aberamentho > aberamentho's Quotes

“As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest on the dark earth.”
― Mircea Eliade

“Plato is fully convinced that philosophers cannot quietly retire from politics because they distain its rampant corruption. Philosophers will inevitably be victimized by unjust governments and perhaps martyred.”
― Jason Reza Jorjani, Lovers of Sophia

“We live among ruins in a World in which ‘god is dead’ as Nietzsche stated. The ideals of today are comfort, expediency, surface knowledge, disregard for one’s ancestral heritage and traditions, catering to the lowest standards of taste and intelligence, apotheosis of the pathetic, hoarding of material objects and possessions, disrespect for all that is inherently higher and better — in other words
a complete inversion of true values and ideals, the raising of the victory flag of ignorance and the banner of degeneracy. In such a time, social decadence is so widespread that it appears as a natural component of all political institutions. The crises that dominate the daily lives of our societies are part of a secret occult war to remove the support of spiritual and traditional values in order to turn man into a passive instrument of dark powers.

The common ground of both Capitalism and Socialism is a materialistic view of life and being. Materialism in its war with the Spirit has taken on many forms; some have promoted its goals with great subtlety, whilst others have done so with an alarming lack of subtlety, but all have added, in greater or lesser measure, to the growing misery of Mankind. The forms which have done the most damage in our time may be enumerated as: Freemasonry, Liberalism, Nihilism, Capitalism, Socialism, Marxism, Imperialism, Anarchism, Modernism and the New Age.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr

“If you are in favour of global liberal hegemony, you are the enemy.”
― Alexander Dugin

“Sooner or later the endless spectacle is over. Then we will take revenge; mercilessly.”
― Alexander Dugin

“[M]an cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short … there is nothing so intrinsically plausible as the theory of original sin.”
― Joseph de Maistre, The Executioner

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“The truth is that human senses come to their peak when spiritual insights are in motion. These senses open the door for such limitless observations and explorations that are generally dormant. Through these senses alone, a person could enter the hidden realm of millions of galaxies and countless stars and could encounter creatures that are otherwise considered non-existent such as angels or species of other planets. The most effective way of activating and enhancing the spiritual sense is Muraqaba (meditation).”
― Khwaja Shamsuddin Azeemi, MURAQABA: The Art and Science of Sufi Meditation

“Well, that's pretty much what the schools are like, I think: they reward discipline and obedience, and they punish independence of mind. If you happen to be a little innovative, or maybe you forgot to come to school one day because you were reading a book or something, that's a tragedy, that's a crime―because you're not supposed to think, you're supposed to obey, and just proceed through the material in whatever way they require.
And in fact, most of the people who make it through the education system and get into the elite universities are able to do it because they've been willing to obey a lot of stupid orders for years and years―that's the way I did it, for example. Like, you're told by some stupid teacher, "Do this," which you know makes no sense whatsoever, but you do it, and if you do it you get to the next rung, and then you obey the next order, and finally you work your way through and they give you your letters: an awful lot of education is like that, from the very beginning. Some people go along with it because they figure, "Okay, I'll do any stupid thing that asshole says because I want to get ahead"; others do it because they've just internalized the values―but after a while, those two things tend to get sort of blurred. But you do it, or else you're out: you ask too many questions and you're going to get in trouble.
Now, there are also people who don't go along-and they're called "behavior problems," or "unmotivated," or things like that. Well, you don't want to be too glib about it―there are children with behavior problems but a lot of them are just independent-minded, or don't like to conform, or just want to go their own way. And they get into trouble right from the very beginning, and are typically weeded out. I mean, I've taught young kids too, and the fact is there are always some who just don't take your word for it. And the very unfortunate tendency is to try to beat them down, because they're a pain in the neck. But what they ought to be is encouraged. Yeah: why take my word for it? Who the heck am I? Figure it out for yourself. That's what real education would be about, in fact.”
― Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

“Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietzsche.)
A vain person is always vain about something. He overestimates the importance of some quality or exaggerates the degree to which he possesses it, but the quality has some real importance and he does possess it to some degree. The fantasy of overestimation or exaggeration makes the vain person comic, but the fact that he cannot be vain about nothing makes his vanity a venial sin, because it is always open to correction by appeal to objective fact.

A proud person, on the other hand, is not proud of anything, he is proud, he exists proudly. Pride is neither comic nor venial, but the most mortal of all sins because, lacking any basis in concrete particulars, it is both incorrigible and absolute: one cannot be more or less proud, only proud or humble.

Thus, if a painter tries to portray the Seven Deadly Sins, his experience will furnish him readily enough with images symbolic of Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Anger, Avarice, and Envy, for all these are qualities of a person’s relations to others and the world, but no experience can provide an image of Pride, for the relation it qualifies is the subjective relation of a person to himself. In the seventh frame, therefore, the painter can only place, in lieu of a canvas, a mirror.”
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

“There is no reasonable, stable government save the aristocratic. Monarchy and republic, based on democracy, are equally weak and absurd. … There exist but three respectable beings: the priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create. Other men are serfs or slaves, created for the stable, that is, to exercise what are called professions.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Mon cœur mis à nu

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
― Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves

“Wisdom comes not from reason but from love.”
― André Gide, Autumn Leaves

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“When a man feels that he has a divine mission, say to lift up, to save or to liberate mankind‐‐when a man feels the divine spark in his heart and believes that he is the mouthpiece of supernatural imperatives‐‐ when such a mission in. flames him, it is only natural that he should stand beyond all merely reasonable standards of judgment. He feels that he is himself sanctified by this mission, that he is himself a type of a higher order! . . . What has a priest to do with philosophy! He stands far above it!‐‐And hitherto the priest has ruled!‐‐He has determined the meaning of "true" and "not true"!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.”
― Andre Breton, Nadja

“The being of God is being-itself. The being of God cannot be understood as the existence of a being alongside others or above others. If God is a being, he is subject to the categories of finitude, especially to space and substance. Even if he is called the “highest being” in the sense of the “most perfect” and the “most powerful” being, this situation is not changed. When applied to God, superlatives become diminutives. They place him on the level of other beings while elevating him above all of them. Many theologians who have used the term “highest being” have known better. Actually they have described the highest as the absolute, as that which is on a level qualitatively different from the level of any being - even the highest being. Whenever infinite or unconditional power and meaning are attributed to the highest being, it has ceased to be a being and has become being-itself. Many confusions in the doctrine of God and many apologetic weaknesses could be avoided if God were understood first of all as being-itself or as the ground of being. The power of being is another way of expressing the same thing in a circumscribing phrase. Ever since the time of Plato it has been known - although it often has been disregarded, especially by the nominalists and their modern followers - that the concept of being as being, or being-itself, points to the power inherent in everything, the power of resisting nonbeing. Therefore, instead of saying that God is first of all being-itself, it is possible to say that he is the power of being in everything and above everything, the infinite power of being.”
― Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol 1

“In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.”
― Kevin Alan Lee, The Split Mind: Schizophrenia from an Insider's Point of View

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“We never forget those who make us blush.”
― Jean-François de La Harpe

“The Worse, the Better.”
― Georgi Plekhanov

“All of those days that came and went - I didn’t realize those were life.”
― Stig Johansson

“possible topics around which the currents of speech may flow: Death and the danger of death: violence, fighting, sickness, fear, dreams, premonitions and communication with the dead. Sex and relations between the sexes: dating, courtship, proposals, marriage, breaking off relationships, affairs, intermarriage. Moral indignation: assignment and rejection of blame, unfairness, injustice, gossip, violations of social norms.”
― William Labov, The Language of Life and Death: The Transformation of Experience in Oral Narrative

“The world ultimately is what we say it is.”
― David Friedrich Strauss

“Science results from a profoundly social process. The common portrayal—that science emerges from a solitary isolated genius, always laboring alone, not owing anything to anyone—is simply wrong.”
― Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

“One has to kill a few of one’s natural selves to let the rest grow — a very painful slaughter of innocents.”
― Henry Sidgwick

“When dealing with a depression the problem is not to bring the depressed person back to his/her normality, to reintegrate behavior in the universal standards of normal social language. The goal is to change the focus of his/her depressive attention, to re-focalize, to deterritorialize the mind and the flow of expression. Depression is based on the stiffening of existential refrain, on the obsessive repetition of the stiffened refrain. The depressed person is unable to go out, to leave the repetitive refrain and s/he goes and goes again in the labyrinth. The goal of the schizoanalyst is to give him/her the possibility to see other landscapes, and to change the focus, to open some new ways of imagination.”
― Franco Bifo Berardi

“You can have anything you want... But not everything you want.”
― Fussell

“We are storytelling creatures, and as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.”
― Jerome Bruner