Throne Quotes (8 quotes)
All power, all subordination rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and the very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society disappears
In Joseph de Maistre and Richard A. Lebrun (trans.), The St. Petersburg Dialogues (1993), 20.
Descartes … commanded the future from his study more than Napoleon from his throne.
Paraphrased from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Montesquieu: A Critical and Biographical Introduction to “The Spirit of the Laws” (1900), xiv. The context referred to “Montesquieu … a lonely scholar sitting in a library. Like Descartes or Kant, he commanded the future from his study more than Napoléon from his throne.”
If “Number rules the universe” as Pythagoras asserted, Number is merely our delegate to the throne, for we rule Number.
In Men of Mathematics (1937), 16.
Kant … commanded the future from his study more than Napoleon from his throne.
Paraphrased from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Montesquieu: A Critical and Biographical Introduction to “The Spirit of the Laws” (1900), xiv. The context referred to “Montesquieu … a lonely scholar sitting in a library. Like Descartes or Kant, he commanded the future from his study more than Napoléon from his throne.”
Night after night, among the gabled roofs,
Climbing and creeping through a world unknown
Save to the roosting stork, he learned to find
The constellations, Cassiopeia’s throne,
The Plough still pointing to the Polar Star,
The movements of the planets, hours and hours,
And wondered at the mystery of it all.
Climbing and creeping through a world unknown
Save to the roosting stork, he learned to find
The constellations, Cassiopeia’s throne,
The Plough still pointing to the Polar Star,
The movements of the planets, hours and hours,
And wondered at the mystery of it all.
In 'Tycho Brahe', The Torch-Bearers: Watchers of the Sky (1922), Vol. 1, 40.
Riches weigh more heavily upon talent than poverty. Under gold mountains and thrones, lie buried many spiritual giants.
From 'Autobiography' translated from the original German by Eliza Buckminster Lee, collected in Life of Jean Paul Frederic Richter (1842), Vol. 1, 20.
When Allah created his creatures Fie wrote above His throne: “Verily, my Compassion overcomes my wrath
— Quran
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 143
Without the suitable conditions life could not exist. But both life and its conditions set forth the operations of inscrutable Power. We know not its origin; we know not its end. And the presumption, if not the degradation, rests with those who place upon the throne of the universe a magnified image of themselves, and make its doings a mere colossal imitation of their own.
In Forms of Water in Clouds and Rivers, Ice and Glaciers (1872), 125.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
