When it shall be desired to enlighten man, let him always have truth laid before him. Instead of kindling his imagination by the idea of those pretended goods that a future state has in reserve for him, let him be solaced, let him be succoured; or, at least, let him be permitted to enjoy the fruit of his labour; let not his substance be ravaged from him by cruel imposts; let him not be discouraged from work, by finding all his labour inadequate to support his existence, let him not be driven into that idleness that will surely lead him on to crime: let him consider his present existence, without carrying his views to that which may attend him after his death: let his industry be excited; let his talents be rewarded; let him be rendered active, laborious, beneficent, and virtuous, in the world he inhabits; let it be shown to him that his actions are capable of having an influence over his fellow men, but not on those imaginary beings located in an ideal world.
We like to romanticize the wild, raw, majestic beauty of nature. But when you take a closer look, nature is really just a giant fuckfest. That beautiful bird chirping? It's a mating call. That pretty little bird is trying to get laid. And why does the peacock have such beautiful feathers? To attract females. Because he's trying to get laid.
You want to find out a mode of renunciation that will be an escape from pain. I tell you again, there is no such escape possible except by perverting or mutilating one's nature. What would become of me, if I tried to escape pain? Scorn and cynicism would be my only opium; unless I could fall into some kind of conceited madness, and fancy myself a favourite of Heaven because I am not a favourite with men.
Only about 3 percent of animal species are monogamous. A couple of penguins, some otters and a few other oddball critters. To these select few it comes natural to mate for life and never look at another member of the opposite sex. Humans are not part of that little club. Like the other 97% of species, humans are not monogamous by nature. We just pretend that we are.
When she thinks of the toxins built up inside of her from so many years of eating carelessly, of the resentment that has grown steadily over fifteen years of marriage, of the stretch marks and the varicose veins that came from two pregnancies, only one of them fulfilled, she thinks the inside of her body must tell a story like a tree. Were she to break open a bone, perhaps it would look like the inside of a coffee mug - riddled with lines, stained with brown blotches.
If you observe nature daily, it brings harmony with you and God.
There are all degrees of proficiency in the use men make of this instructive world where we are boarded and schooled and apprenticed. It is sufficient to our present purpose to indicate three degrees of progress.One class lives to the utility of the symbol, as the majority of men do, regarding health and wealth as the chief good. Another class live about this mark to the beauty of the symbol; as the poet and artist and the sensual school in philosophy. A third class live above the beauty of the symbol to the beauty of the thing signified and these are wise men. The first class have common sense; the second, taste; and the third spiritual perception.I see in society the neophytes of all these classes, the class especially of young men who in their best knowledge of the sign have a misgiving that there is yet an unattained substance and they grope and sigh and aspire long in dissatisfaction, the sand-blind adorers of the symbol meantime chirping and scoffing and trampling them down. I see moreover that the perfect man - one to a millennium - if so many, traverses the whole scale and sees and enjoys the symbol solidly; then also has a clear eye for its beauty; and lastly wears it lightly as a robe which he can easily throw off, for he sees the reality and divine splendor of the inmost nature bursting through each chink and cranny.
And sometimes if I wantTo imagine I’m a lamb(Or a whole flockSpreading out all over the hillsideSo I can be a lot of happy things at the same time),It’s only because I feel what I write at sunset,Or when a cloud passes its hand over the lightAnd silence runs over the grass outside.When I sit and write poemsOr, walking along the roads or pathways,I write poems on the paper in my thoughts,I feel a staff in my handAnd see my silhouetteOn top of a knoll,Looking after my flock and seeing my ideas,Or looking after my ideas and seeing my flock,With a silly smile like someone who doesn’t understand what somebody’s sayingBut tries to pretend they do.
I have been studying for forty years, which is to say forty wasted years; I teach others yet am ignorant of everything; this state of affairs fills my soul with so much humiliation and disgust that my life is intolerable. I was born in Time, I live in Time, and do not know what Time is. I find myself at a point between two eternities, as our wise men say, yet I have no conception of eternity. I am composed of matter, I think, but have never been able to discover what produces thought. I do not know whether or not I think with my head the same way that I hold things with my hands. Not only is the origin of my thought unknown to me, but the origin of my movements is equally hidden: I do not know why I exist. Yet every day people ask me questions on all these issues. I must give answers, yet have nothing worth saying, so I talk a great deal, and am confused and ashamed of myself afterwards for having spoken.
If you could have confidence in nature you would not have to fear. It would keep you up. Creative is nature. Rapid. Lavish. Inspirational. It shapes leaves. It rolls the waters of the earth. Man is the chief of this. All creations are his just inheritance. You don't know what you've got within you. A person either creates or he destroys. There is no neutrality.
I find it very sad that by the time corporate science realizes the value of nature, that it may be too late
If this were so; if the desert were 'home'; if our instincts were forged in the desert; to survive the rigours of the desert - then it is easier to understand why greener pastures pall on us; why possessions exhaust us, and why Pascal's imaginary man found his comfortable lodgings a prison.
Even as to himself, a man cannot pretend to know what he is in himself from the knowledge he has by internal sensation. For as he does not as it were create himself, and does not come by the conception of himself a priori but empirically, it naturally follows that he can obtain his knowledge even of himself only by the inner sense, and consequently only through the appearances of his nature and the way in which his consciousness is affected. At the same time, beyond these characteristics of his own subject, made up of mere appearances, he must necessarily suppose something else as their basis, namely, his ego, whatever its characteristics in itself may be... Now man really finds in himself a faculty by which he distinguishes himself from everything else, even from himself as affected by objects, and that is reason. This being pure spontaneity is even elevated above the understanding. For although the latter is a spontaneity and does not, like sense, merely contain intuitions that arise when we are affected by things (and are therefore passive), yet it cannot produce from its activity any other conceptions than those which merely serve to bring the intuitions of sense under rules, and thereby to unite them in one consciousness, and without this use of the sensibility it could not think at all; whereas, on the contrary, reason shows so pure a spontaneity in the case of what I call "ideas" [Ideal Conceptions] that it thereby far transcends everything that the sensibility can give it, and exhibits its most important function in distinguishing the world of sense from that of understanding, and thereby prescribing the limits of the understanding itself.
Our obsession for success, recognition and supremacy in all circumstances without ever aware of the gravity of the situation and the subtle intricacies that impact the fabric of the society as a whole has made us more inhuman than humanly possible, as a result we have become more artificial, with not even an iota of LIFE throbbing within Us. Humanity as a whole has come to this juncture, wherein if we don't dare to accept and act on our vulnerabilities, our shortcomings in totality and to embrace failures in same breath as success as an integral part of life, then I fear we are creating a world of zombies!
There is something deeply awe-inspiring about the sight of any living creatures in incomputable numbers; it stirs, perhaps, some atavistic chord whose note belongs more properly to the distant days when we were a true part of the animal ecology; when the sight of another species in unthinkable hosts brought fears or hopes no longer applicable.
In moments of peace such as I experienced that day with Edal there exists some unritual reunion with the rest of creation without which the lives of many are trivial. 'Extinct' applies as much to an essential mental attitude as to the vanished creatures of the earth such as the Dodo. We can no longer await some scientific revelation to avoid the destruction of our species in this context; the evidence is all there, the writing on the wall. The way back cannot be the same for all of us, but for those like myself it means a descent of the rungs until we stand again amid the other creatures of the earth and share to some small extent their vision of it, even though this may be labelled Wordsworthian romanticism.
The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wile beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried out in the name of higher interests, according to established rules, and against a limited number of men of a particular type and belief....In a few minutes the business quarter, based on centuries of tradition, was wiped out. It is true that there had always been concealed enmities and jealousies and religious intolerance, coarseness and cruelty, but there had also been courage and fellowship and a feeling for measure and order, which restrained all these instincts within the limits of the supportable and, in the end, calmed them down and submitted them to the general interest of life in common. Men who had been leaders in the commercial quarter for forty years vanished overnight as if they had all died suddenly, together with the habits, customs and institutions which they represented.p. 11
The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried out in the name of higher interests, according to established rules, and against a limited number of men of a particular type and belief....In a few minutes the business quarter, based on centuries of tradition, was wiped out. It is true that there had always been concealed enmities and jealousies and religious intolerance, coarseness and cruelty, but there had also been courage and fellowship and a feeling for measure and order, which restrained all these instincts within the limits of the supportable and, in the end, calmed them down and submitted them to the general interest of life in common. Men who had been leaders in the commercial quarter for forty years vanished overnight as if they had all died suddenly, together with the habits, customs and institutions which they represented.p. 11
Man cannot cherish his existence any longer than life holds out charms to him: when he is wrought upon by painful sensations, or drawn by contrary impulsions, his natural tendency is deranged; he is under the necessity to follow a new route; this conducts him to his end, which it even displays to him as the most desirable good.