Leonardo da Vinci

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Plotinus

the Absolute "has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere" Plotinus


An interesting thought but the its needs to be personified.

Henri-Frederic Amiel

"The great artist is the simplifier.

"The man who has no refuge in himself, who lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not properly a personality at all. He floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions--such a man is a mere article of furniture--a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being--an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air at rest, and the weathercock the humble servant of the air in motion.

"The highest function of the teacher consists not so much in imparting knowledge as in stimulating the pupil in its love and pursuit. To know how to suggest is the art of teaching."

In the world of technology, which is a creation of man, it is not the Creator whom one first encounters; rather man encounters only himself.

- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Syllogism

1. Whenever technology does not humanize it dehumanizes (diminishes man). 2. Whatever diminishes man diminishes his capacity to receive God. 3. Therefore bad technology is spiritually alienating and destructive to the soul. Dan Nicoles

I am not sure if the first proposition is completly true; could not the technology be neutral?
But I would most heartedly agree that any technology that becomes an impediment to serving or receiving God is bad technology and that would account for much of our current technology.

Wendell Berry

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.

“I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor-such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps-what more can the heart of man desire?”

---from "Family Happiness" by Leo Tolstoy

Wendell Berry

Throughout the five-hundred years since Columbus’s first landfall in the Bahamas, the evangelist has walked beside the conqueror and the merchant, too often blandly assuming that his cause was the same as theirs. … The certified Christian seems just as likely as anyone else to join the military-industrial conspiracy to murder Creation

Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.
R.W.E.

Picture of a Factory Village 1833

For liberty our fathers' fought
Which with their blood, they dearly bought,
The factory System sets at nought.
A slave at morn, a slave at eve,
It dothe my inmost feelings grieve;
The blood runs chilly from my heart,
To see fair Liberty depart;
And leave the wretches in their chains,
To feed a vampire from their veins.
Britain's curse is now our own;
Enough to damn a King and Throne.

Thomas Mann

John Ruskin

You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.



He sees in the universal desire to make money … the great and fatal evil of the times, and rebels entirely against all the complex social and political arrangements which have been constituted into a system to that end. He holds that to rely on manufactures for greatness is to lean upon a broken reed, and that England must live upon herself through agriculture if ever she would return to a healthy condition of existence … By those who have not bowed the knee to the modern Baal he will be gratefully remembered as one preaching in the wilderness the abandonment of the grosser things of life and the realisation of the Ideal.”