Damasio > Damasio's Quotes

“To have Christian hope means to know about evil and yet to go to meet the future with confidence. The core of faith rests upon accepting being loved by God, and therefore to believe is to say Yes, not only to him, but to creation, to creatures, above all, to men, to try to see the image of God in each person and thereby to become a lover. That's not easy, but the basic Yes, the conviction that God has created men, that he stands behind them, that they aren't simply negative, gives love a reference point that enables it to ground hope on the basis of faith.”
― Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict

“The aim of all Christian education, moreover, is to train the believer in an adult faith that can make him a "new creation", capable of bearing witness in his surroundings to the Christian hope that inspires him.”
― Pope Benedict-XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis: On the Eucharist as the Source and Summit of the Church's Life and Mission

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“....a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable - books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from the outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And we we cease to grow, we begin to die.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

“The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

“The soul is healed by being with children.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“To love someone means to see them as God intended them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“You can be sincere and still be stupid.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Beauty will save the world.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there - that is living.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov