#dual

You may not be able to change the world for the better, but the world is able to change you for the worst, don't give them the rock you stand on. ↗

— Anthony Liccione

#change #individualism #opposition #rights #rock

In order to eat, you have to be hungry. In order to learn, you have to be ignorant. Ignorance is a condition of learning. Pain is a condition of health. Passion is a condition of thought. Death is a condition of life. ↗

— Robert Anton Wilson

#hagbard-celine #death

We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those year in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked at us. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#individuality #intelligence #objectivism #schooling #students

[E]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. ↗

— John Rawls

#liberalism #liberty #equality

Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood. ↗

— Alice Miller

#individual #truth #experience

I can see it, hear it, feel it, taste it - but I can never be on the inside of it with you. I cannot even be sure whether I really know what it is like. Is it 'like' my own? Or incomparable? Just as I can never know if what you see at any given moment is exactly the same as what I see. We look at a colour. We both call it red. But it is only because we have been taught to call it by that name. There is no guarantee - not ever - that we see it in the same way, that your red is my red. ↗

— André P. Brink

#experience

We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique. ↗

— Benjamin Jowett

#always #attain #cannot #concrete #general

To this I replied, "I still think that my body is not merely a sensory appearance, for surely it came from my parents, who were its cause and condition." He said, "If you think that your body came from your father and mother, then what are the beginning and end of these parents? What are their source, their location, their final destination? Tell me!" I answered, "I think that they exist, but I am not aware of what they are. It seems to me that a physical body without parents is not possible." He retorted, "Consider this. Who are the parents of the body in a dream, in the bardo, and in the hell realms?" With that, I arrived at the decision that this body has never existed, being simply a sensory experience. ↗

— Dudjom Lingpa

#dream #dzogchen #nonduality #sunyata #dreams

First, individual rights cannot be sacrificed for the sake of the general good, and second, the principles of justice that specify these rights cannot be premised on any particular vision of the good life. What justifies the rights is not that they maximize the general welfare or otherwise promote the good, but rather that they comprise a fair framework within which individuals and groups can choose their own values and ends, consistent with a similar liberty for others. ↗

— Michael J. Sandel

#good-life #greater-good #individuals #justice #laws

Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be. ↗

— Jane Austen

#individual #outsider #family