 "Throughout human history, all evil, all sin and indeed all suffering is ultimately a product of human pride and self-conceit. At the same time, all heroism, all virtue, all true progress is ultimately a product of humility and self-sacrifice, from the obedience of Abraham and Moses, to the courage of Jesus on the cross."
Tom DeLay
Thinking must never submit itself, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, if not to facts themselves, because, for it, to submit would be to cease to be.
Henri Poincaré
wikiqoute
"We are young, wandering the face of the Earth, wondering what our dreams might be worth, learning that we're only immortal for a limited time."
Neil Peart
"Dreamline" from Rush's ROLL THE BONES
Since we know that virtue is the means for achieving values, then perfect virtue should give us perfect happiness -- and the closer we get to perfect virtue the closer we get to purr-fect happiness.
David Elmore
Solo - Moral Perfection Thread
The State calls the violence of the individual 'crime.' Its own violence it calls 'law.'
Max Stirner
The Ego & Its Own
 |
Since moral perfection for Aristotle means (1) willfully exercising phronesis to understand and acknowledge that orthos logos which in any given situation specifies the conduct most conducive to the achievement of one's own eudaimonia, (2) willfully choosing to act in accordance with the conduct specified by the orthos logos such that one's genuine eudaimonia will best be achieved, and (3) developing both (1) and (2) to the point where one characteristically exercises phronesis and acts in accordance with the orthos logos as a matter of habit--moral perfection being, therefore, to always act in accordance with one's own best interests--the crown of virtues for Aristotle, the final proof of one's own moral perfection, is pride in being egoistic. One is morally perfect to the extent one is perfectly egoistic and vice versa. To take pride in being morally/egoistically perfect is for Aristotle the ultimate moral achievement for man.
Jack Wheeler
Den Uyl, Douglas J., and Douglas B. Rasmussen, eds. The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1984.
Data: The B-4 is physically identical to me, although his neural pathways are not as advanced. But even if they were, he would not be me.
Picard: How can you be sure?
Data: I aspire, sir. To be better than I am. The B-4 does not.
Star Trek: Nemesis
Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.
Richard Dawkins
Salon
Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption."
John Stuart Mill
When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bike. I realized that The Lord doesn't work that way, so I stole one and asked him to forgive me.
Peter Kay
Peter Kay
Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.
Aristotle
When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.
Vincent Van Gogh
Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Taking authorial responsibility for your post is a basic courtesy, so please sign each of your postings.I discourage the use of pseudonyms. Such a practice greatly reduces the value of a posting, and lowers the quality of the list as well. Being responsible for the words that you post is a basic tenet of communication.
Barbara Branden
Another web site
"Your daily life is your temple and your religion."
Kahil Gibran
It is appallingly obvious that our technology exceeds our humanity.
Albert Einstein
http://www.loveisearned.com/html/quotations.htm
I am only resolved to act in that manner which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.
Jane Austen
Lizzy to Lady Catherine in _Pride and Prejudice_
If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.
Confucius
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/14176.html
"The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall."
Thomas Paine
I know that many will call this useless work; and they will be those of whom Demetrius declared that he took no more account of the wind that came out their mouth in words, than of that they expelled from their lower parts: men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of that wisdom, which is the food and the only true riches of the mind. For so much more worthy as the soul is than the body, so much more noble are the possessions of the soul than those of the body. And often, when I see one of these men take this work in his hand, I wonder that he does not put it to his nose, like a monkey, or ask me if it something good to eat.
Da Vinci Leonardo
The simple fact is, there are people out there who are nothing more than a bipedal cheeseburger. They're a self propelled snack pack looking for someone to eat them. There is no helping the truly consumable among us.
Ken Cook
http://www.selfdefenseforums.com/forums/member.php?find=lastposter&t=8723
When we estimate magnitudes through numbers, that is, conceptually, the imagination selects a unit, which it can then repeat indefinitely. But there is a second kind of estimation, which Kant calls "aesthetic estimation," in which the imagination tries to comprehend or encompass the whole representation in one single intuition. There is an upper bound to its capacity. An object whose apparent or conceived size strains this capacity to the limit - threatens to exceed the imagination's power to take it all in at once - has, subjectively speaking, an absolute magnitude: it reaches the felt limit, and appears as if infinite.[...] imagination reaches its maximum capacity, shows its failure and inadequacy when compared to the demands of Reason, and makes us aware, by contrast, of the maginificence of Reason iteslf. The resulting feeling is the feeling of the sublime.
Monroe C. Beardsley
Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present
God Bless America. Although I am an atheist, I just keep thinking that these days. Thank you, thank you, thank you that you exist, as an idea and a reality, an example and a promise. Thank you to the framers of the constitution, the wisdom of liberty that has still survived in the hearts of so many American people, and especially, thank you for this latest generation of men and women that are fighting for my values in the Middle East as their mainly Anglo-Saxon forefathers did for us in Europe. [SOLOHQ, Cowardly Europe thread, March 8]
David Bertelsen
SOLO has given me something I badly needed. And that is contact with Objectivists and/or Objectivist fellow travelers who have none of the intellectual rigidity and emotional repression, none of the spiritual straitjacket of duty, that are so prevalent elsewhere. So many of you appear to have taken the best of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, and left the rest. It is a great joy to me to see it. [SOLOHQ, Going Home thread, March 7]
Barbara Branden
To go straight to the deepest depth, I went for Hegel; what unclear thoughtless flow of words I was to find there! My unlucky star led me from Hegel to Schopenhauer . . . Even in Kant there were many things that I could grasp so little that given his general acuity of mind I almost suspected that he was pulling the reader's leg or was even an imposter.
Ludwig Boltzmann
Quoted in D Flamm. Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 14 (1983) 257.
Kant originated the technique to sell irrational notions to the men of a skeptical, cynical age who have formally rejected mysticism without grasping the rudiments of rationality. The technique is as follows: if you want to propagate an outrageously evil idea (based on traditionally accepted doctrines), your conclusions must be brazenly clear, but your proof unintelligible. Your proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyze a reader’s critical faculty – a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations, circumlocutions, non sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, irrelevant side issues, clauses, sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, and big chunks of the arbitrary thrown in as self-evident, erudite references to sciences, to pseudo sciences, to the never to be sciences, to the untraceable and the unprovable – all of it resting on a zero: the absence of definitions.
Ayn Rand
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Aristotle
Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try.
Peggy Noonan
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/34491.html
A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.
Ayn Rand
Toothbrush in the jaw toothbrush brush brush tooth jaw foam dome in the foam Roman dome come home home in the jaw Rome dome tooth toothbrush toothpick pickpocket socket rocket
Lois Cook
The Fountainhead
"Everybody thinks that I stand by the scientific character of my work and that my principal scope lies in curing mental maladies. This is a terrible error...I am a scientist by neccesity, and not by vocation. I am really an artist by nature."
Sigmund Freud
Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.
Albert Einstein
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
John Lennon
Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.
Ayn Rand
It is only the shallow who do not judge by appearances.
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A man's character is his fate.
Heraclitus
One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.
Robert A. Heinlein
With everyone talking about how they care so much about human life, I'd just like to see someone actually living one.
Jason Roth
On Triple Splitz-O Cups and Starving Children
The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power. How naive the cliche that money is the root of evil!
Eric Hoffer
When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.
Japanese Proverb
Dining is and always was a great artistic opportunity.
Frank Lloyd Wright
He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he that loses his courage loses all.
Miguel de Cervantes
The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It’s everywhere and nowhere and you can’t reason with him. He’s not open to reason. You can’t speak to him—he can’t hear. You’re tried by an empty bench.
Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead
From my childhood, obedience was something I could not get out of my system. When I entered the armed service at the age of twenty-seven, I found being obedient not a bit more difficult than it had been during my life to that point. It was unthinkable that I would not follow orders. Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one’s need to think.
Adolf Eichmann
Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (286)
You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
IV.4.5
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplacable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.
Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged
[Events like the recent tsunami] mock the notion that human beings should live in harmony with nature. When did nature ever live in harmony with us? The natural world can be wondrous in its beauty and mystery, but it is not our friend. It is a pervasive, relentless threat to our mere existence, and often, that threat is carried out. The story of civilization is the story of humanity's progress in subduing, exploiting, and overcoming nature for the benefit of ordinary people.
Steve Chapman
Chicago Tribune 12/30/04 (via Dr. Hurd.com)
To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.
Aristotle
We live in deeds, not years: In thoughts not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
Aristotle
“The Tragedy is that every brain cell devoted to belief in the supernatural is a brain cell one cannot use to make life richer or easier or happier.”
Kay Nolte Smith
Women Without Superstitions: No Gods, No Masters
|
