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Quote by Robert Ingersoll

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The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll

This book is a compilation of various writings by Robert G. Ingersoll, covering his extensive career as a public speaker and legal professional. It includes his famous speeches on topics such as religion, ethics, and the rights of individuals. The collection offers insight into Ingersoll's advocacy for civil liberties and his role in shaping American thought during the 19th century. more

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Robert Ingersoll

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“I'd always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing. But I was wrong. Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn't the absence of everything you lost - it was the combination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn. - Florence Day”

“Why do people kill themselves? I think they do it when they can no longer find a reason to keep going. When nothing in heir lives is good enough to balance out the bad. And they do it when they no longer have the courage to carry on past some recent painful experience. They commit what is, in the end, a desperate, final call for help, that is hopefully heard in time by someone else. And what if it's not heard in time? I ask although I know the answer. Then they die.”

“The notion of literature as only one of several avenues to a single type of propositional knowledge is, of course, hardly the winning ticket in lit-crit today. More typical are sentiments that see such a notion as not even admissible, if at all desirable. The world of these academic refuseniks is, however, a bleak and sterile place. Disarmed by their own epistemic fiat, scholars cannot assert anything since they deny the idea of objective rationality. If they arrive at an insight whose truth they wish to defend – for example that truth and rationality are passé – they can’t do so because truth and rationality are constructed to be constructed.”

“Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”

“Reasons aren't really things that make you do other things. Reasons are things that you make up, much later, to reassure everyone that we are all logical and that the world makes sense. We do unreasonable things, because we want to, at the time. No reason. Much later we sit in the wreckage, building reasons out of little bits of wreckage, so we'll have something to show the crash investigators. Look, this is what caused it. So the whole mess at least appears reasonable. So we can convince ourselves that at least there was a reason for the disaster, something we can prevent or avoid, so it'll never happen again. But a lot of the time there's no reason. We just flew it to the ground. Because we felt like it. And we're still dangerous. And it could happen again anytime. Its easier to live with each other afterwards if we give each other reasons.”