The Nature Of Perfection Quotes

Perfection: a collection of a variety of pieces that, when viewed and felt individually, are difficult and confusing; but when brought together as one, create a perfect picture. Symphony, harmony, serenity. ~ C. JoyBell C.

What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence? ~ Joshua Foer

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind. ~ George Lakoff

Faeries are known to be tenders of plants and energizing inhabitants of gardens. They are more elusive than Angels and often have lively, mercurial temperaments. They are active in preserving what little wilderness remains on the Earth. ~ Elizabeth S. Eiler

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion. ~ Umberto Eco

There was no portion of land in the world with so contradictory a nature as the Highlands. Now it was a land of sunlit moors stained red with heather, knowing only the peace of the quiet sky and the heart-shaking beauty of the blue hills; now it was a harsh and awesome place where silent mists obscured the peaks and a bitter relentless rain came down from bitter skies, where an angry sea washed against the shore, and sullen clouds reflected in sullen gray lochs.
Scotland in the sun and Scotland in the rain ... ~ Jan Cox Speas

But the fact of the matter is that everyone has an explicit or implicit set of ideas and beliefs as to the essential nature of the world. ~ M. Scott Peck

Aunty! Jean Louise groaned. Coffees were peculiarly Maycombian in nature. They were given for girls who came home. Such girls were placed on view at 10:30 A.M. for the express purpose of allowing the women of their age who had remained enisled in Maycomb to examine them. Childhood friendships were rarely renewed under such conditions. ~ Harper Lee

On the twelfth of June, the forces of Western Europe crossed the borders of Russia, and war began
that is, an event took place contrary to human reason and to the whole of human nature. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The laws of nature are ... thoughts of God ~ Heinrich Zschokke

The dualistic mind tends to think of mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but mu is found throughout all scientific investigation, and nature doesn't cheat, ~ Robert M. Pirsig

The archetype of the witch is long overdue for celebration. Daughters, mothers, queens, virgins, wives, et al. derive meaning from their relation to another person. Witches, on the other hand, have power on their own terms. They have agency. They create. They praise. They commune with nature/ Spirit/God/dess/Choose-your-own-semantics, freely, and free of any mediator. But most importantly: they make things happen. The best definition of magic I've been able to come up with is "symbolic action with intent" - "action" being the operative word. Witches are midwives to metamorphosis. They are magical women, and they, quite literally, change the world. ~ Pamela J. Grossman

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. ~ Erich Fromm

If the rays are the souls of living beings, then the light of that same divine Sun is the spirit of the whole of nature. It is the same light; but not divided, not distinct, as are the rays which we call souls. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

As he was wont to remark, Nature has had her day; she has finally exhausted through the nauseating uniformity of her landscapes and her skies, the sedulous patience of men of refined taste. Essentially, what triteness Nature displays, like a specialist who confines himself to his own single sphere; what small-mindedness, like a shopkeeper who stocks only this one article to the exclusion of any other; what monotony she exhibits with her arrangements of mountains and seas! Page 20.
There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artifice. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

Laurie thought the task of forgetting his love for Jo would absorb all his powers for years; but, to his surprise, he discovered it grew easier every day. He refused to believe it at first,--got angry with himself, and couldn't understand it; but these hearts of ours are curious and contrary things, and time and nature work their will in spite of us. Laurie's heart wouldn't ache; the wound persisted in healing with a rapidity that astonished him, and, instead of trying to forget, he found himself trying to remember. ~ Louisa May Alcott

Ultimately, this cosmologem is not just a piece of funerary geography, but conveys basic truths about the nature of human existence. It relates that the dead have no need for their memories, having passed beyond the realm in which those memories have value. But the memories of the departed are not without value for those who are yet living. The accumulated memories of the dead comprise the totality of human history. Preserved and appreciated, they are the source of true wisdom, the wisdom that is based on the full sweep of human experiences rather than the idiosyncratic events of one human life. In the last analysis, the present depends upon the past, the living upon the dead, and this world upon the other. Those who die do not just pass on but continue to contribute to the sustenance of this world, as the world of the living draws strength, meaning, and wisdom from the world of the dead, much as one draws water from a spring. ~ Bruce Lincoln

I've said you can actually see this fusion in skilled mechanics and machinists of a certain sort, and you can see it in the work they do. To say that they are not artists is to misunderstand the nature of art. They have patience, care and attentiveness to what they're doing, but more than this - there's a kind of inner peace of mind that isn't contrived but results from a kind of harmony with the work in which there's no leader and no follower. The material and the craftsman's thoughts change together in a progression of smooth, even changes until his mind is at rest at the exact instant the material is right. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

The unfinished nature of phenomenology and the inchoate style in which it proceeds are not the signs of failure; they were inevitable because phenomenology's task was to reveal the mystery of the world and the mystery of reason. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act. ~ Stanley Milgram

Clearly, it is time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous. We must find ways to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity - birth, marriage, death - without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality. Only then will the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Muslim, or Jewish be widely recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is. And only then will we stand a chance of healing the deepest and most dangerous fractures in our world. ~ Sam Harris

To be a woman condemned to a wretched and disgraceful punishment is no impediment to beauty, but it is an insurmountable obstacle to power. Like all persons of real genius, her ladyship well knew what accorded with her nature and her means. Poverty disgusted her -subjection deprived her of two-thirds of her greatness. Her ladyship was only a queen amongst queens: the enjoyment of satisfied pride was essential to her sway. To command beings of an inferior nature, was, to her, rather a humiliation than a pleasure. ~ Alexandre Dumas

The foreign states may become actively involved for positive purposes only if and when the internal resistance movement has already begun shaking the dictatorship, having thereby focused international attention on the brutal nature of the regime. ~ Gene Sharp

The connection between radical attentiveness, prayer, and joy pervades Jewish mystical thinking in its diverse phases but never so brightly, so every-day-related, and so clearly as in Hasidism. Melancholy is the dust in the soul that Satan spreads out. Worry and dejection are seen to be the roots of every evil force. Melancholy is a wicked quality and displeasing to God, says Martin Buber.

Rabbi Bunam said: "Once when I was on the road near Warsaw, I felt that I had to tell a certain story. But this story was of a worldly nature and I knew that it would only rouse laughter among the many people who had gathered about me. The Evil Urge tried very hard to dissuade me, saying that I would lose all those people because once they heard this story they would no longer consider me a rabbi. But I said to my heart: `Why should you he concerned about the secret ways of God?' And I remembered the words of Rabbi Pinhas of Koretz: 'All joys hail from paradise, and jests too, provided they are uttered in true joy' And so in my heart of hearts I renounced my rabbi's office and told the story. The gathering burst out laughing. And those who up to this point had been distant from me attached themselves to me." (a quote from Tales of the Hasidim by Martin Buber).

Joy, laughter, and delight are so powerful because, like all mysticism, they abolish conventional divisions, in this case the division between secular and sacred. The often boisterous laughter, especially of wome ~ Dorothee Solle

Death. Life. They are in the air, the water, the earth, and the fire that surround us. They co-mingle like a dance of weeping and rejoicing. The joy and pain become one. We are of a dualistic nature." ---Jennifer Mills ~ Dianne Bright

The satyr, as the Dionysiac chorist, dwells in a reality sanctioned by myth and ritual. That tragedy should begin with him, that the Dionysiac wisdom of tragedy should speak through him, is as puzzling a phenomenon as, more generally, the origin of tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps we can gain a starting point for this inquiry by claiming that the satyr, that fictive nature sprite, stands to cultured man in the same relation as Dionysian music does to civilization. Richard Wagner has said of the latter that it is absorbed by music as lamplight by daylight. In the same manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself absorbed into the satyr chorus, and in the next development of Greek tragedy state and society, in fact everything that separates man from man, gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity that led back into the heart of nature. This metaphysical solace (which, I wish to say at once, all true tragedy sends us away) that, despite every phenomenal change, life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, nature beings who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement.

With this chorus the profound Greek, so uniquely susceptible to the subtlest and deepest suffering, who had penetrated the destructive agencies of both nature and history, solaced himself. Though he had been in danger of craving a Buddhistic denial of the will ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Nature is our book," [Aristotle] would say. "It is the most sacred text we have. Line by line, reason will unlock the mysteries of our world, and once we understand them it will change the way we think. ~ J.L. Taylor

Existential envy which is directed against the other person's very nature, is the strongest source of ressentiment. It is as if it whispers continually: "I can forgive everything, but not that you are - that you are what you are - that I am not what you are - indeed that I am not you." This form of envy strips the opponent of his very existence, for this existence as such is felt to be a "pressure," a "reproach," and an unbearable humiliation. In the lives of great men there are always critical periods of instability, in which they alternately envy and try to love those whose merits they cannot but esteem. Only gradually, one of these attitudes will predominate. Here lies the meaning of Goethe's reflection that "against another's great merits, there is no remedy but love. ~ Max Scheler

All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost - the most legitimate - passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one. ~ Marquis De Sade

The first ideas of religion arose, not from contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life. ~ David Hume

Scientists and shamans alike know that all of life is woven into a web of infinite connections, contributing to the larger whole in a system that is complex beyond our imagining. When we sit quietly at the edge of a lake, or hike through a wildflower-strewn meadow, or walk through a cool, dark forest, we quickly become aware of our unity with the natural world. We fall back into natural rhythms--rhythms we are no longer in synch with as a result of living by the clock and spending much of our time in man-made spaces lit by electricity. Nature has a way of recalibrating us and helping us gain a new perspective on our stressors so that they seem less overwhelming. ~ Carl Greer

How often is the soul of man - especially in childhood - deprived because he is not allowed to come in contact with nature. ~ Maria Montessori

Moral for psychologists. -- Not to go in for backstairs psychology. Never to observe in order to observe! That gives a false perspective, leads to squinting and something forced and exaggerated. Experience as the wish to experience does not succeed. One must not eye oneself while having an experience; else the eye becomes "an evil eye." A born psychologist guards instinctively against seeing in order to see; the same is true of the born painter. He never works "from nature"; he leaves it to his instinct, to his camera obscura, to sift through and express the "case," "nature," that which is "experienced." He is conscious only of what is general, of the conclusion, the result: he does not know arbitrary abstractions from an individual case.
What happens when one proceeds differently? For example, if, in the manner of the Parisian novelists, one goes in for backstairs psychology and deals in gossip, wholesale and retail? Then one lies in wait for reality, as it were, and every evening one brings home a handful of curiosities. But note what finally comes of all this: a heap of splotches, a mosaic at best, but in any case something added together, something restless, a mess of screaming colors. The worst in this respect is accomplished by the Goncourts; they do not put three sentences together without really hurting the eye, the psychologist's eye. Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance. To study "from nature ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness. ~ Thomas Merton

The essence of meditation practice in Dzogchen is encapsulated by these four points:
▪When one past thought has ceased and a future thought has not yet risen, in that gap, in between, isn't there a consciousness of the present moment; fresh, virgin, unaltered by even a hair's breadth of a concept, a luminous, naked awareness?
Well, that is what Rigpa is!
▪Yet it doesn't stay in that state forever, because another thought suddenly arises, doesn't it?
This is the self-radiance of that Rigpa.
▪However, if you do not recognize this thought for what it really is, the very instant it arises, then it will turn into just another ordinary thought, as before. This is called the "chain of delusion," and is the root of samsara.
▪If you are able to recognize the true nature of the thought as soon as it arises, and leave it alone without any follow-up, then whatever thoughts arise all automatically dissolve back into the vast expanse of Rigpa and are liberated.
Clearly this takes a lifetime of practice to understand and realize the full richness and majesty of these four profound yet simple points, and here I can only give you a taste of the vastness of what is meditation in Dzogchen.
…
Dzogchen meditation is subtly powerful in dealing with the arisings of the mind, and has a unique perspective on them. All the risings are seen in their true nature, not as separate from Rigpa, and not as antagonistic to it, but actually as none other–and this is ~ Sogyal Rinpoche

The people who are most discouraged and made despondent by the barbarity and stupidity of human behaviour at this time are those who think highly of Homo Sapiens as a product of evolution, and who still cling to an optimistic belief in the civilizing influence of progress and enlightenment. To them, the appalling outbursts of bestial ferocity in the Totalitarian States, and the obstinate selfishness and stupid greed of Capitalist Society, are not merely shocking and alarming. For them, these things are the utter negation of everything in which they have believed. It is as though the bottom had dropped out of their universe. The whole thing looks like a denial of all reason, and they feel as if they and the world had gone mad together.

Now for the Christian, this is not so. He is as deeply shocked and grieved as anybody else, but he is not astonished. He has never thought very highly of human nature left to itself. He has been accustomed to the idea that there is a deep interior dislocation in the very centre of human personality, and that you can never, as they say, 'make people good by Act of Parliament', just because laws are man-made and therefore partake of the imperfect and self-contradictory nature of man. Humanly speaking, it is not true at all that 'truly to know the good is to do the good'; it is far truer to say with St. Paul that 'the evil that I would not, that I do'; so that the mere increase of knowledge is of very little help in the struggle to outl ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

At the final day, the Savior will not ask about the nature of our callings. He will not inquire about our material possessions or fame. He will ask if we ministered to the sick, gave food and drink to the hungry, visited those in prison, or gave succor to the weak. ~ Joseph B. Wirthlin

St. Thomas Aquinas taught that water has been a natural sacrament since the dawn of creation. In the age of nature - from Adam through the patriarchs - water refreshed and cleansed humankind. ~ Scott Hahn

Human nature is universial, and it endures through all cultures and epochs. This is the secret of perenniality of certain poems and books. ~ Octavio Paz

We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought. ~ Thomas Bernhard

We shine like those fires and those stars; we sigh like those waves; we suffer like those great ships, which are worn out in ploughing the waves, in obeying the wind which urges them towards an end, as the breath of God blows us towards a port. Everything likes to live, Raoul; and everything is beautiful in living things. ~ Alexandre Dumas

Two and two do make four. Nature doesn't ask your advice. She isn't interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all the consequences that that implies. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Add to that that he was to some extent a youth of our last epoch - that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

So that even although he had from the beginning given it no other form than that of chaos, provided only he had established certain laws of nature, and had lent it his concurrence to enable it to act as it is wont to do, it may be believed, without discredit to the miracle of creation, that, in this way alone, things purely material might, in course of time, have become such as we observe them at present; and their nature is much more easily conceived when they are beheld coming in this manner gradually into existence, than when they are only considered as produced at once in a finished and perfect state. ~ Rene Descartes

When your situation has gone beyond the power of nature, it has become a curse. Who can remove a curse but Jesus Christ? ~ T. B. Joshua