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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #freedom
What am I to God? Nothing, a murky shadow. My passage on this earth is too rapid to leave any traces; it counts for nothing in space or in time. God really doesn't pay any attention to us, so even if he exists, it's as if he didn't. My form of atheism, however, leads inevitably to an acceptance of the inexplicable. Mystery is inseparable from chance, and our whole universe is a mystery. Since I reject the idea of a divine watchmaker (a notion even more mysterious than the mystery it supposedly explains), then I must consent to live in a kind of shadowy confusion. And insofar as no explication, even the simplest, works for everyone, I've chosen my mystery. At least it keeps my moral freedom intact. ↗
بيـدٍ أغلقُ أبوابَ جراحـي * ويدي الأخرى على باب الصبـاح نصل سفاح على حنجرتي * وعلى وجهي تهاويل الأضـاحـي قبضة الجبهة لا تـمهـلـنـي * لـحظة.. مــا بيـن ذبـح وانـذبـاح أنــا أوجـاع ملايـيـن صحت * فصحْت غضبة حـق مستبــاح من رخام الأمس دوى ألمي* يا سدود انتظري دَين اكتساحي أبذر الشمس على مستقبلي * واشج بالليل عن فضل وشاحي فاضربوا أوتاركم في وطني * إنها لعبة قش ورياح حرموا الدوح على بلبله * وأبيحوا لكمو غير المباح سأكيل الصاع بالصاعين لكم * ناقلاً ناري من ساح لساح مخلب الصقر أنا قلمته * أمس. فليكبر على حد سلاحي تتحدى زهرتي دبايةً * فاسحقوها، تزدهر كل بطاحي من محيطي لخليجي لم يزل * صاعداً يكتسح الموت جناحي وطني جنة عدني، وأنا * حارس الجنة من كف وقاح وأرى حولي رؤوساً أينعت * وانا قاطفها باسم جراحي غضبي يحرق من يشعله * غضبي القادم ريحاً بلقاح فافهموا يا سادتي، أخبركم * انني صاح، أعيد القول، صاح ألف هولاكو أنا أغرقتهم * في دياجيري، واطلعت صباحي ينتهي العدوان غيماً عابرا * وأنا أبقى، وحبي، وكفاحي. ↗
But most of all, as summer slanted to an end, he was learning to love idleness, idleness no longer as stretches of freedom reclaimed by stealth here and there from involuntary labour, surreptitious thefts to be enjoyed sitting on his heels before a flowerbed with the fork dangling from his fingers, but as a yielding up of himself to time, to a time flowing slowly like oil from horizon to horizon over the face of the world, washing over his body, circulating in his armpits and his groin, stirring his eyelids. He was neither pleased nor displeased when there was work to do; it was all the same. He could lie all afternoon with his eyes open, staring at the corrugations in the roof-iron and the tracings of rust; his mind would not wander, he would see nothing but the iron, the lines would not transform themselves into pattern or fantasy; he was himself, lying in his own house, the rust was merely rust, all that was moving was time, bearing him onward in its flow. ↗
The pollution of the outward environment we are witnessing is only the mirror and the consequence of the inward environment, to which we pay too little heed. I think that this is also the defect of the ecological movements. They crusade with an understandable and also legitimate passion against the pollution of the environment, whereas man's self-pollution of his soul continues to be treated as one of the rights of his freedom. There is a discrepancy here. We want to eliminate the measurable pollution, but we don't consider the pollution of man's soul and his creaturely form.... he must acknowledge himself as a creature and realise that there must be a sort of inner purity to his creatureliness: spiritual ecology, if you will." Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth, Ignatius Press, 1997, pp. 230-231 ↗
Sometimes I even now feel like a stranger in my country. But I knew there would be problems because I had seen the world as a skater. And now? A lot of people in eastern Germany have lost jobs, rents went up, food costs went up, unemployment went to 20 percent. Freedom is good, but it is not easy. ↗
Paradise,’ he began, and the p meant a spray. ‘The old legend about Paradise—that was about us, about right now. Yes! Just think about it. Those two in Paradise, they were offered a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness, nothing else. Those idiots chose freedom. And then what? Then for centuries they were homesick for the chains. That’s why the world was so miserable, see? They missed the chains. For ages! And we were the first to hit on the way to get back to happiness. No, wait ... listen to me. The ancient God and us, side by side, at the same table. Yes! We helped God finally overcome the Devil—because that’s who it was that pushed people to break the commandment and taste freedom and be ruined. It was him, the wily serpent. But we gave him a boot to the head! Crack! And it was all over: Paradise was back. And we’re simple and innocent again, like Adam and Eve. None of those complications about good and evil: Everything is very simple, childishly simple —Paradise! The Benefactor, the Machine, the Cube, the Gas Bell, the Guardians: All those things represent good, all that is sublime, splendid, noble, elevated, crystal pure. Because that is what protects our nonfreedom, which is to say, our happiness. ↗
There has to be a cut-off somewhere between the freedom of expression and a graphically explicit free-for-all. ↗
#artists #arts #arts-and-humanities #dignity #dignity-in-the-arts
The last achievement of the serious admirer is to stop immediately putting to work the energies aroused by, filling up the space opened by, what is admired. Thereby talented admirers give themselves permission to breathe, to breathe more deeply. But for that it is necessary to go beyond avidity; to identify with something beyond achievement, beyond the gathering of power. ↗
Suddenly an unexpected series of sounds began to be heard in this place up against the starry sky. They were the notes of Oak´s flute. It came from the direction of a small dark object under the hedge - a shephard´s hut - now presenting an outline to which an unintiated person might have been puzzled to attach either meaning or use. ... Being a man not without a frequent consciousness that there was some charm in this life he led, he stood still after looking at the sky as a useful instrument, and regarded it in an appreciative spirit, as a work of art superlatively beautiful. For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man. ... Oak´s motions, though they had a quiet energy, were slow, and their deliberateness accorded well with his occupation. Fitness being the basis of beauty, nobody could have denied tha his steady swings and turns in and about the flock had elements of grace. His special power, morally, physically, and mentally, was static. ... Oak was an intensely human man: indee, his humanity tore in pieces any politic intentions of his which bordered on strategy, and carried him on as by gravitation. A shadow in his life had always been that his flock should end in mutton - that a day could find a shepherd an arrant traitor to his gentle sheep. ↗
