Complete quotations of authors whose names start with J

• Jacob, Francois

  1. The rules of the GENETIC game are the same for ALL living beings.
  2. The dream of a BACTERIUM is to become two bacteria.

• Jacob, Max

  When you get to the point where you cheat for the sake of beauty, you're an ARTIST.

• Jaffe, Arthur

  MATHEMATICAL IDEAS do not spring FULL-GROWN from the mind of researchers. History illustrates that mathematics often takes its IMAGINATION from pattern in nature. Lessons distilled from one encounter with nature continue to serve us well when we explore other natural phenomena.

• Jahn, Robert

  The concept of ENTROPY is by no means restricted to MECHANICAL situations. The unfortunate fate of Humpty-Dumpty is an example of a drastic entropy of quite a different system. His demise from a highly organized whole egg to one that was completely scrambled was also highly irreversible.

• James I

  If you STAND at all, stand TALL.

• James, Henry Senior

  Say I'm a philosopher, say I'm a seeker for truth, say I'm a lover of my kind, say I'm an author of books if you like, or best of all, just say I'm a STUDENT.

• James, William

  1. Nature and life have unfitted me for any AFFECTIONATE relations with other individuals.
  2. O my BERGSON, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy. . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.
  3. Not only Walt Whitman could write '"who touches this BOOK touches man". The books of all the great PHILOSOPHERS are like so many men. Our sense of an essential personal flavor in each one of them, typical but indescribable, is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic education. What the system pretends to be is a picture of the GREAT UNIVERSE of GOD. What it is, . . . and oh so flagrantly! . . . is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is.
  4. PHILOSOPHY is once the most SUBLIME and the most TRIVIAL of human PURSUITS. It works in the minutest cranies and opens out the widest vistas. It "bakes no bread'" as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quitting and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world's perspectives. These illuminations at least, and the contrast-effects of darkness and mystery that accompany them, give to what it says an interest that is much more professional.
  5. We measure the total character of the UNIVERSE as we feel it, against the flavor of the PHILOSOPHY proffered us, and one word is enough.
  6. To some of us the thought of GOD is like a sort of quiet music playing in the background of the mind.
  7. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but INDECISION.
  8. Actualities seem to float in a wider sea of POSSIBILITIES from out of which they were chosen; and somewhere, indeterminism says, such possibilities exist, and form part of the truth.
  9. A prudent QUESTION is one half of WISDOM.
  10. The greatest economy of any one of our TRUTHS may be the rest of our truths.
  11. Every WAR leaves such miserable legacies, fatal seeds of future WAR and REVOLUTION.

• Jammer, Max

  1. This then is the story of the basic concept of MASS.

     Although of primary importance in all branches of physics and an indispensable conceptual tool of scientific thought, the notion of mass seems to elude all attempts at a fully comprehensive elucidation and a logical as well as scientifically unobjectionable definition.

     Throughout its long history in human thought, from its early adumbrations in Neo-Platonic philosophy, its mystic and still inarticulate presentation in theology, to its scientific manifestations in the physics of Kepler and Newton, to its carefully though-out redefinitions of positivistic and axiomatic formulations, up to its far-reaching modifications in modern theories of physics . . . nowhere does science seem to get full command and control over all the conceptual intricacies involved. One has to admit that in spite of the concerted effort of physicists and philosophers, mathematicians and logicians, no FINAL CLASSIFICATION of the concept of mass has been reached. 'The modern physicist may rightfully be proud of his spectacular achievements in science and technology. However, he should always be aware that the foundations of his imposing edifice, the basic notions of his discipline, such as the concept of mass, are entangled with serious uncertainties and perplexing difficulties that have as yet not been resolved.

  2. . . . if we speak of a sense of DURATION, Janet argued, we are assuming that things exist outside us in the same way as we conceive them. He concluded that "Las durée, ce phénomène complexe et tardif dans l'évolution, nous comprenons encore très mal car nos notions sur les temps sont encore très vagues, la durée ne doit pas être interprété2 comme une sensation élémentaire" (Janey 1928, p. 47). More recently, another distinguished French psychologist in Paris Paul Fraisse, has criticized Janet for going too far.

• Janet Pierre

  1. A l'époque vraiment rationelle, on n'aime pas le TEMPS; en général, les hommes ne l'aiment pas beaucoup, mais les philosophes ont une horreur particulière pour lui; ils ont tout fait pour supprimer le TEMPS.

• Jastrow, Robert

  1. Nearly five billion years ago, in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy, a cloud of gaseous matter formed by accident out of the swirling tendrils of the primal mist. The history of the solar system began in that softly glowing nebulosity, bathed in the black light of nearby stars. If the observer were prescient, he would see in the moving shadows of the cloud the faint outlines of the sun, the earth, and men walking on the earth.

     Such clouds are the raw stuff out of which stars and planets are made. Appearing, disappearing, and appearing again in endless succession since the beginning of time in the Cosmos, they mark the FIRST STEP on the PATH to LIFE.

     IN THIS ONE CLOUD, MAN'S FATE WAS SEALED. Within the cloud were the light gases, hydrogen and helium, mixed with smaller amounts of other substances. Carbon, nitrogen and oxygen was present, as well as such metals as iron and aluminium, and trace amounts of gold, uranium and other rare elements. Many of these substances would play an important role in the life that was to emerge from the cloud. Nearly all had been conceived in the hearts of other stars; few could trace their lineage to the original moment of creation. The atoms in the interior of the cloud, drawn to its center by the force of gravity, piled up to form a dense, hot mass. The temperature at the center of the cloud climbed; nuclear reaction flared up, and the sun was born.

     The outer regions of the cloud - cooler and less dense - gave birth to the planet . . . The formation of the earth and its sister planets went on over a period of several million years, proceeding with extreme slowness at first and then with rapidly increasing momentum in the final stages . . .

     When the earth came into existence, it was a naked body of rock without air or water; but a subtle transformation taking place in the depths of the planet would soon change that. . . . The earth was ready; it waited for life.

  2. Starting about one million years ago, the fossil record shows an accelerating growth of the human brain. . . .

     Which factor played the most important role in the development of human intelligence? Was it the pressure of the ICE-AGE climate? our tools? Or language? No one can tell; ALL WORKED TOGETHER, through Darwin's law of natural selection, to produce the dramatic increase in the size of the brain that has been recorded in the fossil record in the last million years. The brain reached its present size about one hundred thousand years ago, and its growth ceased. Man's body had been shaped into its modern form several hundred thousand years before that. Now brain and body were complete. Together they made a NEW and MARVELOUS CREATURE, CHARGED with POWER, INTELLIGENCE, and CREATIVE ENERGY. His wits had been honed by the fight against hunger, cold, and the natural enemy; his form had been molded in the crucible of adversity. In the annals of anthropology his arrival is celebrated by a change in name from HOMO ERECTUS - the man who stands erect - to HOMO SAPIENS - the Man of Wisdom.

     The story of man's creation nears an end. In the beginning there was light; then a dark cloud appeared, and made the sun and earth. The earth grew warmer; its body exhaled moisture and gases; water collected on the surface, soon the first molecules struggled across the threshold of life.Some survived; other perished; and the law of Darwin began its work. The pressures of the environment acted ceaselessly, and the forms of life improved.

     The changes were imperceptible from one generation to the next. NO CREATURE WAS AWARE OF ITS ROLE in the LARGER DRAMA; all felt only the PLEASURE and PAIN of EXISTENCE; and LIFE and DEATH were devoid of a greater MEANING.

     But to the human observer, looking back on the history of life from the perspective of many eons, a MEANING becomes evident. He sees that through the struggle against the force of adversity, each generation molds the shapes of its descendants. Adversity and struggle lie at the root of evolutionary progress. WITHOUT ADVERSITY there is NO PRESSURE; without PRESSURE there is no CHANGE.

     These circumstances, so painful to the individual, create the great currents that carry life forward from the simple to the complex. Finally, man stands on the earth, more perfect than any other. Intelligent, self-aware, he alone among all creatures has the CURIOSITY to ASK: HOW DID I COME INTO BEING? What forces have created me? And, guided by his scientific knowledge, he comes to the REALIZATION that he was created by all who came before him, through their struggle against adversity.

• Jay, Antony

  It is strange and quite illogical that creativeness should, in the public mind, be linked to long hair and dirty fingernails instead of grey flannel suits and pinstripe trousers. It is not a rare human attribute like telepathy or double-jointed knees; it is quite a normal quality (like intelligence or manual skill) which most children possess in some degree, as any teacher of five-year-olds will tell you. If most teachers of eighteen-year-olds would question it, that is a reflection on our method of education, not on children. A great many managers are in fact creative people, but people are liable to balk at the idea because they do not look like painters or poets. Nor do most good painters and poets, for that matter, but there is a pre-Raphaelite stereotype which creative people are expected to conform to. . . .

