"Isolation is the worst possible counselor."
"It appears to me to be indisputable that he who I am to-day
derives, by a continuous series of states of consciousness, from him who
was in my body twenty years ago. Memory is the basis of individual
personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective
personality of a people. We live in memory, and our spiritual life
is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform
itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our
future." (Compare this to Alfred N Whitehead's ideas about objective immortality and God)
"It has often been said that every man who has suffered
misfortunes prefers to be himself, even with his misfortunes, rather
than to be someone else without them. For unfortunate men, when they
preserve their normality in their misfortune — that is to say, when
they endeavor to persist in their own being — prefer misfortune to
non-existence. For myself I can say that when a as a youth, and even as a
child, I remained unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell,
for even then nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness
itself. It was a furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite
for divinity, as one of our ascetics [San Juan de los Angeles] has put
it."
"Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and
primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. The necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge and given them such capacity as they possess. Man
sees, hears, touches, tastes and smells that which it is necessary for
him to see, hear, touch, taste and smell in order to preserve his life.
The decay or loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which
his life is environed, and if it increases them less in the state of
society in which we are actually living, the reason is that some see,
hear, touch, taste and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and
without a guide, could not live long. Society is an additional sense; it
is the true common sense. "
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