Month: July 2007

A Grace of Fate

I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: i am completely powerless.

I can only make myself independent of the world-and so in a certain sense master it-by renouncing any influence on happenings.

The world is independent of my will.

Even if everything that we want were to happen, this would still only be, so to speak, a grace of fate, for what would guarantee it is not any logical connection between will and world, and we could not in turn will the supposed physical connection.

And in this sense dostoevsky is right when he says that the man who is happy is fulfilling the purpose of existence.
Or again we could say that the man is fulfilling the purpose of existence who no longer needs to have any purpose except to live. That is to say, who is content.

The solution of the problem of life is to be seen in the disappearance of this problem.

But is it possible for one so to live that life stops being problematic? That one is living in eternity and not in time?
Isn’t this the reason why men to whom the meaning of life had become clear after long doubting could not say what this meaning consisted in?

Wittgenstein

Detached From The Outcome

Self-actualizing people live their lives detached from the outcome. And detached from the outcome means I don’t do what I do because of what might show up for me. I’m not motivated by being famous; I’m not motivated by making money; I’m not motivated by other people’s approval. I’m motivated by doing what I love and loving what I do. And it’s the process of doing it and living it and loving it that appeals the most. And this is very difficult in a world which says that you are what you have and you are what you do and you are your accomplishments and your achievements and your acquisitions. When we begin to evaluate ourselves on the basis on all of these kinds of things, then attracting those kinds of things becomes almost the paramount motivator of our lives. And it is one of the most difficult things in the western civilization to get people to understand that doing what you love and loving what you do is its own reward and whatever the universe provides for you in the way of the outcome is what you accept. So that what you are motivated by is a sense of peace, fulfillment, and awareness that I’m doing what I love and loving what i do.

Dr. Wayne Dyer

To Be Beautiful Is to Be True

This is not particularly a pretty world. We have uglified what is most beautiful in it. We have come very close to losing that sense of beauty and harmony and proportion, and in the absence of that sense we won’t even be aware of what we are doing to ourselves by making our house a fitful and horrific spectacle of a place. We more or less have given up on the idea that government has a central part to play in the cultivation of the civic dimension of life. We’ve given up very much the idea that there is something so universally expressed in human nature that there are certain cultural forms capable of nurturing this nature. In our multicultural tolerance we are losing out on something that gives substance to a shared humanity. We’ve come to think of beauty as an option and the Greeks knew better; it’s a necessity. And it should finally be the source of all we prize and all the might we might will in the world. To be beautiful is to be true and to be those things is to be good. That was the ancient ideal and to lose that is to live in a mechanical and meaningless and empty life.

Prof. Daniel Robinson

The Mysterious

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, i am a devoutly religious man.

What separates me from most so called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.

Science can be created only by those who are imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. this source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. the situation might be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as causally bound as the stars in their motions. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying, ‘a man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills,’ has been a real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance.

Albert Einstein