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1 " By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account. "
― Dan Brown , The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2)
2 " Love by its very nature is extravagant, but we poor human beings, so caught up in fear and worry, limit the very love we were created to bring into the world. "
― , Things My Father Taught Me About Love
3 " Love from its very nature must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant would be as wild a search as for the philosopher’s stone or the grand panacea: and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mankind. The most holy band of society is friendship. "
― Mary Wollstonecraft , A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
4 " A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Wil or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone. "
― Cormac McCarthy , Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
5 " A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.He poured the tumbler full. Drink up, he said. The world goes on. We have dancing nightly and this night is no exception. The straight and the winding way are one and now that you are here what do the years count since last we two met together? Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not. "
6 " Authority in its very nature prevents the full awareness of oneself and therefore ultimately destroys freedom "
7 " I think of us as a people who inoculate ourselves against a plague of insanity with a powerful anti-idiotic called science fiction. I think sf is a literature which by its very nature requires that you be at least a little sane, that you know at least a little something. You must abdicate the right to be ignorant in order to enjoy science fiction, which most people are unwilling to do; and you must learn, if not actually how to think things through, at least what the trick looks like when it's done. Frequent injections will keep a lot of madness away. "
― Spider Robinson , Time Travellers Strictly Cash (Callahan's #2)
8 " Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing, but a compromise- that which is common to you, me, and everybody. "
9 " Religion, by its very nature as an untestable belief in undetectable beings and an unknowable afterlife, disables our reality checks. It ends the conversation. It cuts off inquiry: not only factual inquiry, but moral inquiry. Because God's law trumps human law, people who think they're obeying God can easily get cut off from their own moral instincts. And these moral contortions don't always lie in the realm of theological game-playing. They can have real-world consequences: from genocide to infanticide, from honor killings to abandoned gay children, from burned witches to battered wives to blown-up buildings. "
― Greta Christina
10 " The conventional term is " mystical experience," meaning something that by its very nature lies beyond the reach of language, except for some vague verbal hand-wavings about " mystery" and " transcendence." As far as I was concerned - as a rationalist, an atheist, a scientist by training - this was the realm of gods and fairies and of no use to the great human project of trying to retain a foothold on the planet for future generations. "
11 " Letting go of a craving is not rejecting it but allowing it to be itself: a contingent state of mind that once arisen will pass away. Instead of forcibly freeing ourselves from it, notice how its very nature is to free itself. To let it go is like releasing a snake that you have been clutching in your hand. By identifying with a craving ('I want this," don't want' that" ), you tighten the clutch and intensify its resistance. Instead of being a state of mind that you have, it becomes a compulsion that has you. As with understanding anguish, the challenge in letting go of craving is to act before habitual reactions incapacitate us. "
12 " Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair...Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , This Side of Paradise
13 " Love is the key to the mystery. Love by its very nature is not selfish, but generous. It seeks not its own, but the good of others. The measure of love is not the pleasure it gives-that is the way the world judges it-but the joy and peace it can purchase for others. "
― Fulton J. Sheen
14 " There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring. "
15 " There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be, because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring. "
16 " The world deprived of clear-cut outlines, of the up and the down, of good and evil, succumbs to a peculiar nihilization, that is, it loses its colors, so that grayness covers not only things of this earth and of space, but also the very flow of time, its minutes, days and years. Abstract considerations will be of little help, even if they are intended to bring relief. Poetry is quite different. By its very nature it says: All those theories are untrue. Since poetry deals with the singular, not hte general, it can't - if it is good poetry - look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness. "
― Czesław Miłosz
17 " Love by its very nature is unworldly and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces. "
18 " For sin is just this, what man cannot by its very nature do with his whole being; it is possible to silence the conflict in the soul, but it is not possible to uproot it. "
19 " By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality. "