winds, even in the presence of the grey guardians. But secrecy is hugged, being a vice in itself. And the attitude of the grey ones is: Dear young ladies, you may abandon all modesty, so long as you hug your dirty little secret.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Attitude, Hate, Dirty

  D. H. Lawrence (1966). “Selected Poems of D.h. Lawrence”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

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• Time itself is an element.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1853). “Goethe's Opinions on the World, Mankind, Literature, Science, and Art”, p.113

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• Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature -- it makes the proud man meek -- the cheerful, sad -- the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy fail before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Believe, Character, Past

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• Contemplating the bowl, it is possible to see the interdependent elements which give rise to the bowl.

  Nhat Hanh

  Giving, Contemplating, Bowls

  "Old Path White Clouds". Book by Thich Nhat Hanh, 1987.

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• Human beings are innately loving beings. When we fail to love, it is because an element of ignorance has intruded into our experience, submerging our natural impulse to love.

  Nhat Hanh

  Love, Ignorance, Experience

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• Meditation is, first of all, a tool for surveying our territory so we can know what is going on. With the energy of mindfulness, we can calm things down, understand them, and bring harmony back to the conflicting elements inside us.

  Nhat Hanh

  Meditation, Energy, Mindfulness

  Thich Nhat Hanh (2007). “Living Buddha, Living Christ 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.19, Penguin

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• If we are at war with our parents, our family, our society, or our church, there is probably a war going on inside us also, so the most basic work for peace is to return to ourselves and create harmony among the elements within us - our feelings, our perceptions, and our mental states. That is why the practice of meditation, looking deeply, is so important.

  Nhat Hanh

  Family, Peace, War

  Thich Nhat Hanh (2007). “Living Buddha, Living Christ 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.10, Penguin

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• Give a child the habit of sacredly regarding the truth - of carefully respecting the property of others - of scrupulously abstaining from all acts of improvidence which can involve him in distress, and he will just as likely think of rushing into the element in which he cannot breathe, as of lying or cheating or stealing.

  Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux

  Cheating, Children, Lying

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 295), 1895.

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• It is not death to have the body called back to the earth, and dissolved into its kindred elements, and mouldered to dust, and, it may be, turn to daisies, in the grave. But it is death to have the soul paralyzed, its inner life quenched, its faculties dissipated; that is death.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Death, Dust, Soul

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• No one in his right mind would walk into the cockpit of an airplane and try to fly it, or into an operating theater and open a belly. And yet they think nothing of managing their retirement assets. I've done all three, and I'm here to tell you that managing money is, in its most critical elements even more demanding than the first two.

  William J. Bernstein

  Retirement, Airplane, Thinking

  "Behavioral Finance And Indexing". Interview with Murray Coleman, www.etf.com. June 12, 2008.

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• There are only a few things investors can do to counteract risk: diversify adequately, hedge when appropriate, and invest with a margin of safety. It is a precisely because we do not and cannot know all the risks of an investment that we strive to invest at a discount. The bargain element helps to provide a cushion for when things go wrong.

  Seth Klarman

  Safety, Risk, Investing

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• Diversification is a surrogate - and a damn poor surrogate - for knowledge, elements of control, and priceconsciousness.

  Martin J. Whitman

  Investing, Poor, Damn

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• The elements were "seeking" each other in rage and confusion, and in the fury of the conflict boastful man was utterly humiliated, sucked down, drowned.

  Elizabeth Goudge

  Loss, Men, Confusion

  Elizabeth Goudge (1944). “Green Dolphin Street”

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• It is, I think, a good deal owing to the preponderance of the commercial element in Society that conversation has sunk to its present dull level of conventional chatter.

  Dorothy Nevill

  Women, Thinking, Levels

  Lady Dorothy Nevill (1907). “The reminiscences of Lady Dorothy Nevill”, Arnold

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• As the brain of man is the speck of dust in the universe that thinks, so the leaves—the fern and the needled pine and the latticed frond and the seaweed ribbon—perceive the light in a fundamental and constructive sense. … Their leaves see the light, as my eyes can never do. … They impound its stellar energy, and with that force they make life out of the elements.

  Donald C. Peattie

  Eye, Men, Thinking

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• When home is ruled according to God's Word, angels might be asked to stay a night with us, and they would not find themselves out of their element.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Angel, Home, Night

  Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1868). “John Ploughman's Talk; or, plain advice for plain people”, p.88

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• There are two famous labyrinths where our reason very often goes astray. One concerns the great question of the free and the necessary, above all in the production and the origin of Evil. The other consists in the discussion of continuity, and of the indivisibles which appear to be the elements thereof, and where the consideration of the infinite must enter in.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Two, Evil, Labyrinth

  "Théodicée". Preface to the book by Gottfried Leibniz, 1710.

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• Geometry, which should only obey Physics, when united with it sometimes commands it. If it happens that the question which we wish to examine is too complicated for all the elements to be able to enter into the analytical comparison we wish to make, we separate the more inconvenient [elements], we substitute others for them, less troublesome but also less real, and we are surprised to arrive, notwithstanding a painful labour, only at a result contradicted by nature; as if after having disguised it, cut it short or altered it, a purely mechanical combination could give it back to us.

  Jean le Rond d'Alembert

  Real, Cutting, Giving

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• Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Passion, Fire, Natural

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• The true finish is the work of time, and the use to which a thing is put. The elements are still polishing the pyramids.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Time, Pyramids, Perfection

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.280, Delphi Classics

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• There is only one element that can break the Afrikaner, and that is the Afrikaner himself. It is when the Afrikaner, like a baboonshot in the stomach, pulls out his own intestines. We must guard against that.

  P. W. Botha

  Broken, Break, Stomach

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• The elements are cricket's presiding geniuses.

  Neville Cardus

  Genius, Cricket

  1981 A Fourth Innings with Cardus.

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• Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization's makeup and success - along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like... I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.

  Lou Gerstner

  Business, Makeup, Games

  "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?: Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround". Book by Louis V. Gerstner Jr., 2002.

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