Perpetuating Quotes (page 7)
When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.
Muhammad Yunus
It is as if a man were asked, 'What is the use of a hammer?' and answered, 'To make hammers'; and when asked, 'And of those hammers, what is the use?' answered, 'To make hammers again'. Just as such a man would be perpetually putting off the question of the ultimate use of carpentry, so Mr. Wells and all the rest of us are by these phrases successfully putting off the question of the ultimate value of the human life.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
At no time in the history of man has the world been so full of pain and anguish. Here and there, however, we meet with individuals who are untouched, unsullied, by the common grief. We say of them that they have died to the world. They live in the moment, fully, and the radiance which emanates from them is a perpetual song of joy […] like the clown, we go through the motions, forever simulating, forever postponing the grand event- we die struggling to get born. We never were, never are. ...
Henry Miller
Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of...
Bill Bryson
But, if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from these heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime... But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Disgusted by the abuses to which it led, humanity repressed Christianity by which it had so long been dominated. Repressed, but not eliminated. Herein lies, I believe, the essence of the tragedy of modern times. The modern man lives as if Christianity were a negligible hypothesis with no relation to the concrete realities of the world and society. And yet at the bottom of his heart this man remains impregnated with Christianity, so that he lives in a state of perpetual ambivalence with regard...
Paul Tournier
She had no idea, really, what it meant to see a man's arm ripped out by the root, to see a head torn off a neck. She had no idea. We human beings live perpetually insulated from the horrors that happen all around us. No matter what she'd suffered, she had not witnessed the vicious ugliness of that kind of death. No, it had to be unreal to her, even Laura who had endured so much.
Anne Rice