Last update: October 22, 2007
You are your own master.
Listen only to the music of leaves
amorously embraced by the wind.
-FFL, 2001
| "To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour." |
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"Patience dans l'Azur. |
| - William Blake, opening to Auguries of Innocence |
The thinker, |
- Paul Valéry |
The kiss, by Rodin.
"When we understand that the human is the only animal
who must create meaning,
who must open a wedge into neutral nature,
we already understand the essence of love.
Love is the problem of an animal who must find life,
create a dialogue with nature
in order to experience [its] own being."
- Ernest Becker
"To love is to place our happiness in the happiness of another."
- Gotfried Wilhelm Leibnitz
"We are shaped and fashioned by what [whom] we love."
- Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832)
| "... l'attraction entre deux opposés : entre la culture Anglo-saxonne et la culture Latino-américaine ; entre homme et femme; entre l'observateur et l'observé; entre l'être qui aime et l'être aimé; entre le meneur et le suiveur. L'histoire est aussi basée sur le pouvoir. Le pouvoir de la danse et de la musique; le pouvoir de la création; le pouvoir de l'amour dans la relation réalisateur-acteur. Et la lutte pour le pouvoir de deux individus, chacun habitué à être le meneur dans leur propre sphère, mais chacun ayant besoin de suivre l'autre afin de réaliser ses propres rêves..." - Sally Potter The Tango Lesson, 1997. |
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"Je ne savais pas trop quoi dire. Je me sentais très maladroit.
Je ne savais comment l'atteindre, où la rejoindre...
C'est tellement mystérieux, le pays des larmes."
"Je n'ai alors rien su comprendre!
J'aurais dû la juger sur les actes et non sur les mots.
Elle m'embaumait et m'éclairait. Je n'aurais jamais dû m'enfuir!
J'aurais dû deviner sa tendresse derrière ses pauvres ruses.
Les fleurs sont si contradictoires!
Mais j'étais trop jeune pour savoir l'aimer."
- "Le Petit Prince", Antoine de St-Exupery
"Love matches are made by people who are content, for a month of honey,
to condemn themselves to a life of vinegar."
- Marguerite Gardiner Blessington
"In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision."
- Italo Calvino
"I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left. I lived a few
weeks while you loved me."
- Humphrey Bogart, 'In a Lonely Place'
"L'amour commence à l'instant où une femme s'inscrit par une parole
dans notre mémoire poétique."
Milan Kundera, "L'insoutenable légèreté de l'être."
"L'être qui dort seul est bercé par tous les être qu'il aime, qu'il a
aimés, qu'il aimera."
- Jacques Prévert
"The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is
for the desire of the man."
- Germaine de Stael
"Drink to the fountain of love,
and give it the attention
paragoning your most important work of art or science.
It shall be the zenith in your sky,
forever your guardian angel."
- FFL, from "Water angels" (for ML, Nov. 2002)
La danaide, by Rodin, 1889.
"The forms of virtue are erect, the forms of pleasure
undulate;
Minerva's drapery descends in long uninterrupted lines;
a thousand amorous curves embrace the limbs of Flora."
- Henri Fuseli (1741-1825), "Aphorisms on Art" (item 194).
"I set out to show that there exists single creative activity,
which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences.
It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts,
and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies.
What makes each human, what makes them universal,
is the stamp of the creative mind."
- Jacob Bronowski, "Science and Human Values" (Ch.2 - The Habit of
Truth)
"... science is an expression of the human mind,
which seeks for unity under the chaos of nature
as the writer seeks for it in the variety of human nature"
- Jacob Bronowski
"...the clarity of the thoughts should also be accompanied by the
clarity of the technique."
- Piet Mondrian, 1909
"It is the mark of the educated mind to use for each subject the degree
of exactness which it admits."
- Aristotle
"... from its beginnings and throughout its
development ...
Gestalt psychology has shown a kinship to art. ...
the spirit underlying the reasoning of these men makes the artist feel
at home.
In fact, something like an artistic look at reality was needed
to remind scientists that most phenomena of nature
are not described adequately if they are analyzed piece by piece. ...
at no time could a work of art have been made or understood
by a mind unable to conceive the integrated structure of the whole."
- R. Arnheim, in "Art and Visual Perception," p. vii.
"I try to testify in my prints that we live in a beautiful, orderly
world,
and not in a formless chaos, as it so often seems."
- M.C. Escher
"What is art but a way of seeing?"
- Thomas Berger
"Drawing is putting a line (a)round an idea."
- Henri Matisse (1869-1954)
"Any line drawn on a sheet of paper ...
is like a rock thrown into a pond.
It upsets the repose, it mobilizes space."
- R. Arnheim, in "Art and Visual Perception."
"Exile" (1992), by Michael
Leyton
"The body is in exile
but your mind is the guardian.
While the parts are to explode,
the thoughts re-construct and harmonize.
The flow that was a mere passage
can now become the salvation of Paragone."
- FFL (Sept. 2001)
"This is actually one of the great resources of art:
metaphor, linking parts of the body with other elements of experience.''
- Philip Rawson, "The Art of Drawing", 1983.
"The limitation of one body is that which begins another."
- Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519).
"An artist can exercise artistic liberties to emphasize desired
features in a picture,
but a topologist can and does exercise even more liberties in her
rubber sheet world
where any deformation is perfectly acceptable as long as you do not
tear anything."
- Carroll K. Johnson, 1996.
"Now the work of art also represents a state of final equilibrium,
of accomplished order and maximum relative entropy,
and there are those who resent it.
But art is not meant to stop the stream of life.
Within a narrow span of duration and space
the work of art concentrates a view of the human condition;
and sometimes it marks the steps of progression,
just as a man climbing the dark stairs of a medieval tower
assures himself by the changing sights glimpsed through its narrow
windows
that he is getting somewhere after all."
- Rudolph Arnheim, "Entropy
and Art" (final words), 1971
"Atomism and Form are not mutually exclusive.
Structure
is the essential link between the two."
- Lancelot Law Whyte
"Erscheinung und Entzweien sind synonym."
("Appearance and Segregation are synonyms.")
- Goethe
"In a very large part of morphology,
our essential task lies in the comparison of related forms
rather than in the precise definition of each"
- D'Arcy Thompson, ``On Growth and Form'', 1917.
"Vision is not a mechanical recording of elements,
but the grasping of significant structural patterns."
- R. Arnheim, in "Art and Visual Perception," p. viii.
|
|
"How bewitching the beauty of the human body, |
"Is all that we see or seem
but a dream within a dream."
- Edgar Allan Poe (1827)
"Shape is only operationally defined."
[It] "is not only a property of the object
but equally of the method you use to probe it.''
[It] "depends on the perception - that is, the mode of interaction
and the expectation (your ``theories'' or ``models'')."
- Jan J. Koenderink, "Solid Shape," 1990.
"Between the subject and the world
is inserted the entire sum of discourses that make up visuality,
that cultural construct,
and make visuality different from vision,
the notion of unmediated visual experience."
- Norman Bryson, 'The Gaze in the Expanded Field'
Magritte
"... something like a paradigm is prerequisite to
perception itself.
What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at
and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught
him to see.
In the absence of such training there can only be,
in William James' phrase, a bloomin' buzzin' confusion. "
T. Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," 1970.
``We have learned that to examine how scored and pitted smooth skin
looks under the microscope
does not help us to conceive the satin flesh as leather, ...''
- Adrian Stokes, "Reflections on the Nude", 1967.
"... the swirling of molecules constituting a pool of water
microscopically shows no kinship with the quiet sight of the pool
looked at with the naked eye.
- Rudolph Arnheim, "Entropy
and Art", 1971.
Jokularson, Iceland, by Laurence et Eric Muller-Louart (2001)
"What connects thinking to imagination, imagination to drawing, drawing
to building, and building to our eyes
is projection in one guise or another, or processes that we have chosen
to model on projection.
All are zones of instability."
- Robin Evans, 'The Projective Cast'
"Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the
object before us,
another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our
own mind."
- William James
"All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all
observation is also invention."
- Rudolf Arnheim, "Art & Visual Perception", 1974.
"The only intuition that is given a priori is that of the mere form of
appearances, space and time."
- Emmanuel Kant, 'The Critique of Pure Reason'
"The only real valuable thing is intuition."
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
- Albert Einstein
Magritte
"De poussières d'étoiles au raffinement artistique,
seule reste l'alchimie de l'information
par laquelle, infatigables, nous livrons
notre éternel combat entropique."
- F. Fol Leymarie, Florence, le 24 avril 2000.
"Children have real understanding only of that which they invent
themselves,
and each time that we try to teach them something too quickly,
we keep them from reinventing it themselves."
- Jean Piaget
"A Person is obviously made for thinking.
Therein lies all her dignity and her merit;
and her whole duty is to think as she ought."
- Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)
"The more money a man has, the more he wants, to pay his way."
- Colonel T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia)
"If I had been rich, I probably would not have devoted myself to
mathematics."
- Joseph-Louis Lagrange
"There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad."
- Salvador Dali
"In a mad world only the mad is sane."
-Akira Kurosawa
"It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely."
- Albert Einstein
"Laughter is the shortest distance between two people."
- Victor Borge
'There are those who say I'm impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude,
profane, brash and overbearing.
Whether I'm any of these things or all of them, you can decide for
yourself.
But whatever I am - and this ought to be made very clear at the outset
- I am a very serious woman."
- Bella Abzug (1921 - 1998).
"S'il fait beau je peux prétendre à quelque chose de pas mauvais.
S'il fait mauvais, je ne peux prétendre à rien de beau..."
- Jeannie Longo, Championne du monde cycliste pour la 13e fois, `a 42
ans (Lisbonne, 2001).
"La victoire du disciple, c'est la gloire du maître."
- Gerbert d'Aurillac, le pape de l'an mil, Sylvestre II.
"Si parmi vous il en est un à qui, pendant la première leçon,
ou à la lecture de la première séance,
le coeur ait battu [plus fort];
c'est fait, il est géomètre."
- Gaspard Monge, Leçons de l'École Normale
de l'an III de la République, débats du 16 pluviôse.
"Always listen to experts.
They'll tell you what cannot be done, and why.
Then do it."
- Robert Heinlein
"I could have done it in a much more complicated way,
said the Red Queen, immensely proud."
- Lewis Caroll
"Now I will have less distraction."
- Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) [upon losing the use of his right eye];
Euler, the most prolific mathematician ever, eventually became totally
blind and, at the age of nearly 60, went on to produce almost half his
total works.
"The Reasonable Man adjusts
himself to the world.
The Unreasonable One persists in trying to adapt the world to
himself.
Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- George Bernard Shaw.
|
"Death must enter life "Why should I fear death? "When I thought I was
learning |
 |
"Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces,
kingdoms,
mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses,
and people.
Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of
lines
traces the image of his own face."
- Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
"I see now that the problem of man's status between the world and
himself
has haunted me since the difficult days of boyhood.
All that I have written, though it has seemed to me so different from
year to year,
turns to the same centre: the uniqueness of man that grows out of his
struggle (and his gift)
to understand both nature and himself.
Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974)
Drawing by Michelangelo
"We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me,
that man with all his noble qualities,
...still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly
origin."
- Charles Darwin, final words.
"A great many people think they are thinking
when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
- William James
"Those who believe absurdities readily commit
atrocities."
- Voltaire
"A non-violent system on governance is clearly an impossibility
so long as the wide gulf between the rich and the hungry millions
persists."
- Gandhi, 1945
"The test of orderliness of a country
is not the number of millionaires it owns,
but the absence of starvation among its masses."
- Gandhi, 1916
"The test of our progress,
is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much,
it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1936
"Ask not what your country can do for you;
ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world,
ask not what America will do for you,
but what together we can do for the freedom of man."
- John F Kennedy, Jan. 20, 1961
(closing words of his inaugural speech as 35th president of the USA)
"This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. [...]
In the long run we are all dead."
- John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946)
"A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense
than on programs of social uplift, is approaching spiritual death."
- Martin Luther King Jr., 1967
"Under capitalism, man exploits man.
Under communism, it's just the opposite. "
- John Kenneth Galbraith
"A lie told often enough becomes the truth. "
- Lenin
"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth."
- Otto von Bismark
"Always be capable of feeling...
any injustice committed against anyone
anywhere in the world."
- Che Guevara (in his goodbye letter to his children)
"Qui hait le sang étranger ou le méprise
n'est pas encore un individu,
mais une sorte de protoplasme humain."
- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
M.C.Escher
"Any progress requires a change of order.
A revolution must aim at the destruction of the given order
and will succeed only by asserting an order of its own."
- Rudolph Arnheim, "Entropy and Art", 1971.
"It took only a moment to cause this head to fall
and a hundred years will not suffice to produce its like ."
- Lagrange on the execution of Chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier during
the French revolution (in 1794).
Lavoisier had intervened the year before to prevent Lagrange's arrest
as a foreigner.
"I believe that, in general, one of the first principles of every wise
man
is to conform strictly to the laws of the country in which he is
living,
even when they are unreasonable."
- Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736, Turin -1813, Paris)
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents
and making them see the light,
but rather because its opponents eventually die,
and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
- Max Planck.
"The competition between paradigms
is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs."
"Like the choice between competing political institutions,
that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice
between incompatible modes of community life."
- T. Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", 1970.
"If I have seen further than others,
it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
- Newton
"Les philosophes n'ont fait qu'interpréter le monde de diverses
manières:
il importe maintenant de le transformer."
- Karl Marx (XIe Thèse sur Feuerbach, 1846).
"J'ai découvert ce secret: après avoir gravi une haute colline,
tout ce qu'on découvre, c'est qu'il reste beaucoup d'autres collines à
gravir."
- Rolihlahla (Nelson) Mandela
"Hasta la Victoria siempre!"
- Che
Guevara (1928-1967)
"Do not accept what you hear by report,
do not accept tradition,
do not accept a statement because it is found in our books,
nor because it is in accord with your belief,
nor because it is the saying of your teacher.
Be the lamps unto yourselves."
- Buddha, about 2560 years ago ...
"The idea of the supernatural emerges within the landscape of nature.
If reality appears dangerous or downright hostile to life,
religion calls for something beyond experience to restore the balance."
- Walter Burkert, "Creation of the
Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions", Harvard U.Press.
"... all religions [have] the same foundation - a belief in the
supernatural -
a power above nature that man [can] influence by worship - by sacrifice
and prayer."
- Robert Green Ingersoll, "Why I Am Agnostic",
1896.
"... the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of
objectivity - that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is
no plan, that there is no intention in the universe. Now, this is
basically incompatible with virtually all the religious or metaphysical
systems whatever, all of which try to show that there is some sort of
harmony between man and the universe and that man is a product -
predictable if not indispensable - of the evolution of the universe."
- Jacques Monod
"God is subtle but surely he is not malicious."
"I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details."
"Science without Religion is lame. Religion without Science is blind."
- Albert Einstein
"Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
- Woody Allen (in "Deconstructing Harry")
"...ce qu'il y a d'encombrant dans la Morale,
c'est que c'est toujours la Morale des autres."
- Léo Ferré ("Préface", 1973)
"Cette parole d'évangile
qui fait plier les imbéciles
et qui met dans l'horreur civile
de la noblesse et puis du style.
Ce cri qui n'a pas de rosette,
cette parole de prophète,
je la revendique et vous souhaite,
ni Dieu, ni Maître."
-Léo Ferré (1964/1973)
"Deus sive Natura" (God, that is Nature.)
"Humans are a part of Nature."
"We feel and experience that we are eternal."
Baruch Spinoza, 17th century.
Hell's gates (Middle-Top part), by Rodin.
"If the doors of perception were cleansed
everything would appear [...]
as it is: Infinite."
- William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (1790)
"Before we take to sea we walk on land.
Before we create we must understand."
"One of the great problems of philosophy, is the relationship
between the realm of knowledge and the realm of values.
Knowledge is what is; values are what ought to be.
I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including
Marxism
have tried to derive the 'ought' from the 'is.'
My point of view is that this is impossible, this is a farce."
- Jacques Monod
"Philosophers ask the question, ``What is knowledge?''
As technologists, our answer is that there is a real world
and there is also an image of it in our minds.
Knowledge means that the two are similar.
To help form images we use imaging devices,
such as microscopes, telescopes, cameras, television, [computers,] etc.
- Jon Claerbout (after Blackwell)
"Quand nous philosophons, nous sommes comme des
sauvages,
des hommes primitifs qui entendent
les formes d'expression d'hommes civilisés,
les mésinterprètent et tirent ensuite
d'étranges conclusions de leur interprétation."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
"Imagination is more [relevant] than knowledge."
- Albert Einstein on Bertrand Russell
(who had been turned down for a teaching position at the
City College of New York because of his atheism and views on sex).
But ... "if your sole "tool" is a hammer, then all problems start
looking like nails."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty."
- Jacob Bronowski
"The world can only be grasp by action, not by contemplation . . .
The hand is the cutting edge of the mind."
- Jacob
Bronowski
|
"Many will pass through |
|
"It is much easier to recognize error than to find truth; for error
lies on the surface and may be overcome;
but truth lies in the depths, and to search for it is not given to
everyone."
- Goethe
"The errors of great men are more fruitful than the truths of little
men."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion."
- Francis Bacon
| "... mental growth is an expanding upward spiral in which the same problems are attacked at successive levels but are resolved more completely and more successfully at each higher level." - Jean Piaget (1896-1980) |
 |
"Points are the beginning and end of all things."
- Albrecht Dürer
"[the point is the] metaphysical basic form par excellence."
- Leibniz
"Everything is approximate, less than approximate,
for when more closely and sharply examined,
the most perfect picture is a warty, threadbare approximation,
a dry porridge, a dismal mooncrater landscape.
What arrogance is concealed in perfection.
Why struggle for precision, purity, when they can never be attained.
The decay that begins immediately on completion of the work was now
welcome to me."
- Jean Arp, On My Way. Poetry and Essays , 1912-1947.
"What is the world, if my very vision, modeled by my artistic
predecessors,
is no longer certain of its own reality?
And who am I, if my image in the mirror vacillates,
unsure of its own objectivity?"
- Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)
"Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am).
- Descartes, René (1596-1650)
"Ich mache Fehler - also existiere ich!" (I make errors, therefore I
am!)
- Sawielly G. Tartakower, Chess Grandmaster (1887-1956)
"Relativity declares that space and time would disappear with matter."
- Einstein
"Ubi materia, ibi geometria." (Where there is matter, there is
geometry.)
- Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
"... geometry is equivalent to memory storage."
- Michael Leyton (A Generative Theory of Shape, 2001).
"Quantum mechanics is very impressive but I am convinced God does
not play with dice ..."
- Einstein
"Evidently, God not only plays dice but plays blind-folded,
and, at times, throws them where you can't see them."
- S. Hawking on blackholes.
"It does play with dice, ...
but are they fixed?"
- FFL (1999)
"There is no chance;
and what seems hazard in our eyes
arises from the deepest source."
- Friedrich von Schiller
(1759 - 1805)
"... chance is but the expression of man's ignorance."
- Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749-1827)
"Chance alone is at the source of all novelty, all creation in the
biosphere,..."
"Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind liberty
is at the root of the prodigious edifice that is evolution..."
- Jacques Monod, "Chance and Necessity" (1970)
From Bjork's video "All Is Full of Love," by Chris Cunningham.
"The original question, 'Can machines think?,'
I believe too meaningless to deserve discussion."
- Alan Turing, Mind, 1950
"From a programmer's point of view,
the user is a peripheral that types when you issue a read request."
- Peter Williams
"Computer users deserve the freedom to cooperate.
It's up to us to make that happen.
We must not fail them."
- Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project, 2002.
As an imaging device, a computer is in many ways ideal.
A telescope is limited by the quality of its components.
The image created by a computer is limited more by our understanding
of mathematics, physics, and statistics than by limitations inherent in
the computer.
- Jon Claerbout (after Blackwell)
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
- Pablo Picasso
"In Mathematics, you don't understand things; you
just get used to them."
- J. von Neumann
"Logic can be patient, for it is eternal."
- Oliver Heaviside
"The series is divergent; therefore we may be able to do something with
it."
- O. Heaviside
"The sets of axioms that mathematicians normally use
are fairly concise, otherwise no one would believe in them.
In practice, there's a vast world of mathematical truth out there
-- an infinite amount of information -- but any given set of axioms
only captures a tiny, finite amount of this information. That,
in a nutshell, is why Godel incompleteness is natural and inevitable
rather than mysterious and complicated."
- Gregory J. Chaitin, 2002
"I have no need of this hypothesis."
-Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749-1827),
(to Napoleon on why his works on celestial mechanics
made no mention of God).
"All colours will agree in the dark."
- Francis Bacon
"Good judgment comes from experience; and experience ?...
well, that comes from poor judgment."
"Das Schach ist nur durch die Fehler existenzberechtigt."
(The existence of chess can only be justified by the necessity of
making errors.)
- S. G. Tartakover
"Their is no truthful answer,
but only choices to be made."
|
Et, avec "Droit "Le Petit de St-Exupery |
 |
"Et moi, ..., je n'y serais Jules Verne |
|
Balzac, par Rodin (photo. par E.Steichen, 1908) |
"The future is my garden."
- FFL (Oct. 2007, to Andrea)
"Il faut chercher ce qui assemble, laisser ce qui
détruit et divise."
- Aimée Fol (1902-2001).
Page created & maintained by Frederic Fol Leymarie,
1998-2007
Comments, suggestions, complaints, etc., mail to: ffl at gold dot ac dot uk 
