Extraordinary Quotes - page 46
You know, the Cathars believed that the world was not created by God but by a demon who had stolen a few technological secrets from Him and made this world - which is why it doesn't work. I don't share this heresy. I'm too afraid! But I put it in a play called This Extraordinary Brothel, in which the protagonist doesn't talk at all. There is a revolution, everybody kills everybody else, and he doesn't understand. But at the very end, he speaks for the first time. He points his finger towards the sky and shakes it at God, saying, "You rogue! You little rogue!” and he bursts out laughing. He understands that the world is an enormous farce, a canular played by God against man, and that he has to play God's game and laugh about it.
Eugène Ionesco
I do not practise religion in accordance with the sacred rites. I have made mysterious Nature my religion. I do not believe that a man is any nearer to God for being clad in priestly garments, nor that one place in a town is better adapted to meditation than another. When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvelous ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me. Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul. Around me are the trees stretching up their branches to the skies, the perfumed flowers gladdening the meadow, the gentle grass-carpetted earth, ... and my hands unconsciously assume an attitude of adoration. ... To feel the supreme and moving beauty of the spectacle to which Nature invites her ephemeral guests! ... that is what I call prayer.
Claude Debussy
With Goya we do not think of the studio or even of the artist at work. We think only of the event. Does this imply that 'The Third of May' is a kind of superior journalism, the record of an incident in which depth of focus is sacrificed to an immediate effect? I am ashamed to say that I once thought so; but the longer I look at this extraordinary picture and at Goya's other works, the more clearly I recognize that I was mistaken.
Francisco Goya
The "national interest" is not a geographical term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation. A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns. Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces, external or internal. That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary.
Irving Kristol
Publication by the New York Post two weeks ago of emails from Hunter Biden's laptop, relating to Vice President Joe Biden's work in Ukraine, and subsequent articles from other outlets concerning the Biden family's pursuit of business opportunities in China, provoked extraordinary efforts by a de facto union of media outlets, Silicon Valley giants and the intelligence community to suppress these stories.
Glenn Greenwald
All of these new materials, the authenticity of which has never been disputed by Hunter Biden or the Biden campaign, raise important questions about whether the former Vice President and current front-running presidential candidate was aware of efforts by his son to peddle influence with the Vice President for profit, and also whether the Vice President ever took actions in his official capacity with the intention, at least in part, of benefitting his son's business associates. But in the two weeks since the Post published its initial story, a union of the nation's most powerful entities, including its news media, have taken extraordinary steps to obscure and bury these questions rather than try to provide answers to them.
Glenn Greenwald
He [Jesus] could have been that [a healer and exorcist]--indeed, he could have been "the most extraordinary figure in ... the stream of Jewish charismatic healers," as the same New Testament scholar goes on to say--without attracting more than local attention. What made him outlive his time and place was the way he used the Spirit that coursed though him not just to heal individuals but -- this was his aspiration -- to heal humanity, beginning with his own people.
Huston Smith
It is, in my opinion, a most extraordinary, and, I hope and believe, unparalleled circumstance, that a man of eminence in the literary world should, in order to enhance the bulk and price of his writings, hazard his reputation upon, and descend to, or rather be guilty of, such low, such paltry, such dishonourable, and even dishonest artifices, as almost to deserve the name and punishment of a--SWINDLER.
Joseph Ritson
Wintons chronicle, I understand, is to be published early this winter. The editor is Mr. Macpherson, (not the Highland impostor); and I am assured that the utmost accuracy and integrity is to be manifested on the occasion: either of which, you know, is pretty extraordinary in a Scotchman. Indeed, I am apt to suspect the publishers abilities rather than his honesty: but he has got a very masterly assistant.
Joseph Ritson
Perhaps she would not have thought that evil was a state so rare, so extraordinary, so disorienting, and to which it was so restful to emigrate, if she had been able to discern in herself, as in everyone else, that indifference to the sufferings one causes which, whatever other names one gives it, is the terrible and lasting form assumed by cruelty.
Marcel Proust
To form a Transmission Meditation group, all you need is the intention and desire to serve, and two other people who agree to transmit with you. Of course, the more people the better, but three in itself is a group. The meditation used is simple, but it is the most dynamic I know. It requires no extraordinary expertise. It is a simple aligning meditation – the alignment of the physical brain and the soul by the act of holding the attention at the ajna centre (chakra) between the eyebrows.
Benjamin Creme
Transmission Meditation is really a combination of two yogas: Karma Yoga, the yoga of service, and Laya Yoga, the yoga of the chakras, the energies. This is the true yoga of the coming age. By taking part in Transmission Meditation, your evolution is propelled forward at an extraordinary rate, because of the potency of the spiritual energies sent through the chakras. The energies galvanize and activate the chakras as they pass through them. The Masters register the point in evolution of any individual by looking at the state of the chakras.
Benjamin Creme
To be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq. Thanks to the extraordinary sacrifices of our troops and the determination of our diplomats, we are hopeful about Iraq's future. But regime change there took eight years, thousands of American and Iraqi lives, and nearly a trillion dollars. That is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya.
Barack Obama
What is the "extraordinary"? It is the love of Jesus Christ himself, love that goes to the cross in suffering obedience. It is the cross. The peculiar feature of Christian life is precisely this cross, a cross enabling Christians to go beyond the world, as it were, thereby granting them victory over the world. Suffering encountered in the love of the one who is crucified - that is the "extraordinary" in Christian existence.
The Extraordinary is without doubt that visible element over which the Father in heaven is praised. It cannot remain hidden; people must see it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Nothing can stir the "depths" of mind, but total out-of-doors. We call "depth," last dregs, etc., that in man which only ultimate facts and happenings can interest; that which the near and usual can neither rouse nor ruffle. Somewhere in each man, we imagine, there lies an ultimatum, to be backed by all his energies from all reservoirs, ordinary and extraordinary,--what can elicit from any man such ultimatum and ultimatum-backing?--nothing that has not somewhere in it the word All! There are such things, we think, as ruling passions, "deepest desires," in any man some nameable or unnameable last ambition--what can set such a depth on fire?--nothing but some total opportunity (real or believed real), discovered in the wide world beyond the self.
William Ernest Hocking
Your Majesties, Your Highnesses, Distinguished Guests, Comrades and Friends. Today, all of us do, by our presence here, and by our celebrations in other parts of our country and the world, confer glory and hope to newborn liberty. Out of the experience of an extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long, must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud.
Nelson Mandela
When the happiness or misery of others depends in any respect upon our conduct, we dare not, as self–love might suggest to us, prefer the interest of one to that of many. The man within immediately calls to us, that we value ourselves too much and other people too little, and that, by doing so, we render ourselves the proper object of the contempt and indignation of our brethren. Neither is this sentiment confined to men of extraordinary magnanimity and virtue. It is deeply impressed upon every tolerably good soldier, who feels that he would become the scorn of his companions, if he could be supposed capable of shrinking from danger, or of hesitating, either to expose or to throw away his life, when the good of the service required it.
Adam Smith
Wal-Mart will not be able to profitably run its "warehouse on wheels” when the price of oil fluctuates chronically. [...] We will never again experience the explosion of products, choices, and nonstop marketing that characterized the... twentieth century. The public may look back on the big-box shopping era with deep and mournful nostalgia, but we are apt to discover that happiness is still possible without the extraordinary advertising-driven compulsive materialism of recent decades. We will still have commerce. We will have [a] trade. There will be shopping. We will have... medium of exchange. But we are not going to live in a perpetual blue-light special sale of cornucopian wretched excess.
James Howard Kunstler
These are extraordinary times. And we face an extraordinary challenge. Our strength as well as our convictions have imposed upon this nation the role of leader in freedom's cause. No role in history could be more difficult or more important. We stand for freedom. That is our conviction for ourselves--that is our only commitment to others. No friend, no neutral and no adversary should think otherwise. We are not against any man--or any nation--or any system--except as it is hostile to freedom. Nor am I here to present a new military doctrine, bearing any one name or aimed at any one area. I am here to promote the freedom doctrine.
John F. Kennedy
