Veil Quotes - page 4
Everything that tends to make it difficult to distinguish youth from age is an act of civilization. The best-mannered age in history invented the wig - a homage rendered by hair to baldness. The effect of powder and rouge is to make young women like their grandmothers, and invalids like healthy people. Clever dressmaking establishments and beauty shops create fashions which make it possible for elderly women to keep hoping. After a certain age, the art of dressing consists of hiding one's shortcomings, and this is another form of politeness. The veil is a marvelous invention for confusing the image and giving its wearers the semblance of beauty. All adornments are veils: they conceal the ravages of time as well as may be.
André Maurois
The member of a culture ... purposely avoids the relationship of intimacy; he wants the object somehow depicted and fictionalized. ... He is embarrassed when this is taken out of its context of proper sentiments and presented bare, for he feels that this is a reintrusion of that world which his whole conscious effort has sought to banish. Forms and conventions are the ladder of ascent. And hence the speechlessness of the man of culture when he beholds the barbarian tearing aside some veil which is half adornment, half concealment.
Richard Weaver
Whereas religious prayers sing of peace and harmony, religion has divided human beings through an atrocious history of enmity and bloodshed. Yet, behind the veil of superficiality and hypocrisy, I always believed in the inherent beauty of God that lies at the essence of all true spiritual paths.
Radhanath Swami
I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized that (in) our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.
Chelsea Manning
In the American civil war partisanship with the sides there was the veil of a kind of civil war here. An unspoken instinct revealed to mutually hostile classes in England that their battle also was being fought in the contest between the free North and the slave-holding South. The triumph of the North, as has been often remarked, was the force that made English liberalism powerful enough to enfranchise the workmen, depose official Christianity in Ireland, and deal a first blow at the landlords.
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn
Cause, Principle, and One eternal
From whom being, life, and movement are suspended,
And which extends itself in length, breadth, and depth,
To whatever is in Heaven, on Earth, and Hell;
With sense, with reason, with mind, I discern,
That there is no act, measure, nor calculation, which can comprehend
That force, that vastness and that number,
Which exceeds whatever is inferior, middle, and highest;
Blind error, avaricious time, adverse fortune,
Deaf envy, vile madness, jealous iniquity,
Crude heart, perverse spirit, insane audacity,
Will not be sufficient to obscure the air for me,
Will not place the veil before my eyes,
Will never bring it about that I shall not
Contemplate my beautiful Sun.
Giordano Bruno
