Salzburg, Austria - 2007You can not believe in honor until you have achieved it. Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
Friday, December 21, 2007
Greatness of mind
Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.
Aristotle
Aristotle
Logic
In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
The mother of invention
I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.
Agatha Christie (1890-1976)
_An Autobiography_ [1977], "Growing Up"
Agatha Christie (1890-1976)
_An Autobiography_ [1977], "Growing Up"
Real work
If you want to do real work
give your whole heart to it.
Nothing happens just by talking.
A drop of water inside the house
is better than a gushing river outside.
Rumi
give your whole heart to it.
Nothing happens just by talking.
A drop of water inside the house
is better than a gushing river outside.
Rumi
Space
Wherefrom do all these worlds come? They come from space. All beings arise from space, and into space they return: space is indeed their beginning, and space is their final end.
Upanishads
Upanishads
Dancing in all its forms
Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
_The Twilight of the Idols_ [1888],
"Things the German Lack"
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
_The Twilight of the Idols_ [1888],
"Things the German Lack"
The insider
I love being an outsider, having elements to me that are different. I love the fact that I can pose as an insider but be an outsider, I love that game you can play.
Stephen Fry 1957-
Stephen Fry 1957-
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Rainer Maria Rilke
Salzburg, Austria - 20071. “Again and again, however we know the landscape of love / and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names, / and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others / fall: again and again the two of us walk out together / under the ancient trees, lie down again and again / among the flowers, face to face with the sky.”
2. “A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky.”
3. “Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines, For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open windows and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.“
4. "All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is
impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you."
5. “All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.”
6. "And we: spectators, always, everywhere, looking at everything, and never from!...Who's turned us around like this, so that whatever we do, we always have the look of someone going away? Just as a man on the last hill showing him his whole valley one last time, turns, and stops, and lingers -so we live, and are forever leaving.”
7. ”And you wait, keep waiting for that one thing
which would infinitely enrich your life:
the powerful, uniquely uncommon,
the awakening of dormant stones,
depths that would reveal you to yourself.
In the dusk you notice the book shelves
with their volumes in gold and in brown;
and you think of far lands you journeyed,
of pictures and of shimmering gowns
worn by women you conquered and lost.
And it comes to you all of a sudden:
That was it! And you arise, for you are
aware of a year in your distant past
with its fears and events and prayers.”
8. "..artistic experience lies so incredibly close to that of sex, to its pain and its ecstasy, that the two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and the same yearning and delight."
9. “As Nature gives the other creatures over
to the venture of their dim delight
and in soil and branchwork grants none special cover,
so too our being's pristine ground settles our plight;
we are no dearer to it; it ventures us.
Except that we, more eager than plant or beast,
go with this venture, will it, adventurous
more sometimes than Life itself is, more daring
by a breath (and not in the least
from selfishness) . . . . There, outside all caring,
this creates for us a safety just there,
where the pure forces' gravity rules; in the end,
it is our unshieldedness on which we depend,
and that, when we saw it threaten, we turned it
so into the Open that, in widest orbit somewhere,
where the Law touches us, we may affirm it. “
10. “At the bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one is alone. That isn't as bad as it may first appear; and again it is the best thing in life that each should have everything in himself; his fate, his future, his whole expanse and world.”
11. “Beauty's nothing but beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Each single angel is terrible.”
12. “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to
love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books
that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the
answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be
able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the
questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without
noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer.”
13. “But, alongside the most rapid movements, there will always be slow ones, such, indeed, as are of so extreme a leisureliness that we shall not live to see the course they take. But that is what humanity is for, is it not, to await the realization of that which exceeds a single life-span? From its point of view the slowest process is often the quickest, that is to say, we find that we called it slow simply because it could not be measured.“
14. “But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. / But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. / We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”
15. "But now that so much is changing, is it not up to us to change ourselves? Could we not develop ourselves a little, and slowly take upon ourselves our share of work in love, little by little?"
16. ”Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet--
all this universe, to the furthest stars
all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.
Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,
a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.”
17. “Death is the side of life averted from us, unshone upon by us: we must try to achieve the greatest consciousness of our existence which is at home in both unbounded realms, inexhaustibly nourished from both . . . The true figure of life extends through both spheres, the blood of the mightiest circulation flowers through both: there is neither a here nor a beyond, but the great unity in which the beings that surpass us, the "angels," are at home. . . . We of the here and now are not for a moment hedged in the time-world, nor confined within it; we are incessantly flowing over and over to those who preceded us, to our origins and to those who seemingly come after us. In that greatest "open" world all are, one cannot say "simultaneous," for the very falling away of time determines that the all are. Transiency everywhere plunges into a deep being. And so all the configurations of the here and now are to be used not in a time-bound way only, but, as far as we are able, to be placed in those superior significances in which we have a share. But not in the Christian sense (from which I am more and more passionately moving away), but in a purely earthly, deeply earthly, blissfully earthy consciousness, we must introduce what is here seen and touched into the wider, into the widest orbit. Not into a beyond whose shadow darkens the earth, but into a whole, into the whole. Nature, the things of our intercourse and use, are provisional and perishable; but they are, as long as we are here, our property and our friendship, co-knowers of our distress and gladness, as they have already been the familiars of our forebears. So it is important not only not to run down and degrade all that is here, but just because of its provisionalness, which it shares with us, these phenomena and things should be understood and transformed by us in a most fervent sense. Transformed? Yes, for it is our task to imprint this provisional, perishable earth so deeply, so patiently and passionately in ourselves that its reality shall arise in us again "invisibly." We are the bees of the invisible. Nous butinons eperdument le miel du visible, pour l'accumuler dans la grande ruche d'or de l'Invisble. The Elegies show us at this work, at the work of these continual conversions of the beloved visible and tangible into the invisible vibrations and excitation of our own nature, which introduces new vibration-frequencies into the vibration-spheres of the universe. . . . The earth has no way out other than to become invisible: in us who with a part of our natures partake of the invisible, have (at least) stock in it, and can increase our holdings in the invisible during our sojourn here, in us alone can be consummated this intimate and lasting conversion.“
18. "Do continue to believe that with your feeling and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it."
19. "Don’t be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law. What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. Walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours--that is what you must be able to attain."
20. "Don't forget that I belong to solitude, that I must not need anyone, that all my strength is born from this detachment."
21. “Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words."
22. "Do you remember still the falling stars
that like swift horses through the heavens raced
and suddenly leaped across the hurdles
of our wishes--do you recall? And we
did make so many! For there were countless numbers
of stars: each time we looked above we were
astounded by the swiftness of their daring play,
while in our hearts we felt safe and secure
watching these brilliant bodies disintegrate,
knowing somehow we had survived their fall."
23. “Encircled by her arms as by a shell,
she hears her being murmur,
while forever he endures
the outrage of his too pure image...
Wistfully following their example,
nature re-enters herself;
contemplating its own sap, the flower
becomes too soft, and the boulder hardens...
It's the return of all desire that enters
toward all life embracing itself from afar...
Where does it fall? Under the dwindling
surface, does it hope to renew a center?”
24. ”Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”
25. "Explore transformation throughout. What is your most suffering experience? Is drinking bitter to you, turn to wine."
26. “Extensive as the "external" world is, with all its sidereal distances it hardly bears comparison with the dimensions, the depth dimensions, of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be, in itself, almost unlimited. It seems to me more and more as though our ordinary consciousness inhabits the apex of a pyramid whose base in us (and, as it were, beneath us) broadens out to such an extent that the further we are able to let ourselves down into it, the more completely do we appear to be included in the realities of earthly and, in the widest sense, worldy, existence, which are not dependent on time and space. From my earliest youth I have felt the intuition that at some deeper cross-section of this pyramid of consciousness, mere being could become an event, the inviolable presence and simultaneity of everything that we, on the upper, "normal," apex of self-consciousness, are permitted to experience only as entropy.”
27. ”Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”
28. “For one human being to love another human being, that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation .... Love does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person ... rather it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for another's sake ... :We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them. And yet in the changes brought about by time there are already many things that can help our timid novitiate.
The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing become imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex .... This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be surprised and struck by it. Someday ... there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the opposite of the male, but something in itself, something which makes one think not of any com-
plement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.
This advance will (at first against the will of the outdistanced men) transform the love experience, which is now filed with error, and will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relation of one human being to another, no longer of man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this - that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.”
29. "For one who is not pure has many enemies everywhere and is not safe from them. Only a pure being walks right through his enemy, shaking him to the core."
30. "For therein, too, lies my power, that I do not impede the most secret powers within me."
31. "Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves ... Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point it, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
32. "Having promised one another distance, hunting, and home, don't lovers always cross eachothers boundaries?"
33. ”How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws *one* voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.”
34. ”How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”
35. "...human relationships, which are an extract of life, are the most changeable of all, rising and falling, from minute to minute, and lovers are those whose relationships and contact no one moment resembles another."
36. ”I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voice
surging forth with all my earthly feelings?
They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wings
and whitely fly in circles round your face.
My soul, dressed in silence, rises up
and stands alone before you: can't you see?
don't you know that my prayer is growing ripe
upon your vision as upon a tree?
If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.
But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
and I grow strong with all magnificence
and turn myself into a star's vast silence
above the strange and distant city, Time.”
37. "I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish. I have an inner self of which I was ignorant. Everything goes thither now, what happens there I do not know."
38. “I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more, is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered. We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside. The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary. It is necessary and toward this our development will move gradually that nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us. We have already had to think so many of our concepts of motion, we will also gradually learn to realize that that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them. Only because so many have not absorbed their destinies and transmuted them within themselves while they were living in them, have they not recognized what has gone forth out of them; it was so strange to them that, in their bewildered fright, they thought it must only just then have entered into them, for they swear never before to have found anything like it in themselves. As people were long mistaken about the motion of the sun, so they are even yet mistaken about the motion of that which is to come. The future stands firm . . . but we move in infinite space. How should it not be difficult for us? ”
39. "I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth."
40. "Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious
of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition. Alas, the artist who waits in ambush there, watching, detaining them, will find them transformed like the beautiful gold in the fairy tale hich cannot remain gold because some small detail was not taken care of."
41. "I feel it now: there's a power in me to grasp and give shape to my world I
know that nothing has ever been real without my beholding it. All becoming
has need me…”
42. "I feel that to work is to live without dying. I am full of gratitude and joy. For since my earliest youth I have wanted nothing but that."
43. "If I were to tell you where my greatest feeling, my universal feeling, the bliss of my earthly existence has been, I would have to confess: It has always, here and there, been in this kind of in-seeing, in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this divine seeing into the heart of things."
44. “If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.”
45. "If only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful."
46. ”If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.”
47. "I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation."
48. "...in life there is an immanent justice that fulfills itself slowly but without fail."
49. “In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious power.
And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.”
50. "I wanted to say two further things to you today: irony: Do not let yourself be governed by it, especially not in unproductive moments. In productive ones try to make use of it as one more means of seizing life."
51. "Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names,
so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their
connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all
directions, and find no place where they can settle."
52. "...let happy memories sustain you if your strength fails you, they are always there, and their current does not run backwards, even across foggy country it floats toward the future."
53. "Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always."
54. "Life is very singularly made to suprise us (where it does not utterly appall us)."
55. "Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure were more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work."
56. “Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.”
57. "Look, we don't love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms."
58. "Love and death are the two great gifts that we pass on, and we usually pass them on unopened"
59. "Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other."
60. "Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate-?); it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself in another's sake."
61. "Love is something difficult and it is more difficult than other things because in other conflicts nature herself enjoins men to collect themselves, to take themselves firmly in the hand with all their strength, while in the heightening of love the impulse is to give oneself wholly away."
62. "May I be granted that, in your hands, the habit of looking on love as a thing to accomplish will leave, like an old pain- and that, slowly raising my eyes to look at you, I would no longer know where it had hurt- or where it had been."
63. “Not into a beyond whose shadow darkens the earth, but into a whole, into the whole.”
64. "Oh purity: Is it still possible? Is it possible still to be pure again? Is there a spring that would not be polluted by washing away one's shamefulness? Can such stained water still show itself in nature, which knows waste and ordure, but no evil, nothing opposed to herself, for she encompasses even what is most alien within her."
65. “Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”
66. “Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.”
67. “O, the world's soul will never be united
with mine, till what appears outside me,
as though it always meant to be inside me,
delightedly alights in me.”
68. "Painting is something that takes place among the colors, and one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity."
69. ”Perhaps it's no more than the fire's reflection / on some piece of gleaming furniture / that the child remembers so much later / like a revelation.”
70. "Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as a distraction instead of rallying toward exalted moments."
71. “Put out my eyes, and I can see you still,
Slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;
And without any feet can go to you;
And tongueless, I can conjure you at will.
Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you
And grasp you with my heart as with a hand;
Arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;
And if you set this brain of mine afire,
Then on my blood-stream I yet will carry you.”
72. "Self-transformation is precisely what life is..."
73. "Sex is difficult; yes. But they are difficult things with which we have been charged; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious. If you only recognize this and manage, out of yourself, out of your own nature and ways, out of your own experience and childhood and strength to achieve relation to sex wholly your own (not influenced by convention and custom), then you need no longer be afraid of losing yourself and becoming unworthy of your best possession."
74. ”She looked at him intensely, her eyes bigger and more radiant than ever before. He saw himself in them, in a strange way, and proudly back up, as if in front of a mirror.”
75. "Somehow I too must find a way of making things ; not plastic, written things, but realities that arise from the craft itself. Somehow I too must discover the smallest constituent element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of expressing everything."
76. "So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must become something!"
77. "Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems."
78. "Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity."
79. “[The artist is like] a dancer whose movements are broken by the constraint of his cell. That which finds no expression in his steps and limited swing of his arms, comes in exhaustion from his lips, or else he has to scratch the unlived lines of his body into the walls with his wounded fingers.“
80. ”The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
in the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.”
81. "The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them."
82. "The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings."
83. “The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there's a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.
I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.”
“The necessary thing is great, inner solitude. / What goes on inwardly is worthy of your love.”
84. "The only journey is the one within."
85. “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
86. "There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force it's sap and stands confident in the storms of Spring without the fear that after them may come no Summer. It does come. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful."
87. ”There is no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient.”
88. “The terrible untruthfulness and uncertainty of our age has its roots in the refusal to acknowledge the happiness of sex, in this peculiarly mistaken guilt, which constantly increases, separating us from the rest of nature, even from the child, although his, the child's, innocence does not consist at all in the fact that he does not know sex, so to say, but that incomprehensible happiness, which awakens for us at one place deep within the pulp of a close embrace, is still present anonymously in every part of his body. In order to describe the peculiar situation of our sensual appetite we should have to say: Once we were children in every part, now we are that in one part only.”
89. "These are the days of turning toward the innerself, of increasingly taking possession of oneself, which, under apparent repose, goes on in the most intimate workings of the heart."
90. "The woman who loves always transcends the man she loves, because life is greater than fate. Her devotion wants to be immeasurable; that is her happiness."
91. “They (mankind) fall over themselves in their eagerness to make this world, which we should trust and delight in, evil and worthless and so they deliver the earth more and more into the hands of those who are prepared to wring at least a quick profit out of it. . . . The increasing exploitation of life today, is it not due to a continuous disparagement of this world, begun centuries ago? What madness to divert our thoughts to a beyond, when we are surrounded here by tasks and expectations and futures! What a swindle to steal pictures of earthly bliss in order to sell them to heaven behind our backs! Oh, it is high time that the impoverished earth got back all those loans from its happiness with which men have endowed the hereafter. . . . And, there being no such thing as a vacuum, is not the place of everything removed from here taken by a counterfeit is that why our cities are so full of ugly artificial light and noise, because we have surrendered the true brightness and song to a Jerusalem which we hope to move into presently? “
92. "To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure."
93. “...to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open windows and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return.”
94. "To speak of love is to speak of hardness."
95. "Turn therefore from the common themes to those which your everyday life affords; depict your sorrows and desires, your passing thoughts and belief in some kind of beauty -depict all that with heartfelt, quiet, humble sincerity and use to express yourself the things that surround you."
96. “We are the driving ones.
Ah, but the step of time:
think of it as a dream
in what forever remains.
All that is hurrying
soon will be over with;
only what lasts can bring
us to the truth.
Young men, don't put your trust
into the trials of flight,
into the hot and quick.
All things already rest:
darkness and morning light,
flower and book.”
97. "We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God. But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."
98. "Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divination, perhaps we would then endure our sorrows with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent."
99. ”We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.”
100. “When he sat, waiting abroad; the inn's
diffuse, averted room
morosely around him, and in the avoided mirror
again the room
and later from his tormenting bed
again:
debate was held in the air,
debate impalpable
upon his sensible heart, through the painfully shattered body,
his nonetheless sensible heart,
debate and the judgment:
that it did not have love
(and forbade him further ordainment).”
101. "When one speaks of solitaries, one always takes too much for granted, one supposes that people know what one is talking about. No, they do not. They have never seen a solitary, they have simply hated him without knowing him."
102. ”Where is the outwardness
to what lies here, within?
Whose wound was ever dressed,
bandaged in such fine linen?
Reflected here, what skies
lie open and at ease
as in a lake within
these open roses
in which all softly rests
as if no accidental hand
could shake or make it spill?
Unable to contain
the riches that are theirs
they pour out the excess
sharing their inwardness
to enrich the days; until
the whole of summer seems
one great room, a room within a dream.”
103. “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
Which we are just able to endure,
And we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.”
104. “Why are we not set in the midst of what is most mysteriously ours? How we have to creep round about it and get into it in the end; like burglars and thieves we get into our own beautiful sex, in which we lose our way and knock ourselves and stumble and finally rush out of it again, like men caught transgressing, into the twilight of Christianity. Why, if guilt or sin had to be invented because of the inner tension of the spirit, why did they not attach it to some other part of our body, why did it fall on that part, waiting till it dissolved in our pure source and poisoned and muddied it? Why have they made our sex homeless, instead of making it the place for the festival of our competency . . . ?”
105. “You, you only, exist.
We pass away, till at last,
our passing is so immense
that you arise: beautiful moment,
in all your suddenness,
arising in love, or enchanted
in the contraction of work.
To you I belong, however time may
wear me away. From you to you
I go commanded. In between
the garland is hanging in chance; but if you
take it up and up and up: look:
all becomes festival!”
106. "You must give birth to your images. They are the future waiting to be born... Fear not the strangeness you feel. The future must enter you long before it happens...just wait for the birth, for the hour of new clarity.”
107. You, you only, exist. / *We* pass away, till at last, / our passing is so immense / that you arise: beautiful moment, / in all your suddenness, / arising in love, or enchanted / in the contraction of work. // To you I belong, however time may / wear me away. From you to you I go commanded. In between / the garland is hanging in chance; but if you / take it up and up and up: look: / all becomes festival!
Someday
Someday I'll find you,
Moonlight behind you,
True to the dream I am dreaming.
Noel Coward (1899-1973)
_Someday I'll Find You_ [1930] (song)
Moonlight behind you,
True to the dream I am dreaming.
Noel Coward (1899-1973)
_Someday I'll Find You_ [1930] (song)
Intimacy
It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy--it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.
