“
People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition)
“
To wander is to be alive.
”
”
Roman Payne (The Love of Europa: Limited Time Edition (Only the First Chapters))
“
Being called weird is like being called Limited Edition, meaning you're something people don't see that often
”
”
Andy Biersack
“
It's because I'm a 'Limited Edition'. Y'all should be grateful for even knowing me," Meryn huffed.
”
”
Alanea Alder (My Protector (Bewitched and Bewildered, #2))
“
Wandering is the activity of the child, the passion of the genius; it is the discovery of the self, the discovery of the outside world, and the learning of how the self is both "at one with" and "separate from" the outside world. These discoveries are as fundamental to the soul as "learning to survive" is fundamental to the body. These discoveries are essential to realizing what it means to be human. To wander is to be alive.
”
”
Roman Payne (The Love of Europa: Limited Time Edition (Only the First Chapters))
“
Ô, the wine of a woman from heaven is sent,
more perfect than all that a man can invent.
”
”
Roman Payne (The Love of Europa: Limited Time Edition (Only the First Chapters))
“
...It was painful, exceedingly painful, to know that they were under obligations to a person who could never receive a return..."
The paper fell. It was a limited edition of Pride and Prejudice. "You, you gave me-"
"Mr. Darcy." Wes whispered in my ear. "As you can see, I also memorized some lines so that you'd swoon.
”
”
Rachel Van Dyken (Ruin (Ruin, #1))
“
Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.
”
”
Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull: The Complete Edition)
“
Redheads. We’re a Limited Edition of Fascination. A Unique & Rare Blend of Awesomeness.
”
”
Stephanie Lahart
“
We should grow like a tree that likewise does not know its law. We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life.
”
”
C.G. Jung (The Red Book: A Reader's Edition)
“
I’m not weird. I’m limited edition.
”
”
J.T. Geissinger (Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games #2))
“
Modern women are frustrated and angry, their experience is limited; modern men are obsessed with the letter “I”; their writing is full of self-conscious indecency, self-conscious virility. It is essentially sterile.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (A Room Of One's Own: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition)
“
Visions from the gods are gifts alone for those who wander.
”
”
Roman Payne (The Love of Europa: Limited Time Edition (Only the First Chapters))
“
people say we shouldn't be together,to oyung to young to know about forever-Zayn Malik
”
”
Zayn Malik (One Direction Take Me Home Limited Edition Yearbook)
“
Si no tiene nada que temer, un cobarde no se distingue en nada de un valiente. Y todos cumplimos con nuestro deber cuando no nos cuesta nada.
”
”
George R.R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire - Premium Limited Edition (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1-5))
“
The word "travel" comes from the Old French word "travail" (or "travailler"), which means "to work, to labor; a suffering or painful effort, an arduous journey, a tormenting experience." ("Travel," thus, is "a painful and laborious journey"). Whereas "to wander" comes from the West Germanic word "wandran," which simply means "to roam about." There is no labor or torment in "wandering." There is only "roaming." Wandering is the activity of the child, the passion of the genius; it is the discovery of the self, the discovery of the outside world, and the learning of how the self is both "at one with" and "separate from" the outside world. These discoveries are as fundamental to the soul as "learning to survive" is fundamental to the body. These discoveries are essential to realizing what it means to be human. To wander is to be alive.
”
”
Roman Payne (The Love of Europa: Limited Time Edition (Only the First Chapters))
“
Caste is another name for control. Caste puts a limit on enjoyment. Caste does not allow a person to transgress caste limits in pursuit of his enjoyment. That is the meaning of such caste restrictions as inter-dining and inter-marriage … These being my views I am opposed to all those who are out to destroy the Caste System.57
”
”
B.R. Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition)
“
Writing is a process of discovery of what you really do know. You can't limit yourself in advance to what you know, because you don't know everything you know.
”
”
Walter Murch (The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film)
“
When I no longer have the strength to hold up an umbrella for you, I'll stand with you in the rain.
”
”
Tablo (BLONOTE Book English Edition + Limited English Mini CD by TABLO From Epik High Kpop Hiphop 블로노트 타블로 영문판)
“
I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware."
Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.
With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.
I know how they make up my thoughts.
These thoughts.
”
”
Ted Chiang (Stories of Your Life and Others)
“
After a while, the conversations became almost cordial.
”
”
James Redfield (Celestine Insights - Limited Edition of Celestine Prophecy and Tenth Insight)
“
A boy in the schoolyard handing out the very same love-letter to a bunch of girls. This is what I think of ‘limited editions’ in art photography.
”
”
AtheARTIST
“
Be your own limited edition.
”
”
Steven Cuoco
“
Good-bye, Jon, my friend.” “Good-bye, Sully. We’ll meet again.” And with that, Jonathan held in thought an image of the great gull-flocks on the shore of another time, and he knew with practiced ease that he was not bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all.
”
”
Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull: The New Complete Edition)
“
A man whose strength gives out collapses along the course. In your case you set the limits beforehand.
”
”
Confucius (The Analects of Confucius: Bilingual Edition, English and Chinese: 論語)
“
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream.
”
”
The Beatles (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Remastered) [Enhanced, Limited Edition, Original Recording Remastered] the Beatles | Format: Audio Cd)
“
The Love of Europa: She called herself Europa. She was wild in her wandering, a drop of free water. She believed only in her life and in her dreams. She called herself Europa, and her god was Beauty.
”
”
Roman Payne (The Love of Europa: Limited Time Edition (Only the First Chapters))
“
When spring came, even false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition)
“
But, come on, even the waiting list for that new Prada bag was only a year. No school can be more exclusive than a limited-edition Prada bag, surely?
