A Quote by John Burnside

As attractive as it is, the idea that nature can exist beyond our dangerous 'instinct for happiness' is never the whole story.

John Burnside

Quote Topics

Attractive Beyond Dangerous Exist Happiness Idea Instinct Nature Never Our Story Whole

Quote Author

John Burnside
Scottish - Writer
Born: March 19, 1955

One must distance oneself from the idea of strict realism. It seems to me that real nature doesn't exist anymore, this idea of "the wild." This is why I love parks, and why I chose to use them in my work - they are beyond nature. I see nature as a resource.

Sergio Chejfec

... our purpose in founding our state was not to promote the happiness of a single class, but, so far as possible, of the whole community. Our idea was that we were most likely to justice in such a community, and so be able to decide the question we are trying to answer. We are therefore at the moment trying to construct what we think is a happy community by securing the happiness not of a select minority, but of a whole.

Plato

Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. .... For the man an attractive girl - and for the woman an attractive man - are the prizes they are after. 'attractive' usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally. ... Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values.

Erich Fromm

It is just man's turning away from instinct--his opposing himself to instinct--that creates consciousness. Instinct is nature andseeks to perpetuate nature; while consciousness can only seek culture or its denial.

Carl Jung

For, after all, the foundation of our whole nature, and, therefore, of our happiness, is our physique, and the most essential factor in happiness is health, and, next in importance after health, the ability to maintain ourselves in independence and freedom from care.

Arthur Schopenhauer

...I believe there exists, & I feel within me, an instinct for the truth, or knowledge or discovery, of something of the same nature as the instinct of virtue, & that our having such an instinct is reason enough for scientific researches without any practical results ever ensuing from them.

Charles Darwin

Substances like LSD, which give away a secret about the nature of the social game - the human game and what underlies it - are potentially dangerous, of course, like any good thing is. Electricity is dangerous, fire is dangerous, cars are dangerous, planes are dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving on the freeway. The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it, then you make it worse. Because you project onto it all kinds of bogeys and threats which don't exist in it at all.

Alan Watts

Each thing tends to move towards its own nature. I always desire happiness which is my true nature. My nature is never a burden to me. Happiness is never a burden to me, whilst sorrow is.

Adi Shankara

Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.

Immanuel Kant

Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty... No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.

Blaise Pascal

Instinct told me it was dangerous. I could handle dangerous. Dangerous and me went back a long way. We did lunch when dangerous was in town.

Devon Monk

Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.

Peter Matthiessen

Spirituality points, always, beyond: beyond the ordinary, beyond possession, beyond the narrow confines of the self, and - above all - beyond expectations. Because "the spiritual" is beyond our control, it is never exactly what we expect.

Ernest Kurtz

Nature's creative power is far beyond man's instinct of destruction.

Jules Verne

A total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature can alone lift humanity beyond itself. . . It is only the full emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental Supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle.