Infinite Quotes - Page 26

• Nothing has shown more fully the prodigious ignorance of human ideas and their littleness, than the discovery of [Sir William] Herschell, that what used to be called the Milky Way is a portion of perhaps an infinite multitude of worlds!

  Horace Walpole

  Ignorance, Discovery, Ideas

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• Three elements go to make up an idea. The first is its intrinsic quality as a feeling. The second is the energy with which it affects other ideas, an energy which is infinite in the here-and-nowness of immediate sensation, finite and relative in the recency of the past. The third element is the tendency of an idea to bring along other ideas with it.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Past, Ideas, Feelings

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1974). “Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce”, Harvard University Press

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• The useless search of philosophers for a cause of the universe is a regressus in infinitum (a stepping backwards into the infinite) and resembles climbing up an endless ladder, the recurring question as to the cause of the cause rendering the attainment of a final goal impossible.

  Ludwig Buchner

  Climbing, Goal, Finals

  Ludwig Büchner (1884). “Force and Matter: Or, Principles of the Natural Order of the Universe. With a System of Morality Based Thereon”

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• Once one has kissed a cadaver's forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertasteof nothingness that nothing can erase.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Death, Cadavers, Bitterness

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• There surely is a being who presides over the universe; and who, with infinite wisdom and power, has reduced the jarring elementsinto just order and proportion. Let speculative reasoners dispute, how far this beneficent being extends his care, and whether he prolongs our existence beyond the grave, in order to bestow on virtue its just reward, and render it fully triumphant.

  David Hume

  God, Order, Rewards

  David Hume, Stephen Copley, Andrew Edgar (2008). “Selected Essays”, p.91, Oxford University Press

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• The unique eludes us; yet we remain faithful to the ideal of it; and in spite of sense and of our merely abstract thinking, it becomes for us the most real thing in the actual world, although for us it is the elusive goal of an infinite quest.

  Josiah Royce

  Real, Unique, Thinking

  Josiah Royce (1952). “The Religious Philosophy of Josiah Royce; Edited, with an Introductory Essay, by Stuart Gerry Brown”

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• The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Sleep, Men, Expectations

  Henry David Thoreau (1882). “Walden”, p.142

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• Let the will embrace the highest ideals freely and with infinite strength, but let action first take hold of what lies closest.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Lying, Reality, Firsts

  "Rule of Life", 1815.

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• My life is ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Heart, Glowing, Joy

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2015). “The Brothers Karamazov”, p.441, First Avenue Editions

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• You can keep counting forever. The answer is infinity. But, quite frankly, I don't think I ever liked it. I always found something repulsive about it. I prefer finite mathematics much more than infinite mathematics. I think that it is much more natural, much more appealing and the theory is much more beautiful. It is very concrete. It is something that you can touch and something you can feel and something to relate to. Infinity mathematics, to me, is something that is meaningless, because it is abstract nonsense.

  Doron Zeilberger

  Beautiful, Science, Thinking

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• My soul is an entangled knot,
  Upon a liquid vortex wrought
  By Intellect in the Unseen residing,
  And thine doth like a convict sit,
  With marline-spike untwisting it,
  Only to find its knottiness abiding;
  Since all the tools for its untying
  In four-dimensional space are lying,
  Wherein they fancy intersperses
  Long avenues of universes,
  While Klein and Clifford fill the void
  With one finite, unbounded homoloid,
  And think the Infinite is now at last destroyed.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Lying, Thinking, Space

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• I think that there is an infinite creative force that generates all consciousness and all matter and we are all connected and if you align yourself with this infinite creative force then you can be positive and you can be beautiful, I don't think its a person or god, I don't believe in any particular doctrine or dogma, only that humanity is connected.

  Russell Brand

  Beautiful, Believe, Thinking

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• We tend to misunderstand the colour black, seeing it as evil, or negation of life. Rather, black means all things being possible, infinite energy of life before consciousness has constructed any boundaries. When we fear blackness or darkness we fear the deep unconscious source of life itself.

  Rachel Pollack

  Mean, Energy Of Life, Evil

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• When information is infinite, individual pieces of information are worth nothing.

  Charles K. Kao

  Pieces, Information, Individual

  "Charles K. Kao" by Jim Erickson and Yulanda Chung, www.cnn.com.

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• That's for the best. Otherwise they might realize they're in prison. It can't be helped. You women are used to harems and prisons. A person can spend his whole life between four walls. If he doesn't think or feel that he's a prisoner, then he's not a prisoner. But then there are people for whom the whole planet is a prison, who see the infinite expanse of the universe, the millions of stars and galaxies that remain forever inaccessible to them. And that awareness makes them the greatest prisoners of time and space.

  Vladimir Bartol

  Stars, Wall, Thinking

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• To will nothing, then, is ..looking ..for that infinite virtuosity that always enters into the game and always runs off

  Maurice Blondel

  Running, Games, Virtuosity

  Maurice Blondel, Oliva Blanchette (2004). “Action (1893): essay on a critique of life and a science of practice”, Univ of Notre Dame Pr

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• The God of Christians is a God of love and comfort, a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom he possesses, a God who makes them conscious of their inward wretchedness, and his infinite mercy; who unites himself to their inmost soul, who fills it with humility and joy, with confidence and love, who renders them incapable of any other end than himself.

  Blaise Pascal

  Christian, Heart, Humility

  Blaise Pascal (2010). “Thoughts, Letters & Minor Works”, p.186, Cosimo, Inc.

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• You are not merely the physical body that you identify with out of habit. Your essential state is a field of infinite possibilities.

  Deepak Chopra

  Fields, Essentials, Body

  Deepak Chopra (2010). “Grow Younger, Live Longer: Ten steps to reverse ageing”, p.11, Random House

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• There is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man. That is what looks like God.

  Joseph Campbell

  Men, Mind, Looks

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• Rational thinking which is free from assumptions ends therefore in mysticism. To relate oneself in the spirit of reverence for life to the multiform manifestations of the will-to-live which together constitute the world is ethical mysticism. All profound world-view is mysticism, the essence of which is just this: that out of my unsophisticated and naïve existence in the world there comes, as a result of thought about self and the world, spiritual self-devotion to the mysterious infinite Will which is continuously manifested in the universe.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Spiritual, Thinking, Self

  "Philosophy of Civilisation". Book by Albert Schweitzer, Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics, Preface, 1949.

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• Exaggeration! was ever any virtue attributed to a man without exaggeration? was ever any vice, without infinite exaggeration? Do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves, or do we recognize ourselves for the actual men we are? Are we not all great men? Yet what are we actually, to speak of? We live by exaggeration.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Truth, Men, Vices

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “HENRY DAVID THOREAU - Ultimate Collection: 6 Books, 26 Essays & 60+ Poems, Including Translations. Biographies & Letters (Illustrated): Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, A Yankee in Canada, Canoeing in the Wilderness, Civil Disobedience, Slavery in Massachusetts, Life Without Principle, Excursions, Poems of Nature, Familiar Letters…”, p.1380, e-artnow

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• Philosophy, certainly, is some account of truths the fragments and very insignificant parts of which man will practice in this workshop; truths infinite and in harmony with infinity, in respect to which the very objects and ends of the so-called practical philosopher will be mere propositions, like the rest.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.281, Simon and Schuster

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• I should fear the infinite power and inflexible justice of the almighty mortal hardly as yet apotheosized, so wholly masculine, with no sister Juno, no Apollo, no Venus, nor Minerva, to intercede for me, thumoi phileousa te, kedomene te.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Sister, God, Women

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• The moment the doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, there is no question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks this question, or condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is infinite, to a future which would be finite.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Humility, Men, Soul

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2000). “Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.303, Modern Library

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• The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Long, Use, Shells

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.457, Library of America

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