There is a deep sense in which we are all ghost towns. We are all haunted by the memory of those we love, those with whom we feel we have unfinished business. While they may no longer be with us, a faint aroma of their presence remains, a presence that haunts us until we make our peace with them and let them go. The problem, however, is that we tend to spend a great deal of energy in attempting to avoid the truth. We construct an image of ourselves that seeks to shield us from a confrontation with our ghosts. Hence we often encounter them only late at night, in the corridors of our dreams.
When told that man lives in delusion everyone thinks of himself as the exception; hence his delusion.
What's perfect now, might not be so 10 years hence. Whatever we're basing our design ideas on is not what we remember in the past. It's something that kind of folds in on itself.
Hence, loathèd Melancholy, Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born, In Stygian cave forlorn, 'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy.
The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.
There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a readiness to attempt the impossible, a bias for simple solutionsto cut the knot rather than unravel it, the viewing of compromise as surrender. Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization. Hence, absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
We have come more and more under the dominance of mechanics and sacrificed living humanity to the dead rhythm of the machine without most of us even being conscious of the monstrosity of the procedure. Hence we frequently deal with such matters with indifference and in cold blood as if we handled dead things and not the destinies of men.
Nothing has value in itself. The consumer confers value on it by seeking to acquire it. Hence, the value of a thing is never objective, but always subjective.
However much we talk of the inexorable laws governing the life of individuals and of societies, we remain at the bottom convinced that in human affairs everything in more or less fortuitous. We do not even believe in the inevitability of our own death. Hence the difficulty of deciphering the present, of detecting the seeds of things to come as they germinate before our eyes. We are not attuned to seeing the inevitable.
Democracy cannot survive where there is such uniformity that everyone wears exactly the same intellectual uniform or point of view. Democracy implies diversity of outlook, a variety of points of view on politics, economics, and world affairs. Hence the educational ideal is not uniformity but unity, for unity allows diversity of points of view regarding the good means to a good end.
But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,--cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness.
We cannot think of ourselves save as to some extent social being. Hence, we cannot separate the idea of ourselves and our own good from our idea of others and their good.
Half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. You are always living three, or indeed six, months hence. I believe that people entirely devoid of imagination never can be really good gardeners. To be content with the present, and not striving about the future, is fatal.
Pessimism only describes an attitude, and not facts, and hence is entirely subjective.
Evolution. . . is opportunistic, hence unpredictable.
The hardest thing for a sane person to do is not care what anyone thinks, although everyone swears by it, hence our glorification of insanity.
People don't care about being duped as long as they're happy, which is the shortest form of happiness; hence 'self-duprication' becomes a habit.
I have sometimes almost wished it had been my destiny to be born two or three centuries hence.
The homosexual is a scapegoat who evokes no sympathy. Hence, he can only be a victim, never a martyr.
There is a water soluble sugar that is in beans called oligosaccharides, and they are indigestible by human beings. They ferment during the digestion process, and hence, you have gas.