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Thread: Your favorite quote/passage

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    Default Your favorite quote/passage

    Pretty self explanatory, although I'd prefer some longer passages instead of the short quotes.

    24. In the Happy Isles

    THE figs fall from the trees, they are good and sweet; and in falling the red skins of them break. A north wind am I to ripe figs.

    Thus, like figs, do these doctrines fall for you, my friends: imbibe now their juice and their sweet substance! It is autumn all around, and clear sky, and afternoon.

    Lo, what fullness is around us! And out of the midst of superabundance, it is delightful to look out upon distant seas.

    Once did people say God, when they looked out upon distant seas; now, however, have I taught you to say, Superman.

    God is a conjecture: but I do not wish your conjecturing to reach beyond your creating will.

    Could you create a God?- Then, I pray you, be silent about all gods! But you could well create the Superman.

    Not perhaps you yourselves, my brothers! But into fathers and forefathers of the Superman could you transform yourselves: and let that be your best creating!- God is a conjecture:
    but I should like your conjecturing restricted to the conceivable.

    Could you conceive a God?- But let this mean Will to Truth to you, that everything be transformed into the humanly conceivable, the humanly visible, the humanly sensible! Your own discernment shall you follow out to the end!

    And what you have called the world shall but be created by you: your reason, your likeness, your will, your love, shall it itself become! And verily, for your bliss, you discerning ones!

    And how would you endure life without that hope, you discerning ones? Neither in the inconceivable could you have been born, nor in the irrational.

    But that I may reveal my heart entirely to you, my friends: if there were gods, how could I endure it to be no God! Therefore there are no gods.

    Yes, I have drawn the conclusion; now, however, does it draw me.-

    God is a conjecture: but who could drink all the bitterness of this conjecture without dying? Shall his faith be taken from the creator, and from the eagle his flights into eagle-heights?

    God is a thought- it makes all the straight crooked, and all that stands reel. What? Time would be gone, and all the perishable would be but a lie?

    To think this is giddiness and vertigo to human limbs, and even vomiting to the stomach: verily, the reeling sickness do I call it, to conjecture such a thing.

    Evil do I call it and misanthropic: all that teaching about the one, and the plenum, and the unmoved, and the sufficient, and the imperishable!

    All the imperishable- that's but a parable, and the poets lie too much.- But of time and of becoming shall the best parables speak: a praise shall they be, and a justification of all
    perishing!

    Creating- that is the great salvation from suffering, and life's alleviation. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation.

    Yes, much bitter dying must there be in your life, you creators! Thus are you advocates and justifiers of all perishing.

    For the creator himself to be the new-born child, he must also be willing to be the child-bearer, and endure the pangs of the child-bearer.

    Through a hundred souls went I my way, and through a hundred cradles and birth-throes. Many a farewell have I taken; I know the heart-breaking last hours.

    But so wills it my creating Will, my fate. Or, to tell you it more candidly: just such a fate- wills my Will.

    All feeling suffers in me, and is in prison: but my willing ever comes to me as my emancipator and comforter.

    Willing emancipates: that is the true doctrine of will and emancipation- so teaches you Zarathustra.

    No longer willing, and no longer valuing, and no longer creating! Ah, that that great debility may ever be far from me!

    And also in discerning do I feel only my will's procreating and evolving delight; and if there be innocence in my knowledge, it is because there is will to procreation in it.

    Away from God and gods did this will allure me; what would there be to create if there were- gods!

    But to man does it ever impel me anew, my fervent creative will; thus impels it the hammer to the stone.

    Ah, you men, within the stone slumbers an image for me, the image of my visions! Ah, that it should slumber in the hardest, ugliest stone! Now rages my hammer ruthlessly
    against its prison. From the stone fly the fragments: what's that to me?

    I will complete it: for a shadow came to me- the still and lightest of all things once came to me!

    The beauty of the Superman came to me as a shadow. Ah, my brothers! Of what account now are- the gods to me!-


    Thus spoke Zarathustra.

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    Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervour, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind.
    And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so.
    How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.


    Author Unknown.

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    This passage from Edith Hamilton's Mythology (pp. 300-301) made a tremendous impact on me:

    The world of Norse mythology is a strange world. Asgard, the home of the gods, is unlike any other heaven men have dreamed of. No radiancy of joy is in it, no assurance of bliss. It is a grave and solemn place, over which hangs the threat of an inevitable doom. The gods know that a day will come when they will be destroyed. Sometime they will meet their enemies and go down beneath them to defeat and death. Asgard will fall in ruins. The cause the forces of god are fighting to defend against the forces of evil is hopeless. Nevertheless, the gods will fight for it to the end.

    Necessarily the same is true of humanity. If the gods are finally helpless before evil, men and women must be more so. The heroes and heroines of the early stories face disaster. They know that they cannot save themselves, not by any courage or endurance or great deed. Even so, they do not yield. They die resisting. A brave death entitles them -- at least the heroes -- to a seat in Valhalla, one of the halls in Asgard, but there too they must look forward to final defeat and destruction. In the last battle between good and evil they will fight on the side of the gods and die with them.

    This is the conception of life which underlies the Norse religion, as somber a conception as the mind of man has ever given birth to. The only sustaining support possible for the human spirit, the one pure unsullied good men can hope to attian, is heroism; and heroism depends on lost causes. The hero can prove what he is only by dying. The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.

    Such an attitude toward life seems at firstslight fatalistic, but actually the decrees of an inexorable fate played no more part in the Norseman's scheme of existence than predestination did in St. Paul's or in that of his militant Protestant followers, and for precisely the same reason. Although the Norse hero was doomed if he did not yield, he could choose betwen yielding or dying. The decision was in his own hands. Even more than that. A heroic death, like a martyr's death, is not a defeat, but a triumph. The hero in one of the Norse stories who laughs aloud while his foes cut his heart out of his living flesh shows himself superior to his conquerors. He sayd to them, in effect, You can do nothing to me because I do not care what you do. They kill him, but he dies undefeated.

    This is stern stuff for humanity to live by, as stern in its totaly different way as the Sermon on the Mount, but the easy way has never in the long run commanded the allegiance of mankind. Like the early Christians, the Norsemen measured their life by heroic standards. The Christian, however, looked looked forward to a heaven of eternal joy. The Norsemen did not. But it would appear that for unknown centuries, until the Christian missionaries came, heroism was enough.

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    This one from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals..

    Would anyone care to learn something about the way in which ideals are manufactured? Does anyone have the nerve?…Well then, go ahead! There’s a chink through which you can peek into this murky shop. But wait just a moment, Mr. Foolhardy; your eyes must grow accustomed to the fickle light…all right, tell me what’s going on in there, audacious fellow; now I am the one who is listening.

    “I can’t see a thing, but I hear all the more. There’s a low, cautious whispering in every nook and corner. I have a notion these people are lying. All the sounds are sugary and soft. No doubt you were right; they are transmuting weakness into merit.”

    “Go on”

    “Impotence, which cannot retaliate, into kindness; pusillanimity into humility; submission before those one hates into obedience to One of whom they say that he has commanded this submission--they call him God. The inoffensiveness of the weak, his cowardice, his ineluctable standing and waiting at doors, are being given honorific titles such as patience; to be unable to avenge oneself is called to be unwilling to avenge oneself--even forgiveness (“for they know not what they do--we alone know what they do.”)
    Also there’s some talk of loving one’s enemy--accompanied by much sweat.”

    “Go on”

    “I’m sure they are quite miserable, all these whisperers and smalltime counterfeiters, even thought they huddle close together for warmth. But they tell me that this very misery is the sign of their election by God, that one beats the dogs one loves best, that this misery is perhaps also a preparation, a test, a kind of training, perhaps even more than that: something for which eventually they will be compensated with tremendous interest--in gold? No, in happiness. They call this bliss.”

    “Go on”

    “Now they tell me that not only are they better than the mighty of this earth, whose spittle they must lick ( not from fear--by no means--but because God commands us to honor our superiors), but they are even better off, or at least they will be better off someday. But I’ve had all I can stand. The smell is too much for me. This shop where they manufacture ideals seems to me to stink of lies.”

    “But just a moment. You haven’t told me anything about the greatest feat of these black magicians, who precipitate the white milk of loving-kindness out of every kind of blackness. Haven’t you noticed their most consummate sleight of hand, their boldest, finest, most brilliant trick? Just watch! These vermin, full of vindictive hatred, what are they brewing out of their own poisons? Have you ever heard vengeance and hatred mentioned? Would you ever guess, if you only listened to their words, that these are men bursting with hatred?”

    “I see what you mean. I’ll open my ears again--and stop my nose. Now I can make out what they seem to have been saying all along ‘We, the good ones, are also the just ones.’ They call the thing they seek not retribution but the triumph of justice; the thing they hate is not their enemy, by no means--they hate injustice, ungodliness; the thing they hope for and believe in is not vengeance, the sweet exultation of vengeance (‘sweeter than honey’ as Homer said) but ‘the triumph of God’ who is just, over the godless’; what remains to them to love on this earth is not their brothers in hatred, but what they call their ‘brother in love’-- all who are good and just.”

    “And what do they call that which comforts them in all their suffering--their phantasmagoria of future bliss?”

    “Do I hear correctly? They call it Judgment Day, the coming of their kingdom, the ‘Kingdom of God.’ Meanwhile they live in ‘faith,’ in ‘love,’ in ‘hope.’”

    “Stop! I’ve heard enough.”

    From The Birth of Tragedy & the Genealogy of Morals translated by Francis Golffing..pages 180-182
    Last edited by Lyfing; 02-11-2009 at 07:22 PM.

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    I am not bound to please thee with my answers.

    To love is to lose to lose is to die.

    and,..

    Your mother has SO many ass-hair they can knit carpets from it for WHOLE morocco.

    These among others.

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    An offering from Peter Carroll's essay Slight of Mind:

    A god ignored is a demon born.

    Think you to hypertrophy some selves at the expense of others?

    That which is denied gains power, and seeks strange and unexpected forms of manifestation.

    Deny Death and other forms of Suicide will arise.

    Deny Sex and bizzarre forms of its expression will torment you.

    Deny Love and absurd sentimentalities will disable you.

    Deny Aggression only to stare eventually at the bloody Knife in your shaking hand.

    Deny honest Fear and Desire only to create senseless neuroticism and avarice.

    Deny Laughter and the world laughs at you.

    Deny Magic only to become a confused robot, inexplicable even unto yourself.

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    The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos--in the sense not of a lack of necessity but a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms...Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man... Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses... But when will we ever be done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature? When may we begin to "naturalize" humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?
    from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.109, Walter Kaufmann transl..

    We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error.
    from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.121, Walter Kaufmann transl.

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    "There is no right or wrong, just what you do to help yourself. It's all about the survival of the fittest" or something like that, have no idea whoi wrote it.
    :Visi neinn, sithan mathr fylgja neinn:
    :Fylgja neinn, sithan mathr visi neinn:
    :Hvarfa vith til mathr, etha fagna mathr:

    Gifts does not need to be great, one does often get compliments to few


    This one is machine and nerve, and got a mind concluded.
    This one is but flesh and faith, and are the more deluded.

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    Meine Ehre heisst Treue.

    Translated as: my honour is my loyalty.

    It'll be the first and the last tattoo I'll get!

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    The title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. How can one be a wise man, if he does not know any better how to live than other men? — if he is only more cunning and intellectually subtle?

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

    I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

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

    There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

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

    There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.

    Thoreau

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