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William Kingdon Clifford

William Kingdon Clifford (May 4, 1845 – March 3, 1879) was an English mathematician and philosopher.

Quotes

 * It is a very serious thing to consider that not only the earth itself and all that beautiful face of Nature we see, but also the living things upon it, and all the consciousness of men, and the ideas of society, which have grown up upon the surface, must come to an end. We who hold that belief must just face the fact and make the best of it; and I think we are helped in this by the words of that Jew philosopher who was himself a worthy crown to the splendid achievements of his race in the cause of progress during the middle ages, Benedict Spinoza. He said, "The freeman thinks of nothing so little as of death, and his contemplation is not of death but of life." Our interest, it seems to me, lies with so much of the past as may serve to guide our actions in the present, and to intensify our pious allegiance to the fathers who have gone before us, and the brethren who are with us; and our interest lies with so much of the future as we may hope will be appreciably affected by our good actions now. Beyond that, as it seems to me, we do not know, and we ought not to care. Do I seem to say, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die?" Far from it; on the contrary, I say, "Let us take hands and help, for this day we are alive together."
 * "The First and the Last Catastrophe" in Popular Science Monthly (Vol. 7, (July 1875)

 * The name philosopher, which meant originally 'lover of wisdom,' has come in some strange way to mean a man who thinks it is his business to explain everything in a certain number of large books. It will be found, I think, that in proportion to his colossal ignorance is the perfection and symmetry of the system which he sets up; because it is so much easier to put an empty room tidy than a full one.
 * As quoted by A. D'Abro, The Evolution of Scientific Thought from Newton to Einstein (1927)

On the Space-Theory of Matter (read Feb 21, 1870)
from the Cambridge Philosophical Society's Proceedings II (1876) pp. 157-158

 * Riemann has shewn that as there are different kinds of lines and surfaces, so there are different kinds of space of three dimensions; and that we can only find out by experience to which of these kinds the space in which we live belongs. In particular, the axioms of plane geometry are true within the limits of experiment on the surface of a sheet of paper, and yet we know that the sheet is really covered with a number of small ridges and furrows, upon which (the total curvature not being zero) these axioms are not true. Similarly, he says although the axioms of solid geometry are true within the limits of experiment for finite portions of our space, yet we have no reason to conclude that they are true for very small portions; and if any help can be got thereby for the explanation of physical phenomena, we may have reason to conclude that they are not true for very small portions of space.
 * Abstract

(1) That small portions of space are in fact of a nature analogous to little hills on a surface which is on the average flat; namely, that the ordinary laws of geometry are not valid in them. (2) That this property of being curved or distorted is continually being passed on from one portion of space to another after the manner of a wave. (3) That this variation of the curvature of space is what really happens in that phenomenon which we call the motion of matter, whether ponderable or etherial. (4) That in the physical world nothing else takes place but this variation, subject possibly to the law of continuity.
 * I hold in fact
 * Abstract

 * I am endeavouring in a general way to explain the laws of double refraction on this hypothesis, but have not yet arrived at any results sufficiently decisive to be communicated.

"On the Aims and Instruments of Scientific Thought" (Aug 19, 1872)

 * Lecture before the members of the British Association at Brighton, as quoted in Lectures and Essays by William Kingdon Clifford (1879) Vol. 1, pp. 155-157.

 * By scientific thought we mean the application of past experience to new circumstances by means of an observed order of events. By saying that this order of events is exact we mean that it is exact enough to correct experiments by, but we do not mean that it is theoretically or absolutely exact, because we do not know. The process of inference [is] in itself an assumption of uniformity, and... as the known exactness of the uniformity became greater, the stringency of the inference [is] increased. By saying that the order of events is reasonable we do not mean that everything has a purpose, or that everything can be explained, or that everything has a cause; for neither of these is true. But we mean that to every reasonable question there is an intelligible answer, which either we or posterity may know by the exercise of scientific thought.
 * 155-156.

 * I specially wish you not to go away with the idea that the exercise of scientific thought is properly confined... When the Roman jurists applied their experience of Roman citizens to dealings between citizens and aliens, showing by the difference of their actions that they regarded the circumstances as essentially different, they laid the foundations of that great structure which has guided the social progress of Europe. That procedure was an instance of strictly scientific thought. When a poet finds that he has to move a strange new world which his predecessors have not moved; when, nevertheless, he catches fire from their flashes, arms from their armoury, sustentation from their foot-prints, the procedure by which he applies old experience to new circumstances is nothing greater or less than scientific thought. When the moralist studying the conditions of society and the ideas of right and wrong which have come down to us from a time when war was the normal condition of man and success in war the only chance of survival, evolves from them the conditions and ideas which must accompany a time of peace, when the comradeship of equals is the condition of national success; the process by which he does this is scientific thought and nothing else.
 * pp. 156-157.

 * Remember, then, that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself. And for this reason the question what its characters are... is the question of all questions for the human race.
 * p. 157.

"Energy and Force" (Mar 28, 1873)

 * A previously unpublished lecture by Prof. Clifford before members of the, as described in Nature (May-Oct, 1880) Vol. 22, pp. 122-124. with an introduction by J. F. Moulton.

 * No mathematician can give any meaning to language about matter, force, inertia, used in text-books of mechanics.

'''This idea must be got rid of to understand force. All universally true laws of nature are laws of co-existence, not succession.''' ...In every case the law at work is seen to be a law of co-existence, not succession.
 * Causation is defined by some modern philosophers as unconditional uniformity of succession, e.g., existence of fire follows from putting a lighted match to the fuel.

 *  may be roughly described as quantity motion. A body moving at a speed of say twenty an hour, has a certain quantity of motion. If the body goes forty miles an hour there is twice as motion; or if twice as much matter goes twenty miles hour, there is also twice as much motion. Momentum is measured by the quantity of matter moving at a rate mass $$\times$$ velocity.

Suppose a body with a certain momentum to be the only body in the universe; it will go on with the same momentum. The case of bodies in contact is no exception to this law, but only a particular case. Here the change of motion is called pressure. The case of bodies not in contact is illustrated by the motion of the earth about the sun [under the force of gravitation, as we call it]. '''In all cases change of motion is connected by invariable laws with the position of surrounding bodies. Force, then, has a definite direction [at every instant] at any point in space, and depends on the position of surrounding bodies, and may be described as the change of momentum of a body considered as depending upon its position relative to other things.''' It embodies the quality of direction as well as magnitude. In other words, it is a quantity having direction.
 * Force cannot be explained without stating a law of nature concerning momentum, viz.:—

 * Force, defined as above, is not conserved at all. It may appear and disappear; it is continually being created and destroyed. "Conservation of force" is, mathematically speaking, a contradiction in terms.

 * Energy [is of two kinds: 1. Energy of motion; 2. Energy of position].

 * 1. In a moving body we have a certain quantity of motion [as explained above under the head of momentum]. Thus in a moving railway train let the unit of motion be one carriage going at the rate of one mile per hour; then ten carriages going at the rate of twenty miles per hour have 200 units of motion. [The quantity of motion or momentum in a body may be regarded as travelling with the body, and] energy of motion is the rate at which momentum is carried along. [It depends on momentum and velocity jointly, and the energy of motion of a given body] is known when the velocity is known. In practice it is convenient to call the actual amount of energy of motion half this rate. It is expressed by $$\frac{1}{2}mv^2$$ [i.e., $$mv \times v$$ not $$m \times v^2$$; Clifford in conversation].

 * 2. Energy of position is quite a different thing. If take a book lying on the table and lift it up, and put on the desk above the table, it acquires energy of position, and the energy acquired is measured by the weight [assuming gravity to be constant] of the book measured by the difference of height between the two positions. [Energy of position, like force, may be said to exist any point of space, whether a body is there or not.] The difference of energy between two positions is the quantity of work that must be done to remove a body of unit from one position to the other.

 * When a body is let fall from a higher position to lower one, it has, at the instant when it is let go, energy of motion; but it gains, in falling, as much energy of motion as it loses energy of position. It is found that the sum of energy of motion and energy of position is always constant. ...Energy is a quantity which can be greater or less but has no direction. ...This constancy is expressed by including them in common name of Energy, and saying that energy is conserved, or is indestructible. This form of speech might be applied to other cases of alternate immortality, where one of two things comes into existence on disappearance of the other.

 * Other qualities of bodies are connected with simple energy of motion and energy of position. Such is , which we find by experiment can be turned into work. Finding it convertible with energy, we call it a form of energy. ...But as to heat, it is further established by experiment that in this case the energy of motion does really persist as such. Thus a gas consists of molecules flying about with velocity, rotating and vibrating, and so having energy motion. All this energy of motion is what we call heat, and thus heat is a repetition of a known meaning of energy. Again, heat exists between a radiating body and the thing it warms; now the intermediate space is filled by the luminiferous ether, which, being elastic, has in its ultimate parts both energy of motion energy of position. In these forms the heat exists in the space in question.

 * In the cases of heat and electricity the form of the persisting energy is pretty well ascertained. But there are cases in which we do not know if it is energy of motion or energy position, such as that of '. In the burning of coal there is a falling together of carbon and oxygen [and heat is produced] but we do not know in which of the two forms, if either, the energy which comes out as heat existed in the chemical process. For such a case the is only a probable statement (though of great probability) to the effect that in all cases where a physical quality is convertible with energy, that quality is itself either energy of motion or energy position.'''

Energy is the name of two different quantities. 1. Energy of motion, half the rate at which a body carries momentum. 2. Energy of position, defined by the statement of the law that the work done in getting from one position to another is the same by whatever path the change of position is made.
 * General Results.—Force is a quality of position, definite in magnitude and direction at any point; not constant.

 * Is a physical force, such as the attraction of earth, analogous to our "exertion of force" in muscular work? No, for the sensation of muscular effort is complicated. It involves nerve and muscle, which we know not to be present in the simpler cases, e.g., the motion of a stone let fall. To talk of pushing or pulling in such a case is a personification of external nature.

 * Is mind a force? It is held by some that the will acts as the match to gunpowder, by setting loose a store of energy, the matter of the brain being in unstable equilibrium. But you cannot have in nature an absolutely unstable equilibrium [i.e., an equilibrium capable of being upset by an infinitesimal force], because the universe is not at rest [and every motion in the universe produces a finite change, however small, in the resultant force at every point of space]. Therefore if mind is force, operating in the way suggested, it must be able to create a determinate quantity of energy. This is a supposition which, if true, would destroy its own evidence; for it would destroy the uniformity of nature, on which all of inference ultimately rests.

The Ethics of Belief (1877)

 * Full text online at Wikisource

The Duty of Inquiry

In the first place, let us admit that, so far as it goes, this view of the case is right and necessary; right, because even when a man's belief is so fixed that he cannot think otherwise, he still has a choice in the action suggested by it, and so cannot escape the duty of investigating on the ground of the strength of his convictions; and necessary, because those who are not yet capable of controlling their feelings and thoughts must have a plain rule dealing with overt acts.
 * It might be said to the agitator, "However convinced you were of the justice of your cause and the truth of your convictions, you ought not to have made a public attack upon any man's character until you had examined the evidence on both sides with the utmost patience and care."

Nor is it that truly a belief at all which has not some influence upon the actions of him who holds it. He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart. If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future. It goes to make a part of that aggregate of beliefs which is the link between sensation and action at every moment of all our lives, and which is so organized and compacted together that no part of it can be isolated from the rest, but every new addition modifies the structure of the whole. No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may someday explode into overt action, and leave its stamp upon our character for ever.
 * No man holding a strong belief on one side of a question, or even wishing to hold a belief on one side, can investigate it with such fairness and completeness as if he were really in doubt and unbiased; so that the existence of a belief not founded on fair inquiry unfits a man for the performance of this necessary duty.

 * Our lives are guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes. Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handled on to the next one, not unchanged but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper handiwork. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. An awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.

It is not only the leader of men, statesmen, philosopher, or poet, that owes this bounden duty to mankind. Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race. Every hard-worked wife of an artisan may transmit to her children beliefs which shall knit society together, or rend it in pieces. No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe. It is true that this duty is a hard one, and the doubt which comes out of it is often a very bitter thing. It leaves us bare and powerless where we thought that we were safe and strong. To know all about anything is to know how to deal with it under all circumstances. We feel much happier and more secure when we think we know precisely what to do, no matter what happens, than when we have lost our way and do not know where to turn. And if we have supposed ourselves to know all about anything, and to be capable of doing what is fit in regard to it, we naturally do not like to find that we are really ignorant and powerless, that we have to begin again at the beginning, and try to learn what the thing is and how it is to be dealt with — if indeed anything can be learnt about it. It is the sense of power attached to a sense of knowledge that makes men desirous of believing, and afraid of doubting.
 * Belief, that sacred faculty which prompts the decisions of our will, and knits into harmonious working all the compacted energies of our being, is ours not for ourselves but for humanity. It is rightly used on truths which have been established by long experience and waiting toil, and which have stood in the fierce light of free and fearless questioning. Then it helps to bind men together, and to strengthen and direct their common action. It is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements, for the solace and private pleasure of the believer; to add a tinsel splendour to the plain straight road of our life and display a bright mirage beyond it; or even to drown the common sorrows of our kind by a self-deception which allows them not only to cast down, but also to degrade us. Whoso would deserve well of his fellows in this matter will guard the purity of his beliefs with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away.

 * A bad action is always bad at the time when it is done, no matter what happens afterwards. Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence. We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to, and the evil born when one such belief is entertained is great and wide. But a greater and wider evil arises when the credulous character is maintained and supported, when a habit of believing for unworthy reasons is fostered and made permanent. If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done from the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest. What hurts society is not that it should lose its property, but that it should become a den of thieves, for then it must cease to be society. This is why we ought not to do evil, that good may come; for at any rate this great evil has come, that we have done evil and are made wicked thereby. In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.

 * The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs. Habitual want of care about what I believe leads to habitual want of care in others about the truth of what is told to me. Men speak the truth of one another when each reveres the truth in his own mind and in the other's mind; but how shall my friend revere the truth in my mind when I myself am careless about it, when I believe thing because I want to believe them, and because they are comforting and pleasant? Will he not learn to cry, "Peace," to me, when there is no peace? By such a course I shall surround myself with a thick atmosphere of falsehood and fraud, and in that I must live. It may matter little to me, in my cloud-castle of sweet illusions and darling lies; but it matters much to Man that I have made my neighbours ready to deceive. The credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat; he lives in the bosom of this his family, and it is no marvel if he should become even as they are.

If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it--the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.
 * To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

"But," says one, "I am a busy man; I have no time for the long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain questions, or even able to understand the nature of the arguments." Then he should have no time to believe.
 * Inquiry into the evidence of a doctrine is not to be made once for all, and then taken as finally settled. It is never lawful to stifle a doubt; for either it can be honestly answered by means of the inquiry already made, or else it proves that the inquiry was not complete.

The Weight Of Authority
But because it is not enough to say, "It is wrong to believe on unworthy evidence," without saying also what evidence is worthy, we shall now go on to inquire under what circumstances it is lawful to believe on the testimony of others; and then, further, we shall inquire more generally when and why we may believe that which goes beyond our own experience, or even beyond the experience of mankind.
 * We have no reason to fear lest a habit of conscientious inquiry should paralyse the actions of our daily life.

 However plain and obvious these reasons may be, so that no man of ordinary intelligence, reflecting upon the matter, could fail to arrive at them, it is nevertheless true that a great many persons do habitually disregard them in weighing testimony. Of the two questions, equally important to the trustworthiness of a witness, "Is he dishonest?" and "May he be mistaken?" the majority of mankind are perfectly satisfied if one can, with some show of probability, be answered in the negative. The excellent moral character of a man is alleged as ground for accepting his statements about things which he cannot possibly have known.
 * In what cases, then, let us ask in the first place, is the testimony of a man unworthy of belief? He may say that which is untrue either knowingly or unknowingly. In the first case he is lying, and his moral character is to blame; in the second case he is ignorant or mistaken, and it is only his knowledge or his judgment which is in fault. In order that we may have the right to accept his testimony as ground for believing what he says, we must have reasonable grounds for trusting his veracity, that he is really trying to speak the truth so far as he knows it; his knowledge, that he has had opportunities of knowing the truth about this matter; and his judgment, that he has made proper use of those opportunities in coming to the conclusion which he affirms.

 * It is hardly in human nature that a man should quite accurately gauge the limits of his own insight; but it is the duty of those who profit by his work to consider carefully where he may have been carried beyond it. If we must needs embalm his possible errors along with his solid achievements, and use his authority as an excuse for believing what he cannot have known, we make of his goodness an occasion to sin.

 * The goodness and greatness of a man do not justify us in accepting a belief upon the warrant of his authority, unless there are reasonable grounds for supposing that he knew the truth of what he was saying. And there can be no grounds for supposing that a man knows that which we, without ceasing to be men, could not be supposed to verify.

We shall find reason to answer that it is not only possible and right, but our bounden duty; that the main purpose of the tradition itself is to supply us with the means of asking questions, of testing and inquiring into things; that if we misuse it, and take it as a collection of cut-and-dried statements to be accepted without further inquiry, we are not only injuring ourselves here, but, by refusing to do our part towards the building up of the fabric which shall be inherited by our children, we are tending to cut off ourselves and our race from the human line.
 * What shall we say of that authority, more venerable and august than any individual witness, the time-honoured tradition of the human race? An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life. It is around and about us and within us; we cannot think except in the forms and processes of thought which it supplies. Is it possible to doubt and to test it? and if possible, is it right?

 * We have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it. However many nations and generations of men are brought into the witness-box they cannot testify to anything which they do not know. Every man who has accepted the statement from somebody else, without himself testing and verifying it, is out of court; his word is worth nothing at all. And when we get back at last to the true birth and beginning of the statement, two serious questions must be disposed of in regard to him who first made it: was he mistaken in thinking that he knew about this matter, or was he lying?

 * In regard, then, to the sacred tradition of humanity, we learn that it consists, not in propositions or statements which are to be accepted and believed on the authority of the tradition, but in questions rightly asked, in conceptions which enable us to ask further questions, and in methods of answering questions. The value of all these things depends on their being tested day by day. The very sacredness of the precious deposit imposes upon us the duty and the responsibility of testing it, of purifying and enlarging it to the utmost of our power. He who makes use of its results to stifle his own doubts, or to hamper the inquiry of others, is guilty of a sacrilege which centuries shall never be able to blot out. When the labours and questionings of honest and brave men shall have built up the fabric of known truth to a glory which we in this generation can neither hope for nor imagine, in that pure and holy temple he shall have no part nor lot, but his name and his works shall be cast out into the darkness of oblivion for ever.

The Limits Of Inference

 * A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions. … Even the fundamental "I am," which cannot be doubted, is no guide to action until it takes to itself "I shall be," which goes beyond experience. The question is not, therefore, "May we believe what goes beyond experience?" for this is involved in the very nature of belief; but "How far and in what manner may we add to our experience in forming our beliefs?"

Are we then bound to believe that nature is absolutely and universally uniform? Certainly not; we have no right to believe anything of this kind. The rule only tells us that in forming beliefs which go beyond our experience, we may make the assumption that nature is practically uniform so far as we are concerned. Within the range of human action and verification, we may form, by help of this assumption, actual beliefs; beyond it, only those hypotheses which serve for the more accurate asking of questions.
 * If an event really happened which was not a part of the uniformity of nature, it would have two properties: no evidence could give the right to believe it to any except those whose actual experience it was; and no inference worthy of belief could be founded upon it at all.

 * We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know. We may believe the statement of another person, when there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.  It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.

The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences (1885)
Clifford's work, edited and extended by Richard Charles Rowe & Karl Pearson

 * In March 1879 Clifford died at Madeira; six years afterwards a posthumous work is for the first time placed before the public. ...The original work as planned by Clifford was to have been entitled The First Principles of the Mathematical Sciences Explained to the Non-Mathematical, and to have contained six chapters, on Number, Space, Quantity, Position, Motion, and Mass respectively. Of the projected work Clifford in the year 1875 dictated the chapters on Number and Space completely, the first portion of the chapter on Quantity, and somewhat later nearly the entire chapter on Motion. The first two chapters were afterwards seen by him in proof, but never finally revised. Shortly before his death he expressed a wish that the book should only be published after very careful revision and that its title should be changed to The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences.
 * Preface by Karl Pearson, pp. v-vi.

 * Upon Clifford's death the labour of revision and completion was entrusted to Mr. R. C. Rowe, then Professor of Pure Mathematics at University College, London. ...On the sad death of Professor Rowe, in October 1884, I was requested... to take up the task of editing... For the latter half of Chapter III. and for the whole of Chapter IV. ...I am alone responsible. Yet whatever there is in them of value I owe to Clifford; whatever is feeble or obscure is my own. ...With Chapter V. my task has been by no means light. ...Without any notice of mass or force it seemed impossible to close a discussion on motion; something I felt must be added. I have accordingly introduced a few pages on the laws of motion. I have since found that Clifford intended to write a concluding chapter on mass. How to express the laws of motion in a form of which Clifford would have approved was indeed an insoluble riddle to me, because I was unaware of his having written anything on the subject. I have accordingly expressed, although with great hesitation, my own views on the subject; these may be concisely described as a strong desire to see the terms matter and force, together with the ideas associated with them, entirely removed from scientific terminology—to reduce, in fact, all dynamic to kinematic. I should hardly have ventured to put forward these views had I not recently discovered that they have (allowing for certain minor differences) the weighty authority of Professor Mach, of Prag. But since writing these pages I have also been referred to a discourse delivered by Clifford at the Royal Institution in 1873, some account of which appeared in Nature, June 10, 1880. Therein it is stated that ' no mathematician can give any meaning to the language about matter, force, inertia used in current text-books of mechanics.' This fragmentary account of the discourse undoubtedly proves that Clifford held on the categories of matter and force as clear and original ideas as on all subjects of which he has treated; only, alas! they have not been preserved.
 * Preface by Karl Pearson, pp. vi-ix.

 * Force is not a fact at all, but an idea embodying what is approximately the fact.
 * Preface footnote, p. ix. Mr. R. Tucker searched Clifford's note books for Karl Pearson and sent him the above quote, in Clifford's handwriting.

(i) Our space is perhaps really possessed of a curvature varying from point to point, which we fail to appreciate because we are acquainted with only a small portion of space, or because we disguise its small variations under changes in our physical condition which we do not connect with our change of position. The mind that could recognise this varying curvature might be assumed to know the absolute position of a point. For such a mind the postulate of the relativity of position would cease to have a meaning. It does not seem so hard to conceive such a state of mind as the late Professor Clerk-Maxwell would have had us believe. It would be one capable of distinguishing those so-called physical changes which are really geometrical or due to a change of position in space. (ii) Our space may be really same (of equal curvature), but its degree of curvature may change as a whole with the time. In this way our geometry based on the sameness of space would still hold good for all parts of space, but the change of curvature might produce in space a succession of apparent physical changes. (iii) We may conceive our space to have everywhere a nearly uniform curvature, but that slight variations of the curvature may occur from point to point, and themselves vary with the time. These variations of the curvature with the time may produce effects which we not unnaturally attribute to physical causes independent of the geometry of our space. We might even go so far as to assign to this variation of the curvature of space 'what really happens in that phenomenon which we term the motion of matter.'
 * We may... be treating merely as physical variations effects which are really due to changes in the curvature of our space; whether, in fact, some or all of those causes which we term physical may not be due to the geometrical construction of our space. There are three kinds of variation in the curvature of our space which we ought to consider as within the range of possibility.
 * Clifford & Pearson, Ch IV, Position, §19 On the Bending of Space, pp. 224-225.

Quotes about Clifford

 * Pearson's enthusiasm for W. K. Clifford's intuitive dynamics and physics, also for Clifford's violent hostility to traditional beliefs, influenced at least his earlier thinking. Both Clifford and Pearson were creative mathematicians; neither fitted the milk-and-water, namby-pamby 'great man' ideal of the 'great mathematician' which seems to be the accepted norm in historical accounts of mathematicians; and at least one of them would have hooted at the idea that he was, or was to become, an object of reverence for generations of students.
 * Eric Temple Bell, The Development of Mathematics (1940)

'''Riemann's exceedingly speculative ideas on the subject of the metrical field were practically ignored in his day, save by the English mathematician Clifford, who translated Riemann's works, prefacing them to his own discovery of the non-Euclidean Clifford space. Clifford realised the potential importance of the new ideas and suggested that matter itself might be accounted for in terms of these local variations of the non-Euclidean space, thus inverting in a certain sense Riemann's ideas. But in Clifford's day this belief was mathematically untenable'''. Furthermore, the physical exploration of space seemed to yield unvarying Euclideanism. ...it was reserved for the theoretical investigator Einstein, by a stupendous effort of rational thought, based on a few flimsy empirical clues, to unravel the mystery and to lead Riemann's ideas to victory. (In all fairness to Einstein... he does not appear to have been influenced directly by Riemann.) Nor were Clifford's hopes disappointed, for the varying non-Euclideanism of the continuum was to reveal the mysterious secret of gravitation, and perhaps also of matter, motion, and electricity. ... Einstein had been led to recognize that space of itself was not fundamental. The fundamental continuum whose non-Euclideanism was fundamental was... one of Space-Time... possessing a four-dimensional metrical field governed by the matter distribution. Einstein accordingly applied Riemann's ideas to space-time instead of to space... He discovered that the moment we substitute space-time for space (and not otherwise), and assume that free bodies and rays of light follow geodesics no longer in space but in space-time, the long-sought-for local variations in geometry become apparent. They are all around us, in our immediate vicinity... We had called their effects gravitational effects... never suspecting that they were the result of those very local variations in the geometry for which our search had been in vain....the theory of relativity is the theory of the space-time metrical field.
 * With the new views advocated by Riemann... the texture, structure or geometry of space is defined by the metrical field, itself produced by the distribution of matter. Any non-homogeneous distribution of matter would then entail a variable structure of geometry for space from place to place. ...
 * A. D'Abro, The Evolution of Scientific Thought from Newton to Einstein (1927) pp. 58-59

 * But even the distant reader must allow that Clifford's mental personality belonged to the highest possible type to say no more. The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal. And if in these modern days we are to look for any prophet or saviour who shall influence our feelings towards the universe as the founders and renewers of past religions have influenced the minds of our fathers, that prophet, if he ever come, must, like Clifford, be no mere sentimental worshipper of science, but an expert in her ways. And he must have what Clifford had in so extraordinary a degree—that lavishly generous confidence in the worthiness of average human nature to be told all truth, the lack of which in Goethe made him an inspiration to the few but a cold riddle to the many.
 * William James, 'Clifford's "Lectures and Essays"' (1879) in Collected Essays and Reviews (1920) pp. 138-139. Review of Lectures and Essays and Seeing and Thinking by W. K. Clifford, London and New York (1879). Reprinted from Nation (1879) 29, pp. 312-313.

