In the Church which was founded at Corinth, St. Paul had special difficulties of the kind I have mentioned. In that flourishing commercial city, which through its shipping and situation, maintained a vital connexion between East and West, numerous crowds of people flocked together from all quarters, different in speech and in culture. As they mingled with the inhabitants, they produced, by contacts and contrasts, new and ever new differences. Even in the Church this differentiation endeavoured to make itself felt in sects and parties; and a kind of pagan wisdom made a special attempt to force itself forward as a teacher of truth. In his first letter to this church, from which the text I read is taken, St. Paul strongly combats this tendency.
Soren KierkegaardRelated topics
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Each form of the sacrosanct was regarded by members of the culture which gave rise to it as a revelation of the Truth; at Byzantium it was not a mere hypothesis that was sponsored by the majesty of the Byzantine style. To us, however, these forms make their appeal as forms alone - in other words, as they would be were they the work of a contemporary (and, since this actually is unthinkable, they affect us in a puzzling manner); or else as so many grandiose vestiges of a faith that has died out. We look at them from outside; they are still emotive, but they are no longer true. Thus we deprive them of what was their most vital element; for a religious civilization that regarded what it revered as a mere hypothesis is inconceivable.
André Malraux
I knew Robert Burns, and I knew my father. Yet were you to ask me which had the greater natural faculty, I might perhaps actually pause before replying. Burns had an infinitely wider education, my father a far wholesomer. Besides, the one was a man of musical utterance; the other wholly a man of action, with speech subservient thereto. Never, of all the men I have seen, has one come personally in my way in whom the endowment from nature and the arena from fortune were so utterly out of all proportion. I have said this often, and partly know it. As a man of speculation - had culture ever unfolded him - he must have gone wild and desperate as Burns; hut he was a man of conduct, and work keeps all right. What strange shapable creatures we are!
Thomas Carlyle
Don't forget that God sees you and watches you when you are in pain; He perceives even the beating of your heart. Consequently, He will not leave you without consolation and His fatherly protection. Naturally, the saints rejoiced in their afflictions; as for us, let us at least manage to accept affliction or pain patiently.
My child, pray within your heart, and the name of Jesus will become for you a comforting balm so that you can bear this trial of yours in a way which benefits you. You will greatly benefit from this trial if you submit yourself to it patiently. So again I say to you, with the almighty armor of prayer continually approach the omnipotent Lord more often, and you will come to know how He wondrously lifts the burden of pain and marvellously gives rest to sufferers.
Ephraim of Arizona
Admittedly, the tendency to bracket substantive moral questions makes it difficult to argue for toleration in the language of the good. Defining privacy rights by defending the practices privacy protects seems either reckless or quaint; reckless because it rests so much on moral argument, quaint because it recalls the traditional view that ties the case for privacy to the merits of the conduct privacy protects. But as the abortion and sodomy cases illustrate, the attempt to bracket moral questions faces difficulties of its own. They suggest the truth in the "naive" view, that the justice or injustice of laws against abortion and homosexual sodomy may have something to do with the morality or immorality of these practices after all.
Michael J. Sandel
On 11 October 1908, having worked for six years at my international magazine Poesia, in an attempt to free the Italian lyrical genius that was under sentence of death from its traditional and commercial fetters, I suddenly felt that articles, poetry and controversies were no longer enough. It was absolutely crucial to switch methods, get out into the streets, lay siege to theaters, and introduce the fisticuffs into the artistic struggle... My Italian blood raced faster when my lips coined out loud the word FUTURISM.
It was the new formula of Action-Art and a code of mental health. It was a youthful and innovative banner, anti-traditional, optimistic, heroic and dynamic, that had to be hoisted over the ruins of all attachment to the past.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti