Home > Topic > the condition
1 " Dear Human:You've got it all wrong.You didn't come here to master unconditional love. This is where you came from and where you'll return.You came here to learn personal love.Universal love.Messy love.Sweaty Love.Crazy love.Broken love.Whole love.Infused with divinity.Lived through the grace of stumbling.Demonstrated through the beauty of... messing up.Often.You didn't come here to be perfect, you already are.You came here to be gorgeously human. Flawed and fabulous.And rising again into remembering.But unconditional love? Stop telling that story.Love in truth doesn't need any adjectives.It doesn't require modifiers.It doesn't require the condition of perfection.It only asks you to show up.And do your best.That you stay present and feel fully.That you shine and fly and laugh and cry and hurt and heal and fall and get back up and play and work and live and die as YOU.Its enough.It's Plenty. "
2 " Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their ‘particles’) the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw.It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confident. Even if the pace of change remained the same, one who is really sensitive to (for example) the difference between the medieval collective representations and our own will be aware that, without traveling any greater distance than we have come since the fourteenth century, we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. But the pace of change has not remained the same. It has accelerated and is accelerating. We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. Of course, in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way or other experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motorbicycle substituted for her left breast. "
― Owen Barfield
3 " The egocentric is always frustrated, simply because the condition of self-perfection is self-surrender. There must be a willingness to die to the lower part of self, before there can be a birth to the nobler. "
― Fulton J. Sheen , Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary
4 " (Love’s atopia, characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations, would be that *ultimately* it is possible to talk about love only *according to a strict allocutive determination*; whether philosophical, gnomic, lyric, or novelistic, there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses, though this person may have shifted to the condition of a phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is *for* someone.). "
― Roland Barthes , A Lover's Discourse: Fragments
5 " This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was about: Love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. "
― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending
6 " We doubt in others, what is in fact in ourselves. The skeletons in your own closet are the things that scare you the most about others; people who come from a background of lying are suspicious of lying in others and so on and so forth. The most trusting of people, are not people who have never been betrayed or who have never felt pain; but the most trusting of people are those who in themselves do not find those things worthy of that blame. We see the world through the eyes of the condition of our own souls. "
― C. JoyBell C.
7 " I am God, says Love, for Love is God and God is Love, and this Soul is God by the condition of Love. I am God by divine nature and this Soul is God by the condition of Love. Thus this precious beloved of mine is taught and guided by me, without herself, for she is transformed into me, and such a perfect one, says Love, takes my nourishment. "
8 " Happiness is the condition of who we are and how we think and what we believe and how we live. "
9 " Gavin turned us to face Josh, a satisfied grin springing up when he noticed the condition of Josh’s clothes. “Thanks for the last-minute invitation, man.” Josh chuckled, patting Gavin on the shoulder. “Shall I do the honors, Mr. Suave?” “Sure thing, Frodo Baggins. By the way, I hear the Shire has impeccable dinner parties this time of year.” The corners of Gavin’s lips twitched and his eyebrows shot up as he gestured to a food stain of some sort near the collar of Josh’s white shirt. Josh’s chin shot down to follow Gavin’s amusement and he quickly tried to wipe away the crumbs. “Yeah, well … you know how we hobbits like to eat. "
― , The Gates (Resistance, #2)
10 " Bad enough that getting turned on when he had nothing more than a bath towel to hide it would make the condition kind of hard to miss, but getting turned on in front of his ex-fiancee was akin to smearing honey on his junk and walking into grizzly territory. "
― Heidi Betts , Knock Me for a Loop (Chicks with Sticks #3)
11 " Waiting is an exercise of faith that demonstrates the condition of our hearts. Waiting on God is an act of faith. And faith is what separates the men from the boys. "
12 " The condition and characteristic of an uninstructed person is this: he never expects from himself profit (advantage) nor harm, but from externals. The condition and characteristic of a philosopher is this: he expects all advantage and all harm from himself. "
― Epictetus , A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus with the Encheiridion
13 " The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. it opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out. in moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. It was pressed upon me by every object within sight or hearing, animate or inanimate. The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm. "
― Frederick Douglass , Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
14 " Neglect of women is the major cause for the society’s downfall. The man and the woman are the two wheels of the society. If either one becomes defective, the society cannot make progress. There will be hope for the well-being of the entire world only if the humans, men and women alike, stop deeming the women as some kind of inferior creatures. We, the responsible citizens of the world can build a better future for the entire species, only by improving the condition of the women. "
― Abhijit Naskar , Biopsy of Religions: Neuroanalysis Towards Universal Tolerance
15 " Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility--space itself--to be forgotten: space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions: a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity. "
― Michel de Certeau , The Practice of Everyday Life
16 " The spirit is one of the most neglected parts of man by doctors and scientists around the world. Yet, it is as vital to our health as the heart and mind. It's time for science to examine the many facets of the soul. The condition of our soul is usually the source of many sicknesses. "
― , Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
17 " What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote. "
― E.M. Forster , Two Cheers for Democracy
18 " A sacrifice to be real must cost, must hurt, and must empty ourselves. Give yourself fully to God. He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in his love than in your weakness. "
― Mother Teresa
19 " Hypocrisy is wretched because the hypocrite says with his tongue what is not in his heart. He wrongs his tongue and oppresses his heart. But if the heart is sound, the condition of the tongue follows suit. We are commanded to be upright in speech, which is a gauge of the heart's state. "
― , Purification of the Heart: Signs, Symptoms and Cures of the Spiritual Diseases of the Heart
20 " To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have welded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the " pleasures of the flesh" only on the condition that they may be insipid. "