"The current attitude toward love usually ignores the element of want or need, for it spreads from the protected children of the middle class who have never seen want face to face and whose needs wander among the luxuries, since they are provided with the necessities, of life. But need is more important than sentiment, for it simply is while the ( Read more... )

Out, Majnu! Trouble me no more with your mad passion, thou sickly pessimist. Love is the product of will, and yours is a will to death.

"The sick are the greatest danger to the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but rather from the weakest."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Treatise II, S. 14)

". . . if the deeper meaning of philosophical quarrels and even literary polemics were looked into, traced back to the heart by some relentless analysis, there is no doubt that we should find at the root of our opinions and our favorite theories some strange source of implacable determination, some obscure blind will to be right by exterminating ( Read more... )

"Whatever some hypocritical ministers of government may say about it, power is the greatest of all pleasures. It seems to me that only love can beat it, and love is a happy illness that can't be picked up as easily as a Ministry."
-- Stendhal, "De l'Amour" (1822)

"Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered."
-- Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

"No es a resolver contradicciones, sino a ordenarlas, a lo que podemos pretender."
-- Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios, #1,836

"There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every person, and it can never be filled by any created thing. It can only be filled by God, made known through Jesus Christ."
-- Pascal, PenseesThis is incredibly honest, as Pascal often is: there is a hypothetical something, which, given its certain truth, becomes an unshakeable axis about which our ( Read more... )

From the beginning life holds death in me.
Twin-born these needs: to be and not to be.

-- Helen Pinkerton

Whilst I've come to think that Bodhidharma's outright abandonment of intellect ran very much counter to the spirit of what's actually expressed in the Sutta Pitaka, the Ch'an school has emphasized at least one very valid point: that truth lay not in words, but in experience. It is said that Huineng's monastery kept only one copy of the sutras for ( Read more... )