philosophical

Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.

Hate is bait for the devil, love is the gate to god

Good and Bad is inside everybody. The difference is that the Good remember when they have also been bad and the Bad remember when they have only been good.

We are all only men, defined by our choices.

Micro: Letters create words. Words create language. Language, we are told, permits knowledge & expression. Language is what we are. Are we jailed?

I charge thee, fling away ambition. By that sin fell the angels.

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.

With domineering hand she moves the turning wheel,Like currents in a treacherous bay swept to and fro:Her ruthless will has just deposed once fearful kingsWhile trustless still, from low she lifts a conquered head;No cries of misery she hears, no tears she heeds,But steely hearted laughs at groans her deeds have wrung.Such is a game she plays, and so she tests her strength;Of mighty power she makes parade when one short hourSees happiness from utter desolation grow.(A Consolation of Philosophy, Book II, translated by V.E. Watts)

In reality, there are as many religions as there are individuals.

Some people, no matter how easy the path they are given on the walk of life, will find a way to mess it all up. Ray Levine was one of those people.

Thinking is no more or no less than asking questions. To improve your thinking, improve the quality of the questions you ask.

This other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men's fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end.

Behind every wolf in sheep's clothing is a trail of dead sheep - rjs

Pick a man, any man. That man there. See him. That man hatless. You know his opinion of the world. You can read it in his face, in his stance. Yet his complaint that a man__ life is no bargain masks the actual case with him. Which is that men will not do as he wishes them to. Have never done, never will do. That__ the way of things with him and his life is so balked about by difficulty and become so altered of its intended architecture that he is little more than a walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all. Can he say, such a man, that there is no malign thing set against him? That there is no power and no force and no cause? What manner of heretic could doubt agency and claimant alike? Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence is unentailed? No liens, no creditors? That gods of vengeance and of compassion alike lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers altogether they must evoke only the same silence and that it is this silence which will prevail?

..chaos is the neighbour of God: but everything's usually neat and tidy in hell...

Happy is the man who is nothing.

Have you paused to consider that there is no way out? Each way out of one situation necessarily being the way into another situation.

Death is nothing to us, because a body that has been dispersed into elements experiences no sensations, and the absence of sensation is nothing to us.