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

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(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

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(W)hen we open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do – that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.

- Barack Obama

cc andrewodom

The moral prophets of humanity have always been poets even though they spoke in free verse or by parable.

- John Dewey

cc Shyald

Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing. To be able to keep silent, (one) must have something to say — that is, (one) must have at (one’s) disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of (oneself). In that case one’s reticence makes something manifest, and does away with ‘idle talk’.

- Martin Heidegger

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An idea opposed to another idea is always the same idea, albeit affected by the negative sign. The more you oppose one another, the more you remain in the same framework of thought. New ideas come from the desert, from hermits, from solitary beings, from those who live in retreat and are not plunged into the sound and fury of repetitive discussion. The latter always makes too much noise to enable one to think easily. All the money that is scandalously wasted nowadays on colloquia should be spent on building retreat houses with vows of reserve and silence. We have more than enough debates; what we need are some taciturn people. Perhaps science needs ongoing public discussions; philosophy would surely perish from them.

- Michel Serres

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Between has always struck me as the preposition of prime importance.

- Michel Serres

cc Cindy Funk

The place God calls you is the place where your deepest gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

- Frederick Buechner

cc Jan Paul Yap

Almost dying changes nothing. Dying changes everything.

- Gregory House, M.D.

CC Scottish Libraries

None of us know [sic] what made us what we are, and when we have to say something, we make up a good story.

- Steven Pinker (from The New York Times Magazine, January 11, 2009)

Picture: CC my hovercraft is full of eels

Read as little as possible of literary criticism — such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is as useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them. — Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet