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"The embrace of essential beastliness, made scientific and respectable by a reading of Darwin that may or may not have done justice to his intentions, thrilled and enthralled Western thought in certain quarters and in fact still does enthrall persons and groups that experience live in society as a barely tolerable constraint on a kind of freedom they consider a birthright. This freedom appears to have most of the essential features of a war of each against all, whether a hot war that compels them to go armed to Starbucks or to church or a cold war that makes a virtue of craftiness and guile, the ability to loot and wreck the national economy without getting caught."
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"Thought, if I may put it, is the man behind the possession, appearance, things we like, things we hate and the very epitome of life."
"Your subconscious mind is the universal mind with a universal consciousness."
"Absolute is infinite so there is no absolute truth. There is truth that you can see in infinite ways and make your own."
"Every aspect of your life will be enlivened when you start to think and communicate with your heart and mind in cohesive coordinated harmony."
"Think about yourself because no one has time to think about you. Everyone is busy thinking about themselves."
"I don't claim to know everything, Wally. I only claim that everything can eventually be known."
"I don't know who you are or where you are, but I know your deep driving desires. I am writing to you to make your life a little easier and better."
"There are two kinds of people:those who learned to love and those who didn't."
"Any education that doesn't allow you to think freely is not an education but a prison."
"I came to this world to bloom and spread my love to fill the world with happiness."
Explore more quotes by Marilynne Robinson
"She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it. The right prayer would have been, Lord . . . I am miserable and bitter at heart, and old fears are rising up in me so that everything I do makes everything worse."
"We are supposed to believe [capitalist ideology] was the champion of freedom and prosperity in the epic struggle called the Cold War. If there was such a champion, might it not have been freedom itself, as realized in the institutional forms of democracy? This is not how the story has been told. We are t believe it was an economic system, capitalism, that arrayed its forces against its opposite, communism, and rescued all we hold dear. Yet in the new era... [capitalism] has shown itself very ready to devour what we hold dear, if the list can be taken to include culture, education, the environment, and the sciences, as well as the peace and well-being of our fellow citizens."
"When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists."
"I could have married again while I was still young. A congregation likes to have a married minister, and I was introduced to every niece and sister-in-law in a hundred miles. In retrospect, I'm very grateful for whatever reluctance it was that kept me alone until your mother came. Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what I was waiting for."
"Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view."
"I have mentioned the qualitative difference between Christianity as an ethic and Christianity as an identity. Christian ethics goes steadfastly against the grain of what we consider human nature: the first will be last, to him who asks give, turn the other cheek, judge not. Identity on the other hand appeals to a constellation of the worst human impulses. It is worse than ordinary tribalism because it assumes a more than virtuous "us on one side and on the other a "them who are very doubtful indeed, who are in fact a threat to all we hold dear."
"A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension."
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