Extract from a Statement by the Tibetan
Horace ou Despréaux l'a dit avant vous.—Je le crois sur votre parole; mais je l'ai dit comme mien. Ne puis-je pas penser après eux une chose vraie, et que d'autres encore penseront après moi?
Aphorism 69
Les Caractères (1688), Des Ouvrages de l'Esprit
Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter V - Part 1
“No moral code is right, correct, true. That's nihilism. And we have to accept it.”
The Atheist's Guide to Reality (2011)
Context: Scientism starts with the idea that the physical facts fix all the facts, including the biological ones. These in turn have to fix the human facts—the facts about us, our psychology, and our morality. After all, we are biological creatures, the result of a biological process that Darwin discovered but that the physical facts ordained. As we have just seen, the biological facts can't guarantee that our core morality (or any other one, for that matter) is the right, true, or correct one. If the biological facts can't do it, then nothing can. No moral code is right, correct, true. That's nihilism. And we have to accept it.
Speech at Steinway Hall http://www.victoria-woodhull.com/prostitute.htm (November 20, 1871), New York City, New York.
As quoted in The Baburnama : Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, as translated by Wheeler M. Thackston (2002), p. xxvii
p. 219 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2162/2162-h/2162-h.htm#emancipation
The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation (1906)
Advice for a Young Investigator (1897)
“Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need”
The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle (2005)
Context: Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared.
