#versa

After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world. I mean disassociated. Take a top hat. You think you see it as it really is. But you don’t because you associate it with other things and ideas.If you had never heard of one before, and suddenly saw it alone, you’d be frightened, or you’d laugh. That is the effect absinthe has, and that is why it drives men mad. Three nights I sat up all night drinking absinthe, and thinking that I was singularly clear-headed and sane. The waiter came in and began watering the sawdust.The most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies and roses, sprang up, and made a garden in the cafe. “Don’t you see them?” I said to him. “Mais non, monsieur, il n’y a rien. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#men

It was truly an abomination of nature that one always found the most comfortable spot in the bed five minutes before one had to leave it. ↗

— Mia Ryan

#observation #universal-truths #nature

The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thiswordliness. ↗

— Immanuel Wallerstein

#capitalism #human-rights #religion #universalism #religion

Religion is a positive thing and in individualistic religion it cannot be so proved but it bears its own proof in universalism. Yes, in individualism it is confined within one individual and the rest of the mankind have got to believe him, whereas in the Universalism, the people realize and they speak. Universalism means the seer of God becomes God and attains Godhood and the proof it bears that He will be seen by thousand others within their bodies and they shall announce it. ↗

— sri jibankrishna or Diamond

#godhood #individualism #religion #universalism #religion

This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse -- appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. ↗

— Michael Joseph Oakeshott

#dialogue #humanity #intercourse #body-image

The difficulty with this conversation is that it's very different from most of the ones I've had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees. ↗

— Douglas Adams

#conversation #different #difficulty #explained #had

There's something about being rejected - when I go out without my friends, I'm reminded of how I'm actually quite antisocial. I don't look like a guy who feels like that, but it's very hard for me to start up a conversation. At a party, I'm lost. ↗

— Jason Ritter

#actually #antisocial #being #conversation #feels

Carry out the republican principle of universal suffrage, or strike it from your banners and substitute 'Freedom and Power to one half of society, and Submission and Slavery to the other.' ↗

— Ernestine Rose

#carry #freedom #half #one half #other

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and comercials. ↗

— Neil Postman

#conversation #people #shallowness #talking #television

Sorrow spoken lends a little courage to the speaker. ↗

— Walter Wangerin Jr.

#grief #courage