Nowadays, you suffer the same risks - ostracism, career loss, possible assault - for being perceived as racist that you would have encountered a century ago for daring to question racist ideology.
It is precisely through the onset of old age, through loss or personal tragedy, that the spiritual dimension would traditionally come into people's lives. This is to say, their inner purpose would emerge only as their outer purpose collapsed and the shell of the ego would begin to crack open. The emphasis shifts from doing to Being, and our civilization, which is lost in doing, knows nothing of Being. It asks: being? What do you do with it?
Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.
Of all the nations in the Western world, the United States, with the most money and the most time, has the fewest readers of books per capita. This is an incalculable loss. This, too, is one of the few civilized nations in the world which is unable to support a single magazine devoted solely to books.
Why am I more cautious as I age instead of the other way around? I wonder if it's all tied in to failure. I tend to forget my gains and remember only the losses. The failures have piled up, wreaking havoc with my confidence until, as an adult, I've become afraid to take chances.
The sweetness that all longed for night and day. Some tragedy might be idly guessed at-loss or illness. She had the luminosity of those about to die.
Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.
One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.
Nothing makes us love something more than the loss of it.
We think of death and loss as tragic twins, but in fact it is loss that hurts us.
When people think of the outcomes of their decisions, they think much more short term than that. They think in terms of gains and losses.
One reason education undoes belief is its teaching of evolution; Darwin's own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic. Martin Lings is probably right in saying that more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution. . . than to anything else.
Whether low-income people are dealing with access to veteran's benefits, or a protective order to guard against domestic violence, or a way to guard against the loss of their home due to foreclosure and unscrupulous behavior by mortgage providers, there's no way they can afford a lawyer. And that's a serious problem. Because that erodes respect for law, it erodes the prospects for justice.
Real investment risk is measured not by the percent that a stock may decline in price in relation to the general market in a given period, but by the danger of a loss of quality and earnings power through economic changes or deterioration in management.
Winning and losing are both very temporary things. Having done one or the other, you move ahead. Gloating over a victory or sulking over a loss is a good way to stand still.
Our fiscal ruin and resulting loss of world leadership will, in [liberals'] eyes, be not a tragic event but a desirable one.
(After the losses) I decided I had to break through. I had to set a goal. My goal that I set was to never be pinned.
We shall never forget that it was our submarines that held the lines against the enemy while our fleets replaced losses and repaired wounds.
The only thing that keeps this organization from being recognized as one of the finest in baseball is wins and losses at the major league level.
I felt sure about wanting to look at a person's life that had been limited or damaged, but not necessarily ennobled, by loss.
