#material

If a faithful account was rendered of Man’s ideas upon Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word “gods” has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of the natural, the source of known causes, ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods  …   When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon  …   does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe? ↗

— Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach

#divinity #gods #ignorance #knowledge #materialism

Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma. ↗

— Joseph Joubert

#enigma #material #material world #spiritual #spiritual world

Content arises out of certain considerations about form, material, context-and that when that subject matter is sufficiently far away. ↗

— Anish Kapoor

#arises #away #certain #considerations #content

Human education is concerned with certain changes in the intellects, characters and behavior of men, its problems being roughly included under these four topics: Aims, materials, means and methods. ↗

— Edward Thorndike

#behavior #being #certain #changes #characters

It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection. ↗

— Maurice Wilkins

#copies #could #disorder #essential #exact

The dog and the rabbit are telling us not to chase unattainable material goals. ↗

— Kit Williams

#dog #goals #material #rabbit #telling

I hope that not only my documentaries, but everybody's documentaries, last. It will really confuse historians in the next century, because they'll have, in addition to all the print material, they'll have all these pictures to look at. ↗

— Frederick Wiseman

#because #century #confuse #documentaries #everybody

So that's why one of my rules of parody writing is that it's gotta be funny regardless of whether you know the source material. It has to work on its own merit. ↗

— Al Yankovic

#gotta #know #material #merit #own

Costs of manufactured articles importantly depend on the cost of raw materials as well as labour. ↗

— Charles E. Wilson

#cost #costs #depend #importantly #labour

Los Angeles is a town where status is all and status is only given to success. Dukes and millionaires and playboys by the dozen may arrive and be glad-handed for a time, but they are unwise if they choose to live there because the town is, perhaps even creditably, committed to recognising only professional success, and nothing else, to be of lasting value. The burdensome obligation imposed on all its inhabitants is therefore to present themselves as successes, because otherwise they forfeit their right to respect in that environment ... There is no place in that town for the "interesting failure" or for anyone who is not determined on a life that will be shaped in a upward-heading curve. ↗

— Julian Fellowes

#california #failure #los-angeles #materialism #society