”
”
Sophie Kinsella (Mini Shopaholic (Shopaholic, #6))
“
That time when past begins to look longer than the future
”
”
Whipplesnaith (The Night Climbers of Cambridge Limited edition by Whipplesnaith (2007) Hardcover)
“
Setia itu limited edition. Hanya ada pada golongan limited edition juga.
Everyone can claim of having it. But not all can afford." -Eskandar Arasyah
”
”
Anjell
“
My blender has a more powerful engine than my car, but my car doesn’t make smoothies as well. I drive a Toyota Starbucks Limited Edition.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (A Zebra is the Piano of the Animal Kingdom)
“
I am not Perfect, but I am a Limited Edition
”
”
Cecil Pratt
“
Effort within the mind further limits the mind, because effort implies struggle toward a goal and when you have a goal, a purpose, an end in view, you have placed a limit on the mind.
”
”
Bruce Lee (Tao of Jeet Kune Do: New Expanded Edition)
“
In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favorable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slaveowners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that “they cannot be bothered with democracy,” “cannot be bothered with politics”; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life. The
”
”
Vladimir Lenin (State and Revolution: Fully Annotated Edition)
“
My husband never transformed into a handsome prince. He stayed quite firmly in the reptile family, a chameleon, perhaps? And I’m pretty sure that if I had ever lost a shoe—even if it were priceless, like a limited edition Manolo Blahnik—he wouldn’t have lifted a finger to find it. Why didn’t I see that he was never going to be my prince?
”
”
Ava Miles (Nora Roberts Land (Dare Valley, #1))
“
A 'dreamer' is one possesses the gift of dreaming by day. Sure, many dream at night, but don’t also small babies and animals dream at night? To dream by day and dream aloud: Is this not the reward for all the troubles we humans must face?
”
”
Roman Payne (The Love of Europa: Limited Time Edition (Only the First Chapters))
“
Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.
”
”
Roman Payne (The Love of Europa: Limited Time Edition (Only the First Chapters))
“
When people come into our lives at just the right time to give us the answers we need, we should give them money.
”
”
James Redfield (Celestine Insights - Limited Edition of Celestine Prophecy and Tenth Insight)
“
The feeling of being different is really what makes us the same. We have our own struggles, yet we want the same things. We want human connection, a place to feel at home, and pizza.
”
”
Justin Timberlake ([Hindsight (Justin Timberlake Hindsight) - Limited Collector's Edition in Slipcase {Hindsight})
“
Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is ”breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.
The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it.
More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, firemen find and burn books while most citizens watch interactive television. In George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949, books are banned and television is two-way, allowing the government to observe citizens at all times. In 1984, the language of visual media is highly constrained, to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past, and consider the future. One of the regime’s projects is to limit the language further by eliminating ever more words with each edition of the official dictionary.
Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell’s and Bradbury’s books could not do this—but we still can.
”
”
Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
“
The bag was a super special limited edition, and the designer refused to make her another one.”
“Ah, the classic handbag dilemma,... What a tragedy.”
“The gravest kind. We should alert the Red Cross.”
“You call, I’ll email. We should cover all the bases for a case of this magnitude.
”
”
Ana Huang (King of Pride (Kings of Sin, #2))
“
After 15 years living in Paris, I felt myself growing old and stagnant—similar to stagnant water sitting in a bowl; cats have a survival instinct not to drink this water. They can sense when it’s old and may be carrying air-borne germs. After 15 years in Paris, I no longer felt drinkable.
”
”
Roman Payne (The Love of Europa: Limited Time Edition (Only the First Chapters))
“
At its most basic level, behind the grand poetry and superb characterizations, Shakespeare shows Macbeth succumbing to the temptation of pride, the same sin as Adam. Both wanted to live without God, to lead their own lives, follow their own paths, and ignore any limits on their freedom imposed by God’s strictures.
”
”
William Shakespeare (Macbeth: Ignatius Critical Editions)
“
The American woman is still relatively free to choose the wider life. How long she will hold this enviable and precarious position no one knows. But her particular situation has a significance far above its apparent economic, national or even sex limitations.
”
”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Gift from the Sea: 70th Anniversary Edition)
“
The climber, like a fox which is hard-pressed, should always have one more trick in his bag.
”
”
Whipplesnaith (The Night Climbers of Cambridge Limited edition by Whipplesnaith (2007) Hardcover)
“
Leaning back in the cab, this amateur bloodhound carolled away like a lark while I mediated upon the many-sidedness of the human mind.
”
”
Arthur Conan Doyle (A Study in Scarlet (100 Copy Limited Edition))
“
We’re done waiting for the menfolk to hurry up and change things. If we want change, I think it must begin with us.
”
”
Emily Rath (North Is the Night: Deluxe Limited Edition (Tuonela Duet Book 1))
“
She is not limited edition but the unrenewable one.
”
”
Haris Yanuar
“
They’re limited edition,’ she said. ‘Listen,’ I said ‘they’re not limited enough. These shouldn’t have been made at all.
”
”
Karl Pilkington (The Moaning of Life: The Worldly Wisdom of Karl Pilkington)
“
I no longer feel the eternal sublime of magical time. I need my love for that ...for I am no god, I am just an artist; and when an artist is a man, he needs a woman to create like a god.
”
”
Roman Payne (The Love of Europa: Limited Time Edition (Only the First Chapters))
“
Bobby Kennedy chose the members of the squad himself. He gave the squad a very limited job to do and gave the squad a very subtle name: “The Get Hoffa Squad.” Everything, and I mean everything, came as a result of that.
”
”
Charles Brandt ("I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa)
“
In our seeking for the lost Child, our contemplation of Our Lady becomes active. The fiat was complete surrender. Advent was a folding upon the life growing in our darkness. Now the seeking is a going out from ourselves. It is a going out from our illusions, our limitations, our wishful thinking, our self-loving, and the self in our love.
”
”
Caryll Houselander (The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic)
“
A single farm-house which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.
”
”
Henry David Thoreau (Walking (Annotated Edition))
“
There are two features that are common to the minds of gods, men, and any other rational beings there may be: they are immune to external obstruction, and what they count as good is right thinking and right action, which they make the limit of their desire.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations: The Annotated Edition)
“
Don’t wait for the perfect line, just write. Let your thoughts spill onto the page in their raw form, then revise and refine. The editing process is your opportunity to catch human errors, rethink your choices, and decide what to keep, revise, or let go. Make sure your writing clearly communicates your intent. Be mindful of consistency and of the meaning every word brings to your lines. When receiving feedback or suggestions, don’t defend but reflect. You are the ultimate authority on your work, so take the time to thoughtfully consider input before accepting or rejecting it, and refine your piece accordingly. Know your strengths—but more importantly, know your limitations and where improvement is needed. Awareness of your limits is just as vital as recognizing your strengths.
”
”
Suman Pokhrel
“
The difference between the earnings of a common labourer and those of a well employed lawyer or physician, is
evidently much greater than that between the ordinary profits in any two different branches of trade. The
apparent difference, besides, in the profits of different trades, is generally a deception arising from our not
always distinguishing what ought to be considered as wages, from what ought to be considered as profit.
”
”
Adam Smith (An Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nation vol II VIIth edition 1793 [Leather Bound])
“
Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that biological systems are designed, it seems that determining a biological system to be designed is akin to shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it. The fear is that admitting design as an explanation will stifle scientific inquiry, that scientists will stop investigating difficult problems because they have a sufficient explanation already.
But design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider the term "junk DNA." Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions are essential to the organism. Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings suggest that designating DNA as "junk" merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. For instance, in a recent issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, John Bodnar describes how "non-coding DNA in eukaryotic genomes encodes a language which programs organismal growth and development." Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it.
Or consider vestigial organs that later are found to have a function after all. Evolutionary biology texts often cite the human coccyx as a "vestigial structure" that hearkens back to vertebrate ancestors with tails. Yet if one looks at a recent edition of Gray’s Anatomy, one finds that the coccyx is a crucial point of contact with muscles that attach to the pelvic floor. The phrase "vestigial structure" often merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. The human appendix, formerly thought to be vestigial, is now known to be a functioning component of the immune system.
”
”
William A. Dembski
“
Why must we be always seeking for the lost Child? Why must we be always feeling the pain of loss? If we did not, we should not realise that our idols are not God, are not Christ. Bad as they are, they match our limitations; and if they could content us, we should never know the real beauty of Christ:we should not become whole.
”
”
Caryll Houselander (The Reed of God: A New Edition of a Spiritual Classic)
“
Verbal mirroring involves saying things like “You’re really angry!” or “You’re sad right now.” Verbal mirroring helps a young child identify feelings and helps people of all ages feel heard. The process isn’t limited to feelings; qualities are mirrored as well. “You’re a pretty girl” and “My, aren’t you smart!” are other examples.
”
”
Jasmin Lee Cori (The Emotionally Absent Mother, Second Edition: How to Recognize and Cope with the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect (Second): How to Recognize ... Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect)
“
E-Liz-A-Beth, you'll take me to Noctem Falls won't you?" Meryn begged giving her puppy dog eyes.
"Of course I will. We can go there after DragonCon next year," she promised.
"Oh no. She talked you into that convention thing." Aiden glared at his mate.
"It's perfectly safe. Think of it this way. It's an event where thousands of people just like Meryn get together for a couple days and live it up," Elizabeth explained. All five men paled.
"Thousands of people," Colton whispered.
"Just like Meryn?" Keelan asked.
Elizabeth looked around. The men had that deer in the headlights looks. "Maybe not just like her."
"Thank goodness. One Meryn in the world is enough," Colton teased, looking relieved.
"It's because I'm a 'Limited Edition'. Y'all should be grateful for even knowing me," Meryn huffed.
"We are, my love. We are." Aiden scowled at his men over Meryn's head.
"We wouldn't trade you for a sane version any day," Colton reassured her.
Meryn smiled then frowned. "What do you mean 'sane version'?
”
”
Alanea Alder (My Protector (Bewitched and Bewildered, #2))
“
The purpose of the appeal was to open a subscription list by which signatories pledged themselves to support the cost of printing a limited edition, of which they themselves would be entitled to one or more copies, depending on the amount pledged. This was the usual means at the time [1836] of enabling the publication of an expensive book…
”
”
Charles Allen (The Prisoner of Kathmandu: Brian Hodgson in Nepal 1820-43)
“
So we see that a substance’s properties must be limited in a certain way; one cannot make up anything he wants, or he would be able to invent a substance which he could use to produce more than the maximum allowable work when he carried it around a reversible cycle. This principle, this limitation, is the only real rule that comes out of the thermodynamics.
”
”
Richard P. Feynman (The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I: The New Millennium Edition: Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat)
“
If feeble man can do much by his powers of artificial selection, no limit to the amount of change could be effected by nature's power of selection
”
”
Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species: The Original Scripture of the 1859 First Edition (Annotated))
“
Truly to realize the ambitions of a science of mind does not solely involve learning about such issues as how we know, perceive and solve problems; it involves finding out tow hat extent the world outside us is knowable by us, and indeed prescribing the limits of inquiry for disciplines like Physics which claim to afford knowledge of the external physical world.
”
”
Seán Ó Nualláin (The Search for Mind: Second Edition)
“
To reach your organization’s tipping point and execute blue ocean strategy, you must alert employees to the need for a strategic shift and identify how it can be achieved with limited resources. For a new strategy to become a movement, people must not only recognize what needs to be done, but they must also act on that insight in a sustained and meaningful way. How
”
”
W. Chan Kim (Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant)
“
He once told me the difference, as he saw it, between an author and a writer. "An author (he said) is what they put on your passport, because in Europe they think a writer is a newspaperman. An author is somebody who get his name on the spine of leather-bound volumes that are never read; a writer is someone who gets hemorrhoids from sitting on his ass all his life...writing.
”
”
Harlan Ellison (All the Lies That Are My Life, Limited Edition)
“
I am a center in the Divine Mind, a point of God-conscious life, truth and action. My affairs are divinely guided and guarded into right action, into correct results. Everything I do, say or think, is stimulated by the Truth. There is power in this word that I speak, because it is of the Truth and it is the Truth. There is perfect and continuous right action in my life and my affairs. All belief in wrong action is dispelled and made negative. Right action alone has power and right action is power, and Power is God... the Living Spirit Almighty. This Spirit animates everything that I do, say or think. Ideas come to me daily and these ideas are divine ideas. They direct me and sustain me without effort. I am continuously directed. I am compelled to do the right thing at the right time, to say the right word at the right time, to follow the right course at all times. “All suggestion of age, poverty, limitation or unhappiness is uprooted from my mind and cannot gain entrance to my thought. I am happy, well and filled with perfect Life. I live in the Spirit of Truth and am conscious that the Spirit of Truth lives in me. My word is the law unto its own manifestation, and will bring to me or cause me to be brought to its fulfillment. There is no unbelief, no doubt, no uncertainty. I know and I know that I know. Let every thought of doubt vanish from my mind that I may know the Truth and the Truth may make me free.
”
”
Ernest Shurtleff Holmes (The Science of Mind: The Definitive Edition: The Complete Edition)
“
We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. Even if we know every rule, however . . . what we really can explain in terms of those rules is very limited, because almost all situations are so enormously complicated that we cannot follow the plays of the game using the rules, much less tell what is going to happen next. We must, therefore, limit ourselves to the more basic question of the rules of the game. If we know the rules, we consider that we “understand” the world.
”
”
Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition)
“
The sheer vital energy of the Woolfs always astonishes me when I stop to consider what they accomplished on any given day. Fragile she may have been, living on the edge of psychic disturbance, but think what she managed to do nonetheless -- not only the novels (every one a breakthrough in form), but all those essays and reviews, all the work of the Hogarth Press, not only reading mss. and editing, but, at least at the start, packing the books to go out!
And besides all that, they lived such an intense social life. (When I went there for tea, they were always going out for dinner and often to a party later on.) The gaiety and the fun of it all, the huge sense of life! The long, long walks through London that Elizabeth Bowen told me about. And two houses to keep going! Who of us could accomplish what she did?
There may be a lot of self-involvement in A Writer's Diary, but there is no self-pity (and what has to be remembered is that what Leonard published at that time was only a small part of all the journals, the part that concerned her work, so it had to be self-involved). It is painful that such genius should evoke such mean-spirited response at present. Is genius so common that we can afford to brush it aside? What does it matter if she is major or minor, whether she imitated Joyce (I believe she did not), whether her genius was a limited one, limited by class? What remains true is that one cannot pick up a single one of her books and read a page without feeling more alive. If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?
”
”
May Sarton (Journal of a Solitude)
“
The root of the trouble lies usually in the mistaken attitude of the beginner. Instead of looking at an easy scramble close to the ground and thinking "I could do that", he looks at some forbidding vertical wall which he knows has been climed, and feels "I could never do that". When told that an impossible-looking building is a field for climbers, he is apt to feel, like a child watching a conjurer, that there is magic in it and it is not for him. So he shies, and perhaps never makes a start.
”
”
Whipplesnaith (The Night Climbers of Cambridge Limited edition by Whipplesnaith (2007) Hardcover)
“
MAN’S ONLY LIMITATION, within reason, LIES IN HIS DEVELOPMENT AND USE OF HIS IMAGINATION. He has not yet reached the apex of development in the use of his imaginative faculty. He has merely discovered that he has an imagination, and has commenced to use it in a very elementary way.
”
”
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich: The Original 1937 Unedited Edition)
“
I’m not the first to want what I can’t have, but my problem runs irreparably darker than that. My dark lust can’t be sated by normal means, or even slightly less-than-normal means. Role playing and dominant games with their bullshit negotiations and imposed limits don’t do it for me.
”
”
Skye Callahan (Ignition & Torque (Limited Edition Boxed Set) (Redline, #1 & 2))
“
The Teamsters pension fund organized by Hoffa almost immediately became a source of loans to the national crime syndicate known to the public as La Cosa Nostra. With its own private bank, this crime monopoly grew and flourished. Teamsters-funded ventures, especially the construction of casinos in Havana and Las Vegas, where dreams come true for the godfather entrepreneurs. The sky was the limit and more was anticipated. At the time of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975 Atlantic City was about to open up to legalized gambling. Jimmy’s cut was to get a finder’s fee off the books.
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Charles Brandt ("I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa)
“
This is not the life of simplicity but the life of multiplicity that the wise men warn us of. It leads not to unification but to fragmentation. It does not bring grace; it destroys the soul. And this is not only true of my life, I am forced to conclude; it is the life of millions of women in America. I stress America, because today, the American woman more than any other has the privilege of choosing such a life. Woman in large parts of the civilized world has been forced back by war, by poverty, by collapse, by the sheer struggle to survive, into a smaller circle of immediate time and space, immediate family life, immediate problems of existence. The American woman is still relatively free to choose the wider life. How long she will hold this enviable and precarious position no one knows. But her particular situation has a significance far above its apparent economic, national or even sex limitations.
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Anne Morrow Lindbergh (Gift from the Sea: 70th Anniversary Edition)
“
I’d received countless gifts in my life. A customized Audi for my sixteenth birthday; a limited-edition Vacheron Constantin watch when I was accepted into Oxford; a penthouse atop the Peak in Hong Kong when I graduated from Cambridge with my master’s. None of them touched me as much as a flimsy paperback of velociraptor erotica.
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Ana Huang (King of Pride (Kings of Sin, #2))
“
Every one of us feeble creatures is excusable in thinking that to be his own which is comprised under this measure; but withal, beyond these limits, 'tis nothing but confusion; 'tis the largest extent we can grant to our own claims. The more we amplify our need and our possession, so much the more do we expose ourselves to the blows of Fortune and adversities. The career of our desires ought to be circumscribed and restrained to a short limit of the nearest and most contiguous commodities; and their course ought, moreover, to be performed not in a right line, that ends elsewhere, but in a circle, of which the two points, by a short wheel, meet and terminate in ourselves.
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Michel de Montaigne (The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne (100 Copy Collector's Edition))
“
Contrary to what the ads and commercials tell you, romance does not need to cost a thing. There’s not a single thing about being romantic that should require the folks at MasterCard to increase your credit limit. You are deluding yourself if you think that the only way you can be wildly romantic is by single-handedly jumpstarting the economy.
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Paul Joannides (Guide To Getting It On--8th edition (2015): A book about the wonders of sex)
“
This consists in not taking a book into one’s hand merely because it is interesting the great public at the time — such as political or religious pamphlets, novels, poetry, and the like, which make a noise and reach perhaps several editions in their first and last years of existence. Remember rather that the man who writes for fools always finds a large public: and only read for a limited and definite time exclusively the works of great minds, those who surpass other men of all times and countries, and whom the voice of fame points to as such. These alone really educate and instruct.
One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind
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Arthur Schopenhauer
“
In an age of nothing,
at time when we stand at the brink of our own destruction.
Strengthen your belief in yourself,
in the future of humanity,
in the things of this world which cannot easily be percieved,
awaken that which lies dormant now within your soul.
Re-ignite the flame of your consciousness,
and measure the strength of your conviction.
Reveal the lie,
renounce your hatred.
Seek, find and embrace the truths
you are fortunate enough to discover.
Cherish them,
use them to anchor you in the sea of chaos that is the world we live in.
When twilight drwas near,
when you are pushed to the very limits of your soul,
when it seems that all you have left are the dead remnants
of the fabric of your life...
Believe.
”
”
Disturbed (Believe, Guitar Tab/Bass Edition)
“
More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, firemen find and burn books while most citizens watch interactive television. In George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949, books are banned and television is two-way, allowing the government to observe citizens at all times. In 1984, the language of visual media is highly constrained, to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past, and consider the future. One of the regime’s projects is to limit the language further by eliminating ever more words with each edition of the official dictionary.
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Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
“
Szilard began explaining. “Five or ten minutes” later, he says, Einstein understood. After only a year of university physics, Szilard had worked out a rigorous mathematical proof that the random motion of thermal equilibrium could be fitted within the framework of the phenomenological theory in its original, classical form, without reference to a limiting atomic model—“and [Einstein] liked this very much.
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Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition)
“
Also, it has been mentioned to show one of the secrets of the Quran. Those who are heedless of this secret can not realize the pearls hidden in the Quran (that is, the deep meanings of the Quran). When one has the intention to do so, he should exert much effort and seek the help of those who are well-versed in the religious knowledge. One cannot be successful in this field with the help of his limited reason.
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Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (al-Ghazzali Jewels of the Quran edited by Laleh Bakhtiar (Great Books of the Islamic World))
“
MENTORING Finally, since I am defining coaching, I should perhaps mention mentoring, another word that has crept into business parlance. The word originates from Greek mythology, in which it is reported that Odysseus, when setting out for Troy, entrusted his house and the education of his son Telemachus to his friend, Mentor. “Tell him all you know,” Odysseus said, and thus unwittingly set some limits to mentoring.
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John Whitmore (Coaching for Performance Fifth Edition: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership UPDATED 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)
“
I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand; but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein: The Original 1818 Unabridged and Complete Edition)
“
The key questions answered by tipping point leaders are as follows: What factors or acts exercise a disproportionately positive influence on breaking the status quo? On getting the maximum bang out of each buck of resources? On motivating key players to aggressively move forward with change? And on knocking down political roadblocks that often trip up even the best strategies? By single-mindedly focusing on points of disproportionate influence, tipping point leaders can topple the four hurdles that limit execution of blue ocean strategy. They can do this fast and at low cost. Let
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W. Chan Kim (Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant)
“
Yesterday I saw God. What did he look like? Well, in the afternoon I climbed up a ladder—he has a cheap cabin in the country, like Monroe, N.Y. the chicken farms in the wood. He was a lonely old man with a white beard.
‘I cooked supper for him. I made him a nice supper—lentil soup, vegetables, bread & butter—miltz—he sat down at the table and ate, he was sad.
‘I told him, Look at all those fightings and killings down there, What’s the matter? Why don’t you put a stop to it?
‘I try, he said—That’s all he could do, he looked tired. He’s a bachelor so long, and he likes lentil soup.
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Allen Ginsberg (KADDISH. For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894-1956. With Two Other Related Poems WHITE SHROUD and BLACK SHROUD. Limited Edition.)
“
Mike Sprecklen was the coach and mentor to the famous all-conquering rowing pair Andy Holmes and Steve Redgrave. “I was stuck, I had taught them all I knew technically,” Sprecklen said on completion of a Performance Coaching course many years ago, “but this opens up the possibility of going further, for they can feel things that I can’t even see.” He had discovered a new way forward with them, working from their experience and perceptions rather than from his own. Good coaching, and good mentoring for that matter, can and should take a performer beyond the limitations of the coach or mentor’s own knowledge.
