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"I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out."
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Exlpore more Philosophy quotes
"Let each person decide his or her fate."
"There is no such thing as reincarnation, but only similar incarnation."
"Mind and Soul are one and the same thing."
"Beauty, love with truth, that is all there is."
"Science without Philosophy leads to chaos. Philosophy without Science leads to nowhere. Only together they can construct a better world."
"...an age-old patter that seemed like chaos but was not..."
"It is always, first Self, then everything else."
"The Judgement is not a question, it's a sure answer, as to a clump of dough, that will yeast and rise, or go in the oven and burn to crust."
"Can any man sacrifice is life for his fellow man?"
"I guess it's better to have a chalk smile, than an ink smile. Where chalk changes with the direction of wind, ink stays as a deep stain. Like rain, sun and hail against a fake plant."
Explore more quotes by Annie Dillard
"The writing that so thrills and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing right next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else."
"The question was not death; living things die. It was love. Not that we died, but what we cared wildly, then deeply, for one person out of billions. We bound ourselves to the fickle, changing, and dying as if they were rock."
"You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it."
"In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned."
"I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live maggots in amber, there are shells of worms in the rock and moths flapping at my eyes. A wind from no place rises. A sense of the real exults me; the cords loosen: I walk on my way."
"The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching. A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world-if only from time to time."
"It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. The very holy mountains are keeping mum. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it; we are lighting matches in vain under every green tree."
"There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it."
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