Ay; beauty's princely majesty is such, Confounds the tongue and makes the senses rough.
The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.
I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.
Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next. ' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries.
One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human pre-history where nobody - not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms - had the smallest idea what was going on.
We have no proof that Socrates ever existed. We only know from witnesses to his life that he did. Like Jesus, he never wrote anything down. It doesn't matter to me whether he did or not exist because we have his teachings, his method of thinking, and his extreme intellectual and moral courage.
The universe really is motion & nothing else.
Just because somebody drops in on you from another dimension, don't assume they're wiser than you about anything at all, or that they can do anything better than you can do yourself. Discarnate or mortal, what matters about people is what they know.
There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on.
All minorities think they're immune, but we're absolutely part of the one in five that gets skin cancer! It's a myth, and myths are meant to be debunked!