Rei is often defined as "respect," but it actually means much more. Rei encompasses both an attitude of respect for others and a sense of self-esteem. When those who honor themselves transfer that feeling of esteem — that is, respect — to others, their action is nothing less than an expression of rei.

It is said that "without rei there is disorder," and also that "the difference between men and animals lies in rei". Combat methods that lack rei are not martial arts but merely contemptible violence. Physical power with rei is no more than brute strength, and for human beings it is without value.

It should be noted that although a person's deportment may be correct, without a sincere and reverent heart they do not possess true rei. True rei is the outward expression of a respectful heart.

All martial arts begin and end with rei. Unless they are practiced with a feeling of reverence and respect, they are simply forms of violence. For this reason martial arts must maintain rei from beginning to end.

— Gichin Funakoshi, The Twenty Guiding Principles of Karate

Iconic shot of Gaston Rébuffat on a runout from his book On Snow and Rock. I love how one's mind follows the rope to the bottom of the frame and then imagines all the empty space between him and his last point of protection.

 

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction." 

E.F. Schumacher, "Small is Beautiful", The Radical Humanist, Volume 37

I ran into this quote on a mailing list, where it was attributed to Albert Einstein. I liked the quote, but it didn't quite jibe with Einstein's public humility and "reluctant genius" persona. The phrasing also sounded oddly contemporary.

Googling the quote yields more than two million results, nearly all of which (1.82 million) mention Einstein. A handful (about 121,000) attribute it to economic thinker E.F. Schumacher.

A search in Google Books for the quote is instructive. With no additional filters, one finds a plethora of business and self-help books attributing it to Einstein, with a smattering of Schumacher. Set the time filter to "19th century" and the scales tip to Schumacher, with Einstein nowhere to be found. It appears that sometime after the year 2000, someone changed the attribution from the little-known Schumacher to the icon Einstein and it then spread virally until Schumacher was drowned out in the noise.

The quote is actually by Schumacher, and is from 1973, long after Einstein's death. It's quite difficult to find the primary source, though — some cite "Small is Beautiful", his collection of essays, but the quote doesn't occur within that text, only within the identically-named "Small is Beautiful", an essay in a little-known journal, The Radical Humanist.

I hope that by including the primary source in this post I can help correct the error and give E.F. Schumacher proper credit.

Einstein is like a black hole for misattribution. He'll eventually be cited as the source for every quote on the Internet.

 

People talk about the ephemeral nature of existence but, when you look at the human lifetime as shown in the diagram, it can be seen that we are not ephemeral at all — we live more or less as long as the Universe itself! Of course, this is looking on a 'logarithmic scale', but this is the natural thing to do when we are concerned with such enormous ranges. To put it another way, the number of human lifetimes which make up the age of the Universe is very, very much less than the number of Planck times, or even lifetimes of the shortest lived particles, which make up a human lifetime. Thus we are really very stable structures in the Universe.

— Sir Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind