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“The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”
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“The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home, the more easily is one able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true vision. The more easily, too, does one assess oneself and alien cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance.”
― Orientalism
― Orientalism
“For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible. Dreams, memories, the sacred—they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”
― Spring Snow
― Spring Snow
“She did not know it, but she was actually in despair at the poverty of human emotions. Was it not irrational that there was nothing to do except weep when ten people died, just as one wept for but a single person?”
― Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
― Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
“The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how the impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.”
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Political Philosophy and Ethics
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Study and discussion of the important questions of ethical and political philosophy from Confucius and Socrates to the present. Rules (see also the ...more
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