The barbaric world was to be rewarded in some other world for acting sensibly in this. They were promised rewards in another world, if they would only have self-denial enough to be virtuous in this. If they would forego the pleasures of larceny and murder; if they would forego the thrill and bliss of meanness here, they would be rewarded hereafter for that self-denial. I have exactly the opposite idea. Do right, not to deny yourself, but because you love yourself and because you love others. Be generous, because it is better for you. Be just, because any other course is the suicide of the soul. Whoever does wrong plagues himself, and when he reaps that harvest, he will find that he was not practicing self-denial when he did right.
Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) American lawyer, agnostic, orator
Speech (1886-11-14), “A Lay Sermon,” American Secular Union annual congress, Chickering Hall, New York City
(Source)
Quotations about:
metaphysics
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I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.
That’s metaphysics, my dear fellow. It’s forbidden by my doctors, my stomach won’t take it.
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator
Doctor Zhivago [До́ктор Жива́го], Part 1, ch. 1 “The Five O’Clock Express,” sec. 5 [Ivan Ivanovich] (1955) [tr. Hayward & Harari (1958), US ed.]
(Source)
After a long argument by Voskoboinikov to avowed atheist Ivanovich as to the necessity of Christianity and the Gospels.
Alternate translations:That’s metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctors, my stomach won’t take it.
[tr. Hayward & Harari (1958), UK ed.]Metaphysics, old boy. It's forbidden me by my doctors; my stomach can't digest it.
[tr. Pevear & Volokhonsky (2010)]
