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'The idea of ... empathy is an intellectual interpretation of the primary experience in which there is no room for any sort of dichotomy.' - Daisetsu T. Suzuki
'I have often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.' -Richard Nixon
"An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something, which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History
Walking along a mountain path in Japan, we come upon a rudimentary hermitage with a large temple bell suspended from a simple wooden pagoda. Unlike Western carillon bells, the Japanese bell has no clapper and is struck on the outside much as one might strike a gong....Admiring the excellence and obvious age of the engravings on the casting, we hear the footsteps of the temple priest and turn to ask, “How old is this extraordinary bell?”Touching his palm to the massive casting, he responds, “This is about five hundred years old, but” (removing his hand to point into the black void within the bell) “the emptiness within—that’s eternal”.. --Thomas P. Kasulis
I think it was themerchant who brought this quote to my attention, I love it:A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. -Max Planck (German Physicist)
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
"The sand in my boots was sacred sand because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and even touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground."
Quote from: sciborg2 on June 25, 2019, 09:51:35 pm'I have often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.' -Richard NixonI take it this one's a joke? It is quite funny
Spirit has not only lost its essential life; it is also conscious of this loss, and of the finitude that is its own content. Turning away from the husks, and confessing and cursing its sorry state, it now requires from philosophy, not so much knowledge of what it is, as philosophy’s help in establishing once more its substantiality and solidity of Being. Philosophy is supposed to meet this need, not by opening up the locked fastness of substance and raising this to self-consciousness, not by restoring its chaotic consciousness to the order of thought and the simplicity of the concept, but rather by blurring the distinctions of thought, by suppressing the differentiating concept and by establishing the feeling of the essence, providing edification rather than insight. The beautiful, the holy, the eternal, religion, and love are the bait required to arouse the desire to bite; not the concept, but ecstasy, not the cold advance of necessity in the Thing, but the ferment of enthusiasm, these are supposed to be what sustains and promotes the expansion of the wealth of substance.
In the case of all sciences, arts, skills, and crafts, people are convinced that a complex and laborious programme of learning and practice is necessary for competence. Yet when it comes to philosophy, it seems that the dominant prejudice is now that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and gets leather and a tool, is thereby in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately understands how to philosophize, and how to evaluate philosophy, since he possesses the yardstick for it in his natural reason—as if he did not equally possess the measure of a shoe in his own foot.—It seems that philosophical competence is made to consist precisely in lack of information and study, as though philosophy left off where they begin.
"There is much talk, and I have listened, through rock and metal and time. Now I shall talk, and you shall listen."
"Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure - that of being Salvador Dalí."
"I don't do drugs. I am drugs."
“The Hierarchic Qualm: The sword kills. But the arm moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath to duty, and that duty moves the mind, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless.”
Quote“The Hierarchic Qualm: The sword kills. But the arm moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath to duty, and that duty moves the mind, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless.”― Seth Dickinson, The Traitor Baru Cormorant
The hand dispensing salvific murder is absolved of responsibility for it is the expression of a common will, the sacrosanct will of the Just.
