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Quote by Thomas à Kempis

“Observe this simple counsel of perfection: Forsake all, and you shall find all. Renounce desire, and you shall find peace. Give this due thought, and when you have put it into practice, you will understand all things.”

Quote by Thomas à Kempis

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The Imitation of Christ

Written by Thomas à Kempis, this classic Christian text offers profound insights into the spiritual journey, emphasizing the importance of humility, self-denial, and the pursuit of divine grace. The book is divided into four books, each focusing on different aspects of spiritual growth and the imitation of Christ's character. more

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Thomas à Kempis

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“Poetry is a satisfying of the desire for resemblance. As the mere satisfying of a desire, it is pleasurable. But poetry if it did nothing but satisfy a desire would not rise above the level of many lesser things. Its singularity is that in the act of satisfying the desire for resemblance it touches the sense of reality, it enhances the sense of reality, heightens it, intensifies it.”

“William waved his hand, telling her, “Your turn. Let’s hear a sexual fantasy.” She thought for a moment. Eyes going dreamy, setting off all kinds of warning bells inside his head, she said, “I picture a strong, gorgeous man. He’s dressed, but not for long. He strips. I watch.” William’s mouth went dry. The warning bells? Forgotten. “And then?” She purred with pure, sexual carnality, nearly unmanning him. “He strips me, too, and...does a load of laundry, washing our dirty clothes. Oh, yeah. Oh, baby.”

“Originality is merely a minor, secondary bonus to the pleasure of thought. Individuality, too, is a secondary aspect of the will and desire. The will is never mine; desire is never mine. For them to be will and desire, they have to circulate and be exchanged as symbolic material. For want of this symbolic devolution, we operate a technical transfer of all these functions on to machines — a transference of the human on to the inhuman. Now, if some human being thinks for me, nothing is lost. He is not lost, neither am I. Whereas if a machine thinks in my stead, we are both lost. In fact, this stage of the transference on to the machine is past. Today, it is machines which transfer their functions on to man. Man's fetishization of the machine has been succeeded by the fetishization of man by the machine. Today, it is man who has become the object of the perverse desire of the machine, of its desire to function at all costs. The machine is no longer an excrescence or a protruberance of man – it is man who is now merely the sex organ of the machine (Burroughs). And this is still quite a large claim, for what sex is the machine? Man has, rather, become the inflatable prosthesis of a sexless machine – the phantom limb of a useless function. The infinite degree, the degree zero, degree Xerox of the libido. Among those devices whose virtual libido man stokes up, there is of course the computer, of which man is the unconscious masturbator and his brain a hyper-object of concupiscence, but there is also the spectacularized body of woman, become a bachelor machine, a promotional and pornographic hypostasis, of which man is merely the sexless operator, the slavish voyeur, the auto-decoder.”