152 153 Quotes

“While genes are pivotal in establishing some aspects of emotionality, experience plays a central role in turning genes on and off. DNA is not the heart’s destiny; the genetic lottery may determine the cards in your deck, but experience deals the hand you can play. Scientists have proven, for example, that good mothering can override a disadvantageous temperament.(152)”

“Spiritual literature can be a great aid to an aspirant, or it can be a terrible hindrance. If it is used to inspire practice, motivate compassion, ad nourish devotion, it serves a very valuable purpose. If scriptural study is used for mere intellectual understanding, for pride of accomplishment, or as a substitute for actual practice, then one is taking in too much mental food, which is sure to result in intellectual indigestion. (152)”

“To know another person is to Know How to live and work with her. To know another person in a moral sense is to Know How to respect her... Respect must show in action.”

“She planted that terror of debt so deeply in her children that even now, in a changed economic pattern where indebtedness is a part of living, I become restless when a bill is two days overdue. Olive never accepted the time-payment plan when it became popular. A thing bought on time was a thing you did not own and for which you were in debt. She saved for things she wanted, and this meant that the neighbours had new gadgets as much as two years before we did.”

“Ish #153 "Artificial plants grow best in artificial light.”

“Lust, anger, attachment, greed, over pride be,Jealousy, selfishness, injustice, cruelty, ego truly;- 153 -”

“Writing about memories is an elusive process. It often begins with a good intention: to convey the truth. What happens in reality is that we only write down what passes through the censors' eyes. The censors here are the ambient time and space, social and political conditions, and the psychological changers the writer herself. What one writes now is certainly not what actually happened. It is but a vague indicator of what might have happened, a mixture of illusive and contracted images, a dream, or an act conditioned by either a denial or a desire to see past events shaped by what is yearned for in the present. p. 153”

“today we read of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth, it isalmost an ordeal, which would make us seem very strange and incomprehensibleto the author and his contemporaries, – they read it with a clearconscience as the funniest of books, it made them nearly laugh themselvesto death).To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still – thatOn the Genealogy of Morality4248 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 153–4.49 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 137–9, pp. 140–1, pp. 143–4.50 Don Quixote, Book II, chs 31–7.is a hard proposition, but an ancient, powerful, human-all-too-humanproposition to which, by the way, even the apes might subscribe: as peoplesay, in thinking up bizarre cruelties they anticipate and, as it were, act outa ‘demonstration’ of what man will do. No cruelty, no feast: that is whatthe oldest and longest period in human history teaches us – and punishment,too, has such very strong festive aspects! –”

“Henceforth the crisis of urbanism is all the more concretely a social and political one, even though today no force born of traditional politics is any longer capable of dealing with it. Medico-sociological banalities on the 'pathology of housing projects,' the emotional isolation of people who must live in them, or the development of certain extreme reactions of rejection, chiefly among youth, simply betray the fact that modern capitalism, the bureaucratic society of consumption, is here and there beginning to shape its own setting. This society, with its new towns, is building the terrain that accurately represents it, combining the conditions most suitable for its proper functioning, while at the same time translating in space, in the clear language of organization of everyday life, its fundamental principle of alienation and constraint. It is likewise here that the new aspects of its crisis will be manifested with the greatest clarity.”