Quotes
"Truth has advocates who seek understanding. Corrupt ideas have miserable little fanatics who attempt to enforce their beliefs through intimidation and brutality… through faith. Savage force is faith’s obedient servant. Violence on an apocalyptic scale can only be born of faith because reason, by its very nature, disarms senseless cruelty. Only faith thinks to justify it....Justice is not the exercise of hatred, it is the celebration of civilization."
-p. 576, U.S. hardcover edition
"Every person makes choices as to how they will live. Evil does not exist independent of man. Men do evil by choice. Choice involves the requirement to think, even if ineffectually. The most basic choice you can make is to think or not to think, to let others do the thinking and tell you what to do, even if they tell you to do evil. Wise choices require more, they require rational thinking. Refusal to think rationally affords one the ability to maintain the illusion of knowledge, wisdom, even sanctity while committing evil. If you follow the teaching of others who do your thinking for you and who have you do evil, the innocent victims are harmed just the same as if you choose to harm them yourself. Dead is dead. Their life is over. Teachings that defy reason defy reality; what defies reality defies life. Defying life is embracing death. Celebrating faith over reason is merely a way of denying what is, in favor of embracing any whim that strikes your fancy."
-p. 579, U.S. hardcover edition
"To exist in this vast universe for a speck of time is the great gift of life. Our tiny sliver of time is our gift of life. It is our only life. The universe will go on, indifferent to our brief existence, but while we are here we touch not just part of that vastness, but also the lives around us. Life is the gift each of us has been given. Each life is our own and no one else’s. It is precious beyond all counting. It is the greatest value we can have. Cherish it for what it truly is... Your life is yours alone. Rise up and live it."
-p. 603, U.S. hardcover edition
"I expect that you shall forever worship that to which you no longer will have any connection, or any possibility of a connection, that you will forever pray for an afterlife with the Creator in the spirit world, but you will be forever cut off from any world but your own. In that distant world you will have your own lives, and after you die you will be dead. Your spirits will no longer exist. Your souls will extinguish along with your lives. You will have your lives, and if you waste them by continuing to worship other worlds, wishing for invented visions of eternal salvation, wanting an escape from the reality of existence, you will reap only the emptiness of death after enduring lives unlived. You will have a chance at life; it will be up to you to value those precious lives or to cast them away for nothing. You wanted a new dawn of mankind. You wanted a world of life in which pining for other realms invented in your minds alone was the righteous cause of mankind. I grant you your wish. Now you must live with it."
"Your existence in your world is finite. You will have your lives, but when you die your souls will cease to exist. You have only one existence- in your world of life. If you continue to waste it, if you fail to use your minds to properly grasp the reality of your world, your singular existence, you will lose out on the priceless value of your only life."
Read more about this topic: Confessor (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word quotes:
“A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills with his own voice and humour, and the whole cyclopedia of his table-talk is presently believed to be his own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Young people of high school age can actually feel themselves changing. Progress is almost tangible. It’s exciting. It stimulates more progress. Nevertheless, growth is not constant and smooth. Erik Erikson quotes an aphorism to describe the formless forming of it. “I ain’t what I ought to be. I ain’t what I’m going to be, but I’m not what I was.””
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say “I think,” “I am,” but quotes some saint or sage.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)