philosophy

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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
b488979	"All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thistle and began emptying the seedcase, sowing the air with down. The lighted frame of my window filled. The down rose and spread in all directions, wafting over the dam's waterfall and wavering between the tulip trunks and into the meadow. It vaulted towards the orchard in a puff; it hovered over the ripening pawpaw fruit and staggered up the steep faced terrace. It jerked, floated, rolled, veered, swayed. The thistle down faltered down toward the cottage and gusted clear to the woods; it rose and entered the shaggy arms of pecans. At last it strayed like snow, blind and sweet, into the pool of the creek upstream, and into the race of the creek over rocks down. It shuddered onto the tips of growing grasses, where it poised, light, still wracked by errant quivers. I was holding my breath. Is this where we live, I thought, in this place in this moment, with the air so light and wild? The same fixity that collapses stars and drives the mantis to devour her mate eased these creatures together before my eyes: the thick adept bill of the goldfinch, and the feathery coded down. How could anything be amiss? If I myself were lighter and frayed, I could ride these small winds, too, taking my chances, for the pleasure of being so purely played. The thistle is part of Adam's curse. "Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee." A terrible curse: But does the goldfinch eat thorny sorrow with the thistle or do I? If this furling air is fallen, then the fall was happy indeed. If this creekside garden is sorrow, then I seek martyrdom. I was weightless; my bones were taut skins blown with buoyant gas; it seemed that if I inhaled too deeply, my shoulders and head would waft off. Alleluia."		fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy ring-the-bells enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation	Annie Dillard
ee83e05	"The remarkable thing about the world of insects, however, is precisely that there is no veil cast over these horrors. These are mysteries performed in broad daylight before our very eyes; we can see every detail, and yet they are still mysteries. If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs," then clearly I had better be scrying the signs. The earth devotes an overwhelming proportion of its energy to these buzzings and leaps in the grass. Theirs is the biggest wedge of the pie: Why? I ought to keep a giant water bug in an aquarium on my dresser, so I can think about it."		nature spirit wonder philosophy signs insects mindfulness energy consciousness mystery	Annie Dillard
900bb3a	And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, leaking from here to there, minutely at a rate of a mile a year. What a tug of waters goes on! There are flings and pulls in every direction at every moment. The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved. What else is going on right this minute while ground water creeps under my feet? The galaxy is careening in a slow, muffled widening. If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow. The sun's surface is now exploding; other stars implode and vanish, heavy and black, out of sight. Meteorites are arcing to earth invisibly all day long. On the planet, the winds are blowing: the polar easterlies, the westerlies, the northeast and southeast trades. Somewhere, someone under full sail is becalmed, in the horse latitudes, in the doldrums; in the northland, a trapper is maddened, crazed, by the eerie scent of the chinook, the sweater, a wind that can melt two feet of snow in a day. The pampero blows, and the tramontane, and the Boro, sirocco, levanter, mistral. Lick a finger; feel the now. Spring is seeping north, towards me and away from me, at sixteen miles a day. Along estuary banks of tidal rivers all over the world, snails in black clusters like currants are gliding up and down the stems of reed and sedge, migrating every moment with the dip and swing of tides. Behind me, Tinker Mountain is eroding one thousandth of an inch a year. The sharks I saw are roving up and down the coast. If the sharks cease roving, if they still their twist and rest for a moment, they die. They need new water pushed into their gills; they need dance. Somewhere east of me, on another continent, it is sunset, and starlings in breathtaking bands are winding high in the sky to their evening roost. The mantis egg cases are tied to the mock-orange hedge; within each case, within each egg, cells elongate, narrow, and split; cells bubble and curve inward, align, harden or hollow or stretch. And where are you now?		fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation	Annie Dillard
67c56e3	It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting. The woods are acres of sticks: I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall, the striptease is over; things stand mute and revealed. Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open.		winter reading writing spirit wonder philosophy philosopher-s-stone walking soul	Annie Dillard
9369419	Or, to put it another way, presuppositional apologetics--such as that developed by Francis Schaeffer, but also by Cornelius Van Til and, to a degree, Herman Dooeyeweerd--rejects classical apologetics precisely because presuppositionalism recognizes the truth of Derrida's claim that everything is interpretation (though I am admittedly radicalizing their intuitions).		philosophy interpretation derrida presuppositional-apologetics postmodernism	James K.A. Smith
7230b8d	By calling into question the very ideal of a universal, autonomous reason (which was, in the Enlightenment, the basis for rejecting religious thought) and further demonstrating that all knowledge is grounded in narrative or myth, Lyotard relativizes (secular) philosophy's claim to autonomy and so grants the legitimacy of a philosophy that grounds itself in Christian faith. Previously such a distinctly Christian philosophy would have been exiled from the 'pure' arena of philosophy because of its 'infection' with bias and prejudice. Lyotard's critique, however, demonstrates that no philosophy - indeed, no knowledge - is untainted by prejudice or faith commitments. In this way the playing field is leveled, and new opportunities to voice a Christian philosophy are created. Thus Lyotard's postmodern critique of metanarratives, rather than being a formidable foe of Christian faith and thought, can in fact be enlisted as an ally in the construction of a Christian philosophy.		prejudice christianity philosophy lyotard metanarrative the-enlightenment objectivity narrative knowledge	James K.A. Smith
50dbbfc	You are not alone in your quest to be who you want and have what you want.		inspire philosophy passages-ventura passages-malibu chris-prentiss	Chris Prentiss
d4fe6f1	"The answers are never "out there." All the answers are "in there," inside you, waiting to be discovered."		philosophy zen-and-the-art-of-happiness zen	Chris Prentiss
1a2f2fe	"Your actions create an "energy vortex" that draws in the necessary ingredients for your venture."		inspirational-quotes happiness life philosophy zen-and-the-art-of-happiness zen	Chris Prentiss
10eaeef	On solemn festivals, Julian, who felt and professed an unfashionable dislike to these frivolous amusements, condescended to appear in the Circus; and, after bestowing a careless glance on five or six of the races, he hastily withdrew with the impatience of a philosopher, who considered every moment as lost that was not devoted to the advantage of the public or the improvement of his own mind.		philosophy leasure	Edward Gibbon
053d7df	"What about you, Snipes?" Dunbar asked. "You think there to be mountain lions up here or is it just folks' imaginings?" Snipes pondered the question a few moments before speaking. They's many a man of science would claim there aint because you got no irredeemable evidence like panther scat or fur or tooth or tail. In other words, some part of the animal in questions. Or better yet having the actual critter itself, the whole think kit and caboodle head to tail, which all your men of science argue is the best proof of all a thing exists, whether it be a panther, or a bird, or even a dinosaur." To put it another way, if you was to stub your toe and tell the man of science what happened he'd not believe a word of it less he could see how it'd stoved up or was bleeding. But your philosophers and theologians and such say there's things in the world that's every bit as real even though you can't see them." Like what?" Dunbar asked. Well," Snipes said. "They's love, that's one. And courage. You can't see neither of them, but they're real. And air, of course. That's one of your most important examples. You wouldn't be alive a minute if there wasn't air, but nobody's ever seen a single speck of it."		courage faith science darkness love philosophy	Ron Rash
c64c71a	Yes, I felt guilt. Somehow I had pushed Fand to the precipice without realizing it, and had I not been so blind, perhaps she wouldn't be trying to pull us all over the edge with her now. I was sure Manannan felt it too-the crushing questions of how we got to this place and whether we could have avoided it, where we went wrong, and whether we would ever learn how not to cock up other people's lives in the course of living our own.		philosophy	Kevin Hearne
da9bfc8	L'amore e una faccenda intima strana e piena di contraddizioni, visto che non di rado amiamo qualcuno solo perche amiamo noi stessi, per egoismo, avidita, desiderio fisico, brama di dominare l'oggetto d'amore e asservirlo; o al contrario, per desiderio di asservirci e essere dominati dal nostro amante, e in fondo l'amore assomiglia all'odio e gli e piu prossimo di quanto non si pensi normalmente.		love-quotes philosophical religion love philosophy philosophy-of-life love-and-hate love-hurts jewish	Amos Oz
7d8cbf6	Wenn man einmal das Bose bei sich aufgenommen hat, verlangt es nicht mehr, dass man ihm glaube.		good-and-evil philosophy philosophy-of-life	Franz Kafka
3347acf	Das Negative zu tun, ist uns noch auferlegt, das Positive ist uns schon gegeben.		good-and-evil philosophy philosophy-of-life	Franz Kafka
8e42c72	Empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being.		science philosophy	Oliver Sacks
5e07d38	...the one certain thing in life is that no one can make the truth untrue simply because it hurts.		true morality inspirational-quotes philosophy truth	David Weber
f58c00e	The Greeks who rhapsodized about democracy in their rhetoric rarely created democratic institutions. A few cities such as Athens occasionally attempted a system vaguely akin to democracy for a few years. These cities functioned as slave societies and were certainly not egalitarian or democratic in the Indian sense.		philosophy political-theory democracy	Jack Weatherford
8b6996b	Terrorism has made our world an integrated community in a new and frightening way. Not merely the activities of our neighbors, but those of the inhabitants of the most remote mountain valleys of the farthest-flung countries of our planet, have become our business. We need to extend the reach of the criminal law there and to have the means to bring terrorists to justice without declaring war on an entire country in order to do it. For this we need a sound global system of criminal justice, so justice does not become the victim of national differences of opinion. We also need, though it will be far more difficult to achieve, a sense that we really are one community, that we are people who recognize not only the force of prohibitions against killing each other but also the pull of obligations to assist one another. This may not stop religious fanatics from carrying out suicide missions, but it will help to isolate them and reduce their support.		politics philosophy political-philosophy	Peter Singer
cf57761	...moral relativism, a position many find attractive only until they are faced with someone who is doing something really, really wrong.		philosophy moral-philosophy	Peter Singer
54d729a	Intellectual activity in a culture is not a one-way flow between the great minds and passive recipients; it is a discourse, a complex marketplace-like conglomeration of intellectual exchanges involving many participants all trying to manipulate the ideas available to them in order to explain, justify, lay blame for, or otherwise make sense of what is happening around them. Everyone, not just the great minds, participates in this complicated process.		philosophy history-of-thought	Gordon S. Wood
d04282e	They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.		science philosophy	Kim Stanley Robinson
09292bd	[...] the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and not a means, just as the people who despise money speak as if its only use were to be kept in bags and gloated over? Isn't it fairer to look at them both as opportunities, which may be used either stupidly or intelligently, according to the capacity of the user?		philosophy society	Edith Wharton
db14a86	To give up power to change for the better is inherently distasteful to everyone, and to force people to affirm that they are addicts or alcoholics so they can speak in a meeting is shameful and demoralizing.		change philosophy recovering-addict passages-treatment rehab holistic-treatment passages-rehab non-12-step life-improvement passages-ventura pax-prentiss passages-malibu addiction-treatment alcohol-abuse chris-prentiss healing-abuse healing alcoholism therapy alcoholic recovery self-help	Chris Prentiss
39ccbbc	The verdict of the coroner's inquest had been that Adrian Finn (22) had killed himself 'while the balance of his mind was disturbed.' I remember how angry that conventional phrase made me: I would have sworn on oath that Adrian's was the one mind which would never lose its balance. But in the law's view, if you killed yourself you were by definition mad, at least at the time you were committing the act. The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide's reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the state which paid the coroner? And then, since you had been declared temporarily mad, your reasons for killing yourself were also assumed to be mad. So I doubt anyone paid much attention to Adrian's argument, with its references to philosophers ancient and modern, about the superiority of the intervening act over the unworthy passivity of merely letting life happen to you.		suicide philosophy suicide-note the-sense-of-an-ending law society	Julian Barnes
91b81be	In truth, philosophy is the mode of thought shaped by the most radical form of prejudice: the passion of being-in-the-world. With the sole exception of specialists in the field, virtually everyone senses that anything which offers less than this passion play remains philosophically trivial. Cultural anthropologists suggest the appealing term 'deep play' for the comprehensively absorbing preoccupations of human beings. From the perspective of a theory of the practising life we would add: the deep plays are those which are moved by the heights.		passion philosophy deep-play	Peter Sloterdijk
7d671fe	"[E]very man ought to say to himself, "Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?"		philosophy sartre	Jean-Paul Sartre
fdbe635	Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.		philosophy sartre	Jean-Paul Sartre
fec1234	Not the historians. No, not them. Their greatest crime is that they presume to know what happened, how things come about, when they have only what the past chose to leave behind-- for the most part, they think what they were meant to think, and it's a rare one that sees what really happened, behind the smokescreen of artifacts and paper...No, the fault lies with the artists...The writers, the singers, the tellers of tales. It's them that take the past and re-create it to their liking. Them that could take a fool and give you back a hero, take a sot and make him a king...Liars?...or sorcerers? Do they see the bones in the dust of the earth, see the essence of a thing that was, and clothe it in new flesh, so the plodding beast reemerges as a fabulous monster?		philosophy thought-provoking	Diana Gabaldon
407118b	The Abenaki also believe that there are some people who live between the animal world and the human world, never fully belonging to either one.		philosophy tribal wolf	Jodi Picoult
8741905	Ama bardagimin dibinde biram iliksa, aynada koyu renkli lekeler varsa, fazlaliksam; en icten ve en katisiksiz acim, ayibaligi gibi, hem bir yigin et hem gepgenis bir deriyle ve insanin icine dokunan islak, ama kotuluk dolu gozlerle suruklenip hantallasiyorsa bu benim kabahatim mi?		philosophy	Jean-Paul Sartre
141528a	Pro Life' or 'Right to Life' movement is misnamed. Those who protest against abortion but dine regularly on the bodies of chickens, pigs and calves can hardly claim to have concern for 'life' as such. Their concern about embryos and fetuses suggests only a biased concern for the lives of members of our own species.		morality philosophy ethics	Peter Singer
1c554b5	"... rather than God being "out there" in the heights, God is known in the depths of personal experience."		spirituality religion philosophy	Marcus J. Borg
3df5d42	"Resurrection" does not mean resumption of previous existence but entry into a different kind of existence."		spirituality religion philosophy	Marcus J. Borg
c312e96	The physical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts there is no higher knowledge than the empirical knowledge of scientific phenomena. The mathematical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts that some higher knowledge is needed to explain scientific facts, and that higher knowledge is mathematics.		science philosophy	Fulton J. Sheen
31adf83	If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off than when it was loaded with ideas. The solution to the problem often at first seems unimportant or undesirable, but the state of stuckness allows it, in time, to assumes its true importance. It seemed small because our previous rigid evaluation which led to the stuckness made it small. But now consider the fact that no matter how hard you try to hang on to it, this stuckness is bound to disappear. Your mind will naturally and freely move toward a solution. Unless you are a real master at staying stuckk you can't prevent this. The fear of stuckness is needless because the longer you stay stuck the more you see the Quality-reality that gets you unstuck every time. What's been getting you stuck is the running from the stuckness through the cars of your train of knowledge looking for a solution that is out in front of the train. Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.		philosophy getting-stuck-in-your-head thinking-process	Robert M. Pirsig
f89ddc9	"I care not whether a man is Good or Evil; all that I care Is whether he is a Wise man or a Fool. Go! put off Holiness,		good stupidity religion intelligence philosophy wisdom holiness fool	William Blake
d366b72	Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis: where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing		philosophy samuel-beckett	Shane Weller
6de268a	Je voulais vous exposer mon livre aussi succinctement que possible; mais je vois qu'il me faudra y joindre encore quantite d'explications verbales. Mon expose exigera donc au moins dix soirees d'apres le nombre de chapitres de mon livre. (Il y eut quelques rires.) De plus, je dois vous prevenir que mon systeme n'est pas completement acheve. (Nouveaux rires.) Je me suis embrouille dans mes propres donnees et ma conclusion se trouve en contradiction directe avec l'idee fondamentale du systeme. Partant de la liberte illimitee, j'aboutis au despotisme illimite. J'ajoute a cela, cependant, qu'il ne peut y avoir d'autre solution du probleme que la mienne.		philosophy les-démons despotism liberty russia	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
7afeabd	To some extent the romantic condemnation of rationality stems from the very effectiveness of rationality in uplifting men from primitive conditions.		romantic philosophy rational perspective	Robert M. Pirsig
29b7067	"The most perfect and satisfactory knowledge is that of perception but this is limited to the absolutely particular, to the individual. The comprehension of the many and the various into one representation is possible only through the concept, in other words, by omitting the differences; consequently, the concept is a very imperfect way of representing things. The particular, of course, can also be apprehended immediately as a universal, namely when it is raised to the (Platonic) Idea; but in this process, which I have analysed in the third book, the intellect passes beyond the limits of individuality and therefore of time; moreover, this is only an exception. These inner and essential imperfections of the intellect are further increased by a disturbance to some extent external to it but yet inevitable, namely, the influence that the will exerts on all its operations, as soon as that will is in any way concerned in their result. Every passion, in fact every inclination or disinclination, tinges the objects of knowledge with its colour. Most common of occurrence is the falsification of knowledge brought about by desire and hope, since they show us the scarcely possible in dazzling colours as probable and well-nigh certain, and render us almost incapable of comprehending what is opposed to it. Fear acts in a similar way; every preconceived opinion, every partiality, and, as I have said, every interest, every emotion, and every predilection of the will act in an analogous manner.		philosophy schopenhauer ontology metaphysics intellect will	Arthur Schopenhauer
649dc4c	"Of all the conceptions of the divine, of all the language Jesus could put on the lips of the God character in the story he tells, that's what he has the Father say. "You are always with me, and everything I have is yours." ... Millions of people in our world were told that God so loved the world, that God sent his son to save the world, and that if they accept and believe in Jesus, then they'll be able to have a relationship with God... But there's more. Millions have been taught that if they don't believe, if they don't accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them "the gospel" does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God will have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell... A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony... if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, acceptable, awful reality... sometimes the reason people have a problem accepting the gospel is that they sense that the God lurking behind Jesus isn't safe, loving, or good. It doesn't make sense, it can't be reconciled, and so they say no... God creates, because the endless joy and peace and shared life at the heart of this God knows no other way. Jesus invites us into THAT relationship, the one at the center of the universe... so when the gospel is diminished to a question of whether or not a person will "get into heaven," that reduces the good news to a ticket, a way to get past the bouncer and into the club. The good news is better than that. (excerpts all from chapter 7)"		philosophy monster-god universality theology	Rob Bell
e739ff4	Excellent papier. Rien a voir avec les pates mecaniques d'aujourd'hui... Vous savez quelle est la duree de vie moyenne d'un livre imprime a l'heure actuelle ?... Dis lui, Pablo. - Soixante-dix ans, repondit l'autre avec rancoeur, comme si Corso etait le coupable. Soixante-dix miserables annees. Le frere aine cherchait quelque chose parmi les objets disperses sur la table. Finalement, il s'empara d'une loupe speciale a fort grossissement et l'approcha du livre. - Dans moins d'un siecle, murmura-t-il tandis qu'il soulevait une page pour l'etudier a contre-jour en fermant un oeil, presque tout ce qui se trouve aujourd'hui dans les librairies aura disparu. Mais ces volumes imprimes il y a deux cents ou cinq cents ans, demeureront intacts... Nous avons les livres, comme le monde, que nous meritons... N'est-ce pas, Pablo ? - Des livres de merde pour un monde de merde.		literature world books philosophy handmade-books paper	Arturo Pérez-Reverte
7c081fb	It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.		light women philosophy gender	Ursula K. Le Guin
82c3b69	- Kato dete izpitvakh s'shchoto po klonite na golemite d'rveta. Da stoish prilepen do edin stvol, tolkova dreven, che i nai-drevnata choveshka pamet blednee pred nego, ti vnushava s'shchoto chuvstvo za miasto v sveta.		human philosophy riftwar древен дървета памет философ човек чувство bulgarian longbow война дълголъкия място разлом реймънд свят фийст elder tree philosopher saga бард martin български old sea memory	Raymond E. Feist
4a07bd7	Sometime look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you'll see the difference. The craftsman isn't ever following a single line of instruction. He's making decisions as he goes along. For that reason he'll be absorbed and attentive to what he's doing even though he doesn't deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn't following any set of written instructions because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a progression of changes until his mind's at rest at the same time the material's right.		philosophy quality-of-work workman professional flow style	Robert M. Pirsig
5f59248	This is philosophy, Fool. I have never had time to study such things.' 'No, Fitz, this is life. And no one has time not to think of such things. Each creature in the world should consider this thing, every moment of the heart's beating. Otherwise, what is the point of arising each day?		thoughts philosophy robin-hobb royal-assassin	Robin Hobb
66c2290	What's emerging from the pattern of my own life is the for belief that the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can't be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem. The only ones who're solving it are solving it at a personal level by abandoning 'square' rationality altogether and going by feelings alone. Like John and Sylvia here. And millions of others like them. And that seems like a wrong direction too. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the solution to the problem isn't that you abandon rationality but that you expand the nature of rationality so that it's capable of coming up with a solution.		thoughts philosophy modern-problems solutions rational thinking	Robert M. Pirsig
5dd9611	During periods of root expansion things have always looked as confused and topsy-turvy and purposeless as they do now. The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus' discovery of a new world. It just shook people up. The topsy-turviness of that time is recorded everywhere. There was nothing in the flat-earth views of the Old and New Testaments that predicted it. Yet people couldn't deny it. The only way they could assimilate it was to abandon the entire medieval outlook and enter into a new expansion of reason.		discoveries evolution philosophy renaissance civilization	Robert M. Pirsig
7efa1cb	The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on it it's getting to be something of a high-miler, and old-timer, although there are plenty of older ones running. But over the miles, and I think most cyclists will agree with this, you pick up certain feelings about an individual machine that are unique for that one individual machine and no other. A friend who owns a cycle of the same make, model and even same year brought it over for a repair, and when I test rode it afterward it was hard to believe it had come from the same factory years ago. You could see that long ago it had settled into its own kind of feel and ride and sound, completely different from mine. No worse, but different. I suppose you could call that a personality. Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is the personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance. The new ones start out as good-looking strangers, and depending on how they are treated, degenerate rapidly into bad-acting grouches or even cripples, or else turn into healthy, good-natured, long-lasting friends.		philosophy motorcycle differences mechanics	Robert M. Pirsig
3e7ed5c	Only discovering and healing the root causes of each individual's dependency puts an end to dependency. One-on-one sessions are key because the individual issues at the core of dependency are just that- completely individual.		change philosophy addiction-help addiction-philosophy change-the-world-change-life healing-addiction holistic-therapy one-on-one-therapy non12step chris-prenitss non-12-step passages-ventura passages-malibu addiction-treatment alcoholism	Chris Prentiss
a2d40b1	Now we've a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.		reason intelligence philosophy rationale reasoning thinking logic	Robert M. Pirsig
eae2cd9	"Zen is a journey of exploration and a way of living that, in and of itself, does not belong to any one religion or tradition. It is about experiencing life in the here and now and about removing the dualistic distinctions between "I" and "you" between "subject" and "objective", between our spiritual and our ordinary, everyday activities."		inspiration happiness life philosophy zen-and-the-art-of-happiness chris-prentiss zen	Chris Prentiss
9ef93ca	Everything was dragging me toward the arts; even the study of modern philosophy suggested that philosophy was nonsense.		philosophy	Steve Martin
ca718ad	Although you may have never sat down and defined what your philosophy is, it is fully operative and working in your life at all times. It deals with what you believe about the world in which you live, about its people and events, about how you affect them.		life-and-living life philosophy zen-and-the-art-of-happiness zen	Chris Prentiss
ae9533f	When you change the way you see and interpret events, suddenly everything will be different for you. Everything will make sense.		inspiration life philosophy inspirational passages-ventura passages-malibu chris-prentiss perspective	Chris Prentiss
aa31634	Every belief that you hold manifests itself in some manner by either causing you to take some form of action or by preventing you from taking action. If you don't believe something is possible, you won't even attempt it.		happiness life philosophy zen-and-the-art-of-happiness metaphysics zen	Chris Prentiss
5aeb05c	Stress comes from the way you relate to events or situations.		life philosophy stress-management zen-and-the-art-of-happiness zen stress	Chris Prentiss
2b30b9d	Believe that is cure is possible for you. Discover and heal the underlying causes with a holistic recovery program. Adopt a philosophy based on what is true in the Universe.		universe sobriety freedom inspiration inspire change happiness life philosophy wisdom good-books alcohol-addiction-treatment curing-addiction drug-addiction-treatment recommended-reading renew sober-living treatment-program holistic-treatment addiction-free non12step holistic-health non-12-step passages-ventura passages-malibu addiction-cure addiction-treatment-center chris-prentiss sober healing change-the-world health self-improvement self-help	Chris Prentiss
a89cf21	"Human nature inclines us to have recourse to petition for the purpose of obtaining from another, especially from a person of higher rank, what we hope to receive from him. So prayer is recommended to men, that by it they may obtain from God what they hope to secure from Him. But the reason why prayer is necessary for obtaining something from a man is not the same as the reason for its necessity when there is question of obtaining a favor from God. Prayer is addressed to man, first, to lay bare the desire and the need of the petitioner, and secondly, to incline the mind of him to whom the prayer is addressed to grant the petition. These purposes have no place in the prayer that is sent up to God. When we pray we do not intend to manifest our needs or desires to God, for He knows all things. The Psalmist says to God: "Lord, all my desire is before Thee" and in the Gospel we are told: "Your Father knoweth that you have need of all these things." Again, the will of God is not influenced by human words to will what He had previously not willed. For, as we read in Numbers 23:19, "God is not a man, that He should lie, nor as the son of man, that He should be changed"; nor is God moved to repentance, as we are assured in 1 Kings 15:29. Prayer, then, for obtaining something from God, is necessary for man on account of the very one who prays, that he may reflect on his shortcomings and may turn his mind to desiring fervently and piously what he hopes to gain by his petition. In this way he is rendered fit to receive the favor."		prayer religion god philosophy metaphysics superstition	Thomas Aquinas
7c12fbd	El mayor de todos los males es el poder_ contesto el sumo pontifice_, y es nuestro deber borrar cualquier deseo de poder de los corazones y las almas de los hombres. Esa es la mision de la Iglesia, pues es la lucha por el poder lo que hace que los hombres se enfrentan unos a otros. Ahi radica el mal de nuestro mundo; siempre sera un mundo injusto, siempre sera un mundo cruel para los menos afortunados. Quien sabe,,, Es posible que dentro de quinientos anos los hombres dejen de matarse entre si. Feliz dia sera aquel en el que ocurra. Pero el poder forma parte de la misma naturaleza del hombre. Igual que forma parte de la naturaleza de la sociedad que, para mantener unidos a sus subditos, por el bien de su Dios y d su nacion, un rey tenga que mandar ahorcar a quienes no obedezcan su ley. ?Pues como, si no, podria doblegar la voluntad de su subditos? Ademas, no debemos olvidar que la naturaleza humana es tan insondable como el mundo que nos acoge y que no todos los demonios temen el agua bendita.		religion philosophy humanity-and-society	Mario Puzo
bc9c46b	...(W)hat is remarkable about the Greeks--even pre-philosophically--is that despite the salience of religious rituals in their lives, when it came to the question of what it is that makes an individual human life worth living they didn't look to the immortals but rather approached the question in mortal terms. Their approaching the question of human mattering in human terms is the singularity that creates the conditions for philosophy in ancient Greece, most especially as these conditions were realized in the city-state of Athens.		philosophy singularity	Rebecca Goldstein
86b5fb6	La lumiere des torches ressemble a la sagesse des laches; elle eclaire mal, parce qu'elle tremble.		philosophy	Victor Hugo
3bdbdf0	the pursuit of love is like falconry.- chronicle of death foretold		philosophy	Gabriel García Márquez
97aec45	How do you explain a world that gifts evil men with privilege and wealth and looks the other way while they torment and abuse the weakest members of society?		injustice wealth philosophy privilege human-nature	C.S. Harris
cf1362a	The failure of Hellenism has been, largely, a matter of organization. Rome never tried to impose any sort of worship upon the countries it conquered and civilized; in fact, quite the contrary, Rome was eclectic. All religions were given an equal opportunity and even Isis--after some resistance--was worshipped at Rome. As a result we have a hundred important gods and a dozen mysteries. Certain rites are--or were--supported by the state because they involved the genius of Rome. But no attempt was ever made to coordinate the worship of Zeus on the Capitol with, let us say, the Vestals who kept the sacred fire in the old forum. As time passed our rites became, and one must admit it bluntly, merely form, a reassuring reminder of the great age of the city, a token gesture to the old gods who were thought to have founded and guided Rome from a village by the Tiber to world empire. Yet from the beginning, there were always those who mocked. A senator of the old Republic once asked an auger how he was able to get through a ceremony of divination without laughing. I am not so light-minded, though I concede that many of our rites have lost their meaning over the centuries; witness those temples at Rome where certain verses learned by rote are chanted year in and year out, yet no one, including the priests, knows what they mean, for they are in the early language of the Etruscans, long since forgotten. As the religious forms of the state became more and more rigid and perfunctory, the people were drawn to the mystery cults, many of them Asiatic in origin. At Eleusis or in the various caves of Mithras, they were able to get a vision of what this life can be, as well as a foretaste of the one that follows. There are, then, three sorts of religious experiences. The ancient rites, which are essentially propitiatory. The mysteries, which purge the soul and allow us to glimpse eternity. And philosophy, which attempts to define not only the material world but to suggest practical ways to the good life, as well as attempting to synthesize (as does so beautifully) all true religion in a single comprehensive system.		religion philosophy 362 eclecticism ecumenism formalism mystery-religions hellenism julian paganism	Gore Vidal
36e7e05	If you feel depressed for an hour, you've produced approximately eighteen billion new cells that have more receptors calling out for depressed-type peptides and fewer calling out for feel-good peptides.		depression happiness philosophy zen-and-the-art-of-happiness mindfulness zen	Chris Prentiss
60c10bd	What we call coincidences, accidental and remarkable events occurring at the same time, are actually circumstances and events that have come into your life to serve a purpose- and that purpose is to benefit you.		inspiration life philosophy inspirational life-purpose non-12-step-program passage-ventura passages-malibu chris-prentiss perspective quotes	Chris Prentiss
9bce623	The moment you make the internal changes necessary to obtain your goal, the outside world changes instantly.		philosophy passages-malibu philosophy-of-life self-improvement self-help	Chris Prentiss
d62a097	Well, I did my best,' said Amlis, in a self-deprecating purr. 'But I can tell when a challenge is hopeless. Anyway, it's not your minds I need to change.' And he glanced round at the contents of the ship's hull, acknowledging the scale of the slaughter and its commercial purpose.		philosophy vegan vegetarian	Michel Faber
3b637e7	When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker's mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. [...] In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication.		reality philosophy truth critical-examination depiction critical-thinking marketing logic speech	Harry G. Frankfurt
1e65201	Happiness is not our goal. The achievement of happiness deflects us from our true destiny which is the utter realization of self.		philosophy	Timothy Findley
e54f223	"To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it's just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged. This isn't because what Jesus or Moses said was untrue or because modern society is in error but simply because the route they chose to reveal to others has lost relevance and comprehensibility. "Heaven above" fades from meaning when space-age consciousness asks, Where is "above"? But the fact that the old routes have tended, because of language rigidity, to lose their everyday meaning and become almost closed doesn't mean that the mountain is no longer there. It's there and will be there as long as consciousness exists."		words meaning philosophy zen	Robert M. Pirsig
f2e1113	Certain things can only be understood if we take the trouble to retrace their origins.		philosophy	José Saramago
c950e56	Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years - I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue. My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into the tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well - the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born.		spirituality philosophy zen-buddhism	Elizabeth Gilbert
f6d729a	What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated.		enlightenment philosophy chautauqua american-history entertainment consciousness awareness media	Robert M. Pirsig
9367dc8	A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think. ... Unless we know our cognitive unconscious fully and intimately, we can neither know ourselves nor truly understand the basis of our moral judgments, our conscious deliberations, and our philosophy.		philosophy	George Lakoff
657245a	"I dispelled my invisibility for a few seconds in his full view, a finger resting provocatively on my lower lip, giving him a come-hither look under a streetlight. His jaw and the bottle of Zubrowka dropped at the same time. It shattered, drawing his eyes to the sidewalk, and I took the opportunity afforded by his distraction to disappear again. "That was mean," Oberon said, watching the man look wildly around for me and pawing at his eyes as if to clear them. Why? I asked. I've done him no harm. "Yes, you have. You will haunt him for the rest of his life. I know from experience." You're haunted by someone flashing you on a street corner? "No. It was a dog park. Atticus and I were just arriving and she was leaving." Oh, here we go. "She was so fit and her coat was tightly curled and she had a perfect pouf on the end of her tail like a tennis ball. I saw her for maybe five seconds, until she hopped into a Honda and her human drove her away. And now I can't see a Honda without seeing her." But that's a good thing, isn't it? Kind of romantic? A vision of perfection you can treasure forever, unspoiled by reality. "Well, I don't know. In reality I'd like to try spoiling her, if she was in the mood." Look, Oberon, that man is lonely. He's too skinny and sweaty, and I'm willing to bet you five cows that he's socially awkward or he wouldn't be staggering drunk at this hour. But now, for the rest of his life, he will remember the na**d woman on the street who looked at him with desire. When people treat him like something untouchable, he will have that memory to comfort him. "Or obsess over. What if he starts wandering the streets every night looking for you?" Then he's misunderstood the nature of beauty. It doesn't stay, except in our minds. "Oh! I think I see. That's true, Clever Girl! Sausage never stays, because I eat it, but it's always beautiful in my mind."		philosophy granuaile hunted kevin-hearne oberon	Kevin Hearne
da0c130	"I've never run this far before," he said at one point. "Or this fast for so long. It's better than sticking your head out a car window, that's for sure." My theory is that Oberon might be a master of Tao. He always sees what we filter out. The wind and the grass and something in the sky, sun or moon, shining on our backs as we run: They are gifts that humans toss away like socks on Christmas morning, because we see them every day and don't think of them as gifts anymore. But new socks are always better than old socks. And the wind and grass and sky, I think, are better seen with new eyes than jaded ones. I hope my eyes will never grow old."		dogs nature beauty philosophy inspirational taoism new granuile hunted kevin-hearne old oberon	Kevin Hearne
9fa1bd9	If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.		self-knowledge philosophy science-of-mind human-nature	George Lakoff
fa10d28	io, mio caro, non credo nell'amore universale. L'amore esiste in dosi modiche. Si possono amare forse cinque fra uomini e donne, dieci magari, talvolta financo quindici. E anche questo solo assai di rado. Ma se uno arriva e mi dice che ama tutto il Terzo mondo, o ama l'America Latina, o ama il sesso femminile, quello non e amore ma retorica. Pura demagogia. Slogan. Non siamo nati per amare piu di una manciata di persone.		love-quotes philosophical humanity philosophy society love-hurts jews jewish human-nature	Amos Oz
dfb42b2	no religion was superior because they all brought people closer to God		religion philosophy	Mitch Albom
a3798c0	Well, where is God,' said Mrs. Coulter, 'if he's alive? And why doesn't he speak anymore? At the beginning of the world, God walked in the Garden and spoke with Adam and Eve. Then he began to withdraw, and he forbade Moses to look at his face. Later, in the time of Daniel, he was aged--he was the Ancient of Days. Where is he now? Is he still alive, at some inconceivable age, decrepit and demented, unable to think or act or speak and unable to die, a rotten hulk? And if that is his condition, wouldn't it be the most merciful thing, the truest proof of our love for God, to seek him out and give him the gift of death?		religion philosophy	Philip Pullman
f7429a4	As long as God is a man, not a couple, the life of a woman, according to Hanna,is bound to remain as it is now, namely wretched, with woman as the proletarian of Creation, however smartly dressed.		women god philosophy	Max Frisch
9847512	It is not at all coincidental that Darwinian psychology has the same difficulty explaining the unity and integration of human reasoning as Darwinian biology has explaining the unity and integration of irreducibly complex functions. Practical and theoretical reasoning is often irreducibly complex. A given argument has several well-matched, interacting reasons, and the removal of any one of them makes the argument break down.		philosophy psychology	Angus Menuge
ca777ae	Then turn your eyes back on me, and tell me that Cathy and I are still children to be treated with condescension, and are incapable of understanding adult subjects. We haven't remained idle, twiddling our thumbs while you were off having a good time.		understanding kids youth philosophy wisdom abandonement adult-subjects condescension good-time thumbs incapable subjects away idleness understand experience children condescending eyes	V.C. Andrews
4534264	"Civilization as well as education takes a downward spiral when it ceases to ask "What is truth?" and concerns itself primarily with what is measurable."		philosophy educational-philosophy	Katherine Paterson
86dbd13	"Life's more important than a living. So many people who make a living are making death, not life. Don't ever join them. They're the gravediggers of our civilization - The safe men. The compromisers. The moneymakers. The muddlers-through.		philosophy truth	James Hilton
ea0d988	The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists.		religion philosophy zoology theology	Yann Martel
1dc4b66	"Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space. It is the "folklore" of philosophy, and, like folklore, it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental character is that it is a conception which, even in the brain of one individual, is fragmentary, incoherent and inconsequential." --		philosophy thought	Antonio Gramsci
ec91f5f	Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form... He is much more an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit.		philosophy	Hermann Hesse
09db655	Man is a dubious mixture of mind and matter; since the mind unlocks recognition of the eternal to him, while matter pulls him down and binds him to the transitory, he should strive away from the senses and toward the mind if he wishes to elevate his life and give it meaning.		mind philosophy	Hermann Hesse
fc5f3b3	The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an injustice.		morality philosophy	Alain de Botton
1f1de3d	The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for a requisite number of years. We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends		philosophy schopenhauer	Alain de Botton
95c1968	It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly.		philosophy schopenhauer	Alain de Botton
b557b20	a lack of love: between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a badly organized, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself.		philosophy schopenhauer	Alain de Botton
57b6363	I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.		literature philosophy jeanette-winterson	Jeanette Winterson
68a8624	"Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely. I left my body, I left the room, I left the planet, I stepped through time and I entered the void. I was inside the void, but I also was the void and I was looking at the void, all at the same time. The void was a place of limitless peace and wisdom, The void was conscious and intelligent. The void was God, which means that I was inside God. But not in a gross, physical way - not like I was Liz Gilbert stuck inside a chunk of God's thigh muscle. I just was part of God. In addition to being God. I was both a tiny piece of the universe and exactly the same size as the universe. ("All know that the drop merges into ocean, but few know that the ocean merges into the drop," wrote the sage Kabir - and I can personally attest now that this is true.) It wasn't hallucinogenic, what I was feeling. It was the most basic of events. It was heaven, yes. It was the deepest love I'd ever experienced, beyond anything I could previously imagined, but it wasn't euphoric. It wasn't exciting. There wasn't enough ego or passion left in me to create euphoria and excitement. It was just obvious. Like when you've been looking at an optical illusion for a long time, straining your eyes to decode the trick, and suddenly your cognizance shifts and there - now you can clearly see it! - the two vases are actually two faces. And once you've seen through the optical illusion, you can never not see it again. "So this is God," I thought. "Congratulations to meet you." -"		spirituality love philosophy	Elizabeth Gilbert
099ad33	Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn't hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients' ultima Thule, the modern explorer's Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis's jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom's nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?		fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation	Annie Dillard
0829536	"Xerxes, I read, 'halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction' the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain...you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven't you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered...there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse...and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. "He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life." We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn't it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don't know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore."		fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation	Annie Dillard
445e002	"Someone--Plato, I think--once said, 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' " "True. But a life too closely scrutinized will lead to madness, if not suicide."		philosophy philosophy-of-life	Ken Grimwood
5088d36	"If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs," then clearly I had better be scrying the signs." --		universe world religion philosophy	Annie Dillard
3b41102	"Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, "an infinite storm of beauty." The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth's face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up-mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back. A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash frames. Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and then crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth's surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any images. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid. Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, like a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life."		fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy ring-the-bells enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation	Annie Dillard
6744dc1	Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings...They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10 years. When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn't that have been a sight to see?		fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy ring-the-bells enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation	Annie Dillard
e8657a9	"Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep blank space high up above many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman's tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of dots. At length I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn't find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn't make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at that very moment with great emotion, in intricate, detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which wholly worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, "that was a good time then, a good time to be living." And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water. I saw white-faced cattle lowing and wading in creeks. I saw May apples in forests, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided, and apples grew spotted and striped in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wild ducks flew with outstretched necks, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remember the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean's shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, "yes, that's how it was then, that part there was called France." I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes.		fate seeing free light poem prayer nature poetry freedom joy spirit wonder faith beauty religion science god philosophy ring-the-bells enoughness exultant illumination intricacy joyfulness living-in-the-present-moment religious-diversity stalking-the-gaps the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it gaps philosopher-s-stone multiplicity praying prayers hallelujah life-force seeking exploration praise joyful mindfulness epiphany tolerance grace energy disbelief watching growth belief fearless humility consciousness walking fire mystery curiosity power soul poet creation	Annie Dillard
459d246	"Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply a child's wish--and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy--though Darwin himself had not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely, you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now have killed him."		philosophy truth skepticism	Irvin D. Yalom
17a985c	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.		work philosophy	Sally Rooney
67b225f	...is not all philosophy but preparation for a serene dying?		mortality death philosophy libanius philosophy-of-death aging	Gore Vidal
8dbeb9f	I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare - or, if not, some equally brainy bird - who says that it's always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneakes up behind him with a bit of lead piping		philosophy	P.G. Wodehouse
c1fc6f5	Mma Ramotswe tucked the cheque safely away in her bodice. Modern business methods were all very well, she thought, but when it came to the safeguarding of money there were some places which had yet to be bettered.		humour life-lessons philosophy	Alexander McCall Smith
95c03b3	"Honesty is a moral virtue, a matter of the will. Honesty means willing the truth with the whole of your heart. This demands sacrifice. We have little hope of attaining honesty unless we realize how demanding it is. It demands sacrifice of self-will, self-image, the desire to win, and the comfort of being right. The "honesty" often praised today is usually only emotional honesty with others, not intellectual honesty with one's self; only "letting it all hang out," not asking what is the real truth. Sometimes "honesty" is only a code word for shamelessness. Rarely does it mean the absolute, fanatical, selfless love of truth."		morality philosophy truth	Peter Kreeft
fef62ac	there's no better system than our own morality, not law, not science, not religion... just decency.		morality religion science philosophy law	Rebecca McNutt
43d3c7b	And if your master truly loved you, he would tell you that. In order to escape the bounds of earthly experience, you bind yourself to a master. Bound is bound. If your master really loved you, he would not demand your devotion. He would set you free--from himself, first of all.		philosophy	Tom Robbins
4b18ce2	But I was always coming here. I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.		spirituality life philosophy	Elizabeth Gilbert
805b7c8	"Once the troublesome mind "begins to compose speeches and dream up arguments, especially if these are clever, it will soon imagine it is doing important work." But if you can surpass those thoughts, Teresa explained, and ascend toward God, "it is a glorious bewilderment, a heavenly madness, in which true wisdom is acquired."		philosophy wisdom	Elizabeth Gilbert
deeeff8	One had to know Plato personally to appreciate the love he suppressed puritanically for the music, poetry, and drama he censured in his philosophy and censored in his model communities. They moved him too deeply.		philosophy	Joseph Heller
dca1b95	The events that occur in my life are workout situations. They are there for my benefit so I can become strong and gain wisdom and information by working my way through those situations.		pain joy happiness life love philosophy wisdom addiction-free chris-prentiss-quotes addiction-and-recovery passages-ventura passages-malibu chris-prentiss philosophy-of-life peace guilt	Chris Prentiss
399722f	Via the mediation of the Enlightenment, this movement had changed from a hobby among a tiny literate elite and their secretaries, an ostentatious amusement among princely and mercantile art patrons and their masterly suppliers (who established a first 'art system'), into a national, a European, indeed a planetary matter. In order to spread from the few to the many, the renaissance had to discard its humanistic exterior and reveal itself as the return of ancient mass culture. The true renaissance question, reformulated in the terminology of practical philosophy - namely, whether other forms of life are possible and permissible for us alongside and after Christianity, especially ones whose patterns are derived from Greek and Roman (perhaps even Egyptian or Indian) antiquity - was no longer a secret discourse or an academic exercise in the nineteenth century, but rather an epochal passion, an inescapable pro nobis.		enlightenment philosophy rennaisance	Peter Sloterdijk
99b754c	As a system of hybrid communicating vessels, the human interior consists of paradoxical or autogenous hollow bodies that are at once tight and leaky, that must alternate between the roles of container and content, and which simultaneously have properties of inner and outer walls.		philosophy	Peter Sloterdijk
7df9ae6	It is often said that we live in a youth culture. It's a lie. We live in an old culture. We idolize youth because we are old. We are tired and bored. Ancient cultures respected the old because those cultures were young. They were not bored.		youth philosophy culture	Peter Kreeft
0a641dc	"Zabuna o odnosu izmedu poimanja osobe i covjeka moze uzrokovati golemu stetu. Americki Vrhovni sud dvaput je pokazao da mu je prijeko potrebna lekcija iz filozofije jer ne shvaca da ljudska bica spadaju pod osobe, a ne obrnuto, da su ljudska bica osobe te kao takve posjeduju temeljna ljudska prava. Dred Scott proglasio je crnce nepotpunim osobama opravdavsi tako ropstvo i provodeci povratak odbjeglih robova kao da se radi o vlasnistvu, a ne o osobama. Time im je oduzeo drugo temeljno ljudsko pravo, pravo na slobodu. Jedno stoljece kasnije slucaj oduzeo je nerodenoj djeci prvo osnovno pravo svake osobe, pravo na zivot. Ovo se temelji na filozofiji koja je zapravo identicna nacistickoj: drzava uzima sebi moc da proglasi jednu vrstu ljudskih bica ne-osobama [bilo crnce, bilo Zidove, bilo nerodene]. Osim sto je rijec o prestrasnu moralu, radi se i o jako losoj logici. Naime, smatra "osobe" uzom kategorijom od "ljudskih bica". Postojanje andela pokazuje da se zapravo radi o visoj kategoriji."		christianity philosophy pro-life unborn-child	Peter Kreeft
65f6538	The spaces that humans allow to contain them have their own history - albeit a history that has never been told, and whose heroes are eo ipso not humans themselves, but rather the topoi and spheres as whose function humans flourish, and from which they fall if their unfolding fails.		philosophy topoi	Peter Sloterdijk
fa91c91	If we're only going to eat the prime cuts of young animals, we're going to have to raise & kill a great many more of them. And indeed, this has become the rule with disastrous results for both the animals & the land... If we are going to eat animals, it behooves us to waste as few and as little as we possibly can. Something that the humble cook-pot allows us to do.		philosophy ethics food	Michael Pollan
1dcdd83	She wasn't sure what she wanted to do, except that she knew that if she fooled around for long enough, without fretting, or nagging herself, she'd find out.		life-lessons philosophy mary-malone knowledge	Philip Pullman
fa66d2a	Science and philosophy have for centuries been sustained by unquestioning faith in perception. Perception opens a window on to things. This means that it is directed, quasi-teleologically, towards a truth in itself in which the reason underlying all appearances is to be found. The tacit thesis of perception is that at every instant experience can be co-ordinated with that of the previous instant and that of the following, and my perspective with that of other consciousnesses--that all contradictions can be removed, that monadic and intersubjective experience is one unbroken text--that what is now indeterminate for me could become determinate for a more complete knowledge, which is as it were realized in advance in the thing, or rather which is the thing itself. Science has first been merely the sequel or amplification of the process which constitutes perceived things. Just as the thing is the invariant of all sensory fields and of all individual perceptual fields, so the scientific concept is the means of fixing and objectifying phenomena. Science defined a theoretical state of bodies not subject to the action of any force, and ipso facto defined force, reconstituting with the aid of these ideal components the processes actually observed. It established statistically the chemical properties of pure bodies, deducing from these those of empirical bodies, and seeming thus to hold the plan of creation or in any case to have found a reason immanent in the world. The notion of geometrical space, indifferent to its contents, that of pure movement which does not by itself affect the properties of the object, provided phenomena with a setting of inert existence in which each event could be related to physical conditions responsible for the changes occurring, and therefore contributed to this freezing of being which appeared to be the task of physics. In thus developing the concept of the thing, scientific knowledge was not aware that it was working on a presupposition. Precisely because perception, in its vital implications and prior to any theoretical thought, is presented as perception of a being, it was not considered necessary for reflection to undertake a genealogy of being, and it was therefore confined to seeking the conditions which make being possible. Even if one took account of the transformations of determinant consciousness, even if it were conceded that the constitution of the object is never completed, there was nothing to add to what science said of it; the natural object remained an ideal unity for us and, in the famous words of Lachelier, a network of general properties. It was no use denying any ontological value to the principles of science and leaving them with only a methodical value, for this reservation made no essential change as far as philosophy was concerned, since the sole conceivable being remained defined by scientific method. The living body, under these circumstances, could not escape the determinations which alone made the object into an object and without which it would have had no place in the system of experience. The value predicates which the reflecting judgment confers upon it had to be sustained, in being, by a foundation of physico-chemical properties. In ordinary experience we find a fittingness and a meaningful relationship between the gesture, the smile and the tone of a speaker. But this reciprocal relationship of expression which presents the human body as the outward manifestation of a certain manner of being-in-the-world, had, for mechanistic physiology, to be resolved into a series of causal relations.		philosophy phenomenology	Maurice Merleau-Ponty
44744da	At hun er i live er bra, men det er ikke det det handler om.		suicide philosophy suicide-attempt	Nick Hornby
9d85e1d	"Well," Harry said, "look at it this way: Suppose you were an intelligent bacterium floating in space, and you came upon one of our communication satellites, in orbit around the Earth. You would think, What a strange, alien object this is, let's explore it. Suppose you opened it up and crawled inside. You would find it very interesting in there, with lots of huge things to puzzle over. But eventually you might climb into one of the fuel cells, and the hydrogen would kill you.		misapprehension life-lessons intelligence philosophy	Michael Crichton
9d63c2f	In the end he wore me down. Always asking. And the answer I give him is still the only one I have. What do I want? Peace. And it actually shut him up. He didn't niggle me about it. It was like he got it straight off. I don't just want quiet, neither. I want peace.		philosophy peace	Tim Winton
ade43df	One contradiction of the human heart is this: God refuses to see any one person as unique in his or her relationship to Him, and yet we humans see each other as bottomless wells of creativity and uniqueness.		religion philosophy god-s-love philosophy-of-religion philosophy-of-life	Douglas Coupland
c51f8e8	How they Agree; how temp'ratly they Feed; How curiously they Build; how chastly Breed; How seriously their Bus'ness they intend; How stoutly they their Common-good defend; How timely their Provisions are provided; How orderly their Labors are divided; What Vertues patterns, and what grounds of Art; What Pleasures, and what Profits they impart; When these, with all those other things I mind Which in this Book, concerning Bees, I finde: Me thinkes, there is not half that worth in Mee, Which I have apprehended in a Bee. And that the Pismere, and these Hony-flies, Instruct us better to Philosophize, Than all those tedious Volumes, which, as yet, Are least unto us by meere Humane-wit. For, whereas those but only Rules doe give; These by Examples teach how to live.		nature philosophy	Charles Butler
83f29e8	Nothing in the Grimmerie on how to depose a tyrant - nothing useful... Nothing there that described why men and women could turn out so horrible. Or so wonderful - if that ever happens anymore.		philosophy	Gregory Maguire
5039ad9	Where have i=I read that at the end, when life, surface upon surface, has become completely encrusted with experience, you know everything, the secret, the power, and the glory, why you were born, why you are dying, and how it all could have been different? You are wise. But the greatest wisdom, at that moment, is knowing that your wisdom is too late. You understand everything when there is no longer anything to understand.		life philosophy wisdom	Umberto Eco
d202977	There is only one way to achieve lasting happiness. That is simply: Be happy.		philosophy zen-and-the-art-of-happiness philosophy-of-life	Chris Prentiss
26429f3	By changing how you perceive things and how you act upon those perceptions, you will change your life.		inspiration life philosophy inspirational non-12-step passages-ventura passages-malibu chris-prentiss quotes perception	Chris Prentiss
03bdeb2	"You can take the entire world of physics with all of its macrocosm and microcosm, its quantum mechanics and nuclear physics and reduce it to one word: energy. It's all energy. Scientists say that if you can't measure it, weight it, or see it, it doesn't exist. Well, no one has ever seen energy. We can see its effects, but not "it."		philosophy passages-ventura metaphysics passages-malibu energy quotes	Chris Prentiss
18e6373	A strong personal philosophy does more than sustain us through the tragedies of life. It also stains us daily in everything we think and do. It gives us optimism and hope.		philosophy zen-and-the-art-of-happiness zen	Chris Prentiss
2de9d74	If you have experienced recurring situations in your life that are unpleasant, know that there is something you are supposed to be getting from those situations that you have not been getting and that the moment you get it, those situations will pass out of your life, not to return.		philosophy life-improvement passages-malibu chris-prentiss philosophy-of-life self-improvement self-help	Chris Prentiss
47d87e9	In 1935, when there were no other programs, the founders of AA, Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith, stepped up to the plate and took action to help a crippled population. All credit for the establishment of their wonderful, life-saving group goes to them and to those who came after them who have continued the tradition. However, there are not among the estimated two or three million who attend twelve-step meetings.		change philosophy 12-steps passages-malibu addiction-treatment addiction-treatment-center alcohol-abuse chris-prentiss drug-abuse twelve-step change-the-world tradition	Chris Prentiss
a20e3dc	The occurrence of a highly improbable event is the equivalent of the nonoccurrence of a highly probable one		philosophy	Nassim Nicholas Taleb
a8cd439	Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.		philosophy perspective	Rebecca Goldstein
edf6aeb	Un genio conversa con otro genio cara a cara, lo que no solo supone una alegria reciproca, sino tambien una dicha para el universo entero. Esa alegria existe y el universo existe tambien. El dia que los genios no se reconozcan unos a otros, el mundo se oscurecera y la Tierra dejara de dar vueltas sobre su eje		philosophy knolwedge	Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
02c2980	Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her, as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon out on a holiday.		philosophy	Louisa May Alcott
9579388	Men have special needs too: for example, a man generally needs a higher daily intake of calories than a woman. But this has never been though of as a sign of men's inferiority to women; if anything, it is a sign of strength and an entitlement to extra food.		politics philosophy	Jonathan Wolff
f711471	First mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. Than mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers. Finally mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers.		philosophy mountain river	Dan Millman

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