All that man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts. His suffering and happiness are evolved from within. As he thinks, so he is. As he continues to think, so he remains.
A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that ‘observes’ to reason that ‘acts’. That’s what critical.
Many little people, in little places, doing little things, can change the world.
Nothing’ isn’t better or worse than anything. Nothing is just… nothing. Arya Stark
UNDIVIDEDI am for One world undivided. One world without fear and corruption. One world ruled by Truth and Justice. I am forOne peaceful world for all,Where hate has been overcome by love,And everyone is guided only By their conscience.
The will to a system: expressed morally, a more refined corruption with philosophers, an illness of character; expressed unmorally, his will to appear stupider than he is. Stupider, that means stronger, simpler, more dominating, less cultured, more commanding, more tyrannical.
Truth can be intuited even when it cannot be articulated in language. Such intuition is rooted in our broader obfuscated mind, which can apprehend – in symbolic ways – aspects of reality beyond the grasp of our self-reflective thoughts and perceptions.
Imagination is not a talent of some men, but is health of every man.
… for although people can be made worse off by all other gifts, correct reasoning alone can only be for the good.
To be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes and even his misdeeds seriously for long – that is the sign of strong, rounded natures with a superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative, healing and can make one forget…A man like this shakes from him, with one shrug, many worms which would have burrowed into another man…
Silence is nice to have if you wanted it, but maddening if you didn’t.
All the things we experience in life can be separated into two realms, the realm of the concept and the realm of the senses.
Those who wish to market their good deeds must do well to place their bad deeds on the shelve too.
The most insulting aspect of insincere people is that while they’re pretending to be something other than what they are, they’re inherently positing a different reality to you.
A little while ago I was able to wander in a beautiful sublime fantasy world, in Ossian’s half-dark magical world. But the blessed dreams dissolve; they seem like love potions – they intoxicate, exalt and then disappear, that is the misery and wretchedness of all our feelings. With thoughts it is no better: one easily overthinks things to the point of staleness.
Marianne replaces the yogurt pot in the freezer now and asks Joanna if she finds it strange, to be paid for her hours at work – to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on this earth for the human invention known as money.
Beloved, as we navigate the complexities of triumph, let us remember to scrutinize the subtle repercussions of our actions lest we declare victory prematurely. For it is in the unexamined consequences that the true nature of our success is revealed, and the wisdom of our decisions is ultimately tested.
True victory, beloved, lies not just in the immediate conquest but in the wisdom to discern the long shadow it may cast.
Religion is the perception of that power which constructs the greatness of the centuries out of the paltriness of the hours.
We are all two-faced beings, divided by the Force and fated for eternity to search out our hidden identities.
If you are told that such an one speaks ill of you, make no defence against what was said, but answer, He surely knew not my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these only!
The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world.
A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker.
Le but n’est rien, le développement est tout. Le spectacle ne veut en venir à rien d’autre qu’à lui-même.
Le spectacle est la reconstruction matérielle de l’illusion religieuse.
All these years of thinking, ending up like this: In front of all this beauty, understanding nothing.
There is a common tendency to turn off one’s imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one can keep one’s clear conscience and one’s moral indignation unsullied.
Kalau manusia sama sekali tidak pernah merasa putus asa, kita tidak akan tahu bagian mana dari diri kita yang tak sanggup kita singkirkan. Lalu kita akan tumbuh dewasa tanpa benar-benar mengerti apa saja yang bisa membuat kita gembira. Aku bahagia karena bisa menderita, Eriko (Kitchen)
The philosophic outlook rises above all sectarian controversy. It finds its own position not only by appreciating and synthesizing what is solidly based in the rival sects but also by capping them all with the keystone of nonduality.
We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.
As life in general constituted much pain in the form of struggles against poverty, disease, ignorance, and emotional anguish, what more civilized way for people to alleviate the same than by giving themselves to one another as brothers and sisters in deed as well as in word? A society of people hoping to become politically superior needed first to become spiritually valid.
This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world’s divinely appointed ruler: ‘I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood.
Before man ventures into daydreams about his futuristic society, he shouldfirst immerse himself in the nothingness of his being, and finally restore life to what it is all about: a working hypothesis.
What is this slow blue dream of living, and this fevered death by dreaming?
The method of ‘postulating’ what we want has many advantages ; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.
Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.
Dad was a philosopher and had what he called his Theory of Purpose, which held that everything in life had a purpose, and unless it achieved that purpose, it was just taking up space on the planet and wasting everybody’s time.
O world, world when I was younger I thought there was some order governing you and your deeds. But now you seem to be a labyrinth of errors, a frightful desert, a den of wild beasts, a game in which men move in circles…a stony field, a meadow full of serpents, a flowering but barren orchard, a spring of cares, a river of tears, a sea of suffering, a vain hope.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweetThough to itself it only live and die
The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.
William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.
Quiconque lutte contre des monstres devrait prendre garde, dans le combat, à ne pas devenir monstre lui-même. Et quant à celui qui scrute le fond de l’abysse, l’abysse le scrute à son tour.
On the top of Cadair Idris,I felt how happy a man might bewith a little money and a sane intellect,and reflected with astonishment and pityon the madness of the multitude.
Standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.
Reason may be employed to support faith as well as to destroy it.
The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray – one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.
….I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia—by the dog they would, if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best.(tr Jowett)
Settle, for sure and universally, what conduct will promote the happiness of a rational being.
A world without poetry and art would be too much like one without birds or flowers: bearable but a lot less enjoyable.
Serious thinkers are few, and the world is ruled by crude ideas.
Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.
The church has never been asked to explain anything, our speciality, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralisation of the overly curious mind through faith.