“Like it or not, we humans are bound up with our fellows, and with the other plants and animals all over the world.
Our lives are intertwined.”
Source: Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
“I've never known what to do," said Rincewind with hollow cheerfulness. "Been completely at a loss my whole life." He hesitated. "I think it's called being human, or something.”
Source: Sourcery
“Our purportedly advanced civilization may be changing the delicate ecological balance that has tortuously evolved over the 4-billion-year period of life on Earth.”
Source: Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
“Но человек существо легкомысленное и неблаговидное и, может быть, подобно шахматному игроку, любит только один процесс достижения цели, а не самую цель.”
Source: Notes from Underground
“Spiritual practices in any tradition, including mindfulness in its many forms, are meant to help you live what is yours to live, not make you rise above it. These tools are meant to help you feel companioned inside your grief. They're meant to give you a tiny bit of breathing room inside what is wholly unbearable. That's not at all the same thing as making your pain go away.”
Source: It's OK That You're Not OK
“As the feeling of an internal power of self-determination elevates the man above the unlimited dominion of impulse and the instincts of nature; in a word, absolves him from nature's guardianship, so the necessity, which alongside of her he must recognize, is no mere natural necessity, but one lying beyond the world of sense in the abyss of infinitude; consequently it exhibits itself as the unfathomable power of Destiny. Hence this power extends also to the world of gods: for the Grecian gods are mere powers of nature; and although immeasurably higher than mortal man, yet, compared with infinitude, they are on an equal footing with himself.”
Source: Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature
“But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of—that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.”
Source: Kafka on the Shore
“If any authority should be able to justify itself, if any authority should be able to answer the question "by what right?" with something more than the circular assertion of its own power, it is the authority that claims to be perfectly rational, perfectly just, and the source of all goodness. And yet, it is precisely this authority that most often answers the question 'Why?' with 'Because I AM.”
“...Cuando os encontréis con algo que tiende a ser humano pero todavía no lo es, o que había sido humano en el pasado y ya no lo es, o debería ser humano y no lo es, no lo perdáis de vista y buscad vuestra hacha.”
Source: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
“I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of - that a certain type of perfection can only be realised through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.”
Source: Kafka on the Shore