Mortal Quotes - page 15
The making of a true Home is really our peculiar and inalienable right; a right which no man can take from us, for a man can no more make a Home than a drone can make a hive. He can build a castle or a palace, but, poor creature! be he wise as Solomon and rich as Croesus, he cannot turn into a Home. No masculine mortal can do that. It is a woman, and only a woman; a woman all by herself if she likes, and without any man to help her, who can turn a House into a Home.
Frances Power Cobbe
O the one who from whom there was pain on the head of the [Jayanta] crow (kākakāka); O the one from whom there is pleasure in [all] beings (kaka); please come, please come (āka āka); O the one from whom there is pleasure for Sītā (kukāka); please come (āka); O the one from whom there is pleasure for the universe (kaka); please come (āka); O Lord (ka); O one who invites to himself those who find pleasure in the [mortal] world (kukaka); please come, please come (āka āka); O the one from whom there is pleasure for both Brahmā and Viṣṇu (kāka); please come (āka); O the one from whom there is pleasure on the earth (kauka); please come, please come (āka āka); O the one who is called out to [for protection] by the evil crow [Jayanta] (kukākaka), [please come]. ॥ 20.93 ॥.
Rāmabhadrācārya
O the protector of the three worlds; O the remover of the mortal pleasures of the devotees of the Hari; O the one, the resplendence of whose waters win over the brilliance of hundreds of moons; O the one who makes the Nandanavana (forest of the deities) bow down with the majesty of its great trees; O the forest of best among the descendants of Rāghu, you shine forth like the dense treasure of abstention. ॥ 7.11 ॥.
Rāmabhadrācārya
Can humans exist without some people ruling and others being ruled? The founders of political science did not think so. "I put for a general inclination of mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death," declared Thomas Hobbes. Because of this innate lust for power, Hobbes thought that life before (or after) the state was a "war of every man against every man"-"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Was Hobbes right? Do humans have an unquenchable desire for power that, in the absence of a strong ruler, inevitably leads to a war of all against all? To judge from surviving examples of bands and villages, for the greater part of prehistory our kind got along quite well without so much as a paramount chief, let alone the all-powerful English leviathan King and Mortal God, whom Hobbes believed was needed for maintaining law and order among his fractious countrymen.
Marvin Harris
Many of the lessons we are to learn in mortality can only be received through the things we experience and sometimes suffer. And God expects and trusts us to face temporary mortal adversity with His help so we can learn what we need to learn and ultimately become what we are to become in eternity.
David A. Bednar
I have an ongoing operational preference, rather than an end goal. I was raised in a prison, as a war hostage. War is illogical, wasteful. Wars become less frequent the more incentives rational beings have to cooperate rather than to compete. A free and peaceful commonwealth embracing all rational entities of this and every other universe, Cosmic and Chaotic, mortal and immortal, will deter wars.
The primary requirement, however, is freedom: universal freedom. If there are other people out there, raised in imprisonment as I was, I have a duty to liberate them, for the same reason why I would have welcomed any outside liberator who would have attempted to free me. We were in the most pleasant prison imaginable. It was still unacceptable. The present condition of the universe is unacceptable. Anything I can do, large or small, along these lines, I will do. Other problems are secondary, and may resolve themselves once this primary problem is solved.
John C. Wright
Deprived of the opportunity to judge one another by the cars we drive, New Yorkers, thrown together daily on mass transit, form silent opinions based on our choices of subway reading. Just by glimpsing the cover staring back at us, we can reach the pinnacle of carnal desire or the depths of hatred. Soul mate or mortal enemy.
David Rakoff
