When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a ...direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults. A cult differs from a formal religion in many significant ways. It is in the nature of a cult to claim some esoteric knowledge which has been submerged (or repressed by orthodoxy) for a long time but has now suddenly been illuminated. There is often some heterodox figure, mocked or scorned by the orthodox, who presents these new teachings. There are communal rites which often permit or spur an individual to act out impulses that had hitherto been repressed. In the cult, one feels as though one were exploring novel or hitherto taboo modes of conduct. What defines a cult, therefore, is its implicit emphasis on magic rather than theology, on the personal tie to a guru or to the group, rather than to an institution or a creed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thou wast a pretty fellow when thou hadst no need to care for her frowning; now thou art an O without a figure. I am better than t...hou art now; I am a fool, thou art nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since you saw no form when the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire, take care and watch yourselves closely, so that you do ...not act corruptly by making an idol for yourselves, in the form of any figure -the likeness of male or female...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let the wise also hear and gain in learning, and the discerning acquire skill, to understand a proverb and a figure, the words of ...the wise and their riddles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River f...or the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since [Rousseau's] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to b...ecome a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He saw Mr. Lincoln but once; at the melancholy function called an Inaugural Ball. Of course he looked anxiously for a sign of char...acter. He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism, but rather the same painful sense of becoming educated and of needing education that tormented a private secretary, above all a lack of apparent force. Any private secretary in the least fit for his business would have thought, as Adams did, that no man living needed so much education as the new President but that all the education he could get would not be enough.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Parenthood has really changed for me. It's much more than taking care of my son; more than saying yes and no. Now I have to figure... out what I think and what I know so that I can answer his questions and explain things to him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »