cc Jen SFO-BCN

Every interpretation is a dialogue with the work, and with the saying. However, every dialogue becomes halting and fruitless if it confines itself obdurately to nothing but what is directly said — rather than that the speakers in the dialogue involve each other in that realm and abode about which they are speaking, and lead each other to it. Such involvement is the soul of dialogue. It leads the speakers into the unspoken. The term “conversation” does, of course, express the fact that the speakers are turning to one another. Every conversation is a kind of dialogue. But true dialogue is never a conversation. Conversation consists in slithering along the edges of the subject matter, precisely without getting involved in the unspoken. Most textual interpretations — not only of philosophical texts — remain at the level of conversation, which may often be rich and informative. And that, in many cases is enough.

- Martin Heidegger

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Teaching is even more difficult than learning…. Not because the teacher must have a larger store of information, and have it always ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than — learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by “learning” we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information. The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they — he has to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be more teachable than the apprentices. The teacher is far less assured of his ground than those who learn are of theirs. If the relation between the teacher and the taught is genuine, therefore, there is never a place in it for the authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official.

- Martin Heidegger

cc b.mune

Badly educated children are not those for whom one has done too much. One never does too much for a child. But they are those who have never been taught to give back in exchange for what they have received. Parents who have spoiled their children are selfish people. They really did not give themselves. They kept for themselves what was best in them. They did not confide in them the joy of giving.

- Louis Evely

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There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

- Michel Foucault

cc kellyv

You can watch over people but you can’t make choices for them.

- Horatio Caine (CSI: Miami)

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Hurt people hurt people.

- Florence (Greenberg)

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It is not what one says but what one causes to be understood; it is not what one paints but what one causes to be imagined that is important in eloquence and the arts.

- Joubert

cc Leeni!

The Way of Learning is nothing other than this: searching for the heart that has wandered away.

- Mengzi

cc IntangibleArts

[T]he relationship to the world that modern science fostered and shaped appears to have exhausted its potential. The relationship is missing something. It fails to connect with the most intrinsic nature of reality and with natural human experience. It produces a state of schizophrenia: man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself as a being. Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became. We may know immeasurably more about our universe than our ancestors did, and yet it increasingly seems they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us.

- Vaclav Havel (1994)

 

cc Tambako the Jaguar

(T)his (western) culture, which once imagined itself inside a church, feels trapped in something like a zoo of separate cages…

– Philip Rieff

cc cristee12

(N)uminous violence can recur even in religious cultures that were founded on the rejection of earlier forms of sacred killing, or human sacrifice. They recur, because even drawing on the new definitions of purity and goodness, people make use of these to establish and protect their own sense of purity, their separation from the bad. Do these people oppose the Prince of Peace? Let’s go and smash them! We have the self-given assurance of being the Prince’s most faithful followers, even while we violate his teaching.

- Charles Taylor

cc Hamed Saber

Charity goes beyond justice, because to love is to give, to offer what is “mine” to the other; but it never lacks justice, which prompts us to give the other what is “his,” what is due to him by reason of his being or his acting. I cannot “give” what is mine to the other without first giving him what pertains to him in justice.

- Benedict XVI

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(S)ituated before God, evil… consists less in a transgression of a law than in a pretension of man (sic) to be master of his life. The will to live according to the law is, therefore, also an expression of evil — and even the most deadly, because the most dissimulated: worse than injustice is one’s own justice.

- Paul Ricoeur

cc richardmasoner

(C)asting off religion was meant to free us, give us our full dignity of agents; throwing off the tutelage of religion, hence of the church, hence of the clergy. But now we are forced to go to new experts, therapists, doctors who exercise a kind of control that is appropriate over blind and compulsive mechanisms; who may even be administering drugs to us. Our sick selves are even more being talked down to, just treated as things, than were the faithful of yore in churches.

- Charles Taylor

cc thefuturistics

One hallmark of wisdom in the context of any struggle is to avoid knee-jerk rejection and uncritical acceptance…. Openness to others does not entail wholesale cooptation, and group autonomy is not group insularity.

- Cornel West

cc Lighthelper Off line due to heavy workload!

It is characteristic of holy men (sic) that their own painful trials do not make them lose their concern for the well-being of others. They are grieved by the adversity they must endure, yet they look out for others and teach them needed lessons; they are like gifted physicians who are themselves stricken and lie ill. They suffer wounds themselves but bring others the medicine that restores health.

- Gregory the Great

cc Ru Tover

None of us stands at the point of view of the universal. Our attachment to our own faith cannot come from a universal survey of all others from which we conclude that this is the right one. It can only come from our sense of its inner spiritual power, chastened by the challenges which we will have to meet from other faiths.

- Charles Taylor

cc tanakawho

If I am a good listener, I don’t interrupt the other nor plan my own next speech while pretending to be listening. I try to hear what is said, but I listen just as hard for what is not said and for what is said between the lines. I am not in a hurry, for there is no pre-appointed destination of the conversation. There’s no need to get there, for we are already here; and in this present I am able to be fully present to the other who speaks. The speaker is not an object to be categorized or manipulated, but a subject whose life situation is enough like my own that I can understand it in spite of the differences between us. If I am a good listener, what we have in common will seem more important than what we have in conflict. This does not mean that I never say anything, but I am more likely to ask questions than to issue manifestos or make accusations…. They will be the kind of questions the prosecuting attorney asks on cross examination, but they will not be asked in a prosecuting manner. They will rather be asked as a confessor or therapist asks them. For the purpose is not to win the case but to free understanding from self-deception.

- Merold Westphal

cc RomulusRueda

And I know what I have to do now. Gotta keep breathing. Because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring…

– Chuck Noland (Cast Away)

cc lauren nelson

It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhlemed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn