Es tan corto el amor, y tan largo el olvido. (Love is so short, and forgetting is so long.)
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Another kind of love and compassion is not based on something appearing beautiful or nice, but based on the fact that the other person, just like oneself, wants happiness and does not want suffering and indeed has every right to be happy and to overcome suffering. On such a basis, we feel a sense of responsibility, a sense of closeness toward that being. That is true compassion. This is because the compassion is based on reason, notjust on emotional feeling. As a consequence, it does not matter what the other's attitude is, whether negative, or positive. What matters is that it is a human being, a sentient being that has the experience of pain and pleasure. There is no reason not to feel compassion so long as it is a sentient being.
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Es tan corto el amor, y tan largo el olvido.
(Love is so short, and forgetting is so long.)
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Then, wearied by the uncertainty and difficulties with which each scheme appeared to be attended, he bent up his mind to the strong effort of shaking off his love, like dew-drops from the lion's mane, and resuming those studies and that career of life which his unrequited affection had so long and so fruitlessly interrupted. In this last resolution he endeavoured to fortify himself by every argument which pride, as well as reason, could suggest.
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The common good of a collective -- a race, a class, a state -- was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Does the fault lie in men's hypocrisy or in the nature of the principle? The most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. The believed in the perfect society reached through the guillotine and the firing squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be sacrificed for other men. Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with the declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood. It goes on and will go on so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it. The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing of themselves. But observe the results.
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It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found to be generally true that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon --so long as there is no answer to it-- gives claws to the weak.
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Anger will never disappear so long as thoughts of resentment are cherished in the mind. Anger will disappear just as soon as thoughts of resentment are forgotten
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How pleasant it was in the garden! And how delightful other people's emotions were! -- much more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him. One's own soul, and the passions of one's friends -- those were the fascinating things in life. He pictured to himself with silent amusement the tedious luncheon that he had missed by staying so long with Basil Hallward. Had be gone to his aunt's, he would have been sure to have met Lord Goodbody there, and the whole conversation would have been about the feeding of the poor and the necessity for model lodging-houses. Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour. It was charming to have escaped all that!
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Fame will go by and, so long, I've had you, fame. If it goes by, I've always known it was fickle. So at least it's something I experienced, but that's not where I live.
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Anger will never disappear so long as thoughts of resentment are cherished in the mind. Anger will disappear just as soon as thoughts of resentment are forgotten.
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Every time a poet writes a poem it’s like it’s the first time. When you’ve finished a poem, you don’t know if you’ll ever write another one. Some poems arrive with a weight that’s more significant than other poems and you know it will take a lot of care to do it justice. Poetry, for so long now, has been the way I relate to everything. It’s like a companion. I can’t imagine ever being separated from it.
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So long as faith with freedom reigns And loyal hope survives, And gracious charity remains To leaven lowly lives; While there is one untrodden tract For intellect or will, And men are free to think and act, Life is worth living still.
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Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day? Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed; But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
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'He [the truly ethical man] breaks no leaf from the tree, plucks no flower, is careful to crush no insect with his feet. When he works by his lamp in the summer evening, he prefers to keep his window shut and to breathe the stifling air rather than to see insect after insect falling on his table with singed wings. If after a rain he is walking on the road and sees an earthworm gone astray, he remembers it will dry up in the sun if it does not get back in time to the earth into which it can burrow, and helps it from the fatal stones into the grass. If he comes upon an insect fallen into a puddle, he takes time to save it by extending a leaf or a stalk to it. He is not afraid of being laughed at as sentimental. It is the fate of every truth to be ridiculed before it is recognized. It was once considered stupid to think colored men were really human and must be treated humanely. The time is coming when people will be amazed that it took so long for mankind to recognize that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with ethics.'
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What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?
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Is life worth living? Yes, so long As there is wrong to right.
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The incipient institution needs some stabilizing principle to stop its premature demise. That stabilizing principle is the naturalization of social classifications. There needs to be an analogy by which the formal structure of a crucial set of social relations is found in the physical world, or in the supernatural world, or in eternity, anywhere, so long as it is not seen as a socially contrived arrangement. When the analogy is applied back and forth from one set of social relations to another, and from these back to nature, its recurring formal structure becomes easily recognized and endowed with self-validating truth... For discourse to be possible at all, the basic categories have to be agreed on. Nothing else but institutions can define sameness. Similarity is an institution.
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When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
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Affection cannot be manufactored or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person or a system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote, or incite to violence.
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My experiences of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor be indisposed to serve them: nor, in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future. The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.
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Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.
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So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.
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What would you have me do? Search out some powerful patronage, and be Like crawling ivy clinging to a tree? No thank you. Dedicate, like all the others, Verses to plutocrats, while caution smothers Whatever might offend my lord and master? No thank you. Kneel until my knee-caps fester, Bend my back until I crack my spine, And scratch another’s back if he’ll scratch mine? No thank you. Dining out to curry favour, Meeting the influential till I slaver, Suiting my style to what the critics want With slavish copy of the latest can’t? No thanks! Ready to jump through any hoop To be the great man of a little group? Be blown off course, with madrigals for sails, By the old women sighing through their veils? Labouring to write a line of such good breeding Its only fault is that it’s not worth reading? To ingratiate myself, abject with fear, And fawn and flatter to avoid a sneer? No thanks, no thanks, no thanks! But just to sing, Dream, laugh, and take my tilt of wing, To cock a snook whenever I shall choose, To fight for yes and no, come win or lose, To travel without thought of fame or fortune Wherever I care to go to under the moon! Never to write a line that hasn’t come Directly from my heart: and so, with some Modesty, to tell myself: My boy, Be satisfied with a flower, a fruit, the joy Of a single leaf, so long as it was grown In your own garden. Then, if success is won By any chance, you have nothing to render to A hollow Caesar: the merit belongs to you. In short, I won’t be a parasite; I’ll be My own intention, stand alone and free, And suit my voice to what my own eyes see!
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Had the King of Spain employed the hands of his people, and his Spanish iron so, he had brought to light but little of that treasure that lay so long hid in the dark entrails of America.
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There is one and only one social responsibility of business-to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.
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What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with any woman so long as he doesn't love her
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He has sat on the fence so long that the iron has entered his soul.
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After ten or twelve years you can only play something so long and then you start to parody it.
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So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.
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So long as faith with freedom reigns
And loyal hope survives,
And gracious charity remains
To leaven lowly lives;
While there is one untrodden tract
For intellect or will,
And men are free to think and act,
Life is worth living still.
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