Who has ever been taught how to be kind? Who taught you what kindness looks like? Who taught you what it feels like? Who have we been taught to be kind to? How have we been taught to be kind—by explanation or by example? What were you taught about why we should be kind? Were you taught anything about kindness at all, or were you simply told to be kind without knowing what it meant? How do you teach kindness now?
The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”
— Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment
“If there is any advantage to going through a mental crisis of the worst kind, it is that – on the other side of it – we will have ended up choosing life rather than merely assuming it to be the unremarkable norm. We, the ones who have crawled back from the darkness, may be disadvantaged in a hundred ways, but at least we will have had to find, rather than assumed or inherited, some reasons why we are here. Every day we continue will be a day earned back from death and our satisfactions will be all the more more intense and our gratitude more profound for having been consciously arrived at.”
“Now when I recite the word namaste, I think about it in this way: the light in me honors the light in you, AND the dark in me honors the dark in you; the pain, suffering, beauty, and brilliance in me sees the pain, suffering, beauty, and brilliance in you. All of it, everything. Not just the light, love, truth, beauty, and peace, but also the dark, madness, confusion, and chaos. I want to honor it all because all of it deserves to be honored. We, each of us, contain it all.”
— Sasha Tozzi, What I mean when I say the word “NAMASTE”
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.”
— Arthur C. Clarke (via Dense Discovery)
I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.”
— James Baldwin
Still, it rarely happens that men live according to the guidance of reason. Instead, their lives are so constituted that they are usually envious and burdensome to one another. They can hardly, however, live a solitary life; hence, that definition which makes man a social animal has been quite pleasing to most. And surely we do derive, from society of our fellow men, many more advantages than disadvantages.”
— Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics
Lisa Marie Blair 