Permanent Quotes - page 31
Moore's current focus is on exploring the nature of human experience. The 2016 book ‘Jerusalem' was his magnum opus, explaining the ideas of eternalism, a view of reality not as something moving through time from past through present and into the future, but as a simultaneous permanent reality.
"There is a persistent illusion of transience, that the shows that we used to love aren't on television anymore, you can't get those sweets that we used to enjoy when we were kids, that lovely building that we walked past every day, they pulled that down, our grandmothers, the people in the past who died, we'll never see them again,” he explained.
Alan Moore
I think that art is the commemoration of life in its variety. The novel, for instance, is "historic” in its embodiment in a specific place and time and its suggestion that there is meaning to our actions. Without the stillness, thoughtfulness and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture - no collective memory. As it is, in contemporary societies, where so much concentration is focused on social media, insatiable in its myriad, fleeting interests, the "stillness and thoughtfulness” of a more permanent art feels threatened.
Joyce Carol Oates
Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and Morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great Nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt, that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages, which might be lost by a steady adherence to it? Can it be, that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a Nation with its Virtue?
George Washington
Among many reasons which determine me to prefer monarchy to every form of government, this is a principal one. When monarchy is the essential form, it may be more easily and more usefully tempered with aristocracy or democracy, or both, than either of them, when they are the essential forms, can be tempered with monarchy. It seems to me, that the introduction of a real permanent monarchical power, or any thing more than the pageantry of it, into either of these, must destroy them and extinguish them, as a great light extinguishes a less. Where it may easily be shewn, and the true form of our government will demonstrate, without seeking any other example, that very considerable aristocratical and democratical powers may be grafted on a monarchical stock, without diminishing the lustre, or restraining the power and authority of the prince, enough to alter in any degree the essential form.
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
Unlike Lycurgus, Minos, Hammurabi, and Numa, he [Solon] made no claim that a god had given him these laws; this circumstance, too, revealed the temper of the age, the city, and the man. Invited to make himself a permanent dictator he refused, saying that dictatorship was "a very fair spot, but there was no way down from it.”.
Will Durant
Decadence, instability, disintegration, corruption, reversal of attitude, all that arises through the simple fact of one's going on existing without self-criticism, self-renewal, constant self-adaptation, without letting anything in one die, through the simple fact of gradually settling down in the vantage point one occupies, the good conscience one enjoys. Such is the permanent danger of all spiritual life. It is an inevitable deterioration which can only be overcome-and painfully at that-by a watchful mustering of strength-unless it be effortlessly vanquished by a wonderful gift of grace....Whence the necessity of paradox: or rather the perpetual flavor of paradox that truth has, when it is freshly expressed, for the man who clings to a truth when it is in the process of turning into a lie.
Henri de Lubac