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There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.
Much of what happens over the networks is a metaphor - we chat without speaking, smile without grinning, and hug without touching. How sad to dwell in a metaphor without living the experience.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.
The essence of intelligence is skill in extracting meaning from everyday experience.
I had thought of calling the next sort of superficial people the Idealists; but I think this implies a humility towards impersonal good they hardly show; so I call them the Autocrats. They are those who give us generally to understand that every modern reform will “work” all right, because they will be there to see. Where they will be, and for how long, they do not explain very clearly. I do not mind their looking forward to numberless lives in succession; for that is the shadow of a human or divine hope. But even a theosophist does not expect to be a vast number of people at once. And these people most certainly propose to be responsible for a whole movement after it has left their hands. Each man promises to be about a thousand policemen. If you ask them how this or that will work, they will answer, “Oh, I would certainly insist on this”; or “I would never go so far as that”; as if they could return to this earth and do what no ghost has ever done quite successfully – force men to forsake their sins. Of these it is enough to say that they do not understand the nature of a law any more than the nature of a dog. If you let loose a law, it will do as a dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Such sense as you have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled. But you will not be able to fulfill a fragment of anything you have forgotten to put into it.
Book: Eugenics and Other Evils
Raphael, you always bear the world’s problems on your shoulders. It is an admirable quality when you are a protector of others. But you must realize that while at times you might not be my favorite student, it does not mean that you are my least favorite son. You are strong, passionate, and loyal to your fault. These are the merits of a great leader as well, but only when tempered with compassion and humility.
Movie: TMNT
The first lesson losing one’s virginity should teach is to have a sense of humor about sex. It is entirely too much to ask that something that feels so good should also be aesthetically pleasing.
Sometimes when people get what they want, they realize how limited their goals were.
TV: Mad Men
I never promise a woman anything nor let her know what I’m going to give her. That’s the only way to manage them. Always keep them guessing. If you can’t think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw.
Book: “The Sound and the Fury” by William Faulkner
Warm, flexible, team-oriented and empathetic people are less likely to thrive as C.E.O.’s. Organized, dogged, anal-retentive and slightly boring people are more likely to thrive.
Article: In Praise of Dullness
Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.
Book: The Once and Future King
Всегда неприятно видеть, что человек, которого ты считаешь хуже и ниже себя, любит или ненавидит то же, что и ты и, таким образом, становится похож на тебя.
“It always feels very unpleasant to see that a person that you consider low and worse than yourself likes or dislikes the same things, and thus becomes very much like you.”
“It always feels very unpleasant to see that a person that you consider low and worse than yourself likes or dislikes the same things, and thus becomes very much like you.”
Не говори своему другу того, что не должен знать твой враг.
Don’t tell your friends things that you wouldnt like your enemies to know.
Don’t tell your friends things that you wouldnt like your enemies to know.
I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact: that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. (from Pascal’s Pensèes by 17th Century Christian Philosopher & Scientist, Blaise Pascal)
Book: Renovation of the Heart, Pg 174
You only say you don’t have enough time, when you have goal, a purpose. Wonder around aimlessly and you’ll have all the time in the world.
Hopeless emptiness. Now you’ve said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.
Movie: Revolutionary Road
Tell me the truth, Frank, remember that? We used to live by it. And you know what’s so good about the truth? Everyone knows what it is however long they’ve lived without it. No one forgets the truth, Frank, they just get better at lying.
Movie: Revolutionary Road
You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play nice house, very sweet house, you got to have a job you don’t like.
Movie: Revolutionary Road
If true love shows up on your doorstep and you drive it away, that’s on you. Not the job or anything else.
TV: The Middleman
[…] This wasn’t fate. For every soul of this deluded population who believed in faith’s cosmic clockwork, they neglect to see the wear and tear beneath the surface, the teeth that grind into the cogs, the damage that faith causes so many in its selfish journey toward just one, favorable, consequence.
Movie: Franklyn
If a god is willing to prevent evil, but not able, then he is not omnipotent. If he is able but not willing, then he must be malevolent. If he is neither able or willing, then why call him a god?
Movie: Franklyn
To fight or to give up? This is it, the most basic and the hardest choice in life.
Video game: Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason
How could I hope to change the world if I didn’t start with myself? If I had to change at least one man, let it be me.
Video game: Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason
Most earlier enthusiasts had assumed that “to love Melville was to join a very small circle. It was like eating hasheesh.”
