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Maxims, because what is isolated can be seen better.
 
If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.
 
The concept of man as mass robot was both an expression of and a powerful motive force in industrialized mass society. It was the basis for behavioural engineering in commercial, economic, political and other advertising and propaganda; the expanding economy of the 'affluent society' could not subsist without such manipulation. Only by manipulating humans ever more into Skinnerian rats, robots buying automata, homeostatically adjusted conformers and opportunists (or, bluntly speaking, into morons and zombies) can this great society follow its progress toward ever increasing gross national product.
 
There are living systems; there is no living "matter." No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell.
 
One of the most marked features about the law of mind is that it makes time to have a definite direction of flow from past to future.
 
Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.
 
Se entri mi fai onore; se non entri, un piacere
 
Without darkness there are no dreams. 
 
If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.
 
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
 
We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.
 
Wisdom is the strength of the weak.
 
There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind.
 
A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies and hotheads - and if it earns the confidence of the people, they don't have to become violent in self-defence.
 
In life, stress happens when you resist what arises.
 
It is rather more noble to help people purely out of concern for their suffering than it is to help them because you think the Creator of the Universe wants you to do it, or will reward you for doing it, or will punish you for not doing it. The problem with this linkage between religion and morality is that it gives people bad reasons to help other human beings when good reasons are available.
 
These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.
 
Thoughts naturally arise. The point of meditation is not to banish thoughts but to make peace with them by realizing their lack of substance.
 
The only way to change our lives is by changing our minds.
 
The mechanism of primary emotions does not describe the full range of emotional behaviors. They are, to be sure, the basic mechanism. However, I believe that in terms of an individual's development they are followed by mechanisms of secondary emotions, which occur once we begin experiencing feelings and forming systematic connections between categories of objects and situations, on the one hand, and primary emotions, on the other.
 
2718 quotes