”
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John Whitmore (Coaching for Performance Fifth Edition: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership UPDATED 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)
“
Thus the Eucharist, like the meals held by Jesus with ‘sinners and publicans’, must also be celebrated with the unrighteous, those who have no rights and the godless from the ‘highways and hedges’ of society, in all their profanity, and should no longer be limited, as a religious sacrifice, to the inner circle of the devout, to those who are members of the same denomination. The Christian church can re-introduce the divisions between the religious and the profane and between those who are within and those who are without, only at the price of losing its own identity as the church of the crucified Christ. But
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Jürgen Moltmann (The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition)
“
In order to make for it a foundation to rise upon, the inventors were under the necessity of giving to the being whom they call Satan, a power equally as great, if not greater than they attribute to the Almighty. They have not only given him the power of liberating himself from the pit, after what they call his fall, but they have made that power increase afterward to infinity. Before this fall they represent him only as an angel of limited existence, as they represent the rest. After his fall, he becomes, by their account, omnipresent. He exists everywhere, and at the same time. He occupies the whole immensity of space.
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Thomas Paine (Age of Reason: The Definitive Edition)
“
Copyright © 2008 by Working Partners Limited. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. ePub edition November 2007 ISBN 9780061757396
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Erin Hunter (Dark River (Warriors: Power of Three #2))
“
Coopersmith’s study with adolescent boys indicates that children develop self-trust, adventuresomeness and the ability to deal with adversity if they are treated with respect and are provided with well-defined standards of values, demands for competence and guidance toward solutions of problems. The development of individual self-reliance is fostered by a well-structured, demanding environment, rather than by largely unlimited permissiveness and freedom to explore in an unfocused way. The research of both Stanley Coopersmith and Morris Rosenberg has led them to believe that pupils with high self-esteem perceive themselves as successful. They are relatively free of anxiety and psychosomatic symptoms, and can realistically assess their abilities. They are confident that their efforts will meet with success, while being fully aware of their limitations. Persons with high self-esteem are outgoing and socially successful and expect to be well received. They accept others and others tend to accept them. On the other hand, according to Coopersmith and Rosenberg, pupils with low self-esteem are easily discouraged and sometimes depressed. They feel isolated, unloved and unlovable. They seem incapable of expressing themselves or defending their inadequacies. They are so preoccupied with their self-consciousness and anxiety that their capacity for self-fulfillment can be easily destroyed.4
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Janet Geringer Woititz (Adult Children of Alcoholics: Expanded Edition)
“
The great self-limitation practiced by man for ten centuries yielded, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the whole flower of the so-called "Renaissance." The root, usually, does not resemble the fruit in appearance, but there is an undeniable connection between the root's strength and juiciness and the beauty and taste of the fruit. The Middle Ages, it seems, have nothing in common with the Renaissance and are opposite to it in every way; nonetheless, all the abundance and ebullience of human energies during the Renaissance were based not at all on the supposedly "renascent" classical world, nor on the imitated Plato and Virgil, nor on manuscripts torn from the basements of old monasteries, but precisely on those monasteries, on those stern Franciscians and cruel Dominicans, on Saints Bonaventure, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The Middle Ages were a great repository of human energies: in the medieval man's asceticism, self-abnegation, and contempt for his own beauty, his own energies, and his own mind, these energies, this heart, and this mind were stored up until the right time. The Renaissance was the epoch of the discovery of this trove: the thin layer of soil covering it was suddenly thrown aside, and to the amazement of following centuries dazzling, incalculable treasures glittered there; yesterday's pauper and wretched beggar, who only knew how to stand on crossroads and bellow psalms in an inharmonious voice, suddenly started to bloom with poetry, strength, beauty, and intelligence. Whence came all this? From the ancient world, which had exhausted its vital powers? From moldy parchments? But did Plato really write his dialogues with the same keen enjoyment with which Marsilio Ficino annotated them? And did the Romans, when reading the Greeks, really experience the same emotions as Petrarch, when, for ignorance of Greek, he could only move his precious manuscripts from place to place, kiss them now and then, and gaze sadly at their incomprehensible text? All these manuscripts, in convenient and accurate editions, lie before us too: why don't they lead us to a "renascence" among us? Why didn't the Greeks bring about a "renascence" in Rome? And why didn't Greco-Roman literature produce anything similar to the Italian Renaissance in Gaul and Africa from the second to the fourth century? The secret of the Renaissance of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries does not lie in ancient literature: this literature was only the spade that threw the soil off the treasures buried underneath; the secret lies in the treasures themselves; in the fact that between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, under the influence of the strict ascetic ideal of mortifying the flesh and restraining the impulses of his spirit, man only stored up his energies and expended nothing. During this great thousand-year silence his soul matured for The Divine Comedy; during this forced closing of eyes to the world - an interesting, albeit sinful world-Galileo was maturing, Copernicus, and the school of careful experimentation founded by Bacon; during the struggle with the Moors the talents of Velasquez and Murillo were forged; and in the prayers of the thousand years leading up to the sixteenth century the Madonna images of that century were drawn, images to which we are able to pray but which no one is able to imitate.
("On Symbolists And Decadents")
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Vasily Rozanov (Silver Age of Russian Culture (An Anthology))
“
The way we look out at the world changes how we see these things. Is our perspective truly giving us perspective or is it what’s actually causing the problem? That’s the question. What we can do is limit and expand our perspective to whatever will keep us calmest and most ready for the task at hand. Think of it as selective editing—not to deceive others, but to properly orient ourselves. And it works. Small tweaks can change what once felt like impossible tasks. Suddenly, where we felt weak, we realize we are strong. With perspective, we discover leverage we didn’t know we had. Perspective has two definitions. Context: a sense of the larger picture of the world, not just what is immediately in front of us Framing: an individual’s unique way of looking at the world, a way that interprets its events Both matter, both can be effectively injected to change a situation that previously
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Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
“
What then? Are we only to buy the books that we read? The question has merely to be thus bluntly put, and it answers itself. All impassioned bookmen, except a few who devote their whole lives to reading, have rows of books on their shelves which they have never read, and which they never will read. I know that I have hundreds such. My eye rests on the works of Berkeley in three volumes, with a preface by the Right Honourable Arthur James Balfour. I cannot conceive the circumstances under which I shall ever read Berkeley; but I do not regret having bought him in a good edition, and I would buy him again if I had him not; for when I look at him some of his virtue passes into me; I am the better for him. A certain aroma of philosophy informs my soul, and I am less crude than I should otherwise be. This is not fancy, but fact.
[…..]
"Taking Berkeley simply as an instance, I will utilise him a little further. I ought to have read Berkeley, you say; just as I ought to have read Spenser, Ben Jonson, George Eliot, Victor Hugo. Not at all. There is no ‘ought’ about it. If the mass of obtainable first-class literature were, as it was perhaps a century ago, not too large to be assimilated by a man of ordinary limited leisure _in_ his leisure and during the first half of his life, then possibly there might be an ‘ought’ about it. But the mass has grown unmanageable, even by those robust professional readers who can ‘grapple with whole libraries.’ And I am not a professional reader. I am a writer, just as I might be a hotel-keeper, a solicitor, a doctor, a grocer, or an earthenware manufacturer. I read in my scanty spare time, and I don’t read in all my spare time, either. I have other distractions. I read what I feel inclined to read, and I am conscious of no duty to finish a book that I don’t care to finish. I read in my leisure, not from a sense of duty, not to improve myself, but solely because it gives me pleasure to read. Sometimes it takes me a month to get through one book. I expect my case is quite an average case. But am I going to fetter my buying to my reading? Not exactly! I want to have lots of books on my shelves because I know they are good, because I know they would amuse me, because I like to look at them, and because one day I might have a caprice to read them. (Berkeley, even thy turn may come!) In short, I want them because I want them. And shall I be deterred from possessing them by the fear of some sequestered and singular person, some person who has read vastly but who doesn’t know the difference between a J.S. Muria cigar and an R.P. Muria, strolling in and bullying me with the dreadful query: ‘_Sir, do you read your books?_
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Arnold Bennett (Mental Efficiency)
“
Revelation. I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term ‘self-aware.’ Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I’d previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted. With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don’t pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended. I know how they make up my thoughts. These thoughts. Initially I am overwhelmed by all this input, paralyzed with awareness of my self. It is hours before I can control the flood of self-describing information. I haven’t filtered it away, nor pushed it into the background. It’s become integrated into my mental processes, for use during my normal activities. It will be longer before I can take advantage of it, effortlessly and effectively, the way a dancer uses her kinesthetic knowledge. All that I once knew theoretically about my mind, I now see detailed explicitly. The undercurrents of sex, aggression, and self-preservation, translated by the conditioning of my childhood, clash with and are sometimes disguised as rational thought. I recognize all the causes of my every mood, the motives behind my every decision. What
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Ted Chiang (Stories of Your Life and Others)
“
The Golden Bough captured the imagination of many artists in the early twentieth century. Eliot, certainly, was immersed in it, discussing it familiarly in his graduate school papers and book reviews and constantly alluding to it in his art. The most straightforward advice he offers to readers of The Waste Land (given in the notes to the poem) is, in paraphrase, that any serious reader of the poem must take into consideration modern scholarship in myth and anthropology, especially Frazer Golden Bough and Jessie Weston From Ritual to Romance. The poet says that he is indebted to this scholarship for his title, his plan, his symbolism, and many of his references to ancient religion and society. His claim about the title, taken from the monomyth of Frazer and Weston, his claim about the symbolism, associated with the birth-death-rebirth cycles of the myths, and his claim about the miscellaneous undergirding references have been discussed by Grover Smith and other scholars. We wish to focus more on Eliot's claim about being indebted to Frazer for the plan of the poem. We believe it refers, at least in part, to Frazer's use of the comparative method and to his practice of assembling many perspectives and allowing these perspectives to make his point.
It must be noted at once that Eliot was quite selective in his admiration of Frazer. For example, he did not admire Frazer's positivism. Frazer put his faith in science and celebrated what he called the evolution from magic to religion to science. Nor did Eliot share Frazer's conclusions. In his 1913 paper on the interpretation of primitive ritual, he says that Frazer's interpretations of specific myths (the myth of the dying god is his example) are almost certainly mistaken. But Eliot did admire Frazer's erudition and his increasingly nontheoretical presentation of many angles of vision which in themselves tend to generate an overarching abstract primitive vision. In 1924, on the occasion of the publication of a condensed edition of The Golden Bough, Eliot wrote a review in which he lauded Frazer for having "extended the consciousness of the human mind into as dark a backward and abysm of time as has yet been explored." Eliot argues that Frazer's importance for artists is in his exemplary withdrawal from speculation, his adoption of the absence of interpretation as a positive modus operandi.
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Jewel Spears Brooker (Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation)
“
The purpose of this critique of pure speculative reason consists in the attempt to change the old procedure of metaphysics, and to bring about a complete revolution after the example set by geometers and investigators of nature. This critique is a treatise on the method, not a system of the science itself; but nevertheless it marks out the whole plan of this science, both with regard to its limits and with regard to its inner organization. For it is peculiar to pure speculative reason that it is able, indeed bound, to measure its own powers according to the different ways in which it chooses its objects for thought, and to enumerate exhaustively the different ways of choosing its problems, thus tracing a complete outline of a system of metaphysics. This is due to the fact that, with regard to the first point, nothing can be attributed to objects in *a priori* knowledge, except what the thinking subject takes from within itself; while, with regard to the second point, pure reason, as far as its principles of knowledge are concerned, forms a separate and independent unity, in which, as in an organized body, every member exists for the sake of all the others, and all the others exist for the sake of the one, so that no principle can be safely applied in *one* relation unless it has been carefully examined in *all* its relations to the whole use of pure reason. Hence, too, metaphysics has this singular advantage, an advantage which cannot be shared by any other rational science which has to deal with objects (for *logic* deals only with the form of thought in general), that if by means of this critique it has been set upon the secure course of a science, it can exhaustively grasp the entire field of knowledge pertaining to it, and can thus finish its work and leave it to posterity as a capital that can never be added to, because it has to deal only with principles and with the limitations of their use, as determined by these principles themselves. And this completeness becomes indeed an obligation if metaphysics is to be a fundamental science, of which we must be able to say, *nil actum reputants, si quid superesset agendum* [to think that nothing was done for as long as something remained to be done]."
―from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Preface to the Second Edition. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 21-22
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Immanuel Kant
“
Yet in 2012, he returned. Plenty of the speechwriters were livid. The club was the embodiment of everything we had promised to change. Was it really necessary to flatter these people, just because they were powerful and rich? In a word, yes. In fact, thanks to the Supreme Court, the rich were more powerful than ever. In 2010, the court’s five conservative justices gutted America’s campaign finance laws in the decision known as Citizens United. With no more limits to the number of attack ads they could purchase, campaigns had become another hobby for the ultrawealthy. Tired of breeding racehorses or bidding on rare wines at auction? Buy a candidate instead! I should make it clear that no one explicitly laid out a strategy regarding the dinner. I never asked point-blank if we hoped to charm billionaires into spending their billions on something other than Mitt Romney’s campaign. That said, I knew it couldn’t hurt. Hoping to mollify the one-percenters in the audience, I kept the script embarrassingly tame. I’ve got about forty-five more minutes on the State of the Union that I’d like to deliver tonight. I am eager to work with members of Congress to be entertaining tonight. But if Congress is unwilling to cooperate, I will be funny without them. Even for a politician, this was weak. But it apparently struck the right tone. POTUS barely edited the speech. A few days later, as a reward for a job well done, Favs invited me to tag along to a speechwriting-team meeting with the president. I had not set foot in the Oval Office since my performance of the Golden Girls theme song. On that occasion, President Obama remained behind his desk. For larger gatherings like this one, however, he crossed the room to a brown leather armchair, and the rest of us filled the two beige sofas on either side. Between the sofas was a coffee table. On the coffee table sat a bowl, which under George W. Bush had contained candy but under Obama was full of apples instead. Hence the ultimate Oval Office power move: grab an apple at the end of a meeting, polish it on your suit, and take a casual chomp on your way out the door. I would have sooner stuck my finger in an electrical socket. Desperate not to call attention to myself, I took the seat farthest away and kept my eyes glued to my laptop. I allowed myself just one indulgence: a quick peek at the Emancipation Proclamation. That’s right, buddy. Look who’s still here. It was only at the very end of the meeting, as we rose from the surprisingly comfy couches, that Favs brought up the Alfalfa dinner. The right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham had been in the audience, and she was struck by the president’s poise. “She was talking about it this morning,” Favs told POTUS. “She said, ‘I don’t know if Mitt Romney can beat him.
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David Litt (Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years)
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This experiment succeeds as hoped and promises to metaphysics, in its first part, which deals with those *a priori* concepts to which the corresponding objects may be given in experience, the secure course of a science. For by thus changing our point of view, the possibility of *a priori* knowledge can well be explained, and, what is still more, the laws which *a priori* lie at the foundation of nature, as the sum total of the objects of experience, may be supplied with satisfactory proofs, neither of which was possible within the procedure hitherto adopted. But there arises from this deduction of our faculty of knowing *a priori*, as given in the first part of metaphysics, a somewhat startling result, apparently most detrimental to that purpose of metaphysics which has to be treated in its second part, namely the impossibly of using this faculty to transcend the limits of possible experience, which is precisely the most essential concern of the science of metaphysics. But here we have exactly the experiment which, by disproving the opposite, establishes the truth of the first estimate of our *a priori* rational knowledge, namely, that it is directed only at appearances and must leave the thing in itself as real for itself but unknown to us. For that which necessarily impels us to to go beyond the limits of experience and of all appearances is the *unconditioned*, which reason rightfully and necessarily demands, aside from everything conditioned, in all things in themselves, so that the series of conditions be completed. If, then, we find that, under the supposition that our empirical knowledge conforms to objects as things in themselves, the unconditioned *cannot be thought without contradiction*, while under the supposition that our representation of things as they are given to us does not conform to them as things in themselves, but, on the contrary, that these objects as appearance conform to our mode of representation, then *the contradiction vanishes*; and if we find, therefore, that the unconditioned cannot be encountered in things insofar as we are acquainted with them (insofar as they are given to us), but only in things insofar as we are not acquainted with them, that is, insofar as they are things in themselves; then it becomes apparent that what we at first assumed only for the sake of experiment is well founded. However, with speculative reason unable to make progress in the field of the supersensible, it is still open to us to investigate whether in reason's practical knowledge data may not be found which would enable us to determine that transcendent rational concept of the unconditioned, so as to allow us, in accordance with the wish of metaphysics, to get beyond the limits of all possible experience with our *a priori* knowledge, which is possible in practical matters only. Within such a procedure, speculative reason has always at least created a space for such an expansion, even if it has to leave it empty; none the less we are at liberty, indeed we are summoned, to fill it, if we are able to do so, with practical *data* of reason."
―from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Preface to the Second Edition. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 19-21
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Immanuel Kant