 * Students of Spinoza will easily trace the connection between his theory of mind and matter and the doctrine set forth in Clifford's essays on "Body and Mind," and "The Nature of Things-in themselves. … Briefly put, the conception is that mind is the one ultimate reality; not mind as we know it in the complex forms of conscious feeling and thought, but the simpler elements out of which thought and feeling are built up. The hypothetical ultimate element of mind, or atom of mind-stuff, precisely corresponds to the hypothetical atom of matter, being the ultimate fact of which the material atom is the phenomenon. Matter and the sensible universe are the relations between particular organisms, that is, mind organized into consciousness, and the rest of the world. This leads to results which would in a loose and popular sense be called materialist. But the theory must, as a metaphysical theory, be reckoned on the idealist side. To speak technically, it is an idealist monism. Indeed it is a very subtle form of idealism, and by no means easy of apprehension at first sight. Nevertheless there are distinct signs of a convergence towards it on the part of recent inquirers who have handled philosophical problems in a scientific spirit, and particularly those who have studied psychology on the physiological side. Perhaps we shall be told that this proves the doctrine to be materialism in disguise; but it is hardly worth while to dispute about names while more serious things remain for discussion. And the idea does require much more working out; involving, as it does, extensive restatement and rearrangement of metaphysical problems. It raises not only several questions, but preliminary (and really fundamental) problems as to what questions are reasonable.
 * Sir Frederick Pollock, in "William Kingdon Clifford", in The Living Age, Volume 141 (1879), p. 668.

It has been shown that these are the only possible static world models based on Einstein's theory. In 1922, '''Friedmann... broke new ground by investigating non-static solutions to Einstein's field equations, in which the radius of curvature of space varies with time. This possibility had already been envisaged, in a general sense, by Clifford in the eighties.'''
 * The models of Einstein and de Sitter are static solutions of Einstein's modified gravitational equations for a world-wide homogeneous system. They both involve a positive cosmological constant λ, determining the curvature of space. If this constant is zero, we obtain a third model in classical infinite Euclidean space. This model is empty, the space-time being that of Special Relativity.
 * Gerald James Whitrow, The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (1949)

Public Domain Works by Clifford

 * The Ethics of Belief @Wikisource
 * The Common Sense of the Exact Sciences @GoogleBooks

William Kingdon Clifford

title: William Kingdon Clifford


text: Category:Magicians

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Category:Magicians


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Anywhere But Here

Anywhere but Here is a 1999 film about a mother and daughter who search for success in Beverly Hills.
 * Directed by Wayne Wang. Written by Alvin Sargent, based on the book by Mona Simpson.

A story of a mother who what!?... and a daughter who is Hot Yummy feet

Ann August

 * You know what? I'm really hungry and it's not like we're not at Denny's. So, if someone comes in and sees me eat duck à l'orange, who knows what effect it'll have on my life? The "a" before l'orange is not spoken and the whole phrase "duck l'orange" is dubbed...???
 * He said not to ever do that to me again. He said that if you do he'll have you taken off to prison and locked up and you'll never ever see me again, and you'll have to eat ice-cream on your own. (speaking to her mother after she tried to blame a parking ticket on her wanting ice-cream which she did not request)
 * That summer I turned seventeen... and started planning my escape.
 * I'll always have a place in my heart for the Los Angeles Police Department.
 * Mom, Mom! I'm sorry but you have to understand I was just doing an audition. They wanted me to...no one would even know it was you... You know every morning I wake up and I don't even want to be here. Who would wanna be with you? You're just a crazy, middle aged, unemployed woman with a, with a child to support. Why can't our lives just be normal?
 * Even if you can't stand her, even if you hate her, there's some mystery about my mother.

Adele

 * My daddy always used to say “Be optimistic, doncha be a grumpy, when the road gets bumpy, just smile, smile, smile be happy! Don’t wear a long face it’s never in style, be optimistic and smile!”

Dialogue

 * Ann: You don't have a job in the Los Angeles school district.
 * Adele: I have an interview, and a great outfit.

 * Ann: This is like being kidnapped, you don't understand that do you?
 * Adele: I wish someone had kidnapped me when I was your age
 * Ann: So do I.

 * Ann: I hate my hair. I'm going to cut it all off.
 * Adele: Over my dead body.
 * Ann: Ok.

 * Cop: Your mother is trying to beat a ticket.
 * Ann August: Oh give her one. She already has a drawer full of them.

 * Adele: You're not having sex with anybody are you?
 * Ann: What?
 * Adele: You know.
 * Ann: No, I don't know!

Taglines

 * A story of a mother who knows best... and a daughter who knows better.

Susan Sarandon

 * She is doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons. (speaking about her character, Adele, on the Anywhere But Here DVD)

Cast

 * Susan Sarandon - Adele August
 * Natalie Portman - Ann August
 * - Benny
 * - Josh Spritzer
 * - Lillian
 * - Ted
 * - Jimmy
 * - Carol
 * - Hisham Badir
 * - Gail Letterfine
 * - Peter
 * - Cop
 * - Jack Irwin
 * - Hal
 * , the daughter of Susan Sarandon

title: Anywhere But Here


text:
User talk:Armando

~ MosheZadka (Talk) 12:56, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:Armando


text:
Crazy Frog

Crazy Frog, originally known as The Annoying Thing, is a computer-animated character created in 2003 by Swedish actor and playwright Erik Wernquist. Marketed by the ringtone provider jamba! (later known as Jamster), the animation was originally created to accompany a sound effect produced by Daniel Malmedahl in 1997 while attempting to imitate the sound of a two-stroke engine.

Quotes

 * We appreciate that the frequent broadcast of the same, or similar, commercials can be annoying to some viewers. However, it is for the advertiser and broadcaster to decide how often a particular advertisement is shown.
 * Advertising Standards Authority, February 2005.

 * 'Crazy Frog' is what the market persist on calling the character The Annoying Thing. I personally hate that name and deeply regret I didn't put a stop to that early on.
 * Erik Wernquist, April 2005.

