...some have asked me what understanding of Nature one shapes from so strange a year? I would answer that one's first appreciation is a sense that creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great and as active to-day as they have eve...
There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exi...
Right now there's a commonly-held view among scientists that we know about only four percent of all the matter in the universe. Four percent!" "So what about the other 96 percent?" "We astrophysicists call it 'dark matter' and 'dark energy.' Maybe we...
It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death...
Mary sat on a bench in the park. It was the middle of the night and she was alone and she felt at peace. She leaned back and looked upward. The sky was endless and expansive and the stars stretched on forever. It made her feel very small but it also ...
The ultimate singularity is the Big Bang, which physicists believe was responsible for the birth of the universe. We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, at a single point and for no discernible reason. Th...
Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that t...
Meditation expands our inner being. The inner being is like a small, individual river flowering towards the Ocean. In meditation, I feel how my inner being expands into an inner ocean, which is part of everything, which is one with Existence. Through...
Now you’re going to get it,” I said, guessing Al was coming when the ones in the back scattered. “You should have been nice.” With a weird cry, the closest surface demon fell back, but it was too late. A flash of red light exploded overhead, ...
You are unwilling to pay that price, even knowing that the consolation prize is not only to learn every philosophy that has ever existed, but ones which have not yet been conceived? Even knowing that if you do not accept, you will soon cease to learn...
In Darwin's time no serious attempt had been made to examine the manifestations of variability. A vast assemblage of miscellaneous facts could formerly be adduced as seemingly comparable illustrations of the phenomenon "Variation." Time has shown thi...
The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling ...
Sean looks up at her, and he wants to explain it all to her. Explain what it’s like to be rubbed so raw, to have your emotional threshold exceeded day after day, your psyche beaten so completely that you have no choice but to turn inward, shunning ...
Prior to Flew, major apologies for atheism were those of Enlightenment thinkers (David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Friedrich Nietzsche). Major philosophers of Flew’s generation who were atheists: W. V. O. Quine and Gilbert Ryle...
A man's life is his whole life, not the last glimmering snuff of the candle; and this, I say, is considerable, and not a little matter, whether we regard its pleasures or its pains. To draw a peevish conclusion to the contrary from our own superannua...
To me it seems that those sciences are vain and full of error which are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, first-hand experience which in its origins, or means, or end has passed through one of the five senses. And if we doubt the certa...
BE REAL Bring it on- And let truth be my existence. Value my life- And tell me like it is. Bark at me when I'm wrong- And hug me when I'm right. Praise me if I succeed- And tell me if I fail. Laugh at me if you think I'm funny- And wink at me if you ...
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and ...
Lou reluctantly drew back, still holding Joe, and placed his soft lips on Joe's own. Existence reacted to their reunion. Immediately, it was as if two halves became whole once again. The sky flashed colors overhead as they stood together: day to nigh...
Could I speak to you for a moment, madam?' said Nannie to Agnes. It was at moments of crisis like this that Mary chiefly envied her Aunt Agnes's imperturbable disposition. Most mothers feel a hideous sinking at the heart when these fatal words are pr...
And he wondered, suddenly, what sort of divide it created between them, that he knew pieces of her that she had never shared with him - facts and stories and moments and memories to which she had no idea he was privy. He had collected them for so lon...
