“Activity does not necessarily mean life. Quasars are active. And a monk meditating is not inanimate.”

Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977), Chapter 14 (p. 244)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Activity does not necessarily mean life. Quasars are active. And a monk meditating is not inanimate." by Philip K. Dick?
Philip K. Dick photo
Philip K. Dick 278
American author 1928–1982

Related quotes

Stephen R. Covey photo
Shunryu Suzuki photo
Harry Gordon Selfridge photo

“Bigness alone is nothing, but bigness filled with the activity that does everything continually better means much.”

Harry Gordon Selfridge (1858–1947) America born English businessman

The Romance of Commerce (1918), A Representative Business of the Twentieth Century

Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“Main deficiency of active people. Active men are usually lacking in higher activity--I mean individual activity. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is, as generic beings, but not as quite particular, single and unique men. In this respect they are lazy.”

283 http://books.google.com/books?id=_GLTsGHUxDgC&lpg=PA171&dq=Today%20as%20always%2C%20men%20fall%20into%20two%20groups&pg=PA171#v=onepage&q&f=false
Human, All Too Human (1878)

Edith Stein photo

“Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), The Ethos of Woman's Professions (1930)

Laurence Tribe photo

“Judicial neutrality necessarily involves taking sides. ...[J]udicial restraint is but another form of judicial activism.”

Laurence Tribe (1941) American lawyer and law school professor

American Constitutional Law (1978), Preface to the First Edition

Moses Hess photo
Herbert Marcuse photo

“In conditions of private property … “life-activity” stands in the service of property instead of property standing the service of free life-activity.”

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) German philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist

"The Foundations of Historical Materialism," Studies in Critical Philosophy (1972), p. 32

Gustavo Gutiérrez photo
Gershom Scholem photo

“We shall start from the assumption that a mystic, insofar as he participates actively in the religious life of a community, does not act in the void.”

Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) German-born Israeli philosopher and historian

Source: On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (1960), Ch. 1 : Religious Authority and Mysticism
Context: We shall start from the assumption that a mystic, insofar as he participates actively in the religious life of a community, does not act in the void. It is sometimes said, to be sure, that mystics, with their personal striving for transcendence, live outside of and above the historical level, that their experience is unrelated to historical experience. Some admire this ahistorical orientation, others condemn it as a fundamental weakness of mys­ticism. Be that as it may, what is of interest to the history of reli­gions is the mystic's impact on the historical world, his conflict with the religious life of his day and with his community. No his­torian can say — nor is it his business to answer such questions­ whether a given mystic in the course of his individual religious experience actually found what he was so eagerly looking for. What concerns us here is not the mystic's inner fulfillment. But if we wish to understand the specific tension that often prevailed between mysticism and religious authority, we shall do well to recall certain basic facts concerning mysticism.
A mystic is a man who has been favored with an immediate, and to him real, experience of the divine, of ultimate reality, or who at least strives to attain such experience. His experience may come to him through sudden illumination, or it may be the result of long and often elaborate preparations. From a historical point of view, the mystical quest for the divine takes place almost exclusively wit a prescribed tradition-the exceptions seem to be limited to modern times, with their dissolution of all traditional ties. Where such a tradition prevails, a religious authority, established long before the mystic was born, has been recognized by the com­ munity for many generations.

Related topics