Profound Quotes - page 37
Absurd, irreducible; nothing - not even a profound and secret delirium of nature - could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.
Albert Einstein
You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: 'now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.' You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe you have been completely fair... This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity-not just legal equity but human ability-not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Here I am, a human being who came in this world just like anybody else did. A lot of things happen in our lives. Some traumatic experiences happen, some happy experiences happen. And we all live. We all survive. And there is the one thing that's so simple and so profound within inside of us, which is completely uncontaminated by everything that happens, everything that occurs all around us.
Prem Rawat
The first thing necessary for a constructive dealing with time is to learn to live in the reality of the present moment. For psychologically speaking, this present moment is all we have. The past and future have meaning because they are part of the present: a past event has existence now because you are thinking of it at this present moment, or because it influences you so that you, as a living being in the present, are that much different. The future has reality because one can bring it into his mind in the present. Past was the present at one time, and the future will be the present at some coming moment. To try to live in the "when" of the future or the "then" of the past always involves an artificiality, a separating one's self from reality; for in actuality one exists in the present. The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound.
Rollo May
Donald Trump, the man who defied every political rule and prevailed to win his party's nomination, last week took on perhaps the most sacred political rule of all: Never attack a Gold Star family. Not just because it alienates a vital constituency but because it reveals a shocking absence of elementary decency and of natural empathy for the most profound of human sorrows - parental grief.
Why did Trump do it? It wasn't a mistake. It was a revelation. It's that he can't help himself. His governing rule in life is to strike back when attacked, disrespected or even slighted. To understand Trump, you have to grasp the General Theory: He judges every action, every pronouncement, every person by a single criterion - whether or not it/he is "nice” to Trump.
Charles Krauthammer
Deliberate provocation of mystical experience, particularly by LSD and related hallucinogens, in contrast to spontaneous visionary experiences, entails dangers that must not be underestimated. Practitioners must take into account the peculiar effects of these substances, namely their ability to influence our consciousness, the innermost essence of our being. The history of LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its profound effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preparations are required; with them, an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience. Wrong and inappropriate use has caused LSD to become my problem child.
Albert Hofmann
It is in good part because of Professor Hayek's work [on the topic of social engineering], and also because of his profound insights - most notably in The Constitution of Liberty - into the connection between a free market, the rule of law, and individual liberty, that you don't hear professors saying today, as they used so glibly to say, that 'we are all socialists now.
Friedrich Hayek
It is, of course, a matter of history that our military advisers, in face of this appeal from me, still decided to adhere to their view as to the feasibility of the Flanders offensive. Could I have gone behind these exalted Commanders and conducted independent investigations on the spot into the facts and conditions? ... Profound though my own apprehensions of failure were, I was a layman and in matters of military strategy did not possess the knowledge and training that would justify me in overriding soldiers of such standing and experience. Accordingly, the soldiers had their way. And it is one of the bitter ironies of war that I, who have been ruthlessly assailed in books, in the Press and in speeches for "interfering with the soldiers" should carry with me as my most painful regret the memory that on this issue I did not justify that charge.
David Lloyd George
Being self-taught, he had not known that astronomers were expected to focus on the solar system. Instead, he explored the construction of the universe, and it was on later generations that the questions he asked and the methods he devised to answer them were to have profound influence.
William Herschel
The West regards as truth what the Hindu regards as appearance (for if human life, in the age of Christendom, was doubtless an ordeal it was certainly truth and not illusion), and the Westerner can regard knowledge of the the universe as the supreme value, while for the Hindu the supreme value is accession to the divine Absolute....
But the most profound difference is based on the fact that the fundamental reality for the West, Christian or athiest, is death, in whatever sense it may be interpreted --- while the fundamental reality for India is the endlessness of life in the endlessness of time: Who can kill immortality?
André Malraux
The realization that our mental functioning is largely irrational was arrived at by several thinkers at the same time, including Friedrich Nietzsche... Freud, who was much influenced by both Darwin and Nietzsche... was its most profound and articulate exponent. ...Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele also discovered and explored new aspects of our unconscious mental life. They understood women better than Freud... and they saw more clearly than Freud the importance of an infant's bonding to its mother. They even realized the significance of the aggressive instinct earlier than Freud did. ...Plato discussed unconscious knowledge ...pointing out that much of our knowledge is inherent in the psyche in latent form. ...Hermann von Helmholtz... advanced the idea that the unconscious plays a critical role in human visual perception.
Eric Kandel
I have been a learner all my life, and I am a learner still. ... I have some ideas that may not be thought to furnish good materials for a liberal politician. I do not like changes for their own sake, I only like a change when it is needful to alter something bad into something good, or something which is good into something better. ... [T]he basis of my liberalism is this. It is the lesson which I have been learning ever since I was young. I am a lover of liberty; and that liberty which I value for myself, I value for every human being in proportion to his means and opportunities. That is a basis on which I find it perfectly practicable to work in conjunction with a dislike to unreasoned change and a profound reverence for everything ancient, provided that reverence is deserved.
William Ewart Gladstone
What you have given me, is the most profound experience I could imagine. I'm so filled with emotion, about what's just happened - it's extraordinary. It's extraordinary.
I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now - I don't want to lose it. It's so ... so much larger than me and life and it hasn't got anything to do with the little green planet and the blue orb - it has to do with the enormity - at the quickness and the suddenness of life and death and then oh my God!
William Shatner
Wendy Doniger's conception of Hinduism deserves a more thorough treatment, much of which has already been pioneered by Rajiv Malhotra. But one general observation, which counts for the whole current of psycho-analytical "deconstruction” of Hinduism, is that the clumsy Freudian concepts she uses are simply not sufficient to understand Hindu explorations of consciousness and human nature. I once heard an Indian psychologist who had guzzled down big doses of this psycho-analytical framework, pontificate that a Guru is followed because he is a "father figure”. You could see him savour this expression, as if he considered what he had said as very profound. Well, there are many types of father figure, but only few have the specific qualities needed to be a Guru; and psycho-analysis has never been able to turn anyone into a Guru in the Hindu sense. The smaller cannot contain the greater.
Koenraad Elst
Former president Jimmy Carter recently made a profound and damning statement - the United States is the "most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Carter contrasted the United States with China, saying that China is building high-speed trains for its people while the United States is putting all of its resources into mass destruction. Where are high-speed trains in the United States, Carter appropriately wondered.
Oliver Stone
