Dispersion Quotes

Either all things proceed from one intelligent source and come together as in one body, and the part ought not to find fault with what is done for the benefit of the whole; or there are only atoms, and nothing else than a mixture and dispersion. Why, then, art thou disturbed? Say to this ruling faculty, Art thou dead, art thou corrupted, art thou playing the hypocrite, art thou become a beast, dost thou herd and feed with the rest? ~ Marcus Aurelius

Freedom is the right to difference; being plurality, it postulates the dispersion of the absolute, its resolution into a dust of truths, equally justified and provisional. There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism. ~ Emil Cioran

We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Viewed as a means to the end of political freedom, economic arrangements are important because of their effect on the concentration or dispersion of power. The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other ~ Milton Friedman

Matter would have the universe a uniform dispersion, motionless, complete. Spirit would have an earth, a heaven and a hell, whirl and conflict, an incandescent sun to drive away the dark, to illuminate good and evil, would have thought, memory, desire, would build a stairway of forms increasing in complexity, inclusiveness, to a heaven ever receding above, changing always in configuration, becoming when reached but the way to more distant heavens, the last ... but there is no last, for spirit tends upward without end, wanders, spirals, dips, but tends ever upward, ruthlessly using lower forms to create higher forms, moving toward ever greater inwardness, consciousness, spontaneity, to an ever greater freedom. ~ Allen Wheelis

The history of the Jews is…intensely peculiar in the fact of having given the Western world its concept of origins and monotheism, its ethical traditions, and the founder of its prevailing religion, yet suffering dispersion, statelessness, and ceaseless persecution, and finally in our times nearly successful genocide, dramatically followed by fulfillment of the never-relinquished ream of return to their homeland. Viewing this strange and singular history one can not escape the impression that it must contain some special significance for the history of mankind, that in some way, whether one believes in divine purpose or inscrutable circumstance, the Jews have been singled out to carry the tale of human fate. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

One of George Washington's main concerns was to make sure that his soldiers had adequate supplies of meat: A part of the army has been a week without any kind of flesh, and the rest three or four days. Naked and starving as they are, we cannot enough admire the incomparable patience and fidelity of the soldiery, that they have not been ere this excited by their suffering to a general mutiny and dispersion. ~ George Washington

Mindfulness frees us of forgetfulness and dispersion and makes it possible to live fully each minute of life. Mindfulness enables us to live. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Socrates and Phaedrus, like Odysseus, must sail by the Sirens without being enchanted: instead of listening to their voices, they will outdo them with their own logos. . . . Plato's Odysseus does not even let the song of the Sirens enter him but deafens it with his own rational discourse. Philosophy is itself a Sirens' song, the antidote against the dispersion and drowning of the soul into the body, that is, against the ultimate wandering. ~ Silvia Montiglio

David and his followers taught no new doctrines, in their dispersion or when they came to power, that can be brought to countenance thee at all in shaving off thy beard. ~ Lord George Gordon

Over every person's life, I have found, Satan masturbates and out from the dispersion of this black cloud, at some point follows a demon who waits to wound. ~ The Raveness

Nature is flexible and resilient. Nature likes redundancy and dispersion. It is approximate and deals in gradients. All boundaries are permeable. Nature nests small systems like molecules within larger systems like cells, which in turn are nested in systems called organs, organisms, ecosystems. We grew from ancient one-celled ancestors. Nature likes mergers: we contain multitudes of other life forms within us. We stand at the crest of four billion years, bacteria molded into wondrous form, burning with a slow fire and about to take the next step. ~ Robert Frenay

What is the strongest pretext for loving? ... If it is necessary, our atomized consciousness invents love, imagines it or feigns it, but does not live without it, since in the midst of infinite dispersion, love, even if as a pretext , gives us the measure of our loss. ~ Carlos Fuentes

China today has the economy of a twenty-first-century economic superpower with a political regime little changed since the 1950s. Is this slow evolution in political institutions down to the concentration or the dispersion of power? ~ Matt Ridley

An Experience in Cosmic Consciousness: The divine dispersion of rays poured from an Eternal Source; blazing into galaxies. I saw the creative beams condense into constellations, then resolve into sheets of transparent flame.

Irradiating splendor issued from my nucleus to every part of the universal structure. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

I shall never find a better document for a phenomenology of a being which is at once established in its roundness and developing in it. Rilke's tree propagates in green spheres a roundness that is a victory over accidents of form and the capricious events of mobility. Here becoming has countless forms, countless leaves, but being is subject to no dispersion: If I could ever succeed in grouping together all the images of being, all the multiple, changing images that, in spite of everything, illustrate permanence of being, Rilke's tree would open an important chapter in my album of concrete metaphysics. ~ Gaston Bachelard

There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Swaggering in the coffee-houses and ruffling it in the streets were the men who had sailed with Frobisher and Drake and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Hawkins, and Sir Richard Granville; had perhaps witnessed the heroic death of Sir Philip Sidney, at Zutphen; had served with Raleigh in Anjou, Picardy, Languedoc, in the Netherlands, in the Irish civil war; had taken part in the dispersion of the Spanish Armada, and in the bombardment of Cadiz; had filled their cups to the union of Scotland with England; had suffered shipwreck on the Barbary Coast, or had, by the fortune of war, felt the grip of the Spanish Inquisition; who could tell tales of the marvels seen in new-found America and the Indies, and, perhaps, like Captain John Smith, could mingle stories of the naive simplicity of the natives beyond the Atlantic, with charming narratives of the wars in Hungary, the beauties of the seraglio of the Grand Turk, and the barbaric pomp of the Khan of Tartary. ~ William Shakespeare

In hyperbolic tones he listed the catastrophes that in his view were approaching: one, the decline of the revolutionary subject par excellence, the working class; two, the definitive dispersion of the political patrimony of socialists and Communists, who were already perverted by their daily quarrel over which was playing the role of capital's crutch; three, the end of every hypothesis of change, what was there was there and we would have to adapt to it. ~ Elena Ferrante

As for Proust, his contribution has been to create, from an obstinate contemplation of reality, a closed
world that belonged only to him and that indicated his victory over the transitoriness of things and over
death. But he uses absolutely the opposite means. He upholds, above everything, by a deliberate choice, a
careful selection of unique experience, which the writer chooses from the most secret recesses of his past.
Immense empty spaces are thus discarded from life because they have left no trace in the memory. If the
American novel is the novel of men without memory, the world of Proust is nothing but memory. It is
concerned only with the most difficult and most exacting of memories, the memory that rejects the
dispersion of the actual world and derives, from the trace of a lingering perfume, the secret of a new and
ancient universe. Proust chooses the interior life and, of the interior life, that which is more interior than
life itself in preference to what is forgotten in the world of reality - in other words, the purely mechanical
and blind aspects of the world. But by his rejection of reality he does not deny reality. He does not
commit the error, which would counterbalance the error of American fiction, of suppressing
the mechanical. He unites, on the contrary, into a superior form of unity, the memory of the past and the
immediate sensation, the twisted foot and the happy days of times past. ~ Albert Camus

Even before I came to Chicago, I had gotten interested in the existence of dispersion of prices under conditions which economic theory said would yield a single price. ~ George Stigler

Attachment strangles freedom and clarity and makes us a puppet to our desires and cravings; attachment is the root of suffering, a root that if left unattended grows into a tree which drops the fruits of anger, greed, envy, dispersion, competitiveness, ego and pain ~ Evan Sutter

You know what I found today...that our feelings are just like DISPERSION OF THE WHITE LIGHT INTO IT'S CONSTITUENT COLOURS . It is up to you be the VIBGYOR and feel transparent or else...choose any one of them and stick to it. ~ KARVILEENA DEKA

Unless we have the courage to fight for a revival of wholesome reserve between man and man, we shall perish in an anarchy of human values ... . Socially it means the renunciation of all place-hunting, a break with the cult of the "star," an open eye both upwards and downwards, especially in the choice of one's more intimate friends, and pleasure in private life as well as courage to enter public life. Culturally it means a return from the newspaper and the radio to the book, from feverish activity to unhurried leisure, from dispersion to concentration, from sensationalism to reflection, from virtuosity to art, from snobbery to modesty, from extravagance to moderation. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The ferocity of Santiago Nasar's fate, which had collected twenty years of happiness from him not only with his death but also with the dismemberment of his body and its dispersion and extermination. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

We can simplify the relationships between fragility, errors, and antifragility as follows. When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible - for deviations are more harmful than helpful. This is why the fragile needs to be very predictive in its approach, and, conversely, predictive systems cause fragility. When you want deviations, and you don't care about the possible dispersion of outcomes that the future can bring, since most will be helpful, you are antifragile. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of "perversions." Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities. ~ Michel Foucault

If the British Empire is fated to pass from life into history, we must hope it will not be by the slow process of dispersion and decay, but in some supreme exertion for freedom, for right and for truth. ~ Winston Churchill

Take the notion of tradition: it is intended to give a special temporal status to a group of phenomena that are both successive and identical (or at least similar); it makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same; it allows a reduction of the difference proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for origin. ~ Michel Foucault

It is difficult to return to the places of one's early happiness. The young girls in the flower of their youth
still laugh and chatter on the seashore, but he who watches them gradually loses his right to love them,
just as those he has loved lose the power to be loved. This melancholy is the melancholy of Proust. It was
powerful enough in him to cause a violent rejection of all existence. But his passion for faces and for the
light attached him at the same time to life. He never admitted that the happy days of his youth were lost
forever. He undertook the task of re-creating them and of demonstrating, in the face of death, that the past
could be regained at the end of time in the form of an imperishable present, both truer and richer than it
was at the beginning. The psychological analysis of Remembrance of Things Past is nothing but a potent
means to an end. The real greatness of Proust lies in having written Time Regained, which resembles the
world of dispersion and which gives it a meaning on the very level of integration. His difficult victory, on
the eve of his death, is to have been able to extract from the incessant flight of forms, by means of
memory and intelligence alone, the tentative trembling symbols of human unity. The most definite
challenge that a work of this kind can give to creation is to present itself as an entirety, as a closed and
unified world. This defines an unrepentant work of art. ~ Albert Camus

Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

One more comment from the heart: I'm old fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. Homo Ludens dances, sings, produces meaningful gestures, strikes poses, dresses up, revels and performs elaborate rituals. I don't wish to diminish the significance of these distractions-without them human life would pass in unimaginable monotony and possibly dispersion and defeat. But these are group activities above which drifts a more or less perceptible whiff of collective gymnastics. Homo Ludens with a book is free. At least as free as he's capable of being. He himself makes up the rules of the game, which are subject only to his own curiosity. He's permitted to read intelligent books, from which he will benefit, as well as stupid ones, from which he may also learn something. He can stop before finishing one book, if he wishes, while starting another at the end and working his way back to the beginning. He may laugh in the wrong places or stop short at words he'll keep for a life time. And finally, he's free-and no other hobby can promise this-to eavesdrop on Montaigne's arguments or take a quick dip in the Mesozoic. ~ Wisława Szymborska

All motion consists of two components. One component serves inwardness (internalisation) and the other outwardness (dispersion). Both preconditions for motion regulate the eternal flow of metamorphosis (panta Rhei). ~ Viktor Schauberger

Look at everything that exists, and observe that it is already in dissolution and in change, and as it were putrefaction or dispersion, or that everything is so constituted by nature as to die. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Since the atoms are indestructible, the disintegration of human body after death should be actually considered as the dispersion of the separate filaments (except probably those forming the bones) in all different directions. ~ George Gamow

The slogan offers a counterweight to the general dispersion of thought by holding it fast to a single, utterly succinct and unforgettable expression, one which usually inspires men to immediate action. It abolishes reflection: the slogan does not argue, it asserts and commands. ~ Johan Huizinga

The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power - we must have a dispersion of power. ~ Milton Friedman

Now when he closes his eyes he can really look at himself. He no longer sees a mask. He sees without seeing, to be exact. Vision without sight, a fluid grasp of intangibles: the merging of sight and sound: the heart of the web. Here stream the different personalities which evade the crude contact of the senses; here the overtones of recognition discreetly lap against one another in bright, vibrant harmonies. There is no language employed, no outlines delineated. When a ship founders, it settles slowly; the spars, the masts, the rigging float away. On the ocean floor of death the bleeding hull bedecks itself with jewels; remorselessly the anatomic life begins. What was ship becomes the nameless indestructible. Like ships, men founder time and again. Only memory saves them from complete dispersion. Poets drop their stitches in the loom, straws for drowning men to grasp as they sink into extinction. Ghosts climb back on watery stairs, make imaginary ascents, vertiginous drops, memorize numbers, dates, events, in passing from gas to liquid and back again. There is no brain capable of registering the changing changes. Nothing happens in the brain, except the gradual rust and detrition of the cells. But in the minds, worlds unclassified, undenominated, unassimilated, form, break, unite, dissolve and harmonize ceaselessly. In the mind-world ideas are the indestructible elements which form the jewelled constellations of the interior life. We move within their orbits, freely if we fol ~ Henry Miller

This indeed is the most conspicuous feature of the modern period: need for ceaseless agitation, for unending change, and for ever-increasing speed, matching the speed with which events themselves succeed one another. It is dispersion in multiplicity, and in a multiplicity that is no longer unified by consciousness of any higher principle; in daily life, as in scientific ideas, it is analysis driven to an extreme, endless subdivision, a veritable disintegration of human activity in all the orders in which this can still be exercised; hence the inaptitude for synthesis and the incapacity for any sort of concentration that is so striking in the eyes of Easterners. These are the natural and inevitable results of an ever more pronounced materialization, for matter is essentially multiplicity and division, and this-be it said in passing-is why all that proceeds from matter can beget only strife and all manner of conflicts between peoples as between individuals. The deeper one sinks into matter, the more the elements of division and opposition gain force and scope; and, contrariwise, the more one rises toward pure spirituality, the nearer one approaches that unity which can only be fully realized by consciousness of universal principles. ~ Rene Guenon