God loved the birds and invented the trees, men loved the birds and invented cages
Source: http://www.grinningplanet.com/environmental-quotes/funny-environmental-quotes.htm
God loved the birds and invented the trees, men loved the birds and invented cages
"It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all" is really the same thing as "A ship in the harbor is safe, but that is not what ships were built for" and "The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all". And they are all from the same point of view.
I believe that there are two types of people (along this line, anyway; there can be many different types in these two groups): Those who agree with these statements and those who do not.
Two major sub-groups on each side of the line are those who preach one philosophy and truly believe the other, and those who live the philosophy they preach. I have met many people who profess that it is better to have loved and lost, but truly believe that they would have rather never have loved. They would rather be cautious, not take the risk, not risk injury. But it is difficult to truly dive all the way in, even for the most commited to this philosophy.
The point is: don't be too hard on people who don't agree. It is just a different way to live. I believe that it is much more fullfilling and fun to drown than never to swim, but that is just for me.
Natura Deo Est!
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
Philosophy exists in profoundest opposition to rhetoric, which is speaking for the sake of producing or controlling some effect in others' perceptions. Philosophy is about the caustic or cauterizing effect of the truth, not the currying of sensibilities.
Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppression of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day
Right, wrong and truth are not absolutes...they're perspectives.
History is not made on the beads of an abacus. It is made in the minds of men.
One's philosophy is not best expressed in words;
it is expressed in the choices one makes.
In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves.
The process never ends until we die.
And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know.
God's love, never fails.
I need no warrant for being and no sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.
So successful has the ideological-political-cultural purge been executed that it is hard indeed to find vigorous liberals, and no energetic, coherent and cogent leftists at all can find expression in our controlled media and educational systems. Forget about wholesale culture- or civilization-critics like Marxists. Universities have to be purged of any "radicalism" that can see through to the roots of issues and pathologies, for the same reasons that workers have to have nascent unions aborted among them and contrarian newspapers and media have to be starved of advertising.
"Cynicism," like "heresy" and "heterodoxy" and "atheism" and "agnosticism" and "paganism" and "heathenism," is above all else a way for organized orthodoxy's caste of official censors to encyst and segregate and thus neutralize all contrarian forms of seeing and thinking, all (necessarily implicitly) prohibited and repressed ways of exercising disruptive and iconoclastic intuition and intellection (for to analyze and explain these things too openly is to give them publicity and potential cogency when the point is to asphyxiate them).
Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.
If something in me which can be called religious
then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure
of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
While our managers debated what steps to take to address the sales and cash-flow crisis, I began to lead week-long employee seminars in what we called Philosophies. We’d take a busload at a time to places like Yosemite or the Marin Headlands above San Francisco, camp out, and gather under the trees to talk. The goal was to teach every employee in the company our business and environmental ethics and values.
I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense... symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are.
Every principle or virtue or form of intelligence and insight is always liable to peripeteia, i.e. to an utter reversal in value-polarities: "freedom," "rationality," and all other banausically graspable and desirable "goods-in-abstracto" inevitably and eventually slue around to become malignancies, mind-eating and personality-snuffing cancers and obsessions. Contrary to the delusions of Christian fideism and authoritarianism, values are inherently incapable of being presented or comprehended in an ABSOLUTE form: a malignant or delusive mentality, a malformed personality or character, can SUBVERT anything-and of course conceal from itself utterly that it itself has such a warpage or privation.
Imagination dances with Reality - blurring into one inside my Mind.
Greek culture understands the key to understanding nature, instinct and organism as consisting in the endowment of each creature with some distinctive "excellence" or talent (arete). Among humans there is great controversy whether (because of the diversity among different character-types and the clash of different political and philosophical perspectives) there is at all such a unitary, universal or congruent thing as "excellence" for man per se. There are many aspectival or specialized excellences; but does man in general have a defining purpose or a metaphysically obligatory excellence that everyone, just insofar as he is human, is obligated to cultivate and pursue? --Or do we have a problem here in trying to extend the term "human" to creatures who really have little substantial in common with one another?
(The terms douloi, banausoi and aristoi) are in a way more precise, but what is more vital and valuable, they are more comprehensive: they project a concept of psychic order that embraces entire fields that we have no other way of seeing all together as the working of a single principle. If we think of the human domain as the collaboration and the conflict of these three diverse character-types, we can understand the weave and the stress and polemics of their very different basal teleologies or ultimate governing purposes of life.
In most mentalities language is just fashionable or banal clothing (rarely finery) that obscures the evidence of natural and human reality; it is a programmatic form of mutual or collective self-deception, a grand conspiracy of untruth or denial. Language is a mere tool of mere banausic or utilitarian mentalities, for the most part, who are perfectly closed upon themselves. A fulfilled mind is (as Hegel saw) an infinity-generator, open to its own incalculable richness; and it is so self-possessed that it understands the workings of its own expressive liabilities, and can parry these temptations and set them aside to see things more scrupulously. What passes for objectivity is for the most part an absurdity, a noxious faith that holds people in the webbing of orthodoxy. No one escapes his own gravity-traps of subjective self without prodigious philosophical energies.
Most people traffic in abstractions and generalizations because they are grossly incompetent at culturing their intuition or powers of evidency, refining it to grasp the Thisness (Haecceitas) of what is before them. Thinking is like a Stradivarius that has more potential variations in how it is played than any human can finitely perform or capture.
The music of all the different media of life--memories, images, feeling-tones, poetic-musical connotations of phrasing--is kaleidoscopic and doesn't repeat itself or recur. --People who think they are trapped in a river of regularized and ever-repeating time are merely the victims of their own ordinarizing minds that have elaborated for them a prison-cell of everydayness. The fountains of time, history, life, inspiration, etc. are fresh every instant, if one knows how to grasp them with some finesse: every instant within natural, historical, and personal time is unique.
My view: we can't step twice into the same spiderweb of ghostly presuppositions, the intricate skeletal chemistry of language is just too complex to reconstruct that particular experiment. The world of normative and conceptual and cultural forms is infinitely more capillary than we can articulate. I had some residues of a naive Platonic faith in the universal structures of logic and intellect for years and years until about 15 years ago when it occurred to me that Kierkegaard knew exactly what he was talking about--some ideas occur to you only once in your whole lifetime. Some ideas are truly the rarest of rare species, delicately balanced and inflated little soap-bubbles.
The only measures that count are progress over your own self, and triumph over the vacant abstractions that most people mistake for thinking.
“To cognize the Divine Essence — this is the highest purpose of soul, sent by the Creator to the Earth!” >>>
There are many possibilities that people can choose from. There are bad and there are good ones. So, look carefully to choose for yourself the noble path...
... Do not let the deeds and thoughts of other people confuse you; let them not prompt you to do or say anything evil!
Listen to others’ advice and deliberate yourself. Only fools acts thoughtlessly, without consideration!