Artem Tabakov > Artem's Quotes

“The gap that separates ancient cosmology from materialistic science is enormous. On one hand, we may interpret reality exclusively with mechanical causality, where everything is devoid of meaning and higher purpose. On the other hand, we may interpret reality exclusively through a cosmic language, where facts and events are the hosts of spiritual meaning. Neither of these worldviews is complete without the other. A purely material perspective knows how the universe works but perceives no higher reason for its existence, while a purely spiritual perspective knows the meaning of the universe without understanding how it technically works. Ideally, we should be able to adopt both perspectives without having to sacrifice one or the other.”
― Matthieu Pageau, The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis

“Wide are men’s inquiries into uncertainties; wider still are their disputes about conjectures.”
― Tertullian, A Treatise On The Soul

“I believe because it is absurd.”
― Tertullian, On The Flesh Of Christ

“Reflection is and remains the hardest creditor in existence; hitherto it has cunningly bought up all the possible views of life, but it cannot buy the essentially religious and eternal view of life.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

“Equally unthinkable among young men of today is a truly religious renunciation of the world, adhered to with daily self-denial. On the other hand almost any theological student is capable of something far more wonderful. He could found a society with the sole object of saving all those who are lost. The age of great and good actions is past, the present is the age of anticipation when even recognition is received in advance.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

“Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”
― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

“Without your wounds where would your power be? It is your melancholy that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men and women. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve. Physician, draw back.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good”
― Thornton Wilder

“The life of a healthy individual is characterized by fears, conflicting feelings, doubts, frustrations, as much as by the positive features. The main thing is that the man or woman feels he or she is living his or her own life, taking responsibility for action or inaction, and able to take credit for success and blame for failure. In one language it can be said that the individual has emerged from dependence to independence, or to autonomy.”
― D.W. Winnicott, Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst

“Why do you increase your bonds? Take hold of your life before your light grows dark and you seek help and do not find it. This life is given for repentance, do not waste it in vain pursuits.”
― Isaac the Syrian

“In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say 'I have learned' and 'I have loved,' you will also be able to say 'I have been happy.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Rama II

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but 'That's funny...”
― Isaac Asimov

“You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason---if you pick the proper postulates.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“Both the Sublime and the Beautiful induce a state of submission that is often combined with the possibility of getting lost. They disorientate and undermine purpose. In one of several erotic sections in the Enquiry Burke describes the experience of looking at a beautiful woman’s body: it is, he writes, like a ‘deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye glides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried’. It”
― Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

“The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“The rock, for its part, is not even aware of our existence because we are alive for only a brief instant of its lifespan. To it, we are like flashes in the dark.”
― Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain

“The sole substitute for an experience we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“The achievement of psychological maturity is an individual task-and so is increasingly difficult today when man's individuality is threatened by widespread conformity.”
― C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols

“The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters—there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void. We are back in the Byzantine situation, where idolatry calls on a plethora of images to conceal from itself the fact that God no longer exists. That's why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of a presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.”
― Jean Baudrillard

“Come from the heart, the true heart, not the head. When in doubt, choose the heart. This does not mean to deny your own experiences and that which you have empirically learned through the years. It means to trust your self to integrate intuition and experience. There is a balance, a harmony to be nurtured, between the head and the heart. When the intuition rings clear and true, loving impulses are favored.”
― Brian Weiss, Messages from the Masters: Tapping into the Power of Love

“Not too long ago thousands spent their lives as recluses to find spiritual vision in the solitude of nature. Modern man need not become a hermit to achieve this goal, for it is neither ecstasy nor world-estranged mysticism his era demands, but a balance between quantitative and qualitative reality. Modern man, with his reduced capacity for intuitive perception, is unlikely to benefit from the contemplative life of a hermit in the wilderness. But what he can do is to give undivided attention, at times, to a natural phenomenon, observing it in detail, and recalling all the scientific facts about it he may remember. Gradually, however, he must silence his thoughts and, for moments at least, forget all his personal cares and desires, until nothing remains in his soul but awe for the miracle before him. Such efforts are like journeys beyond the boundaries of narrow self-love and, although the process of intuitive awakening is laborious and slow, its rewards are noticeable from the very first. If pursued through the course of years, something will begin to stir in the human soul, a sense of kinship with the forces of life consciousness which rule the world of plants and animals, and with the powers which determine the laws of matter. While analytical intellect may well be called the most precious fruit of the Modern Age, it must not be allowed to rule supreme in matters of cognition. If science is to bring happiness and real progress to the world, it needs the warmth of man's heart just as much as the cold inquisitiveness of his brain.”
― Franz Winkler

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles"

“Calvinist believers were psychologically isolated. Their distance from God could only be precariously bridged, and their inner tensions only partially relieved, by unstinting, purposeful labor.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism

“Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist-a master-and that is what Auguste Rodin was-can look at an old woman, protray her exactly as she is...and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be...and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart...no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired-but it does to them.”
― Robert Heinlein

“Assume the feeling of your wish fulfilled and observe the route that your attention follows.”
― Neville Goddard, The Power of Awareness

“Dare to believe in the reality of your assumption
and watch the world play its part
relative to to its fulfillment.”
― Neville Goddard

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost