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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| cf8cf81 | the true followers of Jesus imitated his kenosis. As the Christ Hymn had pointed out, Jesus had achieved his high status only by emptying himself and accepting death on a cross. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| eced9ff | THE PROPHET (570-632) During the month of Ramadan in 610 C.E., an Arab business-man had an experience that changed the history of the world. Every year at this time, Muhammad ibn Abdallah used to retire to a cave on the summit of Mount Hira, just outside Mecca in the Arabian Hijaz, where he prayed, fasted and gave alms to the poor. He had long been worried by what he perceived to be a crisis in Arab society. In recent decades his tribe, the.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 590bcab | They were weary of the chaos inflicted by the Roman-Persian wars and longed for the peace that only an autocratic empire seemed able to provide. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 7e6c8b2 | In the very earliest passages of the Talmud, God was experienced in mysterious physical phenomena. The Rabbis spoke about the Holy Spirit, which had brooded over creation and the building of the sanctuary, making its presence felt in a rushing wind or a blazing fire. Others heard it in the clanging of a bell or a sharp knocking sound. One day, for example, Rabbi Yohannan had been sitting discussing Ezekiel's vision of the chariot, when a fi.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 617f2e8 | This continues to be the case: the religion of compassion is followed only by a minority; most religious people are content with decorous worship in synagogue, church, temple and mosque. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 2bf6d91 | Today we have become so familiar with the intolerance that has unfortunately been a characteristic of monotheism that we may not appreciate that this hostility toward other gods was a new religious attitude. Paganism was an essentially tolerant faith: provided that old cults were not threatened by the arrival of a new deity, there was always room for another god alongside the traditional pantheon. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| bc71166 | Thomas Aquinas may have given the impression that God was just another item--albeit the highest--in the chain of being, but he had personally been convinced that these philosophical arguments bore no relation to the mystical God he had experienced in prayer. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century, leading theologians and churchmen continued to argue the existence of God on entirely rational grounds. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| be6b861 | In a theologian such as Lessius we can see that as Europe approached modernity, the theologians themselves were handing the future atheists the ammunition for their rejection of a God who had little religious value and who filled many people with fear rather than with hope and faith. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 9fee9a8 | philosopher Walter Benjamin put it: "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism." | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 54cee62 | The right to liberty was crucial: it is difficult to find a single reference to imprisonment in the whole of rabbinic literature, because only God can curtail the freedom of a human being. Spreading scandal about somebody was tantamount to denying the existence of God.104 Jews were not to think of God as a Big Brother, watching their every move from above; instead they were to cultivate a sense of God within each human being so that our dea.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| b262193 | Rudolf Otto, the German historian of religion who published his important book The Idea of the Holy in 1917, believed that this sense of the "numinous" was basic to religion. It preceded any desire to explain the origin of the world or find a basis for ethical behavior." | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 9676c76 | A veil was, as it were, suddenly stripped away from a reality that had been there all the time, but which we had not seen before. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 72dbe75 | Descartes's argument turns out to be a reworking of Anselm's Ontological Proof. When we doubt, the limitations and finite nature of the ego are revealed. Yet we could not arrive at the idea of "imperfection" if we did not have a prior conception of "perfection." Like Anselm, Descartes concluded that a perfection that did not exist would be a contradiction in terms." | Karen Armstrong | ||
| c0a86a4 | Our experience tells us that the world has objective reality and a perfect God, who must, be truthful, could not deceive us. Instead of using the world to prove the existence of God, therefore, Descartes had used the idea of God to give him faith in the reality of the world. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| b8fefaf | If the potential payoff is mediocre or average, so is your effort. | Timothy Ferriss | ||
| 7317326 | Unlike Descartes, who had proved the existence of the self, God and the natural world in that order, Newton began with an attempt to explain the physical universe, with God as an essential part of the system. In Newton's physics, nature was entirely passive: God was the sole source of activity. Thus, as in Aristotle, God was simply a continuation of the natural, physical order. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 2d237bd | Thus had been born the absurd type of apologetics that attempt to "prove" the veracity of the Bible by finding a rational explanation for the various miracles and myths. Jesus' feeding of the five thousand, for example, has been interpreted as his shaming people in the crowd to produce the picnics that they had surreptitiously brought with them and hand them around." | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 4fa3ea6 | Was not space itself somehow divine, possessing as it did the attributes of eternity and infinity? Was it a second divine entity, which had existed beside God from before the beginning of time? Newton had always been concerned about this problem. In the early essay De Gravitatione et Aequipondio Fluidorum, he had returned to the old Platonic doctrine of emanation. Since God is infinite, he must exist everywhere. Space is an effect of God's .. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 24a2e58 | Mozi believed that a policy could be called virtuous only if it enriched the poor, prevented pointless death, and contributed to public order. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 31be354 | It seems that when human beings contemplate the absolute, they have very similar ideas and experiences. The sense of presence, ecstasy and dread in the presence of a reality--called nirvana, the One, Brahman or God--seems to be a state of mind and a perception that are natural and endlessly sought by human beings. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| a9bea3d | The problem of predestination and free will, which has also exercised Christians, indicates a central difficulty in the idea of a personal God. An impersonal God, such as Brahman, can more easily be said to exist beyond "good" and "evil," which are regarded as masks of the inscrutable divinity. But a God who is in some mysterious way a person and who takes an active part in human history lays himself open to criticism. It is all too easy to.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| c72b4f6 | men and women were naturally prone to lie, steal, and murder, and these evil impulses could be forcibly held in check only by a strong, authoritative government. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 723747d | The God who may have inspired the first successful peasants' uprising in history is a God of revolution. In all three faiths, he has inspired an ideal of social justice, even though it has to be said that Jews, Christians and Muslims have often failed to live up to this ideal and have transformed him into the God of the status quo. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 6b372b5 | Elle Wiesel, premio Nobel, habia vivido solo para Dios durante su infancia en Hungria; su vida habia estado configurada por el Talmud y esperaba ser iniciado un dia en los misterios de la cabala. Cuando era nino lo llevaron a Auschwitz y, despues, a Buchenwald. Durante su primera noche en el campo de concentracion, al ver el humo negro que subia en espiral hacia el cielo desde el horno crematorio donde iban a meter los cuerpos de su madre y.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 0aeae1e | Calamities are only calamities if you define them as such; in reality there are only events and all events can be useful. | Janwillem van de Wetering | ||
| e58caed | A tree is a fantastic example of beauty, but who has time to look at a tree? | Janwillem van de Wetering | ||
| cbe3eb5 | Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground." -- Judith Thurman" | Penny Reid | ||
| fb4ad4b | Sidet' molcha -- eto sposob otoiti ot sebia, izolirovat' sebia, porvat' ne tol'ko s tem, chto tebia okruzhaet, no i s tem, chto prebyvaet v tvoem soznanii. | Janwillem van de Wetering | ||
| e027b26 | stradanie vyzvano zhelaniem -- zhelaniem obladat' i zhelaniem byt', zhelanie mozhno preodolet', zhelanie mozhno preodolet', praktikuia vos'merichnyi put'. | Janwillem van de Wetering | ||
| 9d3bfdb |
Chto net nichego, krome < |
Janwillem van de Wetering | ||
| 7d49ce3 | Greed is a fat demon with a small mouth and whatever you feed it is never enough." - Janwillem van de Wetering" | John W. Mefford | ||
| 7781c38 | Fate won't let us lose forever, for if it did, we would give up and there would be nothing for Fate to watch. You should have seen the aggressive exhibition on the dike today. Supermen in combat clothes firing their futuristic weapons. If I dared to tell my wife, she'd never let me out again. War in a galaxy of a parallel universe. A commander knocking off foreign peons without the slightest emotion. A machine-man, an inhuman computer. Auto.. | Janwillem van de Wetering | ||
| 0d8fea8 | Malo starat'sia izo vsekh sil, nuzhno, staraias' izo vsekh sil, ostavat'sia nepriviazannym k liubym svoim ustremleniiam. | Janwillem van de Wetering | ||
| 39ee07e |
Ia napisal starinnuiu kitaiskuiu poslovitsu, iz dzenskoi traditsii. < |
mindfulness | Janwillem van de Wetering | |
| 03d5db8 | It's like the songs small children sing. 'Shit and piss. And blood, and sperms and slime and vomit and pus and snot and sweat. | Janwillem van de Wetering | ||
| e4ad3f5 | It stops wandering about the world of sense and settles down in the world of intellect, and there it occupies itself, casting off falsehood and feeding the soul in what Plato calls 'the plain of truth,' using his method of division to distinguish the Forms, and to determine the essential nature of each thing, and to find the primary kinds, and weaving together by the intellect all that issues from these primary kinds, till it has traversed .. | A.H. Armstrong | ||
| ef02dbe | Como dijo una vez Mussolini 'La multitud no tiene que conocer; tiene que creer'. En referencia a la ecclesia fascista de creyentes y militantes, explicaba que 'es la fe lo que mueve montanas porque produce la ilusion de las montanas moviendose. La ilusion es, quizas, la unica realidad de la vida'. Lo que unia a los fascistas no era una doctrina sino una actitud, una experiencia en la fe, que se concretizaba en el mito de una nueva 'religion.. | Frances Stonor Saunders | ||
| 0f9a3ee | If I had something valuable, I'd keep it in my pocket where I could keep an eye on it," Michael said. "Sure," said Wendy. "With all the holes you have in your pockets, that would be a real safe place." | Carole Marsh | ||
| 723f78a | I I know where it is, she thought. Then she whipped around and said loudly, "But I need your help." Stacy blushed. She had said the words loud enough that everyone in the great room had turned to look at her. Quickly she ducked her head and sat down on the sofa with the others. "Help with what?" Michael asked, giggling. "Making a fool of yourself?" | Carole Marsh | ||
| be54cfd | Remember, there are a lot of things to be careful about, both here and at Biltmore House. You don't want to get into any trouble." Stacy figured she meant for them not to break anything like a valuable antique or some old person's leg, by running through the lobby." | Carole Marsh | ||
| 4292aad | This table once belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte," he said. "You mean the Napoleon we read about in our history book?" Staci asked. "The guy with his hand under his coat scratching his bellybutton?" Wendy added." | Carole Marsh | ||
| 690bb85 | There are two hidden doors in the paneling of the Billiard Room. But they're not really secret panels. They were just there for the men guests to go from the Billiard Room to the Smoking Room with ease." Secret doors so the men could sneak off and smoke? If she tried that, her mom would bowl her down the alley for sure, Stacy thought." | Carole Marsh | ||
| 5de1960 | Good grief," Michael said as he sat down in one of the 64 enormous upholstered chairs. "My feet don't even think about touching the floor." "This table is longer than the bowling alley," Trent said. He shielded his eyes with his hand and peered down the long wooden table as though he couldn't see the other end. "If you wanted someone to pass you the salt shaker it would take thirty minutes for it to get here," Wendy agreed." | Carole Marsh | ||
| 1c343f6 | My music is not modern, it is merely badly played | Arnold Schoenberg |