The Great Quotes thread

[Vicus]

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

People will do anything, no matter what how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

Carl Gustav Jung

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

"Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees."
~ The last words of Stonewall Jackson on his deathbed, 1863

[grapevine]

[happyuk]

L.M. Singhvi ... relating the anecdote of an Eastern European journalist who said:

... our newspapers, like those of the rest of the world, contain truths, half–truths, and lies. The truths are found on the sports pages, the half–truths are found in the weather forecasts, and the lies are found in everything else.

(La Jornada Semanal, May 18, 1997, p. 7. La Jornada Semanal is a supplement inserted in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada. The passage quoted has, of course, been translated from Spanish.)

[Raskolnikov]

"To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea."

Thoreau

[Eva2]

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
Argue with him.
Eric Orwell aka George Blair
Politics and the English Language. 1946

[Kryztian]

"Reality is invented for you by people who design it like a choreography; there's definitely an office somewhere in Washington, with people you've never heard of, that designs reality. It's not just about what will be the next event to come up but rather what will be the interpretation of a given international event And this must be distributed everywhere through the media, without anyone asking questions about it."

~~~Frank Zappa

[Ewan]

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose...

from 'Convoy' by C. W. McCall, (written 1975).

--------------------------

Dancing Is a Perpendicular Expression of a Horizontal Desire

------- George Bernard Shaw

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

"Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours."
~ Marcus Aurelius

[Raskolnikov]

[Eva2]

The time will come, and it may not be far off, that people will say: It is pathological for people to even think in terms of spirit and soul. ‘Sound’ people will speak of nothing but the body. It will be considered a sign of illness for anyone to arrive at the idea of any such thing as a spirit or a soul. People who think like that will be considered to be sick and — you can be quite sure of it — a medicine will be found for this. At Constantinople, the spirit was made non-existent. The soul will be made non-existent with the aid of a drug. Taking a ‘sound point of view’, people will invent a vaccine to influence the organism as early as possible, preferably as soon as it is born, so that this human body never even gets the idea that there is a soul and a spirit.
The two philosophies of life will be in complete opposition. One movement will need to reflect how concepts and ideas may be developed to meet the reality of soul and spirit. The others, the heirs of modern materialism, will look for the vaccine to make the body ‘healthy’, that is, makes its constitution such that this body no longer talks of such rubbish as soul and spirit, but takes a ‘sound’ view of the forces which live in engines and in chemistry and let planets and suns arise from nebulae in the cosmos. Materialistic physicians will be asked to drive the souls out of humanity.
Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 177 – Fall of the Spirits of Darkness

[Raskolnikov]

[grapevine]

- Big Pharma -

[Raskolnikov]

[Bill Ryan]

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time, they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

Frédéric Bastiat (1801—1850)

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

"The wise have always said the same things, and fools, who are the majority have always done just the opposite."
~ Arthur Schopenhauer

[Raskolnikov]

[Raskolnikov]

"The sea had roared like this long before there was any Yalta or Oreanda, it was roaring now, and it would go on roaring, just as indifferently and hollowly, when we had passed away. And it may be that in this continuity, this utter indifference to life and death, lies the secret of our ultimate salvation, of the stream of life on our planet, and of its never-ceasing movement towards perfection.
Side by side with a young woman, who looked so exquisite in the early light, soothed and enchanted by the sight of all this magical beauty — sea, mountains, clouds and the vast expanse of the sky — Gurov told himself that, when you came to think of it, everything in the world is beautiful really, everything but our own thoughts and actions, when we lose sight of the higher aims of life, and of our dignity as human beings."

Chekhov - The Lady with the Dog

[HopSan]

This quote was in my mind for many years, like a small bell, finally waking me up:

And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good —
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

-- Robert M. Pirsig

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

"Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants."
~ Epictetus