Ralf Pfau's List: Planet-Konzepte

• There is a difference between one and another hour of life, in  their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments;  our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments  which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other  experiences
• The  philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and  magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained,  in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a  stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from  we know not whence.
• As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that  flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season  its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a  surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look  up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien  energy the visions come.
• that great nature in  which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere;  that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being  is contained and made one with all other; that common heart, of which  all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is  submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and  talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to  speak from his character, and not from his tongue, and which evermore  tends to pass into our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and  virtue, and power, and beauty.
• the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and  exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of  memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and  feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the  will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background  of our being, in which they lie, — an immensity not possessed and  that cannot be possessed.
• We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its  manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These  are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this  communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is  an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea  of life. Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment  agitates men with awe and delight. A thrill passes through all men  at the reception of new truth, or at the performance of a great  action, which comes out of the heart of nature. In these  communications, the power to see is not separated from the will to  do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the obedience  proceeds from a joyful perception. Every moment when the individual  feels himself invaded by it is memorable.
• The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary, — between poets like Herbert, and poets like Pope, — between  philosophers like Spinoza, Kant, and Coleridge, and philosophers like  Locke, Paley, Mackintosh, and Stewart, — between men of the world,  who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and here and there a fervent  mystic, prophesying, half insane under the infinitude of his thought, — is, that one class speak from within, or from experience, as  parties and possessors of the fact; and the other class, from without, as spectators merely, or perhaps as acquainted with the  fact on the evidence of third persons. It is of no use to preach to  me from without. I can do that too easily myself. Jesus speaks  always from within, and in a degree that transcends all others. In  that is the miracle. I believe beforehand that it ought so to be.  All men stand continually in the expectation of the appearance of  such a teacher. But if a man do not speak from within the veil,  where the word is one with that it tells of, let him lowly confess  it.

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• In our society the word freedom is used when perhaps the word liberty would be better. By it we mean that power comes from the people who give some of their power to government to act as their agent for the common protection of everyone’s liberty.

• “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent in a human condition”
• “Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too scornful in misfortune.”

• Auf dem Bild kann man sehen, was der Maler sehen wollte oder konnte. Unser aktueller körperlicher und geistiger Zustand, beeinflusst was wir sehen und der Maler erzählt uns was er in seinem Zustand des Malens gesehen hat. Ist das die "Realität"? - Ralf Pfau on 2010-04-30

• The human condition encompasses the totality of the experience of being human and living human lives.
• The ongoing way in which humans react to or cope with these events is the human condition.