Condition Is An Abnormal Accumulation Quotes

Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness. ~ Walter Brueggemann

One or two percent of any society is always subcultural. The Trotskyite, the Communist, the arsonist, the homosexual, the assassin--these are obviously dangerous and the courts must dispose their cases. Law has its problems. I shall not underestimate them; but law is not the problem. The enemy I am talking about is the one lurking in the guts of the whole nation like an invisible and deadly virus. It is not an action, but an attitude that says everyone has the right to arson, murder, rape, because doing those things is necessarily included under the rubric of freedom, of doing what one wants--not what I want or you want, but what someone wants. In a word, we have raised the abnormal and aberrant to the condition of a human right. The beast is loose among us, and he is welcome in our universities and homes. ~ John Senior

Some parents resist the idea of ADD for fear of seeing their children labeled and categorized. They do not like the idea of pinning a medical diagnosis on a child who, except in certain areas of functioning, seems quite well. Such fears are not baseless. Too often ADD seems no more than a judgment that characterizes a child as a problem student, incapable of normal activity. How people use language is quite revealing. People commonly say that this adult or that child "is ADD." That, indeed, is labeling, identifying the whole person with an area of weakness or impairment. No one is ADD, and no one should be defined or categorized in terms of it or any other particular problem.

Recognizing a child's ADD should be simply a way of understanding that helping him calls for some knowledgeable and creative approaches, not a judgment that there is anything fundamentally or irretrievably wrong with him. This recognition should enable us to support the child in fullfilling his potential, not to further limit him.

That even open-minded people may have difficulty coming to terms with this diagnosis is only to be expected. Our usual mode of thinking about illness (or anything else, for that matter) is not comfortable with ambiguity. A patient either has pneumonia or does not; she either has some illness affecting the mind or does not. There is a popular discomfort with any condition of the mind perceived as "abnormal."

But what if illness is not a separate ~ Gabor Mate

perhaps the problem of evil is a human problem, one of an egotistical mind-set, an anthropocentric bent in our thinking and perspective. ~ Jacob M. Held

...I am not I who thinks,but I am the Void, or extension, that thinks me. And so this composite is an accident, in which Void and extension linger for the blink of an eye, to be able afterwards to return to thinking otherwise. In this great Void of the Void, the one thing that truly is, is the history of this evolution in numberless transitory compositions...Compositions of what? Of the one great Nothingness, which is the substance of the whole.

Substance governed by a majestic necessity, which leads it to create and destroy worlds, to weave our pale lives. I must accept this, succeed in loving this Necessity, return to it, and bow to its future will, for this is the condition of Happiness. Only by accepting its law will I find my freedom. To flow back into It will be Salvation, fleeing from passions into the sole passion, the Intellectual Love of God.

If I truly succeeded in understanding this, I would be the one man who has found the True Philosophy, and I would know everything about the God that is hidden. But who would have the heart to go about the world and proclaim such a philosophy? This is the secret I will carry with me to my grave, in the Antipodes. ~ Umberto Eco

By saying "blessed are those who mourn", Jesus does not intend to declare an unfortunate and burdensome condition in life to be happy. Suffering is not a value in itself, but a reality that Jesus teaches us to live with the correct attitude. ~ Pope Francis

Human existence is a brutal experience to me ... it's a brutal, meaningless experience - an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, terrible experience, and so it [salvation] is what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament? That is what interests me the most. ~ Woody Allen

As neoliberalism wages war on public goods and the very idea of a public, including citizenship beyond membership, it dramatically thins public life without killing politics. Struggles remain over power, hegemonic values, resources, and future trajectories. This persistence of politics amid the destruction of public life and especially educated public life, combined with the marketization of the political sphere, is part of what makes contemporary politics peculiarly unappealing and toxic - full of ranting and posturing, emptied of intellectual seriousness, pandering to an uneducated and manipulable electorate and a celebrity-and-scandal-hungry corporate media. Neoliberalism generates a condition of politics absent democratic institutions that would support a democratic public and all that such a public represents at its best: informed passion, respectful deliberation, aspirational sovereignty, sharp containment of powers that would overrule or undermine it. ~ Wendy Brown

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginning of self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. ~ Joan Didion

Falling in love is an amazingly transcendental adventure. It is a great blessing to experience something so pure and sacred. So how can such an experience become corrupted? The answer is that our motivations sully the experience – but these motivations are usually entirely unconscious (that is, below our conscious awareness). When finding love is used as a way of escaping ourselves, it becomes more like a drug to numb our pain, rather than a spiritual journey. The experience is cheapened as conditions are placed upon the relationship for it to work. The dominant unspoken condition is: "You must make me happy and distract me enough from my pain and emptiness for this to work." When this condition isn't met consistently, the relationship begins to sour, decompose, and break apart. ~ Aletheia Luna

It's a folk art of sorts, I said to Hoeller, always longing to kill oneself but being kept by one's watchful intelligence from killing oneself, so that the condition is stabilized in the form of lifelong controlled suffering, it's an art possessed only by this people and those belonging to it. ~ Thomas Bernhard

There is only a limited number of plots, recurring down the ages, derived from an even more limited number of basic patterns-the conflicts, paradoxes, and predicaments inherent in man's condition. And if we continue the stripping game, we find that all these paradoxes and predicaments arose from conflicts between incompatible frames of experience or scales of value, illuminated in consciousness by the bisociative act. In this final illumination Aristotle saw 'the highest form of learning' because it shows us that we are 'men, not gods'; and he called tragedy 'the noblest form of literature' because it purges suffering from its pettiness by showing that its causes lie in the inescapable predicaments of existence. ~ Arthur Koestler

I don't want your love. I want the same love you want. I don't want your love. I want what you want & we can find It together & share our deepening experience of It….I thought it was your love I wanted and it hurt so much when you couldn't give it. I even made a bargain that if I gave it to you, I could expect it back. I thought you agreed to this bargain. I thought you were part of the deal.

I lived in fear that your love would disappear. I moved so deeply into the veil. Now I hear within me the whispering of something else. I feel the possibility of a Love that has nothing to do with you – an infinite resource that it always there. This Love is not affected by any condition, nor does it change in the stream of time. It is the same Love whether my body is strong or weak, whether I am rich and bountiful in material things or whether I am poor. It is not affected by things of this world. This is the Love that brings release. This is the Love that dissolves chains. This is the love that brings peace. This is the only Love I want. It releases you, my friend, from all our contracts."

Stephen Schwartz, Compassionate Presence ~ Stephen R. Schwartz

When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery. ~ Jane Hirshfield

The great Error of our Nature is, not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable Acquirement; not to compound with our Condition; but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable Pursuit after more. ~ Edmund Burke

Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don't use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.
What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don't force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don't understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day. ~ Ray Bradbury

To be fully awake is the condition for not being bored, or being boring - and indeed, not to be bored or boring is one of the main conditions for loving. To be active in thought, feeling, with one's eyes and ears, throughout the day, to avoid inner laziness, be it in the form of being receptive, hoarding, or plain wasting one's time, is an indispensable condition for the practice of the art of loving. ~ Erich Fromm

Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one. ~ Voltaire

It's fun to think that one day our great, great grandchildren may get that much closer to understanding what the hell creation is doing here in the first place, and glimpsing the underlying structure and nature of matter itself. Hopefully they won't live with the same existential horrors we all quietly face today in our own lives.

There is a kind of bravery to our condition, I reckon: brought into being without an explanation, in a potentially infinite and apparently dead universe, and expected to just get on with it as though nothing strange is going on. Well it fucking is. And it's all right to have a meltdown about the whole affair from time to time, faced with the pressures of modern existence, trying to be a good human and a good worker and a good son/daughter/parent, trying to be a good citizen, trying to be wise without condescension but uninhibited without recklessness, trying to just muddle through without making any silly decisions, trying to align with the correct political opinions, trying to stay thin, trying to be attractive, trying to be smart, trying to find the ideal partner, trying to stay financially secure, trying to just find some modest corner of meaning and belonging and sanity to go and sit in, and all the while living on the edge of dying forever.

We're all in the same strange boat, grappling with the same strange condition. But it isn't quite so scary if we all do it together. So let's do it together. ~ Exurb1a

What a lovely thing a rose is!"
He walked past the couch to the open window and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects.
"There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Comrades in the struggle! The position of modern man is not merely lamentable; one might even say that there is no condition, because man hardly exists. Nothing exists to which one could point and say: 'There, that is Homo Zapiens.' HZ is simply the residual luminescence of a soul fallen asleep; it is a film about the shooting of another film, shown on a television in an empty house. ~ Victor Pelevin

A man with an excruciatingly painful condition wrote me and told me that his doctor said that the only cure for what he has is death, and he might want to consider suicide. What do you say to him? I doubt the, "Hey let's go get some coffee and talk" thing is going to be at all helpful. ~ Henry Rollins

It may be an extreme example brought about by abnormal circumstances - but the criteria of human rights kick in, surely, precisely when the conditions are extreme and the situation is abnormal. ~ Breyten Breytenbach

It is amazing that our souls - our eternal essences, with all their hopes and dreams and visions of an eternal world - are contained within these temporal bodies. No wonder suffering is part of the human condition ... ~ Marion Woodman

If there is ever an amelioration of the condition of mankind, philosophers, theologians, legislators, politicians and moralists will find that the regulation of the press is the most difficult, dangerous and important problem they have to resolve. Mankind cannot now be governed without it, nor at present with it. ~ John Adams

Warning: Before beginning an program of physical inactivity, consult your doctor. Sedentary living is abnormal and dangerous to your health. ~ Frank Forencich

We must have no carelessness in our dealings with public property or the expenditure of public money. Such a condition is characteristic either of an undeveloped people, or of a decadent civilization. America is neither. ~ Calvin Coolidge

Something, most certainly, happens to a diver's emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one's point of view starts to lose its "lefts" and "down" and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one's feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror. ~ Barry Lopez

The man who has lost his instincts and does not recognize the obligation Nature has given him cannot hope for any corrective action on Nature's part until he restores his lost instincts by clear intellectual awareness. Once he understands, then he must face the task of making the necessary amends by bringing back what was lost. There is a great danger that once a man no longer sees his duty clearly, he will continue to tear down the racial barriers until the last remaining shred of his best part is finally lost. Then there would be nothing left but a uniform racial mush, which appears to be the ideal sought by our "wonderful world-reformers" today. However this puree mix would soon drive all ideals from the world. True, a group of great size might be formed in that way because a herd animal can be unnaturally combined, but no such mixture can ever produce a man who can carry a culture or a man who can be a cultural founder and creator. The mission of mankind could then be considered at an end.
Anyone who does not want the earth to approach that condition must accept that it is the task, especially of the German State, to be sure, above everything, that all further bastardization is stopped. ~ Adolf Hitler

An optimist is merely an ex-pessimist with his pockets full of money, his digestion in good condition, and his wife in the country. ~ Helen Rowland

Appetite has really become an artificial and abnormal thing, having taken the place of true hunger, which alone is natural. The one is a sign of bondage but the other, of freedom. ~ Paul Brunton