Arise Quotes - page 34
Lawrence was one of those beings whose pace of life was faster and more intense than what is normal. He was not in complete harmony with the normal. The fury of the Great War raised the pitch of life to the Lawrence standard. I have often wondered what would have happened to Lawrence if the Great War had continued for several more years. The earth trembled with the wrath of the warring nations. Everything was in motion. No one could say what was impossible. Lawrence might have realised Napoleon's young dream of conquering the East; he might have arrived in Constantinople in 1919 or 1920 with most of the tribes and races of Asia Minor and Arabia at his back. But the storm wind ceased as suddenly as it had arisen. The skies were clear; the bells of Armistice rang out. Mankind returned with indescribable relief to its long interrupted, fondly cherished ordinary life, and Lawrence was left once more moving alone on a different plane and at a different speed.
T. E. Lawrence
The law of habit exhibits a striking contrast to all physical laws in the character of its commands. A physical law is absolute. What it requires is an exact relation. Thus, a physical force introduces into a motion a component motion to be combined with the rest by the parallelogram of forces; but the component motion must actually take place exactly as required by the law of force. On the other hand, no exact conformity is required by the mental law. Nay, exact conformity would be in downright conflict with the law ; since it would instantly crystallise thought and prevent all further formation of habit. The law of mind only makes a given feeling more likely to arise. It thus resembles the "non-conservative" forces of physics, such as viscosity and the like, which are due to statistical uniformities in the chance encounters of trillions of molecules.
Charles Sanders Peirce
There is no doubt that all nations are aggressive; it is the nature of man. There start up from time to time between countries antagonistic passions and questions of conflicting interest, which, if not properly dealt with, would terminate in the explosion of war. Now, if one country is led to think that another country, with which such questions might arise, is from fear disposed on every occasion tamely to submit to any amount of indignity, that is an encouragement to hostile conduct and to extreme proceedings which lead to conflict. It may be depended on that there is no better security for peace between nations than the conviction that each must respect the other, that each is capable of defending itself, and that no insult or injury committed by the one against the other would pass unresented.
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
It makes a big difference whether you give something back or pay it off...
The framers of the laws instituted festivals, in order that men should be publicly compelled to gaiety, as a necessary temperance for labors; We remember the great orator Pollio Asinius, who was not detained by anything beyond the tenth hour: he did not even need letters for an hour after that, so that no new concern arose, but he put the fatigue of the whole day in those two hours. Some joined in the middle of the day and put off some lighter work in the afternoon hours. Our elders also forbade a new report to be made in the senate after ten o'clock. The army divided the vigils, and the night was safe from the return of the expedition.
Seneca
I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature; and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and, like the grave, cries, "Give, give!” The great fish swallow up the small; and he who is most strenuous for the rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the prerogatives of government. You tell me of degrees of perfection to which human nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances.
Abigail Adams
The book is nowhere a call to leave the world, but everywhere an interpretation of common life as the path to that which lies beyond. "Better for a man is his own duty, however, badly done than the duty of another, though that be easy. "Holding gain and loss as one, prepare for battle." That the man who throws away his weapons, and permits himself to be slain, unresisting in the battle, is not the hero of religion, but a sluggard and a coward; that the true seer is he who carries his vision into action, regardless of the consequences to himself; this is the doctrine of the "Gita" repeated again and again....Not the withdrawn, but the transfigured life, radiant, with power and energy, triumphant in its selflessness, is religion. "Arise!" thunders the voice of Sri Krishna, "and be thou an apparent cause!"
Sister Nivedita
Campaigning at a school in Enfield in 2001, Tony Blair was caught unawares by a feisty British Asian sixth-former. Suddenly this apparition arose before him, demolishing Blair's points as speedily as he tried to make them. This time around the New Labour machine haven't wanted to risk any of that. The Emperor has been ferried from Potemkin village to Potemkin hospital, and before he arrives a rigged rent-a-crowd of "ordinary people" are brought in to wave little flags. Journalists have been "embedded" - undoubtedly the cadres were hoping that these trusties would begin to sympathise with the man upon whom their jobs depended [and] they'd cease to notice how much of what he said was utter shit.
Will Self
A sense of community seems to arise out of the word. Well, that's true. I believe that. I think that's one of the reasons that communities of poetry, and I don't just mean communities of poets, but everywhere in this country communities of poetry-of people reading poetry, listening to poetry, coming together around poetry-are becoming so widespread. It's as if this gathering around the word occurs in response to worsening conditions.
Adrienne Rich
The illusion of free will... is itself an illusion. There is no illusion of free will. Thoughts and intentions simply arise. What else could they do? Now, some of you might think this sounds depressing, but it's actually incredibly freeing to see life this way. It does take something away from life: what it takes away from life is an egocentric view of life. We're not truly separate: we are linked to one another, we are linked to the world, we are linked to our past, and to history. And what we do actually matters because of that linkage, because of the permeability, because of the fact that we can't be the true locus of responsibility. That's what makes it all matter.
Sam Harris
His conflict with the Catholic Church arose because deep in his heart Galileo was a believer. There was for him no path of compromise, no way to have separate secular and theological cosmologies. If the Copernican system was true as he believed, what else could Galileo do but fight with every weapon he had in his arsenal... to make his Church accept a new system of the universe. ...In the contrast between Galileo's heroic stand when he tried to reform the cosmological basis of orthodox theology and his humbled, kneeling surrender when he disavowed his Copernicanism, we may sense the tremendous forces attendant on the birth of modern science.
Galileo Galilei
The broader ontology typically associated with atheism is naturalism-there is only one world, the natural world, exhibiting patterns we call the "laws of nature,” and which is discoverable by the methods of science and empirical investigation. There is no separate realm of the supernatural, spiritual, or divine; nor is there any cosmic teleology or transcendent purpose inherent in the nature of the universe or in human life. "Life” and "consciousness” do not denote essences distinct from matter; they are ways of talking about phenomena that emerge from the interplay of extraordinarily complex systems. Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything outside ourselves. Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless web.
Sean M. Carroll
Though they be
Ill rulers of this household, be not thou
Too swift to strike ere time be ripe to strike,
Nor then by darkling stroke, against them: I
Have erred, who thought by wrong to vanquish wrong,
To smite by violence violence, and by night
Put out the power of darkness: time shall bring
A better way than mine, if God's will be -
As how should God's will be not? - to redeem
Venice. I was not worthy - nor may man,
Till one as Christ shall come again, be found
Worthy to think, speak, strike, foresee, foretell,
The thought, the word, the stroke, the dawn, the day,
That verily and indeed shall bid the dead
Live, and this old dear land of all men's love
Arise and shine for ever: but if Christ
Came, haply such an one may come, and do
With hands and heart as pure as his a work
That priests themselves may mar not.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
In the second part of the Phaedrus Plato attempts to clarify the nature of "true” rhetoric. ... it does not arise from a posterior unity which presupposes the duality of ratio and passio, but illuminates and influences the passions through its original, imaginative characters. Thus philosophy is not a posterior synthesis of pathos and logos but the original unity of the two under the power of the original archai. Plato sees true rhetoric as psychology which can fulfill its truly "moving” function only if it masters original images [eide]. Thus the true philosophy is rhetoric, and the true rhetoric is philosophy, a philosophy which does not need an "external” rhetoric to convince, and a rhetoric that does not need an "external” content of verity.
Ernesto Grassi
I chanced recently to be glancing over ... a book on Japanese Buddhism, and I read among other things that several centuries ago there was a sect of Japanese Buddhism known as the Way of Hardships, and that shortly after there arose another sect known as the Easy Way which at once gained great popularity and tended to supplant the Way of Hardships. But the Japanese Way of Hardships is itself an easy way if one compares it with the original way of Buddha. One can follow indeed very clearly the process by which Buddhist doctrine descended gradually from the austere and almost inaccessible height on which it had been placed by its founder to the level of the prayer mill.
Irving Babbitt
It seems to me, upon the whole matter, that to save or redeem a nation under such circumstances from perdition, nothing less is necessary than some great, some extraordinary conjuncture of ill fortune, or of good, which may purge, yet so as by fire. Distress from abroad, bankruptcy at home, and other circumstances of like nature and tendency, may beget universal confusion. Out of confusion order may arise: but it may be the order of a wicked tyranny, instead of the order of a just monarchy. Either may happen: and such an alternative, at the disposition of fortune, is sufficient to make a stoic tremble! We may be saved indeed by means of a very different kind; but these means will not offer themselves, this way of salvation will not be opened to us, without the concurrence, and the influence of a P.
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