Essay: Melville Climbs the Canon
We live in an age in which we know precisely what recycle bin our newsprint and soda bottles belong. But we have no idea what a human being is, what it’s supposed to do, or who or what it is permissible to sleep with. So, this is the lesson of our time: the “good” man is the one who treats his garbage with greater care than his own soul. This is why, for our cultural gatekeepers, Ms. Chambers is an icon and the Rev. Falwell did not die soon enough.
Money comes and goes, yeah? These kids of ours? That’s a one time deal.
TV: Friday Night Lights
“If you take risks, you may still fail. But if you do not take risks, you will surely fail. The greatest risk of all is to do nothing.” -Roberto C. Goizuet
Not only can…fairy-tales be enjoyed because they are moral, but morality can be enjoyed because it puts us in fairyland, in a world at once of wonder and of war.
Essay: Fairy Tales
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
If you wanna fight, do it on your own time, in a parking lot or somewhere. Not in a school, surrounded by books.
TV: Eastbound and Down
If people are conscious of the fact that sex leads not just to a baby but
to being a parent with someone, they will much more responsibly pursue
sexual relationships. If I am going to be a parent with someone, I must
clearly love that person and I must want to affirm that person. So I
choose as a future spouse someone suitable to be a parent. I’ve chosen
that person because of what I think are their virtues and goodness rather
than just my sexual desires. The task of finding a sexual partner is
very, very different from finding a future parent, and so you assess
people very differently.
to being a parent with someone, they will much more responsibly pursue
sexual relationships. If I am going to be a parent with someone, I must
clearly love that person and I must want to affirm that person. So I
choose as a future spouse someone suitable to be a parent. I’ve chosen
that person because of what I think are their virtues and goodness rather
than just my sexual desires. The task of finding a sexual partner is
very, very different from finding a future parent, and so you assess
people very differently.
Speech: Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, December 2008
To win the battles of the soul, the best strategy often is to bide one’s time and apply the suitable remedy with patience and perseverance. Make more acts of hope. Let me remind you that in your interior life you will suffer defeats, and you will have ups and downs—may God make them imperceptible—because no one is free from these misfortunes. But our all-powerful and merciful Lord has granted us the precise means with which to conquer … All we have to do is to use them resolving to begin again and again at every moment, whenever necessary.
Book: Friends of God
One has to suffer, in patience, the setbacks to our perfection, doing whatever we can to make progress in good spirit. We hope with patience, and instead of getting frustrated at having done so little in the past, we try diligently to do more in the future.
Without moral clarity, humanity has little chance of avoiding a dark future.
Essay: Why Doesn’t Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?
Barack calls it my ‘Star Trek’ belt. He doesn’t understand fashion … He’s always asking: ‘Is that new? I haven’t seen that before.’ It’s like, Why don’t you mind your own business? Solve world hunger. Get out of my closet.
Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.
Like Socrates said, “The male libido is like being chained to a madman.” And I suppose the fire of that insanity is this limp fleshy phallus, dragging us through life.
Article: AV Club Interview - http://www.avclub.com/articles/russell-brand,25065/
Men who lose traditions abandon themselves to conventions.
Essay: The Romance of a Rascal
Modern men are not familiar with the rational arguments for tradition; but they are familiar, and almost wearily familiar, with the rational arguments for change.
Essay: The New Groove
For what is the matter with most of what calls itself the modern mind is simply grooves; and our habit of being content in the grooves, because we are told that they are grooves of change… Its only form of progress is going quicker and quicker along one line in one direction. It has not the curiosity to stop, nor the adventurous courage to go backwards… Now, in spite of the wildest claims to independence, the intellectual life of today still strikes me as being mainly symbolized by the train or the track or the groove. There is any amount of fuss and vivacity about certain fixed fashions or directions of thought; just as there is any amount of rapidity along the fixed rails of the railway-track. But if we begin to think about really getting off the track, we shall find that what is true of the train is equally true of the truth. We shall find it is actually harder to get out of the groove, when the train is going fast, than when the train is going slowly. We shall find that rapidity is rigidity; that the very fact of some social or political or artistic movement going quicker and quicker means that fewer peopole have the courage to move against it. And at last perhaps nobody will make a leap for real intellectual liberty, just as nobody will jump out of a railway-train at eighty miles an hour. This seems to me the primary mark of what we call progressive thought in the modern world.
Essay: The New Groove
It cannot be right that religion should be the dullest of subjects. There must be something wrong if the most important human business is also the least exciting. There must be something wrong if everything is not interesting.
Essay: Reading the Riddle
There is no better test of a man’s ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong.
Essay: The Real Dr. Johnson
It is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.
