Foci Quotes & Sayings

After Napoleon's 1815 defeat at Waterloo, Europeans had created nation-states in the image and likeness of Napoleon. The new states became the foci of popular affection, even worship. All organized themselves as Napoleon had France, and as Hegel had prescribed, with every house numbered so that bureaucratic government could pass its science to and collect sustenance from each. The states became the purveyors of education and sources of authority. They fostered the myth that people within their borders formed distinct races with different geniuses and destinies. All partook of Charles Darwin's ideology that life is an evolutionary struggle in which the fittest survive. — Angelo M. Codevilla

As Jonathan Edwards observed a long time ago, we act on our strongest motive. If our strongest motive, our deepest desire, is to know God, it will generate the discipline that we need to pursue this, because we will want to know God more than anything else. If this is not our strongest motive, we will find ourselves with multiple, alternative, and competing foci. These will inevitably distract us. — David F. Wells

[...] The movement of the celestial bodies can be given as an example. It is not exactly circular, but elliptic; the ellipse constitutes as it were a first "specification" of the circle, by the splitting of the center into two poles or "foci" in the direction of one of the diameters which thereafter plays a special "axial" part, while at the same time all the other diameters are differentiated one from another in respect of their lengths. It may be added incidentally in this connection that, since the planets describe ellipses of which the sun occupies one of the foci, the question arises as to what the other focus corresponds to; as there is nothing corporeal actually there, there must be something belonging only to the subtle order; but that question cannot be further examined here, as it would be quite outside our subject. — Rene Guenon

The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at one of the two foci. — Johannes Kepler

Still going with the phallic foci, eh? Staff and rod?"
"They make me feel all manly. — Jim Butcher

For to change the norms, the very foci of attention, of a cultural system is a difficult task - far more complex than that of changing an individual's attitudes and interests. — James S. Coleman

As all curves have reference to their centres or foci, so all beauty of character has reference to the soul, and is a graceful gesture of recognition or waving of the body toward it. — Henry David Thoreau

Foci development was almost entirely dependent on how much protein was consumed, regardless of how much aflatoxin was consumed! — T. Colin Campbell

Now, the earth occupies one of the foci of the ellipse, and so at one point in its course is at its apogee, that is, at its farthest from the sun, — Jules Verne