"The drain of asceticism from everyday worldly life had been stopped by a dam, and those passionately spiritual natures which had formerly supplied the highest type of monk were now forced to pursue their ascetic ideals within mundane occupations.
But in the course of its development Calvinism added some- thing positive to this, the idea of the necessity of proving one's faith in worldly activity"
Sayfa 74Kitabı okudu
Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour.
Sayfa 14Kitabı okudu
Y.M. What is the sole impulse that ever moves a person to do a thing?
O.M. ...the necessity of contenting his own spirit and winning its approval.
Sayfa 15Kitabı okudu
When will and reason (reason also is choice)
Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled,
Made passive both, had served necessity,
Not me.
Sayfa 82Kitabı okudu
How does one be good?
He had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition; and of the necessity of self-denial and humility, he feared they had never heard from any lips that could profit them.
Like the Stoics, Schopenhauer teaches that the common experience of human life consists in suffering, and that the more we attach ourselves to things the more we expose ourselves to misfortune. He also agrees with the Stoics that the pursuit of the unnatural desires—those for fame, wealth and power—is a major source of unhappiness, because these desires are limitless and therefore insatiable. Again like the Stoics, Schopenhauer thinks that the path to true happiness consists in self-control, self-renunciation and withdrawal from the world, where we cultivate an inner indifference to all that happens. Schopenhauer’s wise man, much like the Stoics’, realizes that he cannot change the world—its suffering, evil and death are eternal and essential features—but he believes that at least he can change his attitude toward it. Achieving the right attitude is a matter of resigning ourselves to the ways of the world, learning to surrender to necessity and then cultivating an indifference to it.
Every explanatory journey has a terminus. That terminus might be matter, or mystery, or metaphysical necessity. It might be a featureless first cause or it might be God. Wherever one decides to end the explanatory journey, there will always still be the possibility of asking ‘Why?’ or ‘But what caused that?’ The answer in all cases –whether religious or secular– is that something or other just is. A much more serious problem for the theist is how to close the large gap between positing a first cause for the universe and identifying that unknown cause with the personal God of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or any other religious tradition.
Sayfa 51 - Oxford University Press
talks about when we change
What changes, I think, are our circumstances. As we grow older, we’re thrust into new situations. We get our first job. We may get married. Our parents get older, and we find ourselves their caretakers. Often, these new situations call on us to act differently than we used to. And, because there’s no species on the planet more adaptable than ours, we change. We rise to the occasion.
In other words, we change when we need to. Necessity is the mother of adaptation.
Sayfa 76Kitabı okudu
But the most notoriously devastating review came from William Buckley’s National Review. Echoing the views of many religious conservatives, another kind of ex-Communist slammed Rand for her atheism and lack of charity and compassion. In “Big Sister Is Watching You,” Whittaker Chambers wrote that Atlas Shrugged substitutes “the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross,” presenting the “Randian Man” who, like “Marxian Man,” is at “the center of a godless world.” Chambers continues: “Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal... From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’ ”
Sayfa 107
"To name Gaia is to name the necessity
of resisting this temptation, the necessity of starting out from the acceptance of this testing challenge: we do not have any choice, because she will not wait."
Sayfa 50
