“But if I am wrong in thinking the human soul immortal, I am glad to be wrong; nor will I allow the mistake which gives me so much pleasure to be wrested from me as long as I live.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
“There is hope for every soul to know the spirit.”
— Lailah Gifty Akita
“The soul is beautiful and blissful.”
— Lailah Gifty Akita
“I am what I am; sacred soul, spirit and body.”
— Lailah Gifty Akita
“The soul identifies with the spirit.”
— Lailah Gifty Akita
“Ibn Rushd caressing her body had often praised its beauty to the point at which she grew irritated and said, You do not think my thoughts worth praising, then. He replied that the mind and body were one, the mind was the form of the human body, and as such was responsible for all the actions of the body, one of which was thought. To praise the body was to praise the mind that ruled it. Aristotle had said this and he agreed, and because of this it was hard for him, he whispered blasphemously in her ear, to believe that consciousness survived the body, for the mind was of the body and had no meaning without it. She did not want to argue with Aristotle and said nothing. Plato was different, he conceded. Plato thought the mind was trapped in the body like a bird and only when it could shed that cage would it soar and be free.”
— Salman Rushdie
“Of man there is little here: therefore do their women masculinize themselves. For only he who is man enough will save the woman in woman.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“The heretic is the one who speaks against the community from a place within its territory. He is the enemy within. The heathen, by contrast, is safely behind the walls, excluded by his own invincible arrogance.”
— Roger Scruton
“And why do you imagine that we bring people to this place?’ ‘To make them confess.’ ‘No, that is not the reason. Try again.’ ‘To punish them.’ ‘No!’ exclaimed O’Brien. His voice had changed extraordinarily, and his face had suddenly become both stern and animated. ‘No! Not merely to extract your confession, not to punish you. Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that?”
— George Orwell
“According to Kant’s late work on the Principles of Politics (1793), the irreducible problem of the human species is the following: the human being is an animal and thus, to live peacefully with other animals of its kind, absolutely needs a master.”
— Gregg Lambert
“Foretold by ancient seers and now by scientists, we are at the unprecedented historic and evolutionary crossroad. We have the capacity to transform ourselves spiritually and our civilisation materially or de-evolve into an Orwellian nightmare”
— Jonathan R. Banks
“For the soul, understand, is itself the whole world.”
— Edgar Maass
“Time is the skin of existence.”
— Renzo Dante (Saligiare)
“Living in a spiritual manner, exhibiting a joyous and mindful embrace of the manifold wonders of an earthy existence, enhances life. A person develops spirituality by spending solitary time thinking about the larger issues in life. Scripting a personal philosophy for conducting a person’s life is a spiritual testament. A spiritual person seeks a system of general truths that encoded statement transforms their character.”
— Kilroy J. Oldster
“So if you can look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in – at a face, a bird, the colour of a sari, the beauty of a sheet of water shimmering in the sun, or anything that gives delight – if you can look at it without wanting the experience to be repeated, then there will be no pain, no fear, and therefore tremendous joy. It is the struggle to repeat and perpetuate pleasure which turns it into pain. Watch it in yourself. The very demand for the repetition of pleasure brings about pain, because it is not the same, as it was yesterday. You struggle to achieve the same delight, not only to your aesthetic sense but the same inward quality of the mind, and you are hurt and disappointed because it is denied to you.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“I have little use for religion as it is practiced, or for astrology, or for belief in witchcraft or omens of good or ill-luck. I think they all stem from some insufficiency in men’s minds, perhaps from a lack of a willingness to feel themselves utterly alone. But now and then I feel that there is something beyond the material world, somethings we all feel intimations of but cannot explain. Underneath the religious vision there is the harsh fundamental reality of all our lives, because we know we must live and die as the animals we are. But sometimes I suspect that under that harsh reality there is a further vision, still deeper based, that comes nearer to true reality than the reality we know.”
— Winston Graham
“Nothing comes from nothing”
— Islam. A. Aly
“I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right.”
— Marge Piercy
“Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it’s clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn’t really philosophical to begin with.”
— Jerry A. Fodor
“We are the result of the universe attempting to understand itself”
— Ronald Mallett
“objectivity is subjective”
— Rick Julian
“Swimming the ocean a giant brain watches us.”
— Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
“The rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality.”
— Kim Stanley Robinson
“When our theories continually move us into more and more complicated explanations then, it is certain that we are moving in the wrong direction.”
— R.A.Delmonico
“Here then we see philosophy brought to a critical position, since it has to be firmly fixed, notwithstanding that it has nothing to support it in heaven or earth. Here it must show its purity as absolute director of its own laws, not the herald of those which are whispered to it by an implanted sense or who knows what tutelary nature. Although these may be better than nothing, yet they can never afford principles dictated by reason, which must have their source wholly a priori and thence their commanding authority, expecting everything from the supremacy of the the law and due respect for it, nothing from inclination, or else condemning the man to self-contempt and inward abhorrence.”
— Immanuel Kant
“In reality, there is no highway to success. Therefore, be prepared for difficulties.”
— Eraldo Banovac
“When a man tells you he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring he is an inexact man.”
— Bertrand Russell
“Religion without reason is merely an illusion of religion – it is a mockery of religion, like it has become today.”
— Abhijit Naskar
“You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgement, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite.”
— Marcus Aurelius