#vs

Religion is the archrival of intimate spirituality…Religion, a tiresome system of manmade dos and don’ts, woulds and shoulds – impotent to change human lives but tragically capable of devastating them – is what is left after a true love for God has drained away. Religion is the shell that is left after the real thing has disappeared. ↗

— Douglas Banister

#religion-vs-faith #change

I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse. ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#intelligence #iq #nerd #nerdiness #nerds

I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#dreamer #fyodor-dostoyevsky #memories #white-nights #dreams

It doesn't matter. Take Eddie's blood. Take Belikov's blood. Take your own for all I care. But If she doesn't want to give hers, then that's all there is to it. She said no. This conversation is done. ↗

— Richelle Mead

#blood

Imagine for a moment that we are nothing but the product of billions of years of molecules coming together and ratcheting up through natural selection, that we are composed only of highways of fluids and chemicals sliding along roadways within billions of dancing cells, that trillions of synaptic conversations hum in parallel, that this vast egglike fabric of micron-thin circuitry runs algorithms undreamt of in modern science, and that these neural programs give rise to our decision making, loves, desires, fears, and aspirations. To me, that understanding would be a numinous experience, better than anything ever proposed in anyone's holy text. ↗

— David Eagleman

#religion #science #science-vs-religion #spirituality #experience

Wondering whether Christianity is real is not the same as wondering whether Christianity is true. If you question the truth of Christianity, you can do something tangible about it. You can read books, take a class, or talk to someone about it. But what can you do when you're already convinced it's true but don't experience it as real? ↗

— Gregory A. Boyd

#experience

Sometimes there's other reason for helping, other than personal gain or benefit," added Sam softly. "Friendship, companionship, trust and love are not confined to light alone...they are harder won, fewer seen...but no less real. ↗

— Eve Forward

#good #good-vs-evil #morality #friendship

The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and drank one black coffee after another. It was sort of night typical of youth, the sort you only can look back on with shame and embarassment once you've grown up. But God knows, I must have grown up already by then, because I don't feel the slightest embarassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia. ↗

— Antal Szerb

#conversations #dostoievsky #melancholy #nights #nostalgia

Ellen rose to her feet. Jack thought for a moment she was going to storm out. Instead, she picked up the pitcher of hot fudge and poured the contents onto Leesha Middleton's pink jeans and fuzzy white sweater. "Oops." Ellen sat down again and went back to eating her ice cream. Leesha screamed, a sound that could be heard in Canada. Every eye in Corcoran's was on her. She slid out of the booth and swiped ineffectually at her jeans with a napkin.Then she plucked at her ruined sweater with her thumb and forefinger. "You...you...I can't believe you did that!" Ellen licked whipped cream from the back of her spoon and looked at Leesha calmly. Leesha was tiny, but she seemed to expand, like an amphibian taking on air, then she drew herself up and retrieved her pink leather purse from the bench next to Jack. It was smeared with fudge too. "You'll pay for that, I promise you," she said to Ellen in a voice that raised the gooseflesh on Jack's neck. Then she turned and left. For a moment, Corcoran's was totally silent. Ellen looked across the table at Jack's sundae. "Are you going to finish that? ↗

— Cinda Williams Chima

#fudge #humor #humor

what are you looking for? There is no Truth. There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and contradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust,stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. what can you do about it, my poor friend? ↗

— Blaise Cendrars

#existentialism #nietzsche #nihilism #imagination