Book: The Man Who Was Thursday
It is at once the safeguard and the glory of mankind that they are easy to lead and hard to drive.
To the Editor:
Re “When Will the Recession Be Over?” (Op-Ed, March 1):
Thank you for the wonderful collection of views on the timing of the recovery. While views differ on the timing of the recovery, no one questioned that a recovery is possible. This is largely because the current crisis is based on financial problems, the most superficial aspect of the economy.
How different it might be or will be (depending on what we do now) when we have a crisis based on the most foundational aspect of the economy, the ecosystem. When productivity falls not because of lack of credit or consumer confidence but because of reaching the earth limits of natural resources and ecosystem services, including climate stability, the question will not be when will the economy recover. We will be adjusting to a new reality.
We are wise to direct our resources to get out of the current crisis to prevent the next crisis, which could be more profound and far longer, if not eternal.
Maggie Winslow
El Cerrito, Calif., March 2, 2009
The writer is a professor of economics at the Presidio School of Management.
Re “When Will the Recession Be Over?” (Op-Ed, March 1):
Thank you for the wonderful collection of views on the timing of the recovery. While views differ on the timing of the recovery, no one questioned that a recovery is possible. This is largely because the current crisis is based on financial problems, the most superficial aspect of the economy.
How different it might be or will be (depending on what we do now) when we have a crisis based on the most foundational aspect of the economy, the ecosystem. When productivity falls not because of lack of credit or consumer confidence but because of reaching the earth limits of natural resources and ecosystem services, including climate stability, the question will not be when will the economy recover. We will be adjusting to a new reality.
We are wise to direct our resources to get out of the current crisis to prevent the next crisis, which could be more profound and far longer, if not eternal.
Maggie Winslow
El Cerrito, Calif., March 2, 2009
The writer is a professor of economics at the Presidio School of Management.
Some have expressed a prayerful desire to walk in the power of a “Resurrected” life. The prerequisite to such a walk, is dying to self. And dying to self is - - when you’re forgotten, or neglected, or purposely set aside and you don’t sting and hurt with the insult of the oversight, but your heart is happy, being counted worthy to suffer for Christ; when your good is evil spoken of, when your wishes are crossed, your advice disregarded, your opinions ridiculed, and you refuse to let anger rise in your heart, or to even defend yourself, but you take it all in patient, loving silence; when you never care to refer to yourself in conversation, or to record your own good words, or itch after commendations, when you truly love to be unknown; when you can see your brother prosper and have his needs met and you can honestly rejoice with him and feel no envy, or question God, while your own needs are far greater and in desperate circumstances; and when you can receive correction and reproof from one of less stature than yourself and can humbly submit inwardly, finding no rebellion or resentment rising up within your heart.
Are you dead yet?
Are you dead yet?
We look back upon history and what do we see, empires rising and falling, revolutions and counter- revolutions, wealth accumulated and wealth dispersed. Shakespeare has spoken of the rise and fall of great ones, that ebb and flow with the moon. I look back on my own fellow countryman in England, once upon a time dominating a quarter of the world. Most of them convinced in the words of what is still a popular song, that the god who made them mighty shall make them mightier yet. I’ve heard of a craze-cracked Austrian announce to the world the establishment of a Reich that would last a thousand years. I’ve seen an Italian clown saying he was going to stop and restart the calendar with his own ascension to power. I’ve heard of a murderous Georgian in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the world as a wiser than Soloman, more humane than Marcus Aurelius, more enlightened than (any wise man). I have seen America wealthier, and in terms of military weapons, more powerful than the rest of the world put together. So had the American people so desired, they could have out done a Caesar or an Alexander in the range and scale of their conquest. All in one life time - all in one life time - all gone - gone with the wind. England, part of a tiny island of the coast of Europe, threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy. Hitler and Mussolini dead, remembered only in infamy. Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he help found and dominate for some three decades. All in one life time, all gone with the wind. Behind the debris of our self-styled-soloman supermen, there stands the gigantic figure of one person, because of whom, by whom, in whom and through whom alone, mankind may still have hope - - the person of Jesus Christ. (And I present him to you as the veritas, the Truth - - and it does matter because the truth does.)
Quoting: British Journalist, Malcom Muggeridge (1903 to 1990)
Quoting: British Journalist, Malcom Muggeridge (1903 to 1990)
Speech: The Harvard Veritas Forum (1992)
Western culture is, largely unbeknown to itself, is a culture of rejection. And rejection, no matter how old one is, is a sword thrust to the soul that has literally killed many.
Book: Renovation of the Heart (2002)
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