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“It is in dealing with death that one is most forcibly made aware of how we yielded, hands down, to the forgetting of Being. One of the few occasions on which at last modern man might be able to grasp the enormity of existence is in the contemplation of death. Yet this is just what we ignore. It is a commonplace that while the Victorians did not talk about sex, they were open about death; we do not talk about death, but are clinically explicit about sex. Unfortunately for us, being open about something robs it of its power, while hiding increases it.”
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
“Knowledge of this universe in which we live must be participatory. If you are not prepared to participate, or to take any risks, love will never be part of your life. Risk and vulnerability are of love's essence. And love - as you will know if you have made the experiment and experience it - opens aspects of reality that would otherwise be concealed from you.”
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
“Speaking of the ground of Being, the Zen monk Shunryū Suzuki writes: 'The true source, ri, is beyond our thinking; it is pure and stainless. When you describe it, you put a limitation on it. That is, you stain the truth or put a mark on it.' In the Analects of Confucius it sis written: 'The Master said, does Heaven speak?' Famously Lao Tzu tells us that 'the tao that can be named is not the eternal tao'. In the Eastern tradition, then, there are many such statements of the impossibility of capturing the source of all things in language.”
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
“Wittgenstein wrote: 'To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.' And he continued: 'To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that the life has a meaning.”
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World
“When Solzhenitsyn asked himself what had given rise to the catastrophic brutalities of the twentieth century, his conclusion was that men had forgotten God. In a speech given in 1983, he repeated: 'If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again; men have forgotten God.' More than this, a positive 'hatred of God', he thought was the principal driving force behind the philosophy and psychology of Marxism-Leninism: 'militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. The hatred of God is indeed a fascinating phenomenon, one more and more evident in out time - and not just in political philosophies, but in the vox pop of media scientists. Lucifer - 'the Bright' - cannot bear the imputation of anything higher than he.”
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Mindaugas’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Mindaugas’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
4 books
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19 friends
50 books
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71 friends
76 books
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45 friends
1 book
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2 friends
1,313 books
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88 friends
27 books
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50 friends
81 books
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11 friends
53 books
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33 friends
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