Otto Neurath quotes

Words divide, pictures unite.
-- Otto Neurath

#Unity

To remember simplified pictures is better than to forget accurate figures.
-- Otto Neurath

#Science #Statistics #Remember

He who knows what best to omit is the best teacher.
-- Otto Neurath

#Teacher #Best Teacher

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
-- Otto Neurath

#Taken #Sea #Support

Modern man receives a large part of his knowledge and general education by way of pictorial impressions, illustrations, photographs, films. Daily newspapers bring more pictures from year to year. In addition, the advertising business operates with optical signals as well as representations. Exhibitions and museums are indeed offspring of this visual hustle.
-- Otto Neurath

#Men #Museums #Illustration

We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from the best components.
-- Otto Neurath

#Sea #Dry #Able

I have reaffirmed my political will to work towards national unity.

But, in conformity to His wisdom it was right that afterwards the Prophet should be sent back from the vision of pure Unity and that he should return . . . toward the separative vision. For, He created man and jinn only that they should worship Him and know Him - and, if they remained at the degree of pure Unity, there would be none to worship Him. In this separative vision, the Worshipped and the worshipper, the Lord and the servant, the Creator and the creature are again perceived.

The first "station of separation" corresponds to the state of the ordinary man who perceives the universe as distinct from God. Starting from here, the initiatic itinerary leads the being first to extinction in the divine Unity, which abolishes all perception of created things. But spiritual realization, if it is complete, arrives afterwards at the "second station of separation" where the being perceives simultaneously the one in the multiple and the multiple in the one.

This is what our love is––a sacred pattern of unbroken unity sewn flawlessly invisible inside all other images, thoughts, smells, and sounds.

Let us all agree to die a little, or even completely so that African unity may not be a vain word

Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.

Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.

In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.

Unspeakable is the variety of form and immeasurable the diversity of beauty, but in all is the seal of unity.

The greatest, like Rembrandt, paint a gallant, a hag, and a carcass with equal passion and rapture; they love the truth as it is.  They do not admit that anything can be ugly or evil; its existence justifies itself.  This is because they know themselves to be part of an harmonious unity; to disdain any item of it would be to blaspheme the whole.  The Thelemite is able to revel in any experience soever; in each he recognizes the tokens of ultimate Truth.  It is surely obvious, even intellectually, that all phenomena are interdependent, and therefore involve each other.