Scales Quotes - Page 10

• Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between Methadone and "cold turkey"-between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps-but no society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active.

  Ivan Illich

  Turkeys, Kicking It, Numbers

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• A fractal is a mathematical set or concrete object that is irregular or fragmented at all scales...

  Benoit Mandelbrot

  Science, Definitions, Fractals

  The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 91, No. 9, (p. 594), November 1984.

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• LEAD, n. A heavy blue-gray metal much used ... as a counterpoise to an argument of such weight that it turns the scale of debate the wrong way. An interesting fact in the chemistry of international controversy is that at the point of contact of two patriotisms lead is precipitated in great quantities.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Science, Blue, Two

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.2446, Delphi Classics

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• Many practitioners think there is some giant balance scale, where someone is keeping track, like Santa Claus, and that will determine your allotment of presents. That's a very exoteric understanding of reincarnation.

  Frederick Lenz

  Thinking, Track, Understanding

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• On the most usual assumption, the universe is homogeneous on the large scale, i.e. down to regions containing each an appreciable number of nebulae. The homogeneity assumption may then be put in the form: An observer situated in a nebula and moving with the nebula will observe the same properties of the universe as any other similarly situated observer at any time.

  Hermann Bondi

  Moving, Science, Numbers

  "Review of Cosmology," Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, p. 107-8, 1948.

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• A better lifetime comes from not some karmic scale but from inner knowledge. Inner knowledge makes you happy. In other words, it is not as if someone is checking!

  Frederick Lenz

  Lifetime, Rebirth, Make You Happy

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• REFUSAL, n. Denial of something desired; Refusals are graded in a descending scale of finality thus: the refusal absolute, the refusal condition, the refusal tentative and the refusal feminine. The last is called by some casuists the refusal assentive.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Desire, Denial, Lasts

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.2495, Delphi Classics

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• I woke at intervals until . . . the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.

  Annie Dillard

  Waking, Awake, Intervals

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.53, Canongate Books

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• Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Feelings, Would Be, Poverty

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1870). “Society and Solitude: Twelve Chapters”, p.98, London S. Low, Son & Marston 1870.

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• Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction, no general standard of taste, or scale of opinion. They see their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught men.

  William Hazlitt

  Men, Self, Mind

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.175, Delphi Classics

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• For thence a paradox Which comforts while it mocks, - Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.

  Robert Browning

  Comfort, Might, Succeed

  'Rabbi Ben Ezra' (1864) st. 7

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• Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.

  Saul Bellow

  Perspective, Anxiety, Suffering

  Saul Bellow (2015). “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction”, p.85, Penguin

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• The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, 'less.

  Albert Camus

  Art, Simplicity, Humans

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays”, p.98, Vintage

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• In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Bridges, Broken, Expectations

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2008). “The Narrative Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.136, Wildside Press LLC

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• Simplicity is cosmic, because it places our life on the same scale as all life, of innocent Nature herself, who is all-powerful.

  Deepak Chopra

  Powerful, Simplicity, Innocent

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• I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension.

  Freeman Dyson

  Mind, Religion, Distinction

  "Progress In Religion". Freeman Dyson's Acceptance Speech for the Templeton Prize at the Washington National Cathedral, www.edge.org. May 16, 2000.

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• It's possible to paint a monumental picture that's only 10 inches wide, if one has a sense of scale, which is very different from a sense of size.

  Robert Motherwell

  Power, Different, Size

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• Sweeping gestures from the shoulder allow you to make generous marks, well suited to large scale work. You don't get anything simpler than this - I'm sure it is the way the cave men drew.

  Stan Smith

  Men, Caves, Gestures

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• Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old "existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour. But everyone feels something.

  Enrico Fermi

  Epic, People, Feelings

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• I let myself go. I thought little of the houses and trees, but applied colour stripes and spots to the canva... Within me sounded the memory of early evening in Moscow, before my eyes was the strong, colour-saturated scale of the Munich light and atmosphere, which thundered deeply in the shadows.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Strong, Memories, Eye

  "Kandinsky" by Frank Whitford, Paul Hamlyn Ltd, London, 1967.

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• Mass production is nothing new. Weren't cathedrals built through mass production? The pyramids?... Paintings can be painted with the left hand, the right hand, someone else's hand, or many people's hands. The scale of production is irrelevant to its content.

  Ai Weiwei

  Hands, Pyramids, People

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• The question, 'How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?' is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren't - indeed it would be wrong if it weren't.

  Rowan Williams

  Believe, Suffering, Would Be

  "Archbishop: 'It should shake our faith in God'" by Martin Bright, www.theguardian.com. January 1, 2005.

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• It's a mistake to think that any increase in wages is inflationary and there is substantial room for non-inflationary wage growth, particularly at the bottom end of the scale.

  Jared Bernstein

  Mistake, Thinking, Growth

  "Minimum wage jumps to $5.15". www.cnn.com. September 1, 1997.

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• Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series

  Stuart Kauffman

  Numbers, Eight, Pairs

  Stuart Kauffman (1996). “At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity”, p.151, Oxford University Press

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• I once worked it out - after $12 million, all millionaires are the same. That's because we're all humans, confined to human scale. How many homes can you live in? How many meals can you eat? You can have a living room the size of a cathedral, but you won't live in it. It's too big.

  Ricardo Semler

  Home, Meals, Rooms

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