Leaves Quotes - page 55
Ramakrishna possessed a deep aversion to formal learning and education. Learned persons were likened by him to kites and vultures, which soar to great heights in the sky but whose eyes are forever focused on the decaying carcasses below. They were also described as similar to foolish people in an orchard who count the leaves and fruit and argue to estimate their value instead of plucking and relishing the juicy fruit. Reason and the intellectual life received little attention or recognition in his teachings.
Anantanand Rambachan
It may fairly be said that no man is to be extolled for doing what he cannot help doing, nor is he to be thanked by the community to which he only leaves wealth at death. Men who leave vast sums in this way may fairly be thought men who would not have left it at all had they been able to take it with them. The memories of such cannot be held in grateful remembrance, for there is no grace in their gifts.
Andrew Carnegie
I wish someone would just start Fly At Your Own Risk Airlines. How 'bout that? You can have your hair gel, you can have your lighter, you can have a fucking gun, how bout that? You can show up at the gate five minutes before the plane leaves, and pay in cash, like in the good ol' 1980s. The ticket just says "shit happens" on the back, because that's the way it is anyway.
Bill Maher
Resignation as to knowledge of the world is for me not an irretrievable plunge into a scepticism which leaves us to drift about in life like a derelict vessel. I see in it that effort of honesty which we must venture to make in order to arrive at the serviceable world-view which hovers within sight. Every world-view which fails to start from resignation in regard to knowledge is artificial and a mere fabrication, for it rests upon an inadmissible interpretation of the universe.
Albert Schweitzer
We have learned to tolerate the facts of war: that men are killed en masse - some twenty million in the Second World War - that whole cities and their inhabitants are annihilated by the atomic bomb, that men are turned into living torches by incendiary bombs. We learn of these things from the radio or newspapers and we judge them according to whether they signify success for the group of peoples to which we belong, or for our enemies. When we do admit to ourselves that such acts are the results of inhuman conduct, our admission is accompanied by the thought that the very fact of war itself leaves us no option but to accept them. In resigning ourselves to our fate without a struggle, we are guilty of inhumanity.
Albert Schweitzer
Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.
John Stuart Mill
In fact, in the Prisoner's Dilemma, the strategy that works best depends directly on what strategy the other player is using and, in particular, on whether this strategy leaves room for the development of mutual cooperation. This principle is based on the weight of the next move relative to the current move being sufHciently large to make the future important.
Robert Axelrod
The nature of "reality" is something about which I'm still confused, which leaves open the possibility that there isn't any such thing. But Egan's Law still applies: "It all adds up to normality." Apples didn't stop falling when Einstein disproved Newton's theory of gravity. Sure, when the dust settles, it could turn out that apples don't exist, Earth doesn't exist, reality doesn't exist. But the nonexistent apples will still fall toward the nonexistent ground at a meaningless rate of 9.8 m/s2.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
But then to part! to part when Time
Has wreathed his tireless wing with flowers,
And spread the richness of a clime
Of fairy o'er this land of ours;
When glistening leaves and shaded streams
In the soft light of Autumn lay,
And, like the music of our dreams,
The viewless breezes seemed to stray-
'T was bitter then to rend the heart
With the sad thought that we must part;
And, like some low and mournful spell,
To whisper but one word-farewell!
Park Benjamin, Sr.
It's a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here's the trunk - it's red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here's the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain't blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What God have in mind, I wonder.
Toni Morrison
Forewarned, forearmed, is sheer nonsense. Who is so indefatigable a scribbler as your abundantly damned author? Which of our orators speak so long and so often as he whom nobody listens to? What actors are so constantly before the public as those whom the town will not go to see? Who so easy to deceive as the dupe who has been taken in all his days? The gamester is a legitimate child of that frail couple, Flesh and Blood; he loses a fourth of what he is worth at the first throw-esteems himself lucky if he loses less today than he did yesterday-goes on staking and forfeiting hour by hour-and parts with his last guinea by exactly the same turn of the dice which lost him his first. Experience leaves fools as foolish as ever.
Samuel Laman Blanchard
He who suffers time to slip away and does not grow in virtue the more one thinks about him the sadder one becomes. No man has a capacity for virtue who sacrifices honour for gain. Fortune is powerless to help one who does not exert himself. That man becomes happy who follows Christ. There is no perfect gift without great suffering. Our triumphs and our pomps pass away; gluttony and sloth and enervating luxury have banished every virtue from the world; so that as it were wandering from its course our nature is subdued by habit. Now and henceforth it is meet that you cure yourself of laziness. The Master has said that sitting on down or lying under the quilts will not bring thee to fame. He who without it has frittered life away leaves no more trace of himself upon the earth than smoke does in the air or the foam on the water.
Leonardo da Vinci
What needs my Shakespear for his honour'd Bones,
The labour of an age in piled Stones,
Or that his hallow'd reliques should be hid
Under a Star-ypointing Pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame,
What need'st thou such weak witnes of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thy self a live-long Monument.
For whilst to th' shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easie numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalu'd Book,
Those Delphick lines with deep impression took,
Then thou our fancy of it self bereaving...
John Milton
I see this war as an unjust, evil, and futile war. I preach to you today on the war in Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. "Ye shall know the truth," says Jesus, "and the truth shall set you free." Now, I've chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.
Martin Luther King Jr.
From the Desert I come to thee
On a stallion shod with fire;
And the winds are left behind
In the speed of my desire.
Under thy window I stand,
And the midnight hears my cry:
I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!
Bayard Taylor
How fevered is the man who cannot look
Upon his mortal days with temperate blood,
Who vexes all the leaves of his life's book,
And robs his fair name of its maidenhood;
It is as if the rose should pluck herself,
Or the ripe plum finger its misty bloom,
As if a Naiad, like a meddling elf,
Should darken her pure grot with muddy gloom;..
John Keats
A philosophy without heart and a faith without intellect are abstractions from the true life of knowledge and faith. The man whom philosophy leaves cold, and the man whom real faith does not illuminate, may be assured that the fault lies in them, not in knowledge and faith. The former is still an alien to philosophy, the latter an alien to faith.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A philosophical essay leaves much to the reader, often saying too little for fear of saying too much; its attention is concentrated, but it does not stay to cross all the ts of the argument; its mood is cautious without being defensive; it is personal but never merely 'subjective'; it does not dissemble the conditionality of the conclusions it throws up and although it may enlighten it does not instruct. It is, in short, a well-considered intellectual adventure recollected in tranquility.
Michael Oakeshott
