Parish > Parish's Quotes

“The world is God because it is the source and preserver of meaning; because the creative advance of the world in its adventure is the supreme cause to be served; because even in our desecration of our space and time within it, the world is holy ground; and because it contains and yet enshrouds the ultimate mystery inherent within existence itself... The world in all the dimensions of its being is the basis for all our wonder, awe, and inquiry.”
― Bernard Loomer

“God is the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality.”
― Alfred North Whitehead

“The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Final answers are not to be trusted. We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.”
― Bernard Loomer

“Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem.”
― Thomas Szasz

“To desire and expect nothing for oneself – and to have profound sympathy for others – is genuine holiness.”
― Ivan Turgenev

“All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“A material thing is first of all “the only bridge of communication between two minds.” The bridge is a passage, but it is also distance maintained. The materiality of the book keeps two minds at an equal distance, whereas explication is the annihilation of one mind by another.”
― Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation

“So far from realizing philosophy, the spectacle philosophizes reality, and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The power to homogenize is the heavy artillery that has battered down all Chinese walls.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Tourism is the chance to go and see what has been made trite… the same modernization that has deprived travel of its temporal aspect has likewise deprived it of the reality of space.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”
― Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

“There is a patience of the wild – dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays