Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), p. 50
Source: Emotional amoral egoism (2008), p.15
“Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.”
Variant: Live the beauty or your own reality.
Source: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Dune Genesis (1980)
Context: No matter how finely you subdivide time and space, each tiny division contains infinity.
But this could imply that you can cut across linear time, open it like a ripe fruit, and see consequential connections. You could be prescient, predict accurately. Predestination and paradox once more.
The flaw must lie in our methods of description, in languages, in social networks of meaning, in moral structures, and in philosophies and religions — all of which convey implicit limits where no limits exist. Paul Muad'Dib, after all, says this time after time throughout Dune.
Answering the question: "Do sentient beings have free will?" in Dzogchen : The Heart Essence of the Great Perfection (2001), p. 168, ISBN 155939157X.
Section 6 : Higher Life
Founding Address (1876), Life and Destiny (1913)
Context: An ideal is a port toward which we resolve to steer. We may not reach it. The mere fact that our goal is definitely located does not suffice to conduct us thither. But surely we shall thus stand a better chance of making port in the end than if we drift about aimlessly, the sport of winds and tides, without having decided in our own minds in what direction we ought to bend our course.
The moral law is the expression of our inmost nature, and when we live in consonance with it we feel that we are living out our true being.
Source: "La Commune de Paris et la notion de l'état" (The Commune of Paris and the notion of the state) http://libcom.org/library/paris-commune-mikhail-bakunin as quoted in Noam Chomsky: Notes on Anarchism (1970) http://pbahq.smartcampaigns.com/node/222
Context: I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J.-J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each — an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty that consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person; liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material, intellectual and moral being — they do not limit us but are the real and immediate conditions of our freedom.
Minute on Education http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html (1835)
Preface
Problems In Genetics (1913)
Context: Few who are familiar with the facts that genetic research has revealed are now inclined to speculate as to the manner by which the process [species come into existence] has been accomplished. Our knowledge of the nature and properties of living things is far too meagre to justify any such attempts. Suggestions of course can be made: though, however, these ideas may have a stimulating value in the lecture room, they look weak and thin when set out in print.
