#singular

A celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity. ↗

— Jeremy Taylor

#apple #celibate #confined #dies #dwells

Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points; the higher the rank the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being may produce results of the greatest importance. ↗

— James C. Maxwell

#account #being #certain #every #existence

In disposition the Negro is joyous, flexible, and indolent; while the many nations which compose this race present a singular diversity of intellectual character, of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of humanity. ↗

— Samuel George Morton

#compose #disposition #diversity #extreme #far

As leaders, we become whole when we see that our focused, singular commitment to making the numbers and the metrics cannot be effective on its own, but only when it is part of the whole picture - only when we see that it takes more than metrics to make up the whole. ↗

— Lance Secretan

#cannot #commitment #effective #focused #leaders

One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.’ Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it. ↗

— Roland Barthes

#life

Mormons invented themselves just as other religious and ethnic groups invented themselves. But Mormons did so in such a singularly impressive way that we will probably always remain baffled as to how exactly it happened. ↗

— Laurence Moore

#ethnic-group #how-it-happened #lds #mormon #mormonism

This fact immediately suggested a singular event - that at some time in the distant past the universe began expanding from an extremely small size. To many people this inference was loaded with overtones of a supernatural event - the creation, the beginning of the universe. ↗

— Michael Behe

#beginning #creation #distant #event #expanding

The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular. ↗

— Brian Eno

#had #history #intrusions #music #occasional

I have a secret thought from some things I have observed, that God may perhaps design you for some singular service in the world. ↗

— David Brainerd

#god #i #may #observed #perhaps

Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth. Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man? If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent? Does it deserve equal rights? It's impossible for us to know what role the torture Turing was enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. But it is undeniable that one of the key figures in the defeat of fascism was destroyed, by our side, after the war, because he was gay. No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of strange creatures. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#artificial-intelligence #computers #gay #homosexuality #singularity