|
|
|
|
A verse from C Day Lewis:-
His laughter was better than birds in the morning, his smile
Turned the edge of the wind, his memory
Disarms death and charms the surly grave.
Early he went to bed, too early we
Saw his light put out; yet we could not grieve
More than a little while,
For he lives in the earth around us, laughs from the sky.
Some words of Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
Life in itself is neither good nor evil. It is the place of good or evil according to what you make of it. And if you have lived one day, you have seen all. One day is equal to all days. There is no other light, no other night. This sun, this moon, these stars and this disposition, are the same that your forefathers enjoyed, and which will uplift those who come after. And, at worst, the distribution and acts of my own story are encompassed in a year. If you look well at the course of my four seasons, they contain the infancy, the youth, the virility and the old age of the world . . . Wherever your life ends, there it is complete. The value of life lies not in its length, but in the use we make of it. This or that man may have lived many years, yet lived little. Pay good heed to that in your own life. Whether you have lived long enough depends upon yourself, not on the number of your years . . .
From ‘Adonais’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
He has outsoared the shadow of our night:
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain.
His made one with Nature; there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird.
His is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely.
George Bernard Shaw
Richard Holloway
'Looking in the Distance: The Human Search for
Meaning', last paragraph.
A sentence is not finished till it has a full stop, and every life needs a dying to complete it. It is dying that finishes us, that ends our story.
When the map of our life is complete, and we die in the richness of our history, some among the living will miss us for a while, but the earth will go on without us. Its day is longer than ours, though we now know that it too will die. Our brief finitude is but a beautiful spark in the vast darkness of space. So we should live the fleeting day with passion and, when the night comes, depart from it with grace.
Ophelia Benson
"Atheism is not a belief system. It's the abstention from a belief system, the non-acceptance of a belief system, the non-adherence to a belief system. If atheism is a belief system then each of us has an infinite nunber of belief systems because just think of all the entities we don't believe in. The Great Pumpkin, The Great Green Pumpkin, the Great Mushroom, the purple aardvark, the two purple aardvarks... etc. Not collecting stamps does not make me a hobbyist. Not playing poker does not make me a gambler. Not playing football does not make me an athlete. And not being a theist does not make me a believer. Not believing is not simply a kind of believing - it's not believing."
Georges Bernanos, French Novelist and Political Writer
"A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all."
Lyrics to Song "I ain't afraid" by Holly Near. Get an MP3 download of the song here.
"Always look on the bright side of life" - Monty Python
"The Galaxy Song" from "The Meaning of Life" - Monty Python
The Golden Rule(s)There’s a common misconception that the so-called Golden Rule is a Christian ethic, but the reality is that it originated long before...“The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be relieved only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance called ‘faith.’”
Robert Ingersoll
“Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being 'pushed to an extreme'; not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.‘
“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.‘
John Stuart Mill “On Liberty“
“Science is about disbelief. It accepts that all knowledge is provisional and that any theory might in principle be disproved. Some theories are better established than others: the earth is probably not flat, babies are almost certainly not brought by storks, and men and dinosaurs are unlikely to have appeared on earth within the past few thousand years. Even so, nothing is sacred in 1905 classical physics collapsed after a seemingly trivial observation about glowing gases and the same is potentially true for all other scientific theories.‘
Professor Steve Jones, University College London
“I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them. The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.‘
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 1945
“We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith [Christianity]. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.‘
Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933
“If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.‘
Ron T. Hubbard, Readers' Digest 1980
“An open mind is a very bad thing, everything falls out.‘
Professor Lewis Wolpert
“No man can blaspheme a book. No man can commit blasphemy by telling his honest thought. No man can blaspheme a God, or a Holy Ghost, or a Son of God. The Infinite cannot be blasphemed. ”
Robert Ingersoll