A Quote by John Herschel

Man is constituted as a speculative being; he contemplates the world, and the objects around him, not with a passive indifferent eye, but as a system disposed with order and design.
...man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the center of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. And neither can man be understood without these objects, nor these objects without man.
In order to educate man to a new longing, everyday familiar objects must be shown to him with totally unexpected perspectives and in unexpected situations. New objects should be depicted from different sides in order to provide a complete impression of the object.
I observe that there are two entirely different theories according to which individual men seek to get on in the world. One theory leads a man to pull down everybody around him in order to climb up on them to a higher place. The other leads a man to help everybody around him in order that he may go up with them.
An artist is not an isolated system. In order to survive he has to interact continuously with the world around him... Theoretically there are no limits to his involvement.
For my own part, I commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent.
In order to understand life it is not only necessary not to be indifferent to men, but not to be indifferent to flocks, to trees. One should be indifferent to nothing.
A people contending for life and liberty are seldom disposed to look with a favorable eye upon either men or measures whose passions, interests or consequences will clash with those inestimable objects.
Man only becomes independent of this physical world when he learns to consider the objects around him as symbols. He must, for this reason, seek to acquire a moral relationship to them.
Mathematicians do not study objects, but relations among objects; they are indifferent to the replacement of objects by others as long the relations don't change. Matter is not important, only form interests them.
Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is man's loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it. Gnosis desires dominion over being; in order to seize control of being the Gnostic constructs his system. The building of systems is a gnostic form of reasoning, not a philosophical one.
The man who is kind and who practices righteousness, who remains passive against the affairs of the world, who considers all creatures on earth as his own self, he attains the Immortal Being; the true God is ever with him.
When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community. The objects of their desires are changed; what they were fond of before has become indifferent; they were free while under the restraint of laws, but they would fain now be free to act against law.
We see buildings in Britain mostly as freestanding objects. They are not meant to have a dialogue with anything around them, or with history, or with ideas of any kind beyond the self-referential. What we call 'regeneration' is largely an excuse for building for maximum profit with a bit of sculptural design thrown in to catch the eye of the media.
In truth, to know oneself seems to be the hardest of all things. Not only our eye, which observes external objects, does not use the sense of sight upon itself, but even our mind, which contemplates intently another's sin, is slow in the recognition of its own defects.
Man has not the right to turn aside and heed not what is happening in the world around him, and this I maintain on moral grounds of the highest order.
[The Polaroid camera is] a system that will be a partner in perception, enabling us to see the objects in the world around us more vividly than we can see them without it, a system to be an aid to memory and a tool for exploration.
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