You cannot be buried in obscurity: you are exposed upon a grand theater to the view of the world. If your actions are upright and benevolent, be assured they will augment your power and happiness.
Ben, if you get pee in my brand-new car, I am going to cut your balls off.Still peeing, Ben looks over at me smirking. You´re gonna need a hell of a big knife, bro.
But understanding will always require some effort. You probably wouldn’t admire a friend who was good at everything if it cost her no effort.
To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.3. Charity is immoral.4. Pay for your own fucking schools.
In every ancient religious and sacred text, faith is a verb; a thing to be demonstrated. It is in modern days that we have diluted faith from an act to a philosophy.
Such Excessive Preoccupation With The Faults Of Others Only Manages To Bring The Spotlight To Shine Bright On Whatever It Is You May Have Hiding Behind All Your Self Perceived Glory.
Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression…
There is no sickness worse for me than words that to be kind must lie.
You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.
I [am] obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, I feel: therefore I exist. I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.
The best ship, the best culture, the best knowledge, is the one which allows us to go farther, explore more territories or oceans of reality, and have the least damaging leaks possible.
We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (…) To games or needles, to some other person.
Why is it so difficult for us to think in relative terms? Well, for the good reason that human nature loves absoluteness, and erroneously considers it as a state of higher knowledge.
Il y a les sachants et les savants: c’est la mémoire qui fait les uns, c’est la philosophie qui fait les autres. La philosophie ne s’apprend pas; la philosophie est la réunion des sciences acquises au génie qui les applique.
Do you not think that God will protect us?”“No,” he said flatly. “My experience is that He rarely attends to the obvious.
Miss Abbott, don’t worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I’m one of them.
The more details, depth and thought you put into your ideas the more valuable they become.
Nobody wants to believe that existence carries on without at least taking a stumble from their departure of this world.
We are seeds as well as parasites to the earth. We can either give or take, depending on our perception of growth.
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of world history- yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.
After your death, you will be what you were before your birth.
What a paradox it is, the sane causes more problems than the insane! It is! The real problems of the world do not come from the insane but, the sane!
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give values to survival.
Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard.We are all held in a single honour, the brave with the weaklings.A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.
Entertainment is temporary happiness, but the real happiness is permanent entertainment.
We did all the tourist crap, but I just wanted to sit in a cafe and watch people
Any person who, with all the sincerity of heart, is in search for God, on land or in the sea, is worthy of respect.
Pain may be the only reality but if mankind had any sense it would pursue the delusion called happiness. All the philosophers and poets who tell us that pain and suffering have a place and purpose in the cosmic order of things are welcome to them. They are frauds. We justify pain because we do not know what to make of it, nor do we have any choice but to bear it. Happiness alone can make us momentarily larger than ourselves.
I refuse to let the standards of evil people chip away at my capacity for integrity.
He was thinking that the cities, perhaps, needed to look into the future even more than the country did. They should look ahead for forty, eighty, one hundred and sixty years, to a strong and healthy plain of population – or to an overworked, weakened, underfed, and infertile desert.
Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.
The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity, and still hovers over it, is the eruption of madness— which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind’s lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason.
We know that the destruction of an ideal does not necessarily produce a truth, but only one more piece of ignorance; it is the extension of our ‘empty space,’ an increase in our ‘waste.
Faith in God is optional, but faith in the self – in the spirit within, is imperative.
Where do they go, these dreams of mine? Do they live? Do they die? Do they fall? Do they fly?
If you can’t impress them with your argument, impress them with your actions.
The decision is your own voice, an opinion is the echo of someone else’s voice.
All books are good,’ he said…’They weren’t bad books,’ Phin countered patiently. ‘They were books that you didn’t enjoy. It’s not the same thing at all. The only bad books are books that are so badly written that no one will publish them. Any book that has been published is going to be a ‘good book’ for someone.’I nodded. I couldn’t fault his logic.
Concerning Concealment as a symptom of love for Krsna:It has been stated, ‘although Srimati Radharani developed a deep loving affection for Krsna, She hid Her attitude in the core of Her heart so that others could not detect Her actual condition.
Perfection is something we should all strive for. It’s a duty and a joy to perfect one’s nature… The most difficult thing is love. A loveless, driving person that just competes in the rat race is far from perfection in my book.
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
There are no free lunches in philosophy any more than in real life.
The ramdomness of events in the world is so lacking in logic that we give it names like destiny, fate, karma and kismat to deal with the irrationality of its sequence
Philosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
God’s pleasure–the beauty creation possesses in his regard–underlies the distinct being of creation, and so beauty is the first and truest word concerning all that appears within being; beauty is the showing of what is; God looked upon what he had wrought and saw that it was good.
Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.
Reverence the highest, have patience with the lowest. Let this day’s performance of the meanest duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant, pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.
The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence — even mental.
The warrior learns of the spiritual realm by dwelling on the cutting edge of the sword, standing at the edge of the fire pit, venturing right up to the edge of starvation if necessary. Vibrant and intense living is the warrior’s form of worship.
Make life easier by living in the present and believing in the future.