To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention--on a landsca...pe, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God--that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.... The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and t...he geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windows ... the displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcity ... mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Philosophy is written in this grand book--I mean the universe-- which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be u...nderstood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquai...ntance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »