philosophy

"Alas, being a New Zealander is such an exquisite dilemma."

"It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is."

"It saddens me a great deal that, you know, so many kids turn around and say, 'My dad doesn't want me doing this.' It's this terrible image that some people have got of 'My son's going to dance' and 'O…"

"What can art accomplish? The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being."

"Everything destroyed is either resolved into the elements from which it came, or else vanishes into not-being. If things are resolved into the elements from which they came, then there will be others:…"

"His pathos is alien to me, especially in my current phase, but he is certainly a genius. Pathetic to the point of being pathological, this endangered man can endanger one who does not see through him.…"

"If you have a success, you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work."

"I don't know how I got into sculpture. I liked its physicality, that's the only reason. I didn't have a program."

"Procrastination is illogical from every viewpoint. It is like the man who wanted to cross the stream, so he sat on the bank to wait for all the water to run by."

"We speak of people "taking refuge" in vagueness — the more precise you are, in general the more likely you are to be wrong, whereas you stand a good chance of not being wrong if you make it vague enou…"

"I lay in the parlour between two beds to keep me from being frozen to death, for as we keep open house the winds enter from every quarter, and are apt to sweep into bed to me."

"Member for Islwyn was going to have a single currency willy-nilly. He has already made up his mind. The argument that he uses is that, if others have it, we must. That is an argument for a flock of sh…"

"Lynn stalked. She had taken up stalking for health reasons, but it was not paying off as handsomely as she had hoped."

"Constantly all around us, one substance is being made into another. This transition and this transformation is happening all the time. If you make mud into food, that's called agriculture. If you make…"

"And we could poke fun at them about by-passing the toll gates and 10 shilling notes and driving up on Ferguson tractors and supplying them with maps of Dublin and Nelson's Pillar not being there anymo…"

"The German emperor's speeches : being a selection from the speeches, edicts, letters, and telegrams of the Emperor William II"

"The nature of Spirit may be understood by a glance at its direct opposite Matter. As the essence of Matter is Gravity, so, on the other hand, we may affirm that the substance, the essence of Spirit is…"

"Being human is overrated."

"In its origin, liberalism had no ambition to be universal either in the sense of claiming to be valid for everyone and every human society or in the sense of purporting to give an answer to all the im…"

"The positive philosophy of Auguste Comte, freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau, in the Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Collection"