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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing that we do. There are many crimes which are the creation of man himself, the wrongfulness of which is put down to their divergence from habit, custom, or tradition. But cruelty is not of these. It is a fundamental sin, and admits of no argument or nice distinctions. If only we do not allow our heart to grow callous, its protest against cruelty is always clearly heard; and yet we go on perpetrating cruelties easily, merrily, all of us - in fact, anyone who does not join in is dubbed a crank.”

“We manage to swallow flesh, only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing we do.”

“We mast show by our behavior that we believe in equality and justice and that our religion teaches faith and love and charity to our fellow men. Here is where each of us has a job to do that must be done at home, because we can lose the battle on the soil of the United States just as surely as we can lose it in any one of the countries of the world.”

“We match each other stroke for stroke until I get a hit on her right arm. She tries to switch sword arms, but I jab my scim at her wrist faster than she can parry. Her scim goes flying, and I tackle her. Her white-blonde hair tumbles free of her bun. “Surrender!” I pin her down at the wrists, but she trashes and rips one arm free, scrabbling for a dagger at her waist. Steel stabs at my ribs, and seconds later, I am on my back with a blade at my throat. “Ha!” She leans down, her hair falling around us like a shimmering silver curtain.”

“we match,” I say, and as soon as the words are out I already know that tomorrow will come and I will remember this moment and wince. We match?? And so, even through this drunken haze, I feel relief when he doesn’t laugh at me. Instead he squeezes me a little tighter, brings me a tiny bit closer so my edges are against his edges, and it’s all warm. Our bodies fit. I secretly sniff him, and get rewarded with his fresh lemony scent”

“We may accept the idea that natural laws govern everything in the Universe and that these laws are in some way absolute. Still, we cannot hide behind scientific laws before explaining them. According to Hawking, scientific laws may be enough for our understanding of the World. His implicit message is that the Creator is not needed. Such statements could have been valid if scientific laws were absolute and scientists, including Hawking, resolved the mystery of existence, the Universe, and the origin and future of everything. Since that is not the case, no scientist can replace the idea of the Creator just by insufficient scientific knowledge. Only a scientist or scientists (or anybody) with absolute knowledge can dethrone the Creator if there is such complete knowledge (scientific or otherwise), proving that there is nothing beyond the “point” where time stops. Unfortunately, this kind of knowledge and understanding does not yet exist. The purpose of science is not to push the Creator out of the picture but to improve, define, and redefine scientific laws in its pursuit of truth.”

“We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us. Santone, then, cannot be blamed for this cold gray fog that came and kissed the lips of the three thousand, and then delivered them to the cross. That night the tubercles, whose ravages hope holds in check, multiplied. The writhing fingers of the pale mist did not go thence bloodless. Many of the wooers of ozone capitulated with the enemy that night, turning their faces to the wall in that dumb, isolated apathy that so terrifies their watchers. On the red stream of Hemorrhagia a few souls drifted away, leaving behind pathetic heaps, white and chill as the fog itself. Two or three came to view this atmospheric wraith as the ghost of impossible joys, sent to whisper to them of the egregious folly it is to inhale breath into the lungs, only to exhale it again, and these used whatever came handy to their relief, pistols, gas or the beneficent muriate. - A Fog in Santone (1898-1901)”

“We may affirm of Mr. Buffon, that which has been said of the chemists of old; though he may have failed in attaining his principal aim, of establishing a theory, yet he has brought together such a multitude of facts relative to the history of the earth, and the nature of its fossil productions, that curiosity finds ample compensation, even while it feels the want of conviction.”

“We may agree, for example, that our societies must provide greater security for the individual; yet if all we succeed in producing is a providing increased anonymity and ever increasing boredom, then we should not wonder if ingenious man turns to such amusements as drugs, housebreaking, vandalism, mayhem, riots, or - at the most harmless - strange haircuts, costumes, standards of cleanliness, and sexual experiments.”

“We may also discover that sexual abuse helps to explain the high prevalence rates of eating disorders among women and may lend some insight into why we are starting to see more documentation of eating disorders among boys as we see the reports of sexual abuse for male children increasing. Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders.”

“We may also struggle with what could be considered justifiable fears. We have fears of loss, pain, disability, and death. These can be transformed only by the human being who has come to know what it means to „die before you die“. In the discipline of transformation, this expression means coming to know our spiritual home, our eternal Self. It is not a metaphor but an accurate description of a psycho-spiritual truth. Many of those who have lived through the experience of a clinical death and have returned to life know that death is not something to fear and that life is an immeasurable gift. These people return to their lives with less fear because they have experienced their true metaphysical home. At the same time they have known that this physical body is important as a means of contact with their fellow human beings. Against the backdrop of eternity this transient human life has acquired a new beauty. To die before death is to detach from our physical body, our thinking, and our emotions at will, as a conscious choice. This is the aim of certain forms of spiritual training. Through control of the breath, fasting, and sustained awareness it becomes possible to separate from our coarser bodies – physical, emotional, mental – and to mount the steed of pure consciousness. When consciousness is separated from the conditioned intellect and desire, it makes direct contact with the electromagnetic field of Love. The soul comes to know a different relationship to all the beings within this electromagnetic field. When we are connected with this Love, we are free of fear and of the domination of the lower self and the thoughts it generates. As Rumi said: „Thinking is powerless in the expression of love.“ Love is reckless and does not count the cost; it expresses itself through courage and self-sacrifice. Often our fear is a lack of love. To be free of fear we must love very much. (p. 159)”

“We may also think that, regardless of how insufficient our language or knowledge is, we can still arrive at conclusions stemming from something more profound than the knowledge or language but only expressed by language. If language (as we understand it) were an absolute instrument of thought, there would be no different languages but only one universal language of thought. Since this is not the case, we can express the same thought in different languages with different signs and sounds.”