Multiplicity Quotes
More Multiplicity Quotes
Great problems are now being handled, keeping every thinking man in suspense; the unity or multiplicity of human races; the creation of man 1,000 years or 1,000 centuries ago; the fixity of species, or the slow and progressive transformation of one species into another; the eternity of matter; the idea of a God unnecessary: such are some of the questions that humanity discusses nowadays.
Louis Pasteur— Translation from The Life of Pasteur, p. 140
That all who are happy, are equally happy, is not true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness.
— 1766 Remark, Feb. Quoted in James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol.2.
Observing sea, sky and stars, I sought to indicate their plastic function through a multiplicity of crossing verticals and horizontals. Impressed by the vastness of Nature, I was trying to express its expansion, rest and unity.
Piet Mondrian— Abstract Art, Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson, London 1990, p. 50
By faithfulness we are collected and wound up into unity within ourselves, whereas we had been scattered abroad in multiplicity.
augustine of hippo— As quoted in Footprints in Time : Fulfilling God's Destiny for Your Life (2007) by Jeff O'Leary, p. 223.
I hope through The L Word to become an honorary member of the gay tribe. I cherish the thought that some young girl or woman somewhere may one night turn on the television and for the first time ever see her life represented -- not as an isolated incident but as a multiplicity. Her overwhelming fear may have been that she might never find her tribe, she might never find love and now she knows that they are both out there waiting for her.
jennifer beals— Speech at L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center Women's Night (17 April 2004)
Every transfinite consistent multiplicity, that is, every transfinite set, must have a definite aleph as its cardinal number.
georg cantor— Letter to Richard Dedekind (1899), as translated in From Frege to Gödel : A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931 (1967) by Jean Van Heijenoort, p. 117
In a free Government, the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases, will depend on the number of interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and number of People comprehended under the same Government.
james madison— Federalist No. 51
The new hero-type favored by Aschenbach, and recurring in his books in a multiplicity of individual variants, had already been remarked upon at an early stage by a shrewd commentator, who had described his conception as that of “an intellectual and boyish manly virtue, that of a youth who clenches his teeth in proud shame and stands calmly on as the swords and spears pass through his body ... the figure of Saint Sebastian is the most perfect symbol if not of art in general, then certainly of the kind of art in question.
thomas mann— Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke
Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
isaac newton— Cited in Rules for methodizing the Apocalypse, Rule 9, from a manuscript published in The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974) by Frank E. Manuel, p. 120, as quoted in Socinianism And Arminianism : Antitrinitarians, Calvinists, And Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe (2005) by Martin Mulsow, Jan Rohls, p. 273.Variant: Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.As quoted in God in the Equation : How Einstein Transformed Religion (2002) by Corey S. Powell, p. 29.
Through such impressions one gathers oneself, wins oneself back from the exacting multiplicity, which speaks and chatters there (and how talkative it is!), and one slowly learns to recognize the very few Things in which something eternal endures that one can love and something solitary that one can gently take part in.
Rainer Maria Rilke— About RomeLetter Five (29 October 1903)
For me, Still ’s pictorial dramas are an extension of the Greek Persephone myth. As he himself has expressed it, his paintings are ‘of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated’ Every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of associations inherent in all living things. To me they form a theogony of the most elementary consciousness, hardly aware of itself beyond the will to live – a profound and moving experience. (1946, catalogue introduction for the first one-man-show of Clyfford Still)
mark rothko— Art of this Century, February 12 – March 2, 1946, Peggy Guggenheim Papers on the work of Clyfford Still; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p. 203
My single pair of eyes Contain the universe they see; Their mirrored multiplicity Is packed into a hollow body Where I reflect the many, in my one.'
stephen spender— "The Human Situation"
The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religions, is the story of the dynamic effort of the World passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God's vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World's multiplicity of effort.
Alfred North Whitehead— Pt. V, ch. II, sec. V
The religious ethos of India was given flexibility, tolerance and strength by the absence of a single religious doctrine, based on a 'Bible' or sacred dogma; by the multiplicity of forms and faiths that collectively formed India’s religious beliefs and the Vedic and beak-away traditions of our sages and seers. It was an inclusive attitude, drawing the alien heretical belief within a total ambience, extending and absorbing while respecting the beliefs of other religions. Heresy was unknown and religious persecution was minimal.
indira gandhi— Selected Thoughts of Indira Gandhi: A Book of Quotes (1985, pg. 275).
"Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists".
— Samuel Johnson, quoted (September 20, 1777) in The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791) by James Boswell
The Soul appears to be finite because of ignorance. When ignorance is destroyed the Self which does not admit of any multiplicity truly reveals itself by itself: like the Sun when the clouds pass away.
— p. 7: Quote nr. 4 (Atma Bodha (1987))
What is so remarkable in all these theories and doctrines is their implicit monism , the claim that behind the obvious multiplicity of the world’s appearances and, even more pertinently to our context, behind the obvious plurality of man’s faculties and abilities, there must exist a oneness the old hen pan , “the all is one” either a single source or a single ruler.
— Hannah Arendt , in The Life of the Mind (1971), p. 70
Faced with a world of “modern ideas” which would like to banish everyone into a corner and a “specialty,” a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea of “greatness,” on the basis of his own particular extensive range and multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of diversity.
friedrich nietzsche— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, I. Johnston, trans., § 212
Avoid all refined speculations; confine yourself to simple reflections, and recur to them frequently. Those who pass too rapidly from one truth to another feed their curiosity and restlessness; they even distract their intellect with too great a multiplicity of views. Give every truth time to send down deep root into the heart.
— François Fénelon, p. 407. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
It is one of our most exciting discoveries that local discovery leads to a complex of further discoveries. Corollary to this we find that we no sooner get a problem solved than we are overwhelmed with a multiplicity of additional problems in a most beautiful payoff of heretofore unknown, previously unrecognized, and as-yet unsolved problems.
— Buckminster Fuller Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)
By faithfulness we are collected and wound up into unity within ourselves, whereas we had been scattered abroad in multiplicity.
— As quoted in Footprints in Time : Fulfilling God's Destiny for Your Life (2007) by Jeff O'Leary, p. 223.
He used to say, half in jest , that his great ambition was to complete St. Augustine's Confessions , but that St. Augustine, like a great artist, had worked from multiplicity to unity , while he, like a small one, had to reverse the method and work back from unity to multiplicity.
— Henry Adams about himself, writing under the name of his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, in the Editor's Preface to the 1918 edition of The Education of Henry Adams (September 1918)
Truth is ever to be found in simplicity , and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
— As quoted in God in the Equation : How Einstein Transformed Religion (2002) by Corey S. Powell, p. 29
The Soul appears to be finite because of ignorance. When ignorance is destroyed the Self which does not admit of any multiplicity truly reveals itself by itself: like the Sun when the clouds pass away.
— Adi Shankara, in Atma Bodha
In Mohammedanism the limited principle of the Jews is expanded into universality and thereby overcome. Here, God is no longer, as with the Asiatics, contemplated as existent in immediately sensuous mode but is apprehended as the one infinite sublime Power beyond all the multiplicity of the world. Mohammedanism is, therefore, in the strictest sense of the world, the religion of sublimity.
— Hegel, Philosophy of Mind (quoted by Slavoj Žižek in A Glance into the Archives of Islam, Lacan dot com, 1997)
