„When you have an emotion you are recruiting a variety of mechanisms that came in the long history of evolution, long before emotions arose, and those mechanisms all had to do with how an organism manages its life.“

„Live all you can — it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?“

—  Henry James, livro The Ambassadors

Fonte: The Ambassadors (1903), book V, ch. II.
Contexto: Live all you can — it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?.. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that... The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.. Live!

„The recoil from the absolute of mechanism was into an equally sterile absolute of the organic: the raw primitive. The organic processes, reduced to shadows by the machine, made a violent effort to retrieve their position. The machine, which acerbically denied the flesh, was offset by the flesh, which denied the rational, the intelligent, the orderly processes of behavior that have entered into all man’s cultural developments—even those developments that most closely derive from the organic. The spurious notion that mechanism had naught to learn from life was supplanted by the equally false notion that life had nothing to learn from mechanism.“

—  Lewis Mumford, livro Technics and Civilization

Fonte: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 6, sct. 9

„Man is an organism, not a mechanism; and the mechanical pacing of his life does harm to his human responses, which naturally follow a kind of free rhythm.“

—  Richard M. Weaver American scholar 1910 - 1963

“Individuality and Modernity,” Essays on Individuality (Philadelphia: 1958), p. 66.

„Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long.“

—  T.S. Eliot, livro The Hollow Men

Variante: Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
Fonte: The Hollow Men (1925)

„Certain things leave you in your life and certain things stay with you. And that's why we're all interested in movies- those ones that make you feel, you still think about. Because it gave you such an emotional response, it's actually part of your emotional make-up, in a way.“

—  Tim Burton American filmmaker 1958

Fonte: Burton on Burton

„[In Bali] life is a rhythmic, patterned unreality of pleasant, significant movement, centered in one's own body to which all emotions long ago withdrew.“

—  Margaret Mead American anthropologist 1901 - 1978

Fonte: 1940s, Balinese Character (1942), p. 48

„War has changed little in principle from the beginning of recorded history. The mechanized warfare of today is only an evolution of the time when men fought with clubs and stones, and its machines are as nothing without the men who invent them, man them and give them life.“

—  Ernest King United States Navy admiral, Chief of Naval Operations 1878 - 1956

p. viii
Contexto: War has changed little in principle from the beginning of recorded history. The mechanized warfare of today is only an evolution of the time when men fought with clubs and stones, and its machines are as nothing without the men who invent them, man them and give them life. War is force- force to the utmost- force to make the enemy yield to our own will- to yield because they see their comrades killed and wounded- to yield because their own will to fight is broken. War is men against men. Mechanized war is still men against men, for machines are masses of inert metal without the men who control them- or destroy them.

„The machine process pervades the modern life and dominates it in a mechanical sense. Its dominance is seen in the enforcement of precise mechanical measurements and adjustment and the reduction of all manner of things, purposes and acts, necessities, conveniences, and amenities of life, to standard units.“

—  Thorstein Veblen, livro The Theory of Business Enterprise

Fonte: The Theory of Business Enterprise, 1904, p. 306

„Me? I had no dreams. No longings. Dreams only set you up for disappointment. Plus, you had to have a life to have dreams of a better life.“

—  Julie Anne Peters, Luna

Fonte: Luna

„If architecture is the history of all phallic emotion, the Empire State Building is utter catharsis, and we are sitting in its silhouette.“

—  Timothy Levitch American actor 1970

The Cruise (1998)

„We have been troubled about the world, and had almost lost faith in man; it helps to think about the long history of the earth, and of how life came to be. And when we think in terms of millions of years, we are not so impatient that our own problems be solved tomorrow.“

—  Rachel Carson American marine biologist and conservationist 1907 - 1964

Speech accepting the John Burroughs Medal (April 1952); also in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 96

„Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.“

—  Doris Lessing British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer 1919 - 2013

„The first living organisms on Earth doubtless arose in an aqueous environment, and the course of evolution has been shaped by the proper­ ties of the aqueous medium in which life began.“

—  Albert L. Lehninger American biochemist 1917 - 1986

Principles of Biochemistry, Ch. 2 : Water

„Don't you find it peculiar? The human conviction that we are the heirs of history instead of paragraphs that are almost over. A survival mechanism, no doubt.“

—  Pierce Brown, livro Dark Age

Fonte: Dark Age (2019), Ch. 33: The Devil's Deal; Atalantia

„And it was because of their long history that he searched for something to say, something that would get them back to where they had been.

All that came to him was…“

—  Jessica Bird U.S. novelist 1969

Fonte: Lover Mine

„But full emotional and intellectual belief never came. Perhaps if I had caught my first sense of life from the church I would have been moved to complete acceptance, but the hymns and sermons of God came into my heart only long after my personality had been shaped and formed by uncharted conditions of life. I felt that I had in me a sense of living as deep as that which the church was trying to give me, and in the end I remained basically unaffected.“

—  Richard Wright, livro Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

„You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that's all even the gods can ask of you.“

—  Marcus Aurelius, livro Meditações

Hays translation
Thou seest how few be the things, the which if a man has at his command his life flows gently on and is divine.
II, 5
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book II

„Don't you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does?… The only time it isn't good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief.“

—  Ernest Hemingway American author and journalist 1899 - 1961

Postscript to letter to critic, poet and translator Ivan Kashkin (19 August 1935); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

„The tendency of life is not the preservation of the species, but solely the preservation of each individual organism, as long as it is in existence at all, and is able to carry on its life processes.“

—  Boris Sidis American psychiatrist 1867 - 1923

Fonte: Nervous Ills their Cause and Cure (1922), p. 20