Quotations #019

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." -- Sören Kierkegaard

"The great achievements of the past were the adventures of adventurers of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past." -- Alfred North Whitehead

"One day spent in the chamber of instruction is better for you than eternity outside it; the works thereof endure like the mountains." -- ancient Egyptian father's advice to a son (King, 19).

"Undoubtedly the desire for food has been, and still is, one of the main causes of great political events." -- Bertrand Russell

"Though we say that we cannot see the future, its conditions lie all around us. They are as if encrypted. We cannot read them because we lack the key (which will be in our hands only when it is too late to use it). But we see their coded fragments and must call them something. Many aspects of our own contemporary culture might be called premonitory shivers: panicky renderings of unreadable messages about the kind of society we are creating. Our dominating passion, after all, is to give life meaning, even if sometimes a hideous one." - Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768, Harvard UP, 1990, p. 1.