• Jay, Bevins

  1. The secret of CONTENTMENT is to settle for half a measure before the cup runs over and makes a mess.
  2. The wall on which GENIUS makes its mark is built by the common man, out of sweat and sometimes sadness - but so common as to be beyond COMMONNESS.
  3. There is no greater remedy for SORROW than WORK.

• Jeans, Sir James

  1. LIFE exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional qualities.
  2. Today there is a wide measure of agreement which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a nonmechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great THOUGHT than like a great machine. MIND no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter . . . not of course our individual minds, but the MIND in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown exist as thoughts.
  3. Many would hold that, from the broad philosophical standpoint, the outstanding achievement of twentieth-century physics is not the THEORY of RELATIVITY with its welding together of space and time, or the THEORY of QUANTA with its present apparent negation of the laws of causation, or the dissection of the atom with the resultant discovery that things are not as they seem; it is the general recognition that we are not yet in contact with REALITY. To speak in terms of Plato's well-known simile, we are still imprisoned in our cave, with our backs to the light, and can only watch the shadows on the wall.
  4. SCIENCE should leave off making pronouncements: the river of KNOWLEDGE has too often turned back on itself.

• Jeffers, Robinson

  1.         HUMANITY is the start of the race; I say
     HUMANITY is the MOLD to break away from, the crust to break
             through, the coal to break into fire,
          The atom to be split.
     	     Tragedy that breaks man's face and a white
            fire flies out of it; vision that fools him
     Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits,
           unnatural crime, INHUMAN SCIENCE,
     Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls of
           nature, the wild fence-vaulter SCIENCE,
     Useful intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning
          demons that make an atom,
     These break, these pierce, these deify, praising their God
          shrilly with fierce voices: not in man's shape
     He approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on the
           Pacific, that laces the suns with planets,
     The heart of the atom with electrons: what is HUMANITY in
           this cosmos? For him, at last
     Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for itself,
           the MOLD to break away from, the coal
     To break into fire, the atom to be split.
     

  2. A day will come when the earth will scratch herself and smile and rub off HUMANITY.
  3. Names foul in the mouthing. The HUMAN RACE is bound to defile, I've often noticed it, Whatever they reach or name, they'd shit on the morningstar If they could reach . . .
  4. The awful POWER that feeds the life of the STARS has been tricked down into the common stews and shambles . . .

• Jefferson, Thomas

  1. I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the PEOPLE themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by EDUCATION.
  2. The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my FAMILY.
  3. I like the dreams of the FUTURE better than the HISTORY of the PAST.

• Jeffreys, Harold

  I have been insisting for about 20 years that the claim of FINALITY for any SCIENTIFIC INFERENCE is absurd.

• Jensen, Roderick V.

  The IRREGULAR, UNPREDICTABLE behavior of deterministic, nonlinear dynamical Systems.

• Jerome, Jerome K.

  I like WORK; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

• Jerrold, Douglas

  LOVE's like measles - all the worse when it comes late in life.

• Jesus Christ

  Not until the MALE becomes female and the female male shall ye enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

• Johnson, Lyndon B.

  It's UNFORTUNATE, but the way the AMERICAN PEOPLE are, now that they have developed all of this CAPABILITY, instead of taking advantage of it, they'll probably just piss it all away.
  1. For the first time in our history it is possible to conquer POVERTY.

• Johnson, Samuel

  1. One doesn't need to be a cook to CRITICISE the cooking.
  2. CURIOSITY is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of vigorous minds.
  3. You LEVELLERS wish to level down as far as themselves; but they bear levelling up to themselves: They would all have some under them; why not then have some people above them?
  4. The true state of every NATION is the state of common life. The manners of a people are not to be found in the schools of learning, or the palaces of greatness, where the NATIONAL CHARACTER is obscured or obliterated by travel or instruction, by philosophy or vanity . . . .
  5. So far as it being true that all men are NATURALLY EQUAL, that no two people can be half an hour together but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.
  6. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from HOPE to HOPE.
  7. KNOWLEDGE is of two kinds. We KNOW a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find INFORMATION upon it.

  8. Let observation with extensive view
     Survey MANKIND, from China to Peru.
     

  9. The longer we live, and the more we think, the higher value we learn to put on the friendship and tenderness of PARENTS and friends. Parents we can have but one; and he promises himself too much who enters life with the expectation of finding many friends.
  10. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the PAST, the DISTANT, or the FUTURE, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of THINKING BEINGS.
  11. Every man has the right to utter what he thinks TRUTH, and every other man has the right to knock him down for it.????
  12. I WRITE a little better to endure the world and a little better to enjoy it.
  13. CONTEMPLATIVE PIETY, or the intercourse between God and the human soul cannot be poetical.
  14. CONTEMPLATIVE PIETY, or the intercourse between God and the human soul cannot be POETICAL.
  15. COURAGE is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.
  16. The true art of MEMORY is the art of ATTENTION.

• Jones, John D.S.

  PHYSICS has always provided mathematicians with PROBLEMS. PHYSICISTS are pragmatic people, whose primary interest is in the physical significance of theories rather than in their rigorous justification. This provides mathematicians with one of their additional sources of good problems. It also creates a little tension: the narrow-minded mathematician dismisses the physicist as sloppy, whereas the narrow-minded physicist complains of mathematicians quibbling over details with no physical significance. Others recognize that the disciplines have different, but compatible objectives and that each has much to learn from the other. An important example of this flexible attitude is the work of Simon Donaldson who has used ideas from gauge theory in theoretical physics to prove new results in geometry and topology. . . .

• Jones, Rufus Matthew

  But it is an eternal law that there can be no COMPULSION in the realm of the spirit. It is essentially a wall of FREE CREATIVE CHOICES.

• Jonson, Ben

  . . . It is no one DREAM that can PLEASE these ALL . . . need INEQUALITY in order to ELIMINATE POVERTY."

• Joseph, Sir Keith

  We NEED INEQUALITY in order to eliminate POVERTY.

• Josephson, Brian D.

  1. . . . From a general viewpoint, when we describe our thought processes we are describing some of the mechanics involved in the expression in action of our intelligence. Logically, the subtler EXPERIENCES of MYSTICISM can also be interpreted as being a part of the workings of intelligence in nature (which characterisation can, in principle, also include the divine intelligence). Because of our consciousness we can have direct knowledge of these processes that is not accessible to the usual means of investigation of SCIENCE and, as previously noted, it is illogical to rule out this kind of knowledge while accepting the use of MATHEMATICS.
  2. PSYCHIC PHENOMENA violate some of our conceptions about space, time and causation. But so does QUANTUM MECHANICS. It is not too far-fetched to say that if psychic phenomena had not been found experimentally, they might have been predicted by an imaginative theoretician.
  3. If PSYCHIC PHENOMENA are a reality, would it mean the overthrow of conventional physics? Hardly. The history of science shows that new phenomena do not have to invalidate the old physics.

• Joubert, Joseph

  A part of KINDNESS consists of loving people. more than they deserve.

• Jung, Carl Gustav

  1. ARTt is a kind of innate drive that seizes a HUMAN BEING and makes him its INSTRUMENT. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its PURPOSES through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an ARTIST he is "Man" in a higher sense - he is "collective man", a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind. That is his office, and it is sometimes as heavy a burden that he is fated to sacrifice HAPPINESS and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary HUMAN BEING.
  2. The BEST can be produced only by the best in man, by his CONSCIENTIOUSNESS and DEVOTION. Cultural products can therefore easily stand for the psychological conditions of their production, that is, for the HUMAN VIRTUES which alone make man capable of civilization.
  3. It is from need and distress that new forms of life take their rise and not from mere wishes or from the requirements of our ideals . . . All CREATIVENESS in the realm of the spirit as well as every PSYCHIC advance of man arises from a state of mental suffering.
  4. And where are the great and wise men who do not merely talk about the meaning of life and the WORLD, but really possess it? Human thought cannot conceive any system of final truth that could give the patient what he needs in order to live: that is, FAITH, HOPE, LOVE and INSIGHT.

     These four achievements of human effort are so many gifts of grace which are neither to be taught or learned, neither given nor taken, neither withheld or earned, since they come through experience, which is something given and therefore beyond the reach of human caprice. Experienced cannot be made. They happen . . . . it is a venture which requires us to commit ourselves with our whole being.

  5. FANTASY is not a sickness but a natural and vital activity which helps the seeds of psychic development to grow.
  6. The true GENIUS nearly always intrudes and disturbs. He speaks to a TEMPORAL world out of a world eternal. He says the wrong things at the right time. ETERNAL TRUTHS are never true at any given moment in history. The process of transformation has to make a halt in order to digest and assimilate the utterly impractical things that the genius has produced from the storehouse of eternity. Yet the genius is the healer of his time, because anything he reveals of ETERNAL TRUTHS is healing.
  7. The GENIUS will come through despite everything, for there is something absolute and INDOMITABLE in his nature. The socalled MISUNDERSTOOD GENIUS is rather a doubtful phenomenon. Generally he turns out to be a good-for-nothing who is forever seeking a soothing explanation of himself.
  8. Talent, on the other hand, can either be hampered, crippled, and perverted, or FOSTERED, DEVELOPED, and IMPROVED. The GENIUS is as rare a bird as the phoenix, an apparition not to be counted upon. Consciously or unconsciously, genius is something that by GOD'S GRACE is there from the start, in full strength. But talent is a statistical regularity and does not always have a DYNAMISM to match.
  9. HISTORY is a nightmare from which NONE of us can awaken.
  10. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of HUMAN EXISTENCE is to kindle a light in the darkness of MERE BEING. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, increase in or consciousness likewise affects the unconscious.
  11. Nature, as we know, is not so lavish with her boons that she joins to a high INTELLIGENCE the gifts of the HEART also. As a rule, where one is present the other is missing, and where one capacity is present in perfection it is generally at the cost of all the others.
  12. Everything that IRRITATES us about others can lead us to an UNDERSTANDING of ourselves.
  13. No doubt it is a great nuisance that MANKIND is not uniform but compounded of individuals whose PSYCHIC STRUCTURE spreads them over a span of at least ten thousand years. Hence there is absolutely no truth that does not spell salvation to one person and damnation to another. All UNIVERSALISMS get stuck in this terrible DILEMMA.
  14. MORAL LAW is nothing other than an outward manifestation of man's innate urge to DOMINATE and CONTROL himself. This impulse to DOMESTICATION and CIVILIZATION is lost in the dim, unfathomable depths of man's evolutionary history and can never be conceived as the consequence of LAWS imposed from without. Man himself, obeying his INSTINCTS, created his LAWS.
  15. SCIENCE qua SCIENCE has no boundaries, and there is no SPECIALTY whatever that can boast of complete self-sufficiency. Any SPECIALTY is bound to spill over its borders and to encroach on adjoining territory if it is to lay serious claim to the status of a science.
  16. I do not regard the PURSUIT of SCIENCE as a bickering about who is right, but as an ENDEAVOUR to augment and deepen human knowledge.
  17. It should not be forgotten that SCIENCE is not the summa of life, that it is actually only one of the psychological attitudes, only one of the forms of human thought.
  18. SCIENCE as an END IN ITSELF is assuredly a high ideal, yet its consistent fulfillment brings about as many ENDS IN THEMSELVES as there are SCIENCES and ARTS. Naturally this leads to a high differentiation and specialization of the particular functions concerned, but also to their detachment from the world and from LIFE, as well as to a multiplication of specialized fields which gradually lose all connection with one another. The result is an impoverishment and desiccation not merely in the specialized fields but also in the psyche of every man who has differentiated himself up or sunk down to a specialized level. Science must prove her value for LIFE; it is not enough that she be the mistress, she must also be the maid. By so serving she in no way dishonours herself.
  19. SCIENCE is not indeed a perfect INSTRUMENT, but it is a superb and invaluable tool that works harm only when it is taken as an END IN ITSELF. Science must serve; it errs when it usurps the throne. It must be ready to serve all its branches, for each, because of its insufficiency, has need of support from the others. Science is the tool of the Western mind, and with it one can open. more doors than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our understanding, and it obscures our INSIGHT only when it claims that the understanding it conveys is the only kind there is.
  20. Don't tell anyone, he said. It's a SECRET.
  21. SPACE FLIGHTS are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the Moon that it is to penetrate one's own being.

  22. Jungk, Robert

      FUTUROLOGY will probably do less for the FUTURE than for the immediate present. It should be regarded more as a search than a find, a game with suppositions rather than a source of reliable forecasts, as a project rather than a plan, a watcher of the process rather than a definer of aims.