If it is true that we cannot possess knowledge of what is good in any absolute sense, it is equally true that we have an ethical duty to decide between what is better and what is worse.

Richard Kearney
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  2. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is... - George Orwell
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  4. I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies. - Aristotle
  5. The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence... - John Stuart Mill
More Quotes By Richard Kearney
  1. If it is indeed the business of imagination to make politics distrust itself - reminding it that its principles are not literal facts but constructs of imagination - it is also its business to encourage politics to remake itself by remaking its images of the...
  2. Clearly, imagining cannot be expected to mean exactly the same thing today as it did in the Middle Ages or antiquity. For one thing, Aristotle and Aquinas never watched television.
  3. While food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.
  4. If we possess narrative sympathy - enabling us to see the world from other's point of view - we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love.
  5. Narrative is an open-ended invitation to ethical and poetical responsiveness. Storytelling invites us to become not just agents of our own lives, but narrators and readers as well. It shows us that the untold life is not worth living. There will always be someone there...
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