A Quote by Rebecca West
... when the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients.
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Heretics were most often bitterly persecuted for the their least deviation from accepted belief. It was precisely their obstinacy about trifles that irritated the righteous to madness.
Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day-if you live long enough-like most people, you will get out of life what you deserve.
No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.
That it does not matter what a man believes is a statement heard on every side today. ... What he believes tells him what the world is for. How can men who disagree about what the world is for agree about any of the minutiae of daily conduct? The statement really means that it does not matter what a man believes so long as he does not take his beliefs seriously.
The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.
Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, here all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely
Believe me, the so-called primitive races who worshipped animals as gods were not so daft as people choose to pretend. At least they were humble. Why should not God have come to the earth as an earth-worm? There are a great many more worms than men, and they do a great deal more good.
Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world, and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them.
You are persecuted and despised. It were better that a person should be the oppressed than that he should be the oppressor; and fitter that he should be a victim to the frailty of human instincts than that he should be powerful and crush the flowers of life and disfigure the beauties of feeling with his desire.
If friends are taking more from you than they're giving, it doesn't matter if they are in the throes of addiction. It does not matter if they are suicidal. It does not matter if they were nice to you when you were kids. It doesn't matter if you've told them things you've never told anybody else and only they can relate. If this person is draining you, this person is not right for you.
For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an "affair".... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?
The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love", and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. "Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the divine love may rest "well pleased".
I'm talking to a journalist and I really have nothing to say anymore, this is already uncomfortable. I feel the pain coming already. The brutal pain, when one day I should read your edit of whatever I say, because no matter what I say, no matter how I say it, no matter its tone, its frequency range, its decibel level or the way in which I put the words together, no matter my intentions and no matter the truth. What I'll read one day will be a chastised, manipulated abortion of your misunderstandings, your manipulations, your agenda and your amateur use of the English language.
If a man were only to deal in the world for a day, and should never have occasion to converse more with mankind, never more need their good opinion or good word, it were then no great matter (speaking as to the concernments of this world), if a man spent his reputation all at once, and ventured it at one throw; but if he be to continue in the world, and would have the advantage of conversation while he is in it, let him make use of truth and sincerity in all his words and actions; for nothing but this will last and hold out to the end.
The weird thing was that I went to Trump rallies thinking I was going to run into militant, right wing, racist people and mostly I didn't. That should have been a clue to me. The people I talked to were not, on the surface level, crazy. They were quite nice, quite normal, employed, and actually were wealthier than the press at that time would have led us to believe. At that time, the narrative was that these were all working poor but these were not working poor. That should've been a clue to me that this was a little bigger than I thought.
Life is more than matter. If it were just matter, there would be no need for comfort. Matter does not feel comfort or discomfort, beauty or ugliness, love or compassion, joy or sorrow. Will a chair ever feel sorry or happy? No, matter does not have these finer values. They belong to the realm of the spirit. But life is also more than spirit. If it were just spirit, there would be no need for water, food, or rest. Human life is a combination of both matter and spirit.
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