Disposition Quotes - page 11
Of these the first is "melting," which is opposed to freezing. For things that are frozen, are closely bound together, so as to be hard to pierce. But it belongs to love that the appetite is fitted to receive the good which is loved, inasmuch as the object loved is in the lover...Consequently the freezing or hardening of the heart is a disposition incompatible with love: while melting denotes a softening of the heart, whereby the heart shows itself to be ready for the entrance of the beloved.
Thomas Aquinas
We regarded opium as a godsend. It did not develop into an illicit trade, though. There was no legal prohibition, no police running around trying to suppress drugs, driving up the price artificially, and no marketing system. There were no distant markets to send it to because shipping anything was slow at best and often unreliable, and travel was something you just didn't do anymore. Anybody could grow their own poppies or buy raw opium paste from one of the growers. Farmers made more money growing raspberries or asparagus. They grew poppies as a public service. A few people took to smoking opium, but those with an extremely apathetic attitude toward survival tended not to last long in the new disposition of things.
James Howard Kunstler
Yet, when we must put aside our wrath, quench our envy, soften our anger, offer our prayers, and show a disposition which is reasonable, mild, kindly, and loving, how could poverty stand in our way? For we accomplish these things not by spending money but by making the correct choice.
John Chrysostom
Through repentance the filth of our foul actions is washed away. After this, we participate in the Holy Spirit, not automatically, but according to the faith, humility and inner disposition of the repentance in which our soul is engaged. For this reason it is good to repent each day as the act of repentance is unending.
Symeon the New Theologian
Hamilton was not only an Irishman, but Irish: and this with curious oppositions of character. He was a non-combatant: there was too much kindness in his disposition to allow any fight to show itself. Impulsive and enthusiastic, with strong opinions and new views, he was never engaged in a scientific controversy... William Rowan Hamilton's preservative was his dread of wounding the feelings of others. In his youth, "Defender of the Absent" was his nickname. ...He had a morbid fear of being a plagiarist; and the letters which he wrote to those who had treated like subjects with himself sometimes contained curious and far-fetched misgivings about his own priority. But, with all this, there was a touch of the national temperament in him... an Irishman who never gets into a row may give quick but quiet symptoms of opposition of opinion, and of what, were it more than a rudiment, would be called pugnacity.
William Rowan Hamilton
The motor rule. In its beginnings the motor rule merges into habit. During the first few months of an infant's life, its manner of taking the breast, of laying its head on the pillow, etc., becomes crystallized into imperative habits. This is why education must begin in the cradle. To accustom the infant to get out of its own difficulties or to calm it by rocking it may be to lay the foundations of a good or of a bad disposition.
But not every habit will give rise to the knowledge of a rule. The habit must first be frustrated, and the ensuing conflict must lead to an active search for the habitual. Above all, the particular succession must be perceived as regular, i.e. there must be judgment or consciousness of regularity (Regelbewusstseiri). The motor rule is therefore the result of a feeling of repetition which arises out of the ritualization of schemas of motor adaptation.
Jean Piaget
The believers in the non-natural character of sudden conversion have had practically to admit that there is no unmistakable class-mark distinctive of all true converts. The super-normal incidents, such as voices and visions and overpowering impressions of the meaning of suddenly presented scripture texts, the melting emotions and tumultuous affections connected with the crisis of change, may all come by way of nature, or worse still, be counterfeited by Satan. The real witness of the spirit to the second birth is to be found only in the disposition of the genuine child of God, the permanently patient heart, the love of self eradicated. And this, it has to be admitted, is also found in those who pass no crisis, and may even be found outside of Christianity altogether.
William James
When one considers the sublime disposition underlying the tmly universal educatiOn (of traditional India) ... then what IS or has been called religion in Europe seems to us to be scarcely deserving of that name. And one feels compelled to advise those who Wish to witness religion to travel to India for that purpose ....
Friedrich Schlegel
[T]he establishment of freedom of trade and of a general disposition to remove from trade every possible restriction and every possible burden...has been the main agent in raising the commerce of the United Kingdom to that extraordinary position it has now attained. I apprehend that I am stating the matter very moderately if I put it thus, that in the course of the last 30 years our population has increased somewhere about 25 or 30 per cent., while our trade in the same period has increased in the ratio of certainly something not much under 400 per cent.
William Ewart Gladstone
Victimless crimes are the lifeline of the RIGHT virus. And there is a growing recognition, even in official quarters, that victimless crimes should be removed from the books or subject to minimal penalties. Those individuals who cannot or will not mind their business cling to the victimless-crime concept, equating drug use and private sexual behavior with robbery and murder. If the right to mind one's own business is recognized, the whole shit disposition is untenable and Hell hath no vociferous fury than an endangered parasite.
William S. Burroughs
Our enemies, who, I may parenthetically remark, are attempting to change their constitution, appear to have no notion that what we want is not so much a change of the form of the apparatus of government as a change in the hearts by which that government is to be directed and animated, and if we are to judge, and surely we may judge without unfairness, of a man's heart by what he does, I would ask you whether those who have made mankind pale with horror over their early barbarities and brutal excesses in Belgium show the least sign that four years of war has in any material respect improved their disposition. Brutes they were when they begun the war, and, as far as we can judge, brutes they remain at the present moment.
Arthur Balfour
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
George Washington
