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a species QUOTES

a species QUOTES

1 " She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky.

My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father. And to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world. "

― Nicole Krauss , The History of Love

2 " Whether or not you believe in God, you must believe this: when we as a species abandon our trust in a power greater than us, we abandon our sense of accountability. Faiths… all faiths… are admonitions that there is something we cannot understand, something to which we are accountable. With faith we are accountable to each other, to ourselves, and to a higher truth. Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed. The church consists of a brotherhood of imperfect, simple souls wanting only to be a voice of compassion in a world spinning out of control. "

― Dan Brown , Angels & Demons (Robert Langdon, #1)

3 " It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60). "

― Joseph Campbell , Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

4 " So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent dotard who soiled Himself and the universe with his corruption, a low-budget divinity passing itself off as the genuine article. (Ask the Gnostics.) They trust in Jesus Christ, a historical cipher stitched together like Frankenstein's monster out of parts robbed from the graves of messiahs dead and buried - a savior on a stick. They trust in the virgin-pimping Allah and his Drum Major Mohammed, a prophet-come-lately who pioneered a new genus of humbuggery for an emerging market of believers that was not being adequately served by existing religious products. They trust in anything that authenticates their importance as persons, tribes, societies, and particularly as a species that will endure in this world and perhaps in an afterworld that may be uncertain in its reality and unclear in its layout, but which states their craving for values " not of this earth" - that depressing, meaningless place their consciousness must sidestep every day. "

5 " Or consider a story in the Jewish Talmud left out of the Book of Genesis. (It is in doubtful accord with the account of the apple, the Tree of Knowledge, the Fall, and the expulsion from Eden.) In The Garden, God tells Eve and Adam that He has intentionally left the Universe unfinished. It is the responsibility of humans, over countless generations, to participate with God in a " glorious" experiment - the " completing of the Creation." The burden of such a responsibility is heavy, especially on so weak and imperfect a species as ours, one with so unhappy a history. Nothing remotely like " completion" can be attempted without vastly more knowledge than we have today. But, perhaps, if our very existence is at stake, we will find ourselves able to rise to this supreme challenge. "

6 " We have a long distance to travel,' said the Angel of Death to our friend Gil, as soon as they had left the Villa. 'I will order my chariot.' And he struck the ground with his foot. A hollow rumbling, like that which precedes an earthquake, sounded under the ground. Presently there rose round the two friends an ash-colored cloud of vapor, in the midst of which appeared a species of ivory chariot, resembling the chariots we see in the bas-reliefs of antiquity.A brief glance would have sufficed (we will not disguise the fact from out readers) to show that the chariot was not made of ivory, but solely and simply of human bones polished and joined together with exquisite skill, but retaining still their natural form.The Angel of Death gave his hand to Gil and they ascended the chariot, which rose into the air like the balloons of the present day, but with the difference that it was propelled by the will of its occupants. (" The Friend of Death" ) "

7 " I hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be: Here perished a species which lived to tell stories.

We tell stories to strangers to ingratiate ourselves, stories to lovers to better adhere us skin to skin, stories in our heads to banish the demons. When we tell truth, often we are callous; when we tell lies, often we are kind. Through it all, we tell stories, and we own an uncanny knack for the task. "

― Lyndsay Faye , Jane Steele

8 " The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out. "

― Anne Lamott

9 " Our Ancestors came to Australia, foraged for food in a rain forest where AM grew, ate the AM, and suffered the effects of muscimol hallucinations in a cave and drew paintings of a religious nature and these paintings were confirmed at 50,000 years ago, at the exact inception of religion. This was done by a species that never had religion before that. Since the species would therefore have no religious content until they ate the hallucinogens, it follows that these AM were the start of religion. "

― Leviak B. Kelly , Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction

10 " Education means nourishing the mind and make it develop in order to see beyond the limitations of current social perception - it means breaking the barriers of the rugged sociological system that impede in the progress of human civilization - it means trying out new things for the first time in human history and succeeding in a few while failing in some. And that is how a species grows to become more advanced. "

― Abhijit Naskar , The Education Decree

11 " Humans, unlike Jedi, are powerfully afraid of rejection. We do not survive well alone, so humans as a species are especially vulnerable to thoughts that make us afraid the rest of the “tribe” will desert us to die a sad, lonely death. "

― Stephen Richards , Develop Jedi Self-Confidence: Unleash the Force within You

12 " When phobia starts to build up in the psyche of thinking humanity against a part of its own kind, there is nothing more primordial and gruesome than that, especially when we are talking about a species that is supposedly the most intelligent one on Earth. Phobias recorded in DSM do not make a person lesser human, but Islamophobia does indeed define whether a person is really a thinking and sentient sapiens or an ignorant caveman. "

― Abhijit Naskar , The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance

13 " Usually the term phobia refers to the psychological fear of the human mind from something that poses a threat. But when a species starts using the term fear against a biological portion of itself, there is nothing more demeaning than this. "

― Abhijit Naskar , The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance

14 " They say, in life change is the most important thing for you to evolve.
I think it's the pain which makes a person evolve, A species evolve.

Time will throw a thousand happy moments, which will teach you nothing. Real sense of life is understood when you go through that one painful moment.
Which will help you evolve, which will help you change. "

― Akash Lakhotia , World Hypnotized: Making of the Fuhrer(1 of 3)

15 " Don’t believe what you hear about those penguins. A species of lazy waddlers. Their extinction is immanent. "

― Jarod Kintz , A Story That Talks about Talking Is Like Chatter to Chattering Teeth, and Every Set of Dentures Can Attest to the Fact That No..

16 " The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche. "

― David Deutsch , The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications

17 " Universally accepted, microevolution has limits for what it can explain. These limits do not reach the center where the controversy lies - the Thesis of Common Ancestry was popularized by Charles Darwin. Darwin believed that the world we see today has come to us through an evolutionary process called natural selection. Through genetic mutation, species adapt and develop because the strongest of a species will survive and pass on their DNA to their successors. Macroevolution is the belief that all development — from the first moments of the universe, the formation of stars and planets, to the eventual emergence of simple bacteria, to the most complex human being is explainable through this naturalistic transformational process. "

― , Clear Minds & Dirty Feet: A Reason to Hope, a Message to Share

18 " It is our ultimate purpose to continually evolve as a species both physically and emotionally, as change is the mechanism for growth and development, and if we fear change we stunt our own growth and with it, human evolution. "

― Kat Lahr , Anatomy Of Illumination (Thought Notebook Journal #5)

19 " An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment. "

― Mahatma Gandhi ,

20 " We're told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It's possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there's nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution. "

― Arundhati Roy , Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations