Skill and Imagination

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

— Tom Stoppard

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  • Apathy

    History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

    — Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom

  • Live Life’s Questions

    I want to beg you as much as I can . . . to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything.

    Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

    Take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

    — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

  • Problem of Evil

    Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.

    Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.

    Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?

    Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

    — Epicurus, philosopher (c. 341-270 BCE)

    Years ago I struggled deeply with the Problem of Evil, i.e. the reconciliation of the existence of evil and suffering with the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent God. At the time, I found Dostoyevski’s novel The Brother’s Karamozov to be a great comfort and insight on the dilemma. I wish I had found Epicurus’ quote earlier in my life. The logic is compelling and impeccable.

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