Cole Bailey

“What causes all the hatred? At some level, it’s always the same thing: human beings operating under the influence of human brains whose design presupposed their specialness. That is, human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields that control us in many and subtle ways, convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it’s not a reflection of the “real us”; whereas they and theirs aren’t in the right and aren’t by nature good, and when they do the occasional good thing, it’s not a reflection of the “real them.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

“Philosophy has to be an energy, with the aim and effect of improving man. Socrates has to enter Adam and produce Marcus Aurelius.1 In other words, make the man of wisdom emerge from the man of bliss. Change Eden into a lyceum.2 Science should be a tonic. Pleasure—what a sad goal, what a puny ambition! The brute feels pleasure. To think—that’s the real triumph of the soul. To hold out thought to quench people’s thirst, to hand everyone the notion of God as an elixir, to cause conscience and science to fraternize inside them, make them more just through such a mysterious confrontation—that is the purpose of real philosophy. Morality is the blossoming of sundry truths. To contemplate leads to action. The absolute has to be put into practice. What is ideal has to be breathable, drinkable, edible to the human mind. It is the ideal that has the right to say: “Take of this, this is my body, this is my blood.” Wisdom is Holy Communion. It is on this condition that it ceases to be a sterile love of science and becomes the one, almighty method of human rallying, and is promoted from philosophy to religion. Philosophy should not be a simple ivory tower built over mystery so that it can gaze at it at its leisure, with no other consequence than being at curiosity’s beck and call. For us, postponing the development of our thinking for some other occasion, we will just say here that we do not understand either man as a starting point, nor progress as an end, without these two forces that are the two engines: faith and love. Progress is the end; the ideal is the model. What is the ideal? God.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“To be between two religions, one you have not yet emerged from, the other you have not yet embraced, is unbearable; and such gloomy half-light only appeals to batlike souls. Marius was open-eyed and he needed real light. The crepuscular light of doubt hurt him. Whatever his desire to stay put and to hold out, he was invincibly compelled to move on, to advance, to examine, to think, to go one step further. Where was all that going to lead him? He feared, after having taken so many steps that had drawn him closer to his father, to take steps now that would take him away from him. His uneasiness grew with every thought that came to him. High walls hemmed him in on all sides. He did not fit in with either his grandfather or his friends; he was reckless according to the one, backward according to the others; and he recognized that he was doubly cut off—from the old and from the young.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“To sum up, that despot, the cannon, can’t do all it would like to; strength is a great weakness. A cannonball does only six hundred leagues an hour; light does seventy thousand leagues a second. That is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoléon.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables