There seems to be much misunderstanding about True Will ... The fact of a person being a gentleman is as much an ineluctable factor as any possible spiritual experience; in fact, it is possible, even probable, that a man may be misled by the enthusiasm of an illumination, and if he should find apparent conflict between his spiritual duty and his duty to honour, it is almost sure evidence that a trap is being laid for him and he should unhesitatingly stick to the course which ordinary decency indicates.
Aleister CrowleyRelated topics
almost course duty experience factor find gentleman lay man person possible should stick sure trap honourRelated quotes
To carry on a war for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie, a war which is a hundred times more difficult, protracted and complex than the most stubborn of ordinary wars between states, and to renounce in advance any change of tack, or any utilisation of a conflict of interests (even if temporary) among one's enemies, or any conciliation or compromise with possible allies (even if they are temporary, unstable, vacillating or conditional allies) - is that not ridiculous in the extreme?
Vladimir Lenin
If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself-as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation-you may hate it, or deify it, but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
I find it expressed in various passages of Scripture that the fact that God knows things while in a state of possibility, when their existence belongs to the future, does not change the nature of the possible in any way; that nature remains unchanged; and the knowledge of the realisation of one of several possibilities does not yet effect that realisation. This is likewise one of the fundamental principles of the Law of Moses concerning which there is no doubt nor any dispute.
Maimonides
Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity, for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him - in fact, he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's.
Lionel Trilling
I did not share the enthusiasm of certain politicians for the National Front leader, it was because I had noticed, in the past, some strange contradictions between Mossadeq's declared ends and his actions. Officially he defended nationalist anti-colonialism and was the most intransigent patriot who declared that no concessions or advantages should be granted to foreign powers. He described his doctrine as a "negative balance" and in fact his greatest failing was that he was negative.
Muhammad Reza Pahlavi