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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #russell
When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless. ↗
I wish I could say I gulp pure courage as I run, like those brave little girls you read about in stories, ... But this burst of speed comes from an older adrenaline, some limbic other. Not courage, but a deeper terror. I don't want to be left alone. And I am ready to defend Ossie against whatever monster I encounter, ... and save her for myself. ↗
Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came toseemtrue. Thisexercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking, and helps us to realize how foolish many of our own cherished prejudices will seem to an age which has a different temper of mind. ↗
To the primitive mind, everything is either friendly or hostile; but experience has shown that friendliness and hostility are not the conceptions by which the world is to be understood. ↗
Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more - 'damn you tiny assassin, clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial'. ↗
#faith #pain #russell-brand #wasps #faith
Flannery O’Connor’s writing is quite dark, but it is so because she believes in the Devil, and in the Fall, and in humanity as it is. Novels that avoid the horror of human existence in this time between Eden and New Jerusalem can reinforce a Christian’s tendency to Pelagianism. The Christian gospel isn’t “clean” and “safe” and “family-friendly.” It comes to its narrative climax at a bloody Place of the Skull and in a borrowed grave. (http://bit.ly/KZS8Zh) ↗
I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate. ↗
The meta-physical creed, I shall maintain, is a mistaken outcome of the emotion, although this emotion, as colouring and informing all other thoughts and feelings, is the inspirer of whatever is best in Man. ↗