Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The fourth (of the four cardinal virtues) is supportiveness: this manifests as service to others without expectation of reward. (Paraphrased: Such service is not a mere conforming to some external rule of behavior, but instead a manifestation of your original nature).
The law-abiding citizen by his labor serves both himself and his fellow man and thereby integrates himself peacefully into the social order. The robber, on the other hand, is intent, not on honest toil, but on the forcible appropriation of the fruits of others' labor.
Even if the Constitution of the United States had intended to recognize slavery, as a constitutional state institution, such intended recognition would have failed of effect, and been legally void, because slavery then had no constitutional existence to be recognized.
These (literary) studies are the food of youth, and consolation of age; they adorn prosperity, and are the comfort and refuge of adversity; they are pleasant at home, and are no incumbrance abroad; they accompany us at night, in our travels, and in our rural retreats.
I do not argue that nature is sacrosanct in the sense that we must never tamper with nature. That would disempower, really, all of medicine. That would mean that we can't combat dread diseases - malaria, polio, all of which are given by nature, if one thinks about it.
If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.
Realise this: one day your soul will depart from your body and you will be drawn behind the curtain that floats between us and the unknown. While you wait for that moment, be happy, because you don't know where you came from and you don't know where you will be going.
Under the pretext of study we spent our hours in the happiness of love, and learning held out to us the secret opportunities that our passion craved. Our speech was more of love than of the books which lay open before us; our kisses far outnumbered our reasoned words.
It looks to me as if Darwinians are like someone who, having observed that tugboats sometimes maneuver ocean liners in tight places by directing high-pressure streams of water at them, concludes that he has discovered the method by which the liners cross the Atlantic.
Thus rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong ... And so the rhetorician's business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe.
Education is a process by which the individual is developed into something better than he would have been without it. ... The very though seems in a way the height of presumption. For one thing, it involves the premise that some human beings can be better than others.
If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a "weakness" or an "absurdity": it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.)
Let us reflect in this way, too, that there is good hope that death is a blessing, for it is one of two things: either the dead are nothing and have no perception of anything, or it is, as we are told, a change and a relocation for the soul from here to another place.
Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity's memory.
Death induces the sensual person to say: Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die - but this is sensuality's cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live.
And if something should be found, particularly in the first part of the dissertation, that one is generally not accustomed to come across in scholarly writings, the reader must forgive my jocundity, just as I, in order to lighten the burden, sometimes sing at my work.
The one aim of [my] yoga is an inner self-development by which each one who follows it can in time discover the One Self in all and evolve a higher consciousness than the mental, a spiritual and supramental consciousness which will transform and divinize human nature.
Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It's some kind of gnostic demon. It's some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected.
One has, you know, a window of opportunity somewhere between zip and a hundred to solve, or understand, or penetrate, or appreciate, or come to terms with the conundrum of being, this amazing circumstance in which we find ourselves, both individually and collectively.
The 'hard swallow' built into science is this business about the Big Bang. ... This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. ... Notice that this is the limit test for credulity. . . . It's the limit case for likelihood.
My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.
Love, when it is pure, has a revitalizing effect upon others, and in the presence of a truly loving person others grow and expand into a healthier state of being. Without deep reverence for the beloved, such a refreshing stream cannot flow from the heart of the lover.
Thirdly, even if we assume that the world is governed by purpose, we need only add that this purpose - or, if there are several, at least one of them - is not especially intent on preventing suffering, whether it is indifferent to suffering or actually rejoices in it.
Even if you can't get rid of the heat, as long as you can get rid of bother with the heat, your body is always on a cool terrace. Even if you can't get rid of poverty, as long as you can get rid of the sadness of poverty, your mind always lives in a comfortable abode.
The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.
Shakespeare's naturalness is attested to by the strange fact that he is the only classical author who remains popular. The critical termites are massed and eating away at the foundations, trying to topple him. Whether they will succeed will be a test of his robustness.
The more opportunities there are in a Society for some persons to live upon the toil of others, and the less those others may enjoy the fruits of their work themselves, the more is diligence killed, the former become insolent, the latter despairing, and both negligent.
In my travels, which have been wider than ever man yet accomplished, I have seen many, many wild beasts of Arabia and India; but this beast, that is commonly called a Tyrant, I know not how many heads it has, nor if it be crooked of claw, and armed with horrible fangs.
In seeking for justice men seek for the mean or neutral, for the law is the mean. Again, customary laws have more weight, and relate to more important matters, than written laws, and a man may be a safer ruler than the written law, but not safer than the customary law.
The government of freemen is nobler and implies more virtue than despotic government. Neither is a city to be deemed happy or a legislator to be praised because he trains his citizens to conquer and obtain dominion over their neighbors, for there is great evil in this.
All men agree that a just distribution must be according to merit in some sense; they do not all specify the same sort of merit, but democrats identify it with freemen, supporters of oligarchy with wealth (or noble birth), and supporters of aristocracy with excellence.
The memory should be specially taxed in youth, since it is then that it is strongest and most tenacious. But in choosing the things that should be committed to memory the utmost are and forethought must be exercised; as lessons well learnt in youth are never forgotten.
In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live, from the tyranny of death.
I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
The severity of punishments ought to be relative to the state of the nation itself. Stronger and more easily felt impressions have to be made on a people only just out of the savage state. A lightning strike is needed to stop a fierce lion who is provoked by a gunshot.
Of causes, some are complete and primary, others auxiliary and proximate. Hence, when we say that all things come about through fate by antecedent causes, we do not mean this to be understood as 'by complete and primary causes,' but 'by auxiliary and proximate causes.'
Our general repression of matters disgusting prevents us facing up to a serious health problem. If we are the 'god that shits,' then we are in full flight from ourselves. I even wonder whether religion itself and the whole idea of a god is produced by our self-disgust.
There is, indeed a more mitigated scepticism or academical philosophy, which may be both durable and useful, and which may, in part, be the result of this Pyrrhonism, or excessive scepticism, when its undistinguished doubts are corrected by common sense and reflection.
There is no reason why the profoundest thoughts should not make easy and exciting reading. A profound thought is an exciting thing as exciting as a detective's deductions or hunches. The simpler the words in which a thought is expressed the more stimulating its effect.
A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. They inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism.
Civil Society is a cluster of institutions and associations strong enough to prevent tyranny, but which are, none the less, entered and left freely, rather than imposed by birth or sustained by awesome ritual. You can join the Labour Party without slaughtering a sheep.
...science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common-sense rounded out and minutely articulated. It is therefore as much an instinctive product, as much a stepping forth of human courage in the dark, as is any inevitable dream or impulsive action.
It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
How much freedom I have depends on the number and nature of my options. And that, in turn, depends both on the rules of the game and on the assetts of the players: it is a very important and widely neglected truth that it does not depend on the rules of the game alone.
Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.
We think so because all other people think so; Or because-or because-after all, we do think so; Or because we were told so, and think we must think so; Or because we once thought so, and think we still think so; Or because, having thought so, we think we will think so.
We have a priori reasons for believing that in every sentence there is some one order of words more effective than any other; and that this order is the one which presents the elements of the proposition in the succession in which they may be most readily put together.
Foucault's genius is to go down to the little dramas, dress them in facts hardly anyone else has noticed, and turn these stage settings into clues to a hitherto un-thought series of confrontations out of which, he contends, the orderly structure of society is composed.
Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.
The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.