 * From [the] reactions [to The Annoying Thing I've received] I think the absence of pants is a success (when it comes to annoyance). I will definitely keep them off.
 * - Erik Wernquist, April 2003.

 * The Crazy Frog sound? That's my fault!
 * Daniel Malmedahl, January 2005.

 * We don’t like the frog and it brings me out in hives. I go red. The point is that little thing should have its legs chopped off and I’d like to eat them in a restaurant.
 * - Chris Martin, frontman for Coldplay, on his band's chart battle with the Crazy Frog in May 2005.

title: Crazy Frog


text:
Talk:Lost in Space

--62.77.168.10 15:22, 27 October 2005 (UTC)andrea

title: Talk:Lost in Space


text:
User talk:72.10.101.129

Deliberate vandalism can result in IP addresses being blocked from editing. ~ Kalki 15:50, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

title: User talk:72.10.101.129


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Paul Valéry

Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry (30 October 1871 – 20 July 1945) was a French author and Symbolist poet. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath. In addition to his fiction (poetry, drama, and dialogues), he also wrote many essays and aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events.

Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (1895)

 * Le mal de prendre une hypallage pour une découverte, une métaphore pour une démonstration, un vomissement de mots pour un torrent de connaissances capitales, et soi-même pour un oracle, ce mal naît avec nous.
 * The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

 * Collect all the facts that can be collected about the life of Racine and you will never learn from them the art of his verse. All criticism is dominated by the outworn theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.

Writing at the Yalu River (1895)

 * Vous n’avez ni la patience qui tisse les longues vies, ni le sentiment de l’irrégularité, ni le sens de la place la plus exquise d’une chose, … « L’intelligence, pour vous, n’est pas une chose comme les autres. […] vous l’adorez comme une bête prépondérante. […] Un particulier qu’elle enivre, compare sa pensée aux décisions des lois, aux faits eux-mêmes, nés de la foule et de la durée : il confond le rapide changement de son cœur avec la variation imperceptible des formes réelles et des Êtres durables. … C’est par cette loi que l’intelligence méprise les lois... et vous encouragez sa violence ! Vous en êtes fous jusqu’au moment de la peur. Car vos idées sont terribles et vos cœurs faibles. Vos pitiés, vos cruautés sont absurdes, sans calme, comme irrésistibles. Enfin, vous craignez le sang, de plus en plus. Vous craignez le sang et le temps.
 * You have neither the patience that weaves long lines nor a feeling for the irregular, nor a sense of the fittest place for a thing … For you intelligence is not one thing among many. You … worship it as if it were an omnipotent beast … a man intoxicated on it believes his own thoughts are legal decision, or facts themselves born of the crowd and time. He confuses his quick changes of heart with the imperceptible variation of real forms and enduring Beings .... You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.
 * Writing at the Yalu River (1895) quoted in Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge: Reflections on the Strategy of Existence (1990) by Julius Thomas Fraser, Part 2, Images in Heaven and on the Earth, Ch. IV, The Roots of Time in the Physical World. Sect. 3 The Living Symmetries of Physics

La Crise de l'Esprit (1919)

 * We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

delivered as a lecture (late 1927)

 * For the musician, before he has begun his work, all is in readiness so that the operation of his creative spirit may find, right from the start, the appropriate matter and means, without any possibility of error. He will not have to make this matter and means submit to any modification; he need only assemble elements which are clearly defined and ready-made. But in how different a situation is the poet! Before him is ordinary language, this aggregate of means which are not suited to his purpose, not made for him. There have not been physicians to determine the relationships of these means for him; there have not been constructors of scales; no diapason, no metronome, no certitude of this kind. He has nothing but the coarse instrument of the dictionary and the grammar. Moreover, he must address himself not to a special and unique sense like hearing, which the musician bends to his will, and which is, besides, the organ par excellence of expectation and attention; but rather to a general and diffused expectation, and he does so through a language which is a very odd mixture of incoherent stimuli.
 * Originally delivered as a lecture (late 1927); Pure Poetry: Notes for a Lecture The Creative Vision (1960)

Littérature (1930)

 * Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation."

Moralités (1932)

 * Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.

 * Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

Mauvaises Pensées et Autres (1941)

 * An intelligent woman is a woman with whom one can be as stupid as one wants.

 * The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.

 * God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.

The Art of Poetry (1958)

 * The very object of art, the principle of its artifice, is precisely to impart the impression of an ideal state in which the man who reaches it will be capable of spontaneously producing, with no effort or hesitation, a magnificent and wonderfully ordered expression of his nature and our destinies.
 * Remarks on Poetry in The Art of Poetry (1958)

Monsieur Teste (1919)
Teste was conceived — in a room where Auguste Comte spent his early years — at a period when I was drunk on my own will and subject to strange excesses of consciousness of my self. I was suffering from the acute ailment called precision. I tended toward the extreme of the reckless desire to understand, and I searched in myself for the critical points in my powers of attention.
 * This character out of my fantasy, whose author I became in the days of my partly literary, partly solitary or . . inward youth, has lived, apparently, since that faded time with a certain life — which his reticence, more than what he said, has persuaded a few readers to attribute to him.
 * Preface

 * La bêtise n’est pas mon fort. J’ai vu beaucoup d’individus ; j’ai visité quelques nations ; j’ai pris ma part d’entreprises diverses sans les aimer ; j’ai mangé presque tous les jours ; j’ai touché à des femmes. Je revois maintenant quelques centaines de visages, deux ou trois grands spectacles, et peut-être la substance de vingt livres. Je n’ai pas retenu le meilleur ni le pire de ces choses : est resté ce qui l’a pu.
 * Stupidity is not my strong point. I have seen many persons; I have visited several countries; I have taken part in various enterprises without liking them; I have eaten nearly every day; I have had women. I can now recall a few hundred faces, two or three great spectacles, and the substance of perhaps twenty books. I have not retained the best nor the worst of these things: what could stay with me did.
 * Variant translations:
 * Stupidity is not my strong suit.

L'Âme et la danse (1921)
Dance and the Soul, in Paul Valéry, Dialogues (Bollingen Series XLV 4/Princeton University Press, 1989), translated by William McCausland Stewart

 * My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!
 * Eryximachus, p. 27

 * But what, Phaedrus, is the contrary of a dream if not some other dream?… A dream of vigilance and tension dreamt by Reason herself!—And what would such a Reason dream?—If a Reason were to dream—a Reason hard, erect, eyes armed, mouth closed, as though mistress of her lips—would not the dream she dreamt be what we see now—this world of exact forces and studied illusions?—A dream, a dream, but a dream interpenetrated with symmetries, all order, acts and sequences!
 * Socrates, p. 35

 * You have experienced nothing that was not both lawful and obscure, and thus conforming perfectly to the human machine. Are we not organized fantasy? And is not our living system functioning incoherency, disorder in action? Do not events, desires, ideas interchange within us in the most necessary and incomprehensible ways?
 * Eryximachus to Phaedrus, p. 43

 * Reason, sometimes, seems to me to be the faculty our soul possesses of understanding nothing about our body!
 * Eryximachus, p. 46

 * [T]he soul of love is the invincible difference of lovers, while its subtle matter is the identity of their desires.
 * Phaedrus, p. 47

 * What are mortals for?—Their business is to know. Know? And what is to know?—It is assuredly: not to be what one is.—And so here are humans raving and thinking, introducing into nature the principle of unlimited error, and myriads of marvels!
 * Eryximachus, p. 52

Eupalinos ou l'architecte (1921)
Eupalinos, or The Architect, in Paul Valéry, Dialogues (Bollingen Series XLV 4/Princeton University Press, 1989), translated by William McCausland Stewart
 * I cannot think that there exists more than one Sovereign Good.
 * Socrates, p. 81

 * To construct oneself, to know oneself—are these two distinct acts or not?
 * Socrates, p. 81

 * What is most beautiful is of necessity tyrannical.
 * Eupalinos quoted by Phaedrus, p. 86

 * What is there more mysterious than clarity?… What more capricious than the way in which light and shade are distributed over hours and over men?
 * Socrates, p. 107. Ellipsis in original.

 * Man can act only because he can ignore.
 * Socrates, p. 124

 * And do not humans strive in a thousand ways to fill or to break the eternal silence of those infinite spaces that affright them?
 * Socrates, p. 125
 * Valéry alludes to a famous pensée of Blaise Pascal: 'The eternal silence of these infinite spaces affrights me.' (Pensées, no. 201).

 * Man discerns three great things in the All: he finds there his body, he finds there his soul—and then there is the rest of the world. Between these things there is an unceasing commerce, and sometimes even a confusion arises; but always after a certain time has elapsed, these three things come to be clearly distinguished from one another.
 * Socrates, p. 128

 * It is therefore reasonable to think that the creations of man are made either with a view to his body, and that is the principle we call utility, or with a view to his soul, and that is what he seeks under the name of beauty. But, further, since he who constructs or creates has to deal with the rest of the world and with the movement of nature, which both tend perpetually to dissolve, corrupt or upset what he makes, he must recognize and seek to communicate to his works a third principle, that expresses the resistance he wishes them to offer to their destiny, which is to perish. So he seeks solidity or lastingness.
 * Socrates, pp. 128–9

 * Nay, who knows, Phaedrus, if the efforts of humans in their search for God, the observances, the prayers they essay, their obstinate will to discover the most efficacious… who knows if mortals will not finally discover a certitude—or an incertitude—stable and in exact conformity with their nature, if not with the very nature of God?
 * Socrates, p. 130. Ellipsis in original.

 * The greatest liberty is born of the greatest rigor.
 * Socrates, p. 131

 * Most people in reasoning, dear Phaedrus, use notions that not only are "ready-made," but have actually been made by nobody. No one is responsible for them, and so they serve everyone badly.
 * Socrates, p. 137

 * Man's deepest glances are those that go out to the void. They converge beyond the All.
 * Socrates, p. 141

 * Now, of all acts the most complete is that of constructing. A work demands love, meditation, obedience to your finest thought, the invention of laws by your soul, and many other things that it draws miraculously from your own self, which did not suspect that it possessed them. This work proceeds from the most intimate center of your existence, and yet it is distinct from yourself.
 * Socrates, p. 145

 * But still less should the gold of rich men lazily sleep its heavy sleep in the urns and gloom of treasuries. This so weighty metal, when it becomes the associate of a fancy, assumes the most active virtues of the mind. It has her restless nature. Its essence is to vanish. It changes into all things, without being itself changed. It raises blocks of stone, pierces mountains, diverts rivers, opens the gates of fortresses and the most secret hearts; it enchains men; it dresses, it undresses women with an almost miraculous promptitude. It is truly the most abstract agent that exists, next to thought. But thought exchanges and envelops images only, whereas gold incites and promotes the transmutations of all real things into one another; itself remaining incorruptible, and passing untainted through all hands.
 * Socrates, pp. 147–8

Charmes ou poèmes (1922)
Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes; Midi le juste y compose de feux La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée O récompense après une pensée Qu'un long regard sur le calme des dieux!'' Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly. Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame — That sea forever starting and re-starting. When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding Are the long vistas of celestial calm!
 * ''Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,
 * This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by,
 * Le Cimetière Marin · Online original and translation as "The Graveyard By The Sea" by C. Day Lewis
 * Variant translations:
 * The sea, the ever renewing sea!

Maint diamant d'imperceptible écume, Et quelle paix semble se concevoir! Quand sur l'abîme un soleil se repose, Ouvrages purs d'une éternelle cause, Le temps scintille et le songe est savoir.'' The manifold diamond of the elusive foam! What peace I feel begotten at that source! When sunlight rests upon a profound sea, Time's air is sparkling, dream is certainty — Pure artifice both of an eternal Cause.
 * ''Quel pur travail de fins éclairs consume
 * What grace of light, what pure toil goes to form
 * As translated by by C. Day Lewis

Après tant d'orgueil, après tant d'étrange Oisiveté, mais pleine de pouvoir, Je m'abandonne à ce brillant espace, Sur les maisons des morts mon ombre passe Qui m'apprivoise à son frêle mouvoir.'' After such arrogance, after so much strange Idleness — strange, yet full of potency — I am all open to these shining spaces; Over the homes of the dead my shadow passes, Ghosting along — a ghost subduing me.
 * ''Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regarde-moi qui change!
 * Beautiful heaven, true heaven, look how I change!
 * As translated by by C. Day Lewis

L'insecte net gratte la sécheresse; Tout est brûlé, défait, reçu dans l'air A je ne sais quelle sévère essence. . . La vie est vaste, étant ivre d'absence, Et l'amertume est douce, et l'esprit clair.'' The brittle insect scrapes at the dry loam; All is burnt up, used up, drawn up in air To some ineffably rarefied solution. . . Life is enlarged, drunk with annihilation, And bitterness is sweet, and the spirit clear.
 * ''Ici venu, l'avenir est paresse.
 * Now present here, the future takes its time.
 * As translated by by C. Day Lewis

La sainte impatience meurt aussi!'' Am I. Divine impatience also dies.
 * ''Allez! Tout fuit! Ma présence est poreuse,
 * All perishes. A thing of flesh and pore
 * As translated by by C. Day Lewis

L'air immense ouvre et referme mon livre, La vague en poudre ose jaillir des rocs! Envolez-vous, pages tout éblouies! Rompez, vagues! Rompez d'eaux rejouies Ce toit tranquille où picoraient des focs!'' The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages! Break, waves! Break up with your rejoicing surges This quiet roof where sails like doves were pecking.
 * ''Le vent se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre!
 * The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!
 * As translated by by C. Day Lewis
 * Variant translations:
 * The wind is rising ... we must attempt to live.

Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931)

 * The “determinist” swears that if we knew everything we should also be able to deduce and foretell the conduct of every man in every circumstance, and that is obvious enough. But the expression “know everything” means nothing.
 * p. 42

 * A really free mind is scarcely attached to its opinions. If the mind cannot help giving birth to … emotions and affections which at first appear to be inseparable from them, it reacts against these intimate phenomena it experiences against its will.
 * p. 55

 * Great things are accomplished by men who are not conscious of the impotence of man. Such insensitiveness is precious. But we must admit that criminals are not unlike our heroes in this respect.
 * p. 58

 * It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that these days it is necessary—and not only necessary but urgent—to interest minds in the fate of Mind, that is to say, in their own fate.
 * p. 156

 * Since everything that lives is obliged to expend and receive life, there is an exchange of modifications between the living creature and its environment. And yet, once that vital necessity is satisfied, our species—a positively strange species—thinks it must create for itself other needs and tasks besides that of preserving life. … Whatever may be the origin or cause of this curious deviation, the human species is engaged in an immense adventure, an adventure whose objective and end it does not know. … The same senses, the same muscles, the same limbs—more, the same types of signs, the same instruments of exchange, the same languages, the same modes of logic—enter into the most indispensable acts of our lives, as they figure into the most gratuitous. ... In short, man has not two sets of tools, he has only one, and this one set must serve him for the preservation of his life and his physiological rhythm, and expend itself at other times on illusions and on the labours of our great adventure. ... The same muscles and nerves produce walking as well as dancing, exactly as our linguistic faculty enables us to express our needs and ideas, while the same words and forms can be combined to produce works of poetry. A single mechanism is employed in both cases for two entirely different purposes.
 * pp. 158-159

 * There is a value called “mind” as there is a value oil, wheat, or gold. … One can invest in that value, one can “follow” it as they say on the stock exchange; one can watch its fluctuations in I know not what price list which is the world’s general opinion of it. … All these rising and falling values constitute the great market of human affairs. And of these the unfortunate value mind does not stop falling.
 * p. 161

 * The commerce of minds was necessarily the first commerce in the world, … since before bartering things one must barter signs, and it is necessary therefore that signs be instituted. There is no market or exchange without language. The first instrument of all commerce is language.
 * p. 166

 * Freedom of mind and mind itself have been most fully developed in regions where trade developed at the same time. In all ages, without exception, every intense production of art, ideas, and spiritual values has occurred in some locality where a remarkable degree of economic activity was also manifest.
 * pp. 167-168

 * I said that to invite minds to concern themselves with Mind and its destiny was a sign and symptom of the times. Would that idea have occurred to me, had not a whole body of impressions been sufficiently significant and powerful to reflect themselves in me, and for that reflection to become action? And that action, which consists of expressing it in your presence, would not perhaps have been accomplished had I not felt that my impressions were those of many other people, that the sensation of a diminution of mind, of a menace to culture, of a twilight of the most pure gods was a sensation which imposed itself with increasing strength on all those who are capable of feeling something in the order of superior values of which we are speaking.
 * p. 172

Tel Quel (1943)

 * That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

 * God created man, and finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a female companion so that he might feel his solitude more acutely.

 * The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.

 * Politeness is organized indifference.

 * Politics is the art of stopping people from minding their own business.

 * Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

Dialogue de l'arbre (1943)
Dialogue of the Tree, in Paul Valéry, Dialogues (Bollingen Series XLV 4/Princeton University Press, 1989), translated by William McCausland Stewart
 * The being filled with wonder is lovely, like a flower.
 * Lucretius, p. 163

 * In the Beginning was the Fable.
 * Tityrus, p. 169, quoting "a philosopher whose name I have forgotten". The philosopher is Valéry himself, who used this phrase at the end of his essay on Poe's Eureka, and elsewhere (Dialogues, textual note on p. 195).

 * What's loftiest in the mind can only live through growth.
 * Lucretius, p. 171

 * Is not to meditate to deepen oneself in Order?
 * Lucretius, p. 173

Degas Danse Dessin (1937)

 * Pascal lui-même n'a pas manqué de s'y tromper, qui traita de cet art avec superbe, et le réduisait à la vanité de poursuivre laborieusement la ressemblance de choses dont la vue d'elles-mêmes est sans intérêt, ce qui prouve qu'il ne savait pas regarder, c'est-à-dire oublier les noms des choses que l'on voit.
 * Pascal himself did not fail to make a mistake, who treated this art superbly, and reduced it to the vanity of laboriously pursuing the resemblance of things whose sight of themselves is of no interest, which proves that he did not know how to look, that is to say, how to forget the names of the things we see.
 * Machine translation from Degas Danse Dessin, 1965 edition, page 246
 * Even Pascal was mistaken when he spoke of this art with arrogance, reducing it to the "vanity" of laboriously pursuing a likeness uninteresting in itself. This proves he did not know how to see, meaning, he could not forget the name of what he saw.
 * English translation by Helen Burlin, Degas Dance Drawing, 1948, Lear Publishers, pages 63-64

Collected Works

 * If the state is strong, it crushes us. If it is weak, we perish.
 * History and Politics as translated by D. Folliot and J. Mathews (1971)

 * A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.
 * "Recollection", Collected Works, vol. 1 (1972), as translated by David Paul
 * Variant translations:
 * A poem is never finished; it's always an accident that puts a stop to it — i.e. gives it to the public.
 * As attributed in Susan Ratcliffe, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (2011), p. 385.
 * A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.
 * Widely quoted, this is a paraphrase of Valéry by W. H. Auden in 1965. See W. H. Auden: Collected Poems (2007), ed. Edward Mendelson, "Author's Forewords", p. xxx.
 * An artist never finishes a work, he merely abandons it.
 * A paraphrase by Aaron Copland in the essay "Creativity in America," published in Copland on Music (1944), p. 53
 * In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished — a word that for them has no sense — but abandoned; and this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public (and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver) is a kind of an accident to them, like the breaking off of a reflection, which fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless.

 * Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.
 * Letter to writer André Gide, as quoted in The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1978) by Julian Symons, Pt. 1, Epilogue

title: Paul Valéry