#vs

To kill for murder is an immeasurably greater evil than the crime itself. Murder by legal process is immeasurably more dreadful than murder by a brigand. A man who is murdered by brigands is killed at night in a forest or somewhere else, and up to the last moment he still hopes that he will be saved. There have been instances when a man whose throat had already been cut, was still hoping, or running away or begging for his life to be spared. But here all this last hope, which makes it ten times easier to die, is taken away FOR CERTAIN; here you have been sentenced to death, and the whole terrible agony lies in the fact that you will most certainly not escape, and there is no agony greater than that. Take a soldier and put him in front of a cannon in battle and fire at him and he will still hope, but read the same soldier his death sentence FOR CERTAIN, and he will go mad or burst out crying. Who says that human nature is capable of bearing this without madness? Why this cruel, hideous, unnecessary, and useless mockery? Possibly there are men who have sentences of death read out to them and have been given time to go through this torture, and have then been told, You can go now, you've been reprieved. Such men could perhaps tell us. It was of agony like this and of such horror that Christ spoke. No, you can't treat a mean like that. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#the-idiot #death

Nature and Passion are powerful, but they are also full of grief. True happiness would have the calm and order of bourgeois routine without its utilitarian ignobility and boredom. ↗

— W.H. Auden

#nature

All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is. ↗

— Vernor Vinge

#nature #nature

They don’t teach kidnapping at Eton, dad ↗

— Gwenn Wright

#dysfunctional-relationship #peter-strauss #von-strassenberg-saga #vssaga #ya

Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other 'undesirable' side, the bad and the black. That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation. ↗

— Chögyam Trungpa

#defending #duality #fighting #good-and-evil #good-vs-evil

If I could, Sister James, I would certainly choose to live in innocence. But innocence can only be wisdom in a world without evil. Situations arise and we are confronted with wrongdoing and the need to act. ↗

— John Patrick Shanley

#good #good-vs-evil #religion #right #wrong

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#reason #science #science-vs-religion #scientific-method #sense-of-wonder

I don't argue things being spiritual vs scientific, because I've never met anyone who knows enough about either to be convincing. ↗

— S. Kelley Harrell

#spirituality #religion

In our country religion is not different from philosophy and religion & philosophy don’t differ from science. ↗

— Virchand Raghavji Gandhi

#philosophy #quotations #quotes #religion #science

Terrible things are done in the name of religion, without a doubt, but it was not religion but science that brought the world itself to the brink of destruction. ↗

— Chris Beckett

#religion