#static

Pleasure is a shadow, wealth is vanity, and power a pageant; but knowledge is ecstatic in enjoyment, perennial in frame, unlimited in space and indefinite in duration. ↗

— DeWitt Clinton

#ecstatic #enjoyment #frame #indefinite #knowledge

Charles' conversation was as flat as a street pavement, on which everybody's ideas trudged past, in their workday dress, provoking no emotion, no laughter, no dreams. At Rouen, he said, he had never had any desire to go and see a Paris company at the theatre. He couldn't swim, or fence, or fire a pistol, and was unable to explain a riding term she came across in a novel one day. Wheras a man, surely, should know about everything; excel in a multitude of activities, introduce you to passion in all its force, to life in all its grace, initiate you in all mysteries! But this one had nothing to teach; knew nothing, wanted nothing. He thought she was unhappy; and she hated him for that placid immobility, that stolid serenity of his, for that very happiness which she herself brought him. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#contentment #static #dreams

All science is static in the sense that it describes the unchanging aspects of things. ↗

— Frank Knight

#describes #science #sense #static #things

People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming. ↗

— Rem Koolhaas

#anything #architecture #both #course #ecstatic

The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts. ↗

— Twyla Tharp

#business #change #fear #i #makes

A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one. ↗

— Kenneth Tynan

#moves #novel #past #play #static

There is no more reason to think that they expected the world to remain static than there is to think that any of us holds a crystal ball. The only way to create a foundational document that could stand the test of time was to build in enough flexibility that later generations would be able to adapt it to their own needs and uses. ↗

— Diane Wood

#adapt #any #ball #build #could

There occurred within a causal radius of Brandon Station one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause. In the soul of the great blazing sun there were complicated superhuman vibrations [connected] ... with the feelings of a few intellectual sages who had enough imagination to recognise the conscious personality of this fiery orb as it flung far and wide its life-giving magnetic forces. Roaring, cresting, heaving, gathering, mounting, advancing, receding, the enormous fire-thoughts of this huge luminary surged relentlessly to and fro, evoking a turbulent aura of psychic activity. ↗

— John Cowper Powys

#mystical #pretentious #imagination

When spring knocks at your door, regardless of the time of year or season of our lives, run, do not walk to that door, throw it open with wild abandon, and say, "Yes! Yes, come in! Do me, and do me big! ↗

— Jeffrey R. Anderson

#ecstatic #nature #seasons-of-life #spring #wild-abandon

Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself. ↗

— Samuel Butler

#hearing #me #myself #prevents #static