Quotes by Scholars - Page 6

Shut up and write.
K.A. Laity
Beware of the man of one book.
Isaac D'Israeli
The admission of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.
James Edwin Gunn
Each of us repeats Adam’s journey and acknowledges, with the loss of innocence, that he is mortal. Weep and pray, O Arseny. And do not fear death, for death is not just the bitterness of parting. It is also the joy of liberation.” (Laurus, p. 30)
Eugene Vodolazkin
We preach and practice brotherhood — not only of man but of all living beings — not on Sundays only but on all the days of the week. We believe in the law of universal justice — that our present condition is the result of our past actions and that we are not subjected to the freaks of an irresponsible governor, who is prosecutor and judge at the same time; we depend for our salvation on our own acts and deeds and not on the sacrificial death of an attorney.
Virchand Gandhi
We would not listen to those who were wont to say the voice of the people is the voice of God for the voice of the mob is near akin to madness.
Alcuin
For modern cosmology God cannot be a working hypothesis because God is not given to us in the observable nature of things. The poetic and theological idea that the universe is an expression of God's creative power is false. And yet the possibility that underlying the nature of things is an undiscoverable force of unimaginable simplicity that one may call God haunts and frustrates modern science. If this principle exists, then it cannot be different from our experience of it: it must be inherent, not transcendent; purely natural, therefore, not a violation of its own being, and hence intelligent, in the sense it requires coherence rather than chaos and confusion to exist at all--as the ancient myths tell us; impersonal to the extent that we cannot attribute moral purposes or even will, classically understood, to what we can observe of its operations. It is entirely coextensive and if it has a limit coterminous with what is--a perception that dates in theology from Anselm to Tillich and in natural philosophy from Democritus to Planck. It does not exist in gaps of undiscovered data or models or as an unsolved mystery but in the givenness of the world and the intelligent life form that has arisen to ponder it.
R. Joseph Hoffmann
A Muslim just follows Allah. Sunni-Shiah? That's farga, the groups—Allah discourages this in the Quran, you know, never ever form the groups.
Michael Muhammad Knight
The fear of life is the favorite disease of the twentieth century.
William Lyon Phelps
It must be constantly remembered that the Qu r’ān is not just descriptive but is primarily prescriptive. Both the content of its message and the power of the form in which it is conveyed are designed not so much to "inform" men in any ordinary sense of the word as to change their character. The psychological impact and the moral import of its statements, therefore, have a primaryrole. Phrases like "God has sealed their hearts, blinded their eyes, deafened them to truth” in the Qur’ān do have a descriptive meaning in terms of the psychological processes described earlier; but even more primarily in such contexts, they have a definite psychological intention: to change the ways of men in the right direction.
Fazlur Rahman
The tongue can cut deeper than the sword or heal faster than in the ward.
Mufti Ismail Menk
...But it is also told that Niuka forgot to fill two tiny crevices in the blue firmament. Thus began the dualism of love--two souls rolling through space and never at rest until they join together to complete the universe. Everyone has to build anew his sky of hope and peace.
Kakuzō Okakura
The Romans may be known for many things, but humor isn't one of them. As usual, this interpretation relies on a prima facie reading of Jesus as a man with no political ambitions whatsoever. That is nonsense. All criminals sentenced to execution received a titulus so that everyone know the crime for which they were being punished and thus be deterred from taking part in similar activity. That the wording on Jesus's titulus was likely genuine is demonstrated by Joseph A. Fitzmeyer, who notes that "if [the titulus] were invented by Christians, they would have used Christos, for early Christians would scarcely have called their Lord 'King of the Jews'."[..] the notion that a no-name Jewish peasant would have received a personal audience with the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who had probably signed a dozen execution orders that day alone, is so outlandish that it cannot be taken seriously.
Reza Aslan
The critic is an overgoer with pen-envy.
Geoffrey Hartman
One master defines Zen as the art of feeling the polar star in the southern sky. Truth can be reached only through the comprehension of opposites.
Kakuzō Okakura
We being satiate with continual wars, let the desire of peace a little move us.
Erasmus
If what is soft wears down the hard, how much the more so shall the words of the Torah, which are as hard as iron, hollow out my heart, which is flesh and blood.
