Attempting Quotes

“NOTICEPersons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER OF THE AUTHORPer G.G.,Chief of Ordnance”

“The destiny of a man is determined by his daily action, God won't allow you go anywhere, if you don't make an attempt to move.”

“Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?...Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can.”

“In our frenzied attempts to catch up with life, we run right past it. Once we have run past it, what we are in reality attempting to catch is ourselves.”

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt”

“So you've made a few bad decisions. So have I. So has Elias. So has everyone attempting to do something difficult. That doesn't mean that you give up, you fool. Do you understand?”

“Let them run ahead. Then I’ll have good reason for shooting them down. Sharpeville? Attempting to escape. Attempting to escape from the prison of their lives. That’s the most dangerous crime. It brings about revolution. So, off we go, lads!”

“The fundamental problem here is the continued over-identification with doing. By attempting to “do” The Leap, the practitioner is attempting the impossible (as doing and being point to two different realms). Thus far your training has been largely if not entirely immersed in the relative domain. With Being, your training is stepping beyond this domain into the transcendent. Fundamentally, there is nothing you can “do” to “be.”

“We must discover our own path to joy and a sense of leading a purposeful existence. I spent the first part of life attempting to discern what a man ought to be, and spent the latter years attempting to reconcile why I was not the man whom I always aspired to be. A person endures a tragic consumption of the spirit when they discover that they are not what they desired to become.”