Illuminating Quotes

• Better to illuminate than merely to shine; to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Powerful, Thoughtful, Love Is

  "Summa Theologica". Book by Thomas Aquinas (Part II-II, Question 188), 1485.

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• Better to illuminate than merely to shine.

  Thomas Aquinas

  Shining, Contemplation, Contemplating

  "Summa Theologica". Book by Thomas Aquinas (Part II-II, Question 188), 1485.

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• As we curve around into the loop of the City Circle, I can see that a couple of other stylists have tried to steal Cinna and Portia's idea of illuminating their tributes. The electric-light-studded outfits from District 3, where they make electronics, at least make sense. But what are the livestock keepers from Distric 10, who are dressed as cows, doing with flaming belts? Broiling themselves? Pathetic.

  Suzanne Collins

  Couple, Curves, Light

  Suzanne Collins (2010). “Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games)”, p.213, Scholastic Inc.

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• Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Love Is, Judging Yourself, Evil

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2015). “The Cost of Discipleship”, p.129, SCM Press

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• Four billion people on this earth, but my imagination is still the same. It's bad with large numbers. It's still taken by particularity. It flits in the dark like a flashlight, illuminating only random faces while all the rest go blindly by, never coming to mind and never really missed. . . . I can't tell you how much I pass over in silence.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Taken, Dark, Numbers

  Wislawa Szymborska (2015). “View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems”, p.105, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• This splendid book discusses how, in the last two hundred fifty years, large numbers of people have achieved levels of well-being that were previously available only to a few individuals, and how this achievement has given rise to equally unprecedented inequalities. Unique in its focus and scope, exceptional knowledge and coherence, and careful argumentation, The Great Escape is highly illuminating and a delight to read.

  Thomas Pogge

  Book, Unique, Years

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• Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts. It is a way of illuminating the facts.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Imagination, Way, Facts

  Alfred North Whitehead (1967). “Aims of Education”, p.93, Simon and Schuster

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• Awareness must be like the rays of the sun: extending everywhere, illuminating all.

  B.K.S. Iyengar

  Rays, Sun, Awareness

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• The extreme possibilities are the most illuminating.

  David Mumford

  Science, Mathematics, Possibility

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• I am a moment illuminating eternity....I am affirmation...I am ecstasy.

  Alexander Scriabin

  Affirmation, Moments, Eternity

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• Srinivasa Ramanujan was the strangest man in all of mathematics, probably in the entire history of science. He has been compared to a bursting supernova, illuminating the darkest, most profound corners of mathematics, before being tragically struck down by tuberculosis at the age of 33, like Riemann before him. Working in total isolation from the main currents of his field, he was able to rederive 100 years' worth of Western mathematics on his own. The tragedy of his life is that much of his work was wasted rediscovering known mathematics.

  Michio Kaku

  Life, Science, Men

  "Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension". Book by Michio Kaku, March 24, 1994.

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• In fact, nothing in science as a whole has been more firmly established by interwoven factual information, or more illuminating than the universal occurrence of biological evolution. Further, few natural processes have been more convincingly explained than evolution by the theory of natural selection, or as it has been popularly called, Darwinism.

  E. O. Wilson

  Religion, Atheism, Information

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• There are few greater treasures to be acquired in youth than great poetry-and prose-stored in the memory. At the time one may resent the labor of storing. But they sleep in the memory and awake in later years, illuminated by life and illuminating it.

  Richard Livingstone

  Memories, Sleep, Years

  Richard Livingstone (2013). “On Education”, p.101, Cambridge University Press

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• To be lovingly present through the primal, naked pain that marks aspects of birth, and to be lovingly present through the difficult, heart-wrenching ending that marks aspects of death is to learn about life and love. Fear may be strong but love is stronger. Learning how to love includes learning how to make room for and transform fear. Learning how to live involves learning how to die. Love alone is the most potent power illuminating the breath's journey in between these thresholds. Love is the key. Love is the dance.

  Amy Wright

  Strong, Pain, Life And Love

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• At first it seems as if begoing follows becoming. But look even closer and you will see that there are only flashes of lightning illuminating the empty sky.

  Adyashanti

  Journey, Sky, Becoming

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• This national argument is usually interpreted as a battle between imperialists led by Roosevelt and Lodge and anti-imperialists led by William Jennings Bryan and Carl Schurz. It is far more accurate and illuminating however, to view it as a three-cornered fight. The third group was a coalition of businessmen, intellectuals, and politicians who opposed traditional colonialism and advocated instead a policy of an open door through which America's preponderant economic strength would enter and dominate all underdeveloped areas of the world.

  William Appleman Williams

  Fighting, Doors, Views

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• The basic problem is not political, it is apolitical and human. One of the most important things to do is to keep cutting deliberately through political lines and barriers and emphasizing the fact that these are largely fabrications and that there is another dimension, a genuine reality, totally opposed to the fictions of politics: the human dimension which politics pretend to arrogate entirely to themselves. This is the necessary first step along the long way toward the perhaps impossible task of purifying, humanizing and somehow illuminating politics themselves.

  Thomas Merton

  Cutting, Reality, Long

  "The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters".

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• Steadiness of faith, was, in the long run, as illuminating and essential as sophistication of thought.

  Jon Meacham

  Running, Long, Essentials

  Jon Meacham (2008). “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House”, p.24, Random House

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• Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.

  David Malouf

  Animal, Skins, Unseen

  David Malouf (2011). “The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World”, p.87, Black Inc.

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• The vain.- We are like shop windows in which we are continually arranging, concealing or illuminating the supposed qualities other ascribe to us - in order to deceive ourselves.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Order, Quality

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• What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.

  Umberto Eco

  Doe, Culture, Want

  "We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die". Interview with Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris, www.spiegel.de. November 11, 2009.

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• Well, it's because I gladly acknowledge some ideas that are part of process theology, but which I think are not tied to all the details of process thought, and are very illuminating and helpful.

  John Polkinghorne

  Thinking, Ideas, Details

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• We don't know why we are here and . . . our role in the universe, and the thought of an infinite universe. It's something the human mind can't really grasp. [And] it's statistically impossible that there's not life on other planets.

  Joel Kinnaman

  Mind, Roles, Why We Are Here

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• An illuminating read for every classical scholar engaged with the current quest for the subject's roots, and the excavation of the way that it has evolved over the past century and a half.

  Edith Hall

  Past, Roots, Half

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• Every time you make a rule you take away a choice, and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning.

  Marcus Buckingham

  Choices, Boss, Fuel

  Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffman (2014). “First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently”, p.122, Simon and Schuster

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