Life Dualism Quotes & Sayings

The Biblical "dualism" in life then, is not between the "sacred" and the "secular" in contrived upper and lower stories of life, but rather between that which is in harmony with God's design or in conflict with it, that is, between good and evil, no matter in what sphere of life or endeavor it takes place. — Christian Overman

It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type ("light coming out of darkness"); weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection. — Mircea Eliade

When one devotes oneself to meditation, mental burdens, unnecessary worries, and wandering thoughts drop off one by one; life seems to run smoothly and pleasantly. A student may now depend on intuition to make decisions. As one acts on intuition, second thought, with its dualism, doubt and hesitation, does not arise. — Nyogen Senzaki

Our desire to segregate the mind's cogitations from the body's exertions reflects the grip that Cartesian dualism still holds on us. When we think about thinking, we're quick to locate our mind, and hence our self, in the gray matter inside our skull and to see the rest of the body as a mechanical life-support system that keeps the neural circuits charged. More than a fancy of philosophers like Descartes and his predecessor Plato, this dualistic view of mind and body as operating in isolation from each other appears to be a side effect of consciousness itself. Even though the bulk of the mind's work goes on behind the scenes, in the shadows of the unconscious, we're aware only of the small but brightly lit window that the conscious mind opens for us. And our conscious mind tells us, insistently, that it's separate from the body. — Nicholas Carr

Prayer that craves a particular commodity - anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rome changed the New Testament catholicity (which purifies and sanctifies as it's proper domain the whole of life) and has substituted in its place a dualism which separates the supernatural from the natural. — Henry R. Van Til

Pathological dualism does three things. It makes you dehumanise and demonise your enemies. It leads you to see yourself as a victim. And it allows you to commit altruistic evil, killing in the name of the God of life, hating in the name of the God of love and practising cruelty in the name of the God of compassion. — Jonathan Sacks

Allowing ourselves to become pure point of view, we hang in midair over the city. What we see now is a gigantic metropolis waking up. Commuter trains of many colors move in all directions, transporting people from place to place. Each of those under transport is a human being with a different face and mind, and at the same time each is a nameless part of the collective identity. Each is simultaneously a self-contained whole and a mere part. Handling this dualism of theirs skillfully and advantageously, they perform their morning rituals with deftness and precision: brushing teeth, shaving, tying neckties, applying lipstick. They check the morning news on TV, exchange words with their families, eat, defecate. — Haruki Murakami

The number two, he thought, was an ominous number. Two is a reflection or duplication of one, the most perfect of the natural numbers. Two is all echo and counterpoise; two is the beginning of multiplicity, the way the universal oneness differentiates itself and breaks apart into strings and quarks and photons, all the separate and component pieces of life. Two is a symbol of becoming as opposed to pure being ... — David Zindell

Dualism is the closest human feeling, but it is not necessarily the highest human philosophy. On the contrary, all great philosophies have been monistic. Man experiences the world dualistically, but monism is the essence of all human thinking. Philosophy disagrees with dualism. However, this fact does not mean too much, because life, being superior to thought, may not be judged by it. In reality, since we are human beings, we are living two realities. We can deny these two worlds, but we cannot escape from them. Life does not depend too much on our understanding of it. — Alija Izetbegovic

There is no murky pit of hell awaiting anyone ... Mind cannot arise alone without body, or apart from sinews and blood ... You must admit, therefore, that when then body has perished, there is an end also of the spirit diffused through it. It is surely crazy to couple a mortal object with an eternal... — Titus Lucretius Carus

Dualism ... Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life. — Aldous Huxley

If dualism is true, then life after death is not only possible, but plausible. That's because our immaterial minds are distinct from our material bodies, and the mortal fate of our bodies in no way implies the death of our minds. Even more than this, the death of the body becomes a kind of emancipation for the mind, because during life our minds are inextricably bound to our bodies. Think of a vapor or gas that is sealed inside a bottle. Smash the bottle and you haven't smashed the vapor; you have released it. The fate of the vapor is not tied to the fate of the bottle as long as vapors and bottles are different kinds of stuff. Both Plato and Descartes advanced arguments along these lines for the immortality of the soul, — Anonymous

Humanity may destroy the possibilities for life on earth unless the freedom and power that we have acquired are channeled in new creative directions by a spiritual awareness and moral commitment that transcend nationalism, racism, sexism, religious sectarianism, anthropocentrism, and the dualism between human culture and nature. This is the great issue for the 1990s and the twenty-first century. — Steven Clark Rockefeller

We could speak about the meaning of life vis-a-vis non-consequential/deontological theories, apodictic transformation schemata, the incoherence of exemplification, metaphysical realism, Cartesian interactive dualism, revised non reductive dualism, postmodernist grammatology and dicey dichotomies. But we would still be left with Nietzsche's preposterous mustache which instills great anguish and skepticism in the brain, which leads (as it did in his case) to utter madness. I suggest we go to Paris instead. — Maira Kalman