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Quote by Abhijit Naskar

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Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission

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Abhijit Naskar

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“And yet, and yet; it is a strange dance that the Fool must learn as he encounters the Devil on his path. Like the serpent who offered Eve the fruit of knowledge, or Samuel who seduced Lilith away from paradise, all knowledge comes from darkness, and so we are drawn towards it. But darkness and evil are not the same thing. We go to the darkness willingly, so we can, as Cormac McCarthy wrote, “learn how to carry the fire”, but sojourn too long and we open the door to forces we may not be able to pry ourselves from. Indifference, doubt and scepticism form, as Kelly Braffet describes, the “logic that the Devil likes most”, to trap us into the conviction not just of the absence of evil, but more cynically, the non-existence of virtue. Thomas Aquinas rather beautifully defined sloth as "sorrow about spiritual good", for perhaps it is not that “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is to convince the world that he doesn’t exist” (Baudelaire), but rather the far superior and more hellish of hoaxes, that God doesn’t either.”

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Book:THE MAP: Archetypes of the Major Arcana
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“What saves me is people. Strangers. Old women. Shopkeepers. Young lovers and milkmen doing their rounds and window cleaners with ladders fixed on top of their vans. Individuals oblivious to one another and yet, in a way, they act like insurance. An invisible web. Nothing too bad will happen on the street of a small town like this because people are everywhere. If something heinous occurs, then it's likely to be short-lived. Terrible acts are more difficult to conceal in a place like this. Someone will eventually step in or call the police. Horrors can still take place, but people look after people even though they might never think of it that way.”

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Book:The Last Thing to Burn
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“The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call ‘ourselves’, to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be ‘good’. We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way—centred on money or pleasure or ambition—and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.”

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Book:Mere Christianity
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“Моральний героїзм рідко народжується з неперевершеної фронтально-кортикальної сили волі. Натомість він виникає тоді, коли правильний вчинок забирає не багато зусиль.”

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Book:Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
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“We all know hopelessness; we know Christ crucified when we see it--in the slums of India and Oakland; passed out on city sidewalks; in someone's early, painful death. We know from resurrection. If I use the word 'God,' I sure don't mean an old man in the sky who loves the occasional goat sacrifice. I mean 'God' as Jane Kenyon described God: 'I am food on the prisoner's plate . . . / the patient gardener / of the dry and weedy garden . . . / the stone step, / the latch, and the working hinge.' I mean 'God' as the shorthand for the Good, for the animating energy of love; for Life, for the light that radiates from within people and from above; in the energies of nature, even in our rough, messy selves.”

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Book:Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair by Anne Lamott
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