A picture of earth from the edge of the solar system, by Voyager 1 Carl Sagan: Relfections on a Mote of Dust Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, …
whiskey river stares into the abyss: I pace back and forth on the edge of the abyss, looking down into the dark. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. [Friedrich Nietzsche said that. But you knew that.] And now, feel it begin to sink. Here’s hoping everything’s okay down by the whiskey river.
John Henry Newman: The Idea of A University, 1854 The general principles of any study you may learn by books at home; but the detail, the colour, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it lives already. You must imitate the student in French or German, who is not content with his grammar, but goes to Paris or Dresden: you must take example from the young artist, who aspires to visit the great Masters in Florence and in Rome. Till we have discovered some intellectual daguerreotype, …
BuddhaNet’s Online Buddhist Study Guide Cool.
On Early Islam Muslims discovered Greek thought hundreds of years before the Western Christians, yet it was the latter who ultimately assimilated it. Why did the reverse not happen? By tracing the major currents of medieval Islamic and Christian thought, this article, in part, proposes that the outcome had little to do with the virtues or vices of the tenets of either Islam or Christianity (they were both obstacles), but with older and deeper dispositions of mass belief. The Roman Christians (unlike the Byzantine Christians) lacked a significant spiritual-mystical dimension in the faith of their masses, unlike in the Islamic …