Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent.Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?
| — | Epicurus |
If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are always praying for evil against one another.
| — | Epicurus |
I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin’s. Said he: “The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie.
| — | Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore |
Cattle die, kinsmen die,
One day, you too will die,
But one thing that does not die is
The reputation of a dead man.
One day, you too will die,
But one thing that does not die is
The reputation of a dead man.
| — | Havamal |
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
| — | Galileo Galilei |