Akiba Ben Joseph
The Qur’ān definitely seems optimistic about the future, while rather grim about the past It is absolutely imperative for successor civilizations and their bearer communities to study well and learn from the fate of earlier ones that have perished; or they will assuredly meet with the same fate, for "God's law does not change" for any people. This is perhaps one of the most insistent ideas in the Qur’ān, which constantly exhorts people to "travel on the earth and see the end of those before them
Fazlur Rahman
A world where it is safe to love is a world where it is safe to live
Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio
Why am I compelled to write?... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger... To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispell the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit... Finally I write because I'm scared of writing, but I'm more scared of not writing.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Every writer is first a reader, and what we read matters.
Sara Ahmed
They need a deen that's not your uncle's deen.
Michael Muhammad Knight
Not surprisingly, the all-powerful evocation of terrorism is reserved only for those acts that threaten the government-sponsored status quo, but not that perpetrated by the state or corporations against the population. So, for example, the ugly history of white people lynching, bombing, and killing Blacks in the United States is not understood, taught, or remembered as a part of the homeland’s history of terrorism.
Henry A. Giroux
The Qur’ān began by criticizing two closely related aspects of that society: the polytheism or multiplicity of gods which was symptomatic of the segmentation of society, and the gross socioeconomic disparities that equally rested on and perpetuated a pernicious divisiveness of mankind. The two are obverse and converse of the same coin: only God can ensure the essential unity of the human race as His creation, His subjects, and those responsible finally to Him alone. The economic disparities were most persistently criticized, because they were the most difficult to remedy and were at the hear of social discord—although tribal rivalries, with their multiple entanglements of alliance, enmity, and vengeance, were no less serious, and the welding of these tribes into a political unity was an imperative need. Certain abuses of girls, orphans, and women, and the institution of slavery demanded desperate reform.
Fazlur Rahman
Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his early vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all the skills of the imagination. Language itself is a continuously imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination. The Dogon, a people of West Africa, will tell you that a white fox named Ogo frequently weaves himself a hat of string bean hulls, puts it on his impudent head, and dances in the okra to insult and infuriate God Almighty, and that there's nothing we can do about it except abide him in faith and patience.This is not folklore, or quaint custom, but as serious a matter to the Dogon as a filling station to us Americans. The imagination; that is, the way we shape and use the world, indeed the way we see the world, has geographical boundaries like islands, continents, and countries. These boundaries can be crossed. That Dogon fox and his impudent dance came to live with us, but in a different body, and to serve a different mode of the imagination. We call him Brer Rabbit.
Guy Davenport
Yığın kadındır. Irzını teslim edecek bir zorba arar. Çobansız rahat edemeyen kaz sürüsü.
Cemil Meriç
Religion is like an art gallery. One painting will speak to you more than another, and there's no need to explain or defend your taste.
Michael Muhammad Knight
There is no time for fear. It's much too interesting.
Cordwainer Smith
Why should we labor this unpleasant point? Because the Book of Mormon labors it, for our special benefit. Wealth is a jealous master who will not be served halfheartedly and will suffer no rival--not even God: "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon." (Matthew 6:24) In return for unquestioning obedience wealth promises security, power, position, and honors, in fact anything in this world. Above all, the Nephites like the Romans saw in it a mark of superiority and would do anything to get hold of it, for to them "money answereth all things." (Ecclesiastes 10:19) "Ye do always remember your riches," cried Samuel the Lamanite, ". . .unto great swelling, envyings, strifes, malice, persecutions, and murders, and all manner of iniquities." (Helaman 13:22) Along with this, of course, everyone dresses in the height of fashion, the main point being always that the proper clothes are expensive--the expression "costly apparel" occurs 14 times in the Book of Mormon. The more important wealth is, the less important it is how one gets it.
Hugh Nibley
The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.
Okakura Kakuzo
Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.
Cheris Kramarae
How can one be so serious with the world when the world itself is so ridiculous?
Kakuzō Okakura
If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery--skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.
Saidiya V. Hartman
Too many companies believe people are interchangeable. Truly gifted people never are. They have unique talents. Such people cannot be forced into roles they are not suited for, nor should they be. Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do.
Warren G. Bennis
The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.
Guy Davenport
The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it.
Reza Aslan
Sharing is sometimes more demanding than giving.
Mary Bateson
The picture of the bacchante who stands motionless and stares into space must have been well known. Catullus is thinking of her when he tells of the abandoned Ariadne, who follows her faithless lover with sorrowing eyes as she stands on the reedy shore ‘like the picture of a maenad.’ Indeed, melancholy silence becomes the sign of women who are possessed by Dionysus. […]Madness dwells in the surge of clanging, shrieking, and pealing sounds, it dwells also in silence. The women who follow Dionysus get their name, maenads, from this madness. Possessed by it, they rush off, whirl madly in circles, or stand still, as if turned to stone.
Walter F. Otto
[Islam] is the dynamic conviction that a person's spiritual and worldly responsibilities are one and the same, that an individuals duty to the community is indistinguishable from his or her duty to God.
Reza Aslan
Watchfulness is the path of immortality:Unwatchfulness is the path of death.Those who are watchful never die:Those who do not watch are already as dead.Those who with a clear mind have seen this truth,Those who are wise and ever watchful,They feel the joy of watchfulness,The joy of the path of the great.And those who in high thought and in deep contemplationWith ever living power advance on the path,They in the end reach NIRVANA,The peace supreme and infinite joy.~ Buddha
Juan Mascaró
What you have now then is the marketing of racialized identities as tools for consumption. And certain racialized bodies and images are associated with hipness, coolness, edginess. So all kinds of youth all over the world are appropriating that style as a way of, sort of, countering authority, stating their rebelliousness, and wanting to be seen as significant.
Amalia Mesa-Bains
Ninguna cosa es más propia a Dios que el amor, ni al amor hay cosa más natural que volver al que ama en las condiciones e ingenio del que es amado.
Luis de León
[I]t is not by being richer or more powerful that a man becomes better; one is a matter of fortune, the other of virtue. Nor should she deem herself other than venal who weds a rich man rather than a poor, and desires more things in her husband than himself. Assuredly, whomsoever this concupiscence leads into marriage deserves payment rather than affection.
Héloïse d'Argenteuil
The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded upon a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts and we grow happier as we grow older.
William Lyon Phelps
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.
Donna J. Haraway
His shortcoming is his long staying.
Lewis L. Lewisohn
Get it? Gender is a country, a field of signifying roses you can walk through, or wear tucked behind your ear.Eventually the flower wilts & you can pick another, or burn the field, or turn & run back across the tracks.(from "Essay on the Theory of Motion")
Cameron Awkward-Rich
Certainly the shahadah contained an important theological innovation, but that innovation was not monotheism. With this simple profession of faith, Muhammad was declaring to Mecca that the God of the heavens and the earth required no intermediate whatsoever, but could be accessed by anyone.
Reza Aslan
The stars have not dealt me the worst they could do:My pleasures are plenty, my troubles are two.But oh, my two troubles they reave me of rest,The brains in my head and the heart in my breast.Oh, grant me the ease that is granted so free,The birthright of multitudes, give it to me,That relish their victuals and rest on their bedWith flint in the bosom and guts in the head.
A.E. Housman
The opposite of hope is despair, and when we despair, it is because we feel there are no choices.
Warren G. Bennis
All Poets are mad.
Robert Burton
Of two evils choose the least.
Erasmus
Environmentalists generally object to battery-powered devices and for good reason: batteries require mined minerals, employ manufacturing processes that leak toxins into local ecosystems and leave behind an even-worse trail of side effects upon disposal. Though when it comes to the largest mass-produced battery-powered gadget ever created—the electric car—environmentalists cannot jump from their seats fast enough to applaud it.
Ozzie Zehner
If you want to die happily learn to live if you would live happily learn to die.
Celio Calcagnini
Would that thy love, beloved, had less trust in me, that it might be more anxious!
Héloïse d'Argenteuil
Fate will unwind as it must!
Burton Raffel
The Buddha-nature which is ours from the very beginning is like the sun which emerges from the clouds, or like a mirror which, when rubbed, regains its original purity and clarity. (217)
Edward Conze
The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.
William Lyon Phelps
Into my heart an air that killsFrom yon far country blows:What are those blue remembered hills,What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,I see it shining plain,The happy highways where I wentAnd cannot come again.
A.E. Housman
We All Bleed RedWe have a confirmed threat against the homeland and I for one am grateful for the Americans sitting in the Army conference room in Fort Stewart, Georgia. The display cubes and screens lets us see different locations, cities, departments of the armed forces. It also allows us to see three commonalities. (1) We are all different. I take such pleasure in seeing the diverse group we call the intelligence community. We are different races, nationalities, and ethnic groups.(2) This brings us to the second commonality…we are all Americans. Yes, we fuss, we have differences of opinions, but we are all Americans.(3) The third and most important commonality is the fact that we all bleed red. We are humankind.These are the bonds that unite us…bond us…make us better beings. I have not mentioned religion because my God allows me to respect other people’s belief. I just ask that as we work through this crisis that we hold dearly on to these three commonalities.The Director of National Intelligence
James M. Robinson