„Hero tales suggest the price of courage is beyond the ordinary budget. They tempt us to disown the common capacity of the human spirit to transcend normality.“

Quelle: Cosmos (1980), p. 4
Kontext: The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

Quelle: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 621.

Speech declaring bid for the Conservative Party leadership http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/theresa-mays-tory-leadership-launch-statement-full-text-a7111026.html (30 June 2016)

Quelle: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Power of Words (1937), p. 222
Kontext: There is no area in our minds reserved for superstition, such as the Greeks had in their mythology; and superstition, under cover of an abstract vocabulary, has revenged itself by invading the entire realm of thought. Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought. In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends. To keep to the social level, our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities. This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary: nation, security, capitalism, communism, fascism, order, authority, property, democracy. We never use them in phrases such as: There is democracy to the extent that... or: There is capitalism in so far as... The use of expressions like "to the extent that" is beyond our intellectual capacity. Each of these words seems to represent for us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean, successively or simultaneously, anything whatsoever. Our lives are lived, in actual fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits; and yet we act and strive and sacrifice ourselves and others by reference to fixed and isolated abstractions which cannot possibly be related either to one another or to any concrete facts. In this so-called age of technicians, the only battles we know how to fight are battles against windmills.

Quelle: The Faith of Leap (2011), p. 96

Quelle: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

The Book of Ammon
Kontext: Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member. Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier. Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual. Therefore one with love, courage, and wisdom is one in a million who moves the world, as with Jesus, Buddha, and Gandhi.

"Creative aspect of language use"
Quotes 2000s, 2007-09, (3rd ed., 2009)

Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter LXVII: On Ill-Health and Endurance of Suffering

Here in this region beyond thought the human spirit actively soars
The Exemplar, The Life of the Servant

Quelle: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Life of Fredrick the Great http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/metabook/fgreat.html, Bk. IV, ch. 3 (1858–1865). Sometimes misreported as "Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains"; see Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 12.
1860s

Discours de réception de Louis Pasteur (1882)
Kontext: The human spirit, driven by an invincible force, will never cease to ask: What is beyond? Does he want to stop either in time or in space? Since the point at which he has reigned is only a finite magnitude, greater only than all those who have preceded him, he has scarcely begun to think of it as the implacable question and always without being able to silence his curiosity. There is nothing to answer: there are spaces, times or magnitudes without limits. No one understands these words. <!-- He who proclaims the existence of the infinite, and no one can escape from it accumulates in this affirmation more supernatural than there is in all the miracles of all religions; for the notion of the infinite has the double character of imposing itself and of being incomprehensible.

Tiger and the Rose, 1971

Quelle: Girl at Sea

http://www.daplastique.com/about.php?sectionID=3

Quelle: Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter