It was no accident that the beau ideal of his (John Adams') political philosophy was balance, since he projected onto the world the conflicting passions he felt inside himself and regarded government as the balancing mechanism that prevented those fa...
... the invention of the mechanical clock in medieval Europe. This was one of the great inventions in this history of mankind -- not in a class with fire and the wheel, but comparable to movable type in its revolutionary implications for cultural val...
The more we delve into quantum mechanics the stranger the world becomes; appreciating this strangeness of the world, whilst still operating in that which you now consider reality, will be the foundation for shifting the current trajectory of your lif...
A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment...For imagination sets the goal ‘picture’ which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not becaus...
There are certain shocks which, if sufficiently strong, seem to have power to destroy the balance of life. Such a shock would seem to overthrow all the intricate, vital, slowly developed mechanism of mind, to plunge the victim into a chaotic half-wor...
Tomorrow and tomorrow come creeping in and always will. We're fools trapped in a mechanism of our own unconscious making. Shadows strutting and fretting for one brief hour upon a stage, then heard no more. I'll weep an ocean in my heart, if the world...
had given a talk on the then new quantum mechanics, of whose wonders he was most appreciative. He spoke hard and earnestly in the New Lecture Hall. And when he was done, Professor , who presided, thanked him for his efforts, and not least for 'leavin...
Again came that ringing crow, and Peter dropped in front of them. "Greeting, boys," he cried, and mechanically they saluted, and then again was silence. He frowned. "I am back," he said hotly, "why do you not cheer?
When you're writing plays, it's possible to believe you don't have any real world skill. When you're adapting, it is really all about the mechanics, so you feel closer to, I don't know, an accountant or someone who has a body of information. It's not...
The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilibility of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concr...
I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don't have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own all day. Show me a writer who doesn't get depressed: who has a completely stable mood. They'd be a garage mechanic or something.
One day I looked at something in myself that I had been avoiding because it was too painful. Yet once I did, I had an unexpected surprise. Rather than self-hatred, I was flooded with compassion for myself because I realized the pain necessary to deve...
Because the biological mechanisms that affect our health and well-being are so dynamic, when people change their diet and lifestyle, they usually feel so much better, so quickly; it reframes the reason for changing from fear of dying to joy of living...
Look at anyone's bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you're going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that's at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas...
My way of dealing with the world has always been to make fun of it and observe it but not take part in it. That's how I became a writer. But when you have kids, suddenly you have to be part of things. It leads almost to a breakdown because your whole...
I loved my computer; it's a tool. A tool increases your mechanical advantages. It allows you to use your strengths and talents to greater advantage, and that's what tools do, and that's what my computer does for me. It's not my toy, it's my tool.
There is no such thing as originality. It has all been said before, suffered before. If a person knows that, is it any wonder love becomes mechanical and death just a scene to be shunned? There is no absolute knowledge to be gained from either. Just ...
Grain isn't structured like a screen door that you're looking through, but pixels are. Film-based grain is just all over the place, one frame totally different from the next. So your edges are coolly sharp and have a different feeling, an organic fee...
What was destiny? What was the power that shaped the patterns and attempted to enforce them? God? Should she be raging at God - or begging Him to let her son live and to spare her from the life of a cripple? Or was the power behind destiny merely a n...
The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have said on another occasion, is the technique of techni...
Sean: [about Will] He pushes people away before they get a chance to leave him. It's a defense mechanism. And for 20 years he's been alone because of that. And if you push him right now, it's gonna be the same thing all over again and I'm not gonna l...
