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An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.
--
TED talk, February 2003

 

Marvin Minsky

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There is One God. He created all beings, and He exists beyond the beyond of religions, beyond the separations of race, religion, and philosophies. He is beyond mind, desire, and physical vision. He is beyond the world, lust, torpor, and illusion. God resides in that spotlessly pure place known as the heart and sees and knows everything. He sees each and every heart and mind and understands all things.

 

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

 

“One must work for a living in order to live-that’s just the way life is-it’s the shabby side of existence. We sleep seven hours out of twenty-four; its wasted time, but it has to be that way. We work five hours out of the twenty-four; it is wasted time, but it has to be that way. By working five hours, a person has his livelihood, and when he has that he begins to live. Now, a person’s work should preferably be as boring and meaningless as possible, just so he has his livelihood from it. If he has a special talent, he should never commit the sin against it of making it his source of income. No, he coddles his talent; he possesses it for its own sake; he has even greater joy from it than a mother from her child. He cultivates it; he develops it for twelve hours of the day, sleeps for seven hours, is a nonhuman for five, and thus life becomes quite bearable, even quite beautiful, because working five hours is not so bad, inasmuch as, since a person’s thoughts are never on the work, he hoards his energies for the pursuit of his delight.” Our hero is making no headway. For one thing, he has no special talent with which to fill the twelve hours at home; for another, he has already gained a more beautiful view of working, a view he is unwilling to give up. So he probably will decide to seek help from the ethicist again. The latter is very brief. “It is every human being’s duty to have a calling.” More he cannot say, because the ethical as such is always abstract, and there’s no abstract calling for all human beings. On the contrary, he presupposes that each person has a particular calling. Which calling our hero should choose, the ethicist cannot tell him, because for that a detailed knowledge of the esthetic aspects of his whole personality is required, and even if the ethicist did have this knowledge, he would still refrain from choosing for him, because in that case he would indeed deny his own view of life. What the ethicist can teach him is that there is a calling for every human being and, when our hero has found this, that he is to choose it ethically.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees in himself. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting what he sees before him. Otherwise his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead.

 

Caspar David Friedrich

 

Nature, with equal mind,
Sees all her sons at play
Sees man control the wind,
The wind sweep man away.

 

Matthew Arnold

 

As in the night when the sun is not present, one sees the light in the moon, the man who is not present in the heart, sees merely the mind.

 

Ramana Maharshi