Separating one's “self” physically from the world (as an unseen entity) alienates the human being from the facts of a sensual world and its realities. In order to have a self, you must provide a story for that self. Whether it is the tale of past...
Ethics is nothing other than reverence for life because God is within every other human being you come in contact with either physically, or emotionally. Living with reverence for life is attuning goodliness, which is a state of godliness.
Never take offense. Even if someone is robbing you blind, it’s usually nothing personal. Survival is a funny thing, and we all react differently to it. Some react to fear and forget to be human and humane, but that doesn’t mean they have maliciou...
Arguably the greatest technological triumph of the century has been the public-health system, which is sophisticated preventive and investigative medicine organized around mostly low- and medium-tech equipment; ... fully half of us are alive today be...
When we feel fear, we deny our True Nature, forgetting that, as an indivisible part of the Oneness, we have the same creative power as the Oneness. As we have unconsciously created our fears, similarly, we can consciously decree their end and start t...
The art of writing is not as solitary as one might think. When it finally dawns on us one day that our task as writers is to share what we know of the human spirit, we suddenly discover that we were never truly alone.
...it does not matter if we are forgotten; what matters is the effect we have on those around us and those who come after us. What matters is how our own lives affect the larger, perpetual community of the living.
You ride as a man, fight as a man, and you think as a man-" "I think as a human being," she retorted hotly. "Men don't think any differently from women- they just make more noise about being able to.
Humanity has determined it is supreme in the kingdom of animals, yet [the] beasts live a less tragic existence...and many of their tragedies are a consequence of so-called human brilliance.
Davout looked up and gazed intently at him. For some seconds they looked at one another, and that look saved Pierre. Apart from conditions of war and law, that look established human relations between the two men. At that moment an immense number of ...
That was what humans did: They left on another messages through time, pressed between pages or carved into rock. Like reaching out a hand through time, and trusting in a phantom hoped-for hand to catch yours. Humans did not last forever. They could o...
As a house can be only be built satisfactorily and durably when there is a foundation, and a picture can be painted only when there is something prepared to paint it on, so carnal love is only legitimate, reasonable, and lasting when it is based on t...
Through creativity, we are seamlessly connected and sustained as we pull back the veil, revealing beneath our differences and distinctive characteristics, human expression and the human experience are universal. It is the greatness of this experience...
We need to keep examining evilness. For instance, I'm totally against the fact that Osama bin Laden was shot. I think that he should have been put on trial and exposed as that human being he was. I think he should've been standing mentally naked in f...
When I was between 2 and 3 years old, I got to know my first non-human being. The non-human was a cocker spaniel named Baba. We weren't friends, Baba and I, nor enemies. He wasn't my dog. He belonged to the people my mother worked for, and he lived i...
You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when huma...
City of God interprets all of the human story, from Creation to the Last Judgment, as the drama of divine providence and human free choice, especially the choice between the two most fundamental options of membership in one or the other of the "two c...
We want to believe in the essential, unchanging goodness of people, in their power to resist external pressures, in their rational appraisal and then rejection of situational temptations. We invest human nature with God-like qualities, with moral and...
The living werewolves have genuine needs and desires, which, though they may oppose ours, are valid. Even if they want to eat humans, you can't really call them evil, any more than mice can call cats evil, or chickens can call humans evil. It's all j...
Humanity does not suffer from the disease of wrong beliefs but humanity suffers from the contagious nature of the lack of belief. If you have no magic with you it is not because magic does not exist but it is because you do not believe in it. Even if...
We can be amazed at man not only because he is a person, not only because he's made in the image of God, but also because, by the Incarnation, human nature itself has been raised to a divine dignity.
