To come to grips with glamour, humanity must recognize its mechanism, by which means the central heresy - that we are separate - is created and maintained. All that tends to reinforce the sense of separateness is the result of the action of glamour, and all that seeks to undermine that heresy works for its destruction. Glamour resides in the notion that man's desires are real, that they have their own intrinsic validity and purpose, whereas, in truth, they are the cause of all unhappiness; no more real, no less transient, than the mirage of the desert.
Benjamin CremeRelated topics
action cause central desert destruction glamour heresy humanity intrinsic less mechanism mirage notion purpose real reinforce result sense separate transient truth validity whereas unhappiness means works separatenessRelated quotes
At a certain point I came to the conclusion that one of the murderous aspects of the AIDS crisis was that people were used to not talking about sexual experiences in detail. Gay sex for instance does not cause AIDS. There are certain acts that transmit a virus and there are certain other acts that don't transmit a virus. If you don't talk about what goes on in sexuality, so that you know what particular acts you're dealing with, then I think you're, possibly in an indirect way but never-the-less in a very real way, contributing to an atmosphere of ignorance which the result is people die.
Samuel R. Delany
How ironic. In order to avoid the "nutty" theory of inversion, Gaskell invented the even odder notion of stomachs turning into brains with new guts forming below. No wonder then, that later biologists cast a plague on both speculative houses and opted instead for the obvious alternative: arthropods and vertebrates do not share the same anatomical plan at all, but rather represent two separate evolutionary developments of similar complexity from a much simpler common ancestor that grew neither a discrete gut nor a central nerve cord.
Stephen Jay Gould
Never better than after the last four centuries of his history could a Western man understand that, while assuming the right to impose a radical separation of humanity and animality, while granting to one all that he denied the other, he initiated a vicious circle. The one boundary, constantly pushed back, would be used to separate men from other men and to claim-to the profit of ever smaller minorities-the privilege of a humanism, corrupted at birth by taking self-interest as its principle and its notion.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.
Shashi Tharoor
... poets are sensitive to the challenge 'What is the moral justification of poetry?' because they are conscious of the intrinsic goodness of poetry. Goody-goody humanitarian causes draw them easily into membership by making them wince at the notion of all the injustices prevalent in the world of physical consciousness. Let it be declared as clearly as possible that the goodness of poetry is not moral goodness, the goodness of temporal action, but the goodness of thought, the loving exercise of the will in the pursuit of truth.
Laura Riding