Jane Austen (1775-1817)
_Sense And Sensibility_ [1811], Chapter 12
Jane Austen (1775-1817)
_Sense And Sensibility_ [1811], Chapter 12
Two of me
"Ah! If only there were two of me," she thought, "one who spoke and one who listened; one who lived and the other who watched, how I would love myself! I'd envy no one."
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
_All Men Are Mortal_ [1955], Chapter 1
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
_All Men Are Mortal_ [1955], Chapter 1
Taken for granted
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)
_A Severed Head_ [1961], Chapter 28
Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)
_A Severed Head_ [1961], Chapter 28
Pain and delight
To an envious man, nothing is more delightful than another's misfortune, and nothing more painful than another's success.
Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677)
_Ethics_ [1677], "Man's Loves And Hates"
Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677)
_Ethics_ [1677], "Man's Loves And Hates"
Sayings of the past
The superior man acquaints himself with many sayings of antiquity and many deeds of the past, in order to strengthen his character thereby.
I Ching
I Ching
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
To be nobody-but-myself
Salzburg, Austria - 2007To be nobody-but-myself--in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else--means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
(In a letter to a high school editor, 1955.
Quoted in Charles Norman's _The Magic-Maker_ [1958])
e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
(In a letter to a high school editor, 1955.
Quoted in Charles Norman's _The Magic-Maker_ [1958])
Radii
We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision.
C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis
The difference
The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
Simone Weil
"Human Personality"
Simone Weil
"Human Personality"
Into the woods
In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.
John Fowles
John Fowles
Who wants to live forever?
Still seems it strange, that thou shouldst live forever?
Is it less strange, that thou shouldst live at all?
This is a miracle; and that no more.
Edward Young
Is it less strange, that thou shouldst live at all?
This is a miracle; and that no more.
Edward Young
Your ideal scene
"The simple step of writing down your ideal scene can lead you to discover the unfailing natural laws of manifestation."
Marc Allen
Marc Allen
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Born posthumously
My time has not yet come . . . some are born posthumously.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
_Ecce Homo_ [1888]
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
_Ecce Homo_ [1888]
A god within
There is a god within us, and we have intercourse with heaven. That spirit comes from abodes on high.
Ovid
Ovid
Happiness
Happiness is the test of all rules of conduct and the end of life. But... this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy, I thought, who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.
John Stuart Mill, in 'Autobiography'
John Stuart Mill, in 'Autobiography'
Part of a whole
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
Pathetically scanty
How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
The right to think
Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.
Hypatia of Alexandria
Hypatia of Alexandria
Natural science
Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.
Werner Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
Faeries
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
William Butler Yeats 1865-1939, "The Land of Heart's Desire," (1894)
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
William Butler Yeats 1865-1939, "The Land of Heart's Desire," (1894)
Friday, December 14, 2007
Music makers
Salzburg, Austria - 2007Ode
Arthur O'Shaughnessy
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.
Hateful
Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.
Homer
Homer
Not our own
We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.
Hildegard von Bingen
Hildegard von Bingen
Terrestrial matters
To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking
Fantasy
Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.
Goya
Goya
Every day
Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.
Goethe
Goethe
Heroes and authors
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author"
Chesterton, Gilbert
Chesterton, Gilbert
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Joseph Campbell
Salzburg, Austria - 2007
1. "A myth is as good as a smile."
2. “A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.”
3. “Eternity has nothing to do with the hereafter... This is it... If you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here's the place to have the experience.”
4. “Follow your bliss.”
5. “For not all of us are philosophers. Many require an atmosphere of incense, music, vestments and processions, gongs, bells, dramatic mimes and cries, to be carried away beyond themselves.”
6. “For the marvel of the Asian golden age was that everywhere reality, fierce and difficult though it was for all (as the records of history show), was translated, not only in fable but also in belief and experience, into wonder - which, of course, as our own physicists now show, is exactly what reality is. The chief lost art of antiquity might be said, therefore, to have been the art of living in realization of the sheer wonder of the world: passing readily back and forth between the plane of experience of its hard crust and the omnipresent depth of inexhaustible wonder within.”
7. “If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.”
8. “If you realize what the real problem is - losing yourself - you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial.”
9. “I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
10. “Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?”
11. “I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, (just) for the money - has turned himself into a slave.”
12. “Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.”
13. “Myth is the public dream, and dream is the private myth.”
14. “Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.”
15. “No one of adult mind today would turn to the Book of Genesis to learn of the origins of the earth, the plants, the beasts, and man. There was no flood, no tower of Babel, no first couple in paradise, and between the first known appearance of men on earth and the first building of cities, not one generation (Adam to Cain) but a good two million must have come into this world and passed along. Today we turn to science for our imagery of the past and of the structure of the world, and what the spinning demons of the atom and the galaxies of the telescope’s eye reveal is a wonder that makes the babel of the Bible seem a toyland dream of the dear childhood of our brain.”
16. “One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.”
17. “Our demons are out own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit...each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest.”
18. ”People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances without own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
19. "Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people's myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts - but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. Myth tells you what the experience is."
20. “Thales, we have seen, believed that “water” was the ultimate ground (…) of all perceptible things; Anaximander, the “unlimited”; Anaximenes, “air”; the Pythagoreans, “number”; and we have now entered a world of thought, a century or so later, where love – of and as beauty – has become the (…) prime substance of things.”
21. “The best things cannot be told, the second best are misunderstood. After that comes civilized conversation; after that, mass indoctrination; after that, intercultural interchange.”
22. “The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark “forest ahead of you.”
23. “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
24. "This first stage of the mythological journey--which we have designated the "call to adventure" --signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown."
25. “The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.”
26. “The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as 'the wasteland.' The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer. It's the world of people living inauthentic lives - doing what they are supposed to do.”
27. “Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historical, macrocosmic triumph. Whereas the former—the youngest or despised child who becomes the master of extraordinary powers—prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter brings back from his adventure the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole.”
28. "We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come."
29. “We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.”
30. "What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else."
31. "What did you do as a child
that created timelessness
that made you forget time?
There lies the myth to live by."
32. “What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not made from man's imagination?”
33. "What you have to do, you do with play."
34. “When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”
35. “When you follow your bliss... doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors; and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else.”
36. “When you see the Earth from space, you don't see any divisions of nation-states there. This may be the symbol of the new mythology to come; this is the country we will celebrate, and these are the people we are one with.”
37. “When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”
38. “… where the old patterns of morality are retained they no longer match the actualities even of the local, let alone the world, scene. The adventure of the Grail - the quest within for those creative values by which the Waste Land is redeemed - has become today for each the unavoidable task; for, as there is no more fixed horizon, as there is no more fixed center, any Mecca, Rome, or Jerusalem. Our circle today is that announced, c. 1450, by Nicolaus Cusanus (1401-1464): whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere; the circle of infinite radius, which is also a straight line.”
39. “Whether small or great, and no matter what the stage or grade of life, the Call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration- a rite, or moment, of spiritual passage, which, when complete,amounts to a dying and a birth. The familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer.”
40. “You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning... a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.”
41. “You've got to find the force within you.”
Campbell´s ten steps for reading myths
(from http://freenet.msp.mn.us/org/mythos/mythos.www/TENCOM.HTML):
1. Read myths with the eyes of wonder:
the myths transparent to their universal meaning,
their meaning transparent to its mysterious source.
2. Read myths in the present tense: Eternity is now.
3. Read myths in the first person plural: the Gods and Goddesses
of ancient mythology still live within you.
4. Any myth worth its salt exerts a powerful magnetism. Notice
the images and stories that you are drawn to and repelled by.
Investigate the field of associated images and stories.
5. Look for patterns; don't get lost in the details. What is
needed is not more specialized scholarship, but more
interdisciplinary vision. Make connections; break old patterns of parochial thought.
6. Resacralize the secular: even a dollar bill reveals the imprint of Eternity.
7. If God is everywhere, then myths can be generated anywhere,
anytime, by anything. Don't let your Romantic aversion to
science blind you to the Buddha in the computer chip.
8. Know your tribe! Myths never arise in a vacuum; they are the
connective tissue of the social body which enjoys synergistic
relations with dreams (private myths) and rituals (the enactment of myth).
9. Expand your horizons! Any mythology worth remembering
will be global in scope. The earth is our home
and humankind is our family.
10. Read between the lines! Literalism kills;
Imagination quickens.
To read a writer
"To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company"
Gide, André
Gide, André
The wonder is that colour came from the colourless
The wonder is that colour came from the colourless:
how is it that colour came to fight the colourless?
Since the rose is born from the thorn, and the thorn
from the rose, why are they quarellling?
Or is it not really war but divine purpose and artifice,
like the quarrels of merchants?
Or is it neither this nor that? Is it the perplexity?
The treasure must be sought;
this perplexity is the ruin where it is hidden.
Rumi
how is it that colour came to fight the colourless?
Since the rose is born from the thorn, and the thorn
from the rose, why are they quarellling?
Or is it not really war but divine purpose and artifice,
like the quarrels of merchants?
Or is it neither this nor that? Is it the perplexity?
The treasure must be sought;
this perplexity is the ruin where it is hidden.
Rumi
An announcement
"Let us first make an announcement to the gods, saying that we are not going to investigate about them, for we do not claim to be able to do that."
[Socrates, 469-399 BC. Plato, Cratylus 401a]
[Socrates, 469-399 BC. Plato, Cratylus 401a]
A dream within a dream
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow --
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand --
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep -- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?.
Edgar Allan Poe
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow --
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand --
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep -- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?.
Edgar Allan Poe
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Anatole France
Salzburg, Austria - 20071. ”A good critic is one who narrates the adventures of his mind among masterpieces.”
2. “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!”
3. “An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.”
4. “A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.”
5. “Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when He does not wish to sign his work.”
6. ”Christianity has done a great deal for love by making a sin of it.”
7. ”Education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.”]
8. “He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and this pretension itself is a very great prejudice.”
9. "History books that contain no lies are extremely dull."
10. ”I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being.”
11. "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
12. “I freely acknowledge that it is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.”
13. “If the path is beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.”]“In art as in love, instinct is enough.”
14. ”Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.”
15. “Intelligent women always marry fools.”
16. ”I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.”
17. “It is almost systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no difference between right and wrong."
18. “It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.”
19. “It is in the ability to deceive oneself that one shows the greatest talent.
20. “It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be.”
21. “It is his reasonable conversation which mostly frightens us in a madman.”
22. “Justice is the means by which established injustices are sanctioned.”
23. "Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness."
24. “Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe.”
25. ”Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labour by taking up another.”
26. “Never lend books, for no one ever returns them. The only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me.”
27. "Nine tenths of education is encouragement."
28. ”Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.”
29. "Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal."
30. "One must never lose time in vainly regretting the past or in complaining against the changes which cause us discomfort, for change is the essence of life."
31. “One thing above all gives charm to men's thoughts, and this is unrest. A mind that is not uneasy irritates and bores me.”
32. ”Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.”
33. "The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you cannot understand them."
34. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
35. ”The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.”
36. “Those who have given themselves the most concern about the happiness of peoples have made their neighbors very miserable.”
37. "To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe."
38. ”To die for an idea is to set a rather high price upon conjecture.”
39. "To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all."
40. ”We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.”
41. "We reproach people for talking about themselves; but it is the subject they treat best."
42. “When a thing has been said, and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.”
43. "Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom."
44. ”Without the Utopias of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first city . . . Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.”
(All quotations by Anatole France)
2. “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!”
3. “An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.”
4. “A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.”
5. “Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when He does not wish to sign his work.”
6. ”Christianity has done a great deal for love by making a sin of it.”
7. ”Education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.”]
8. “He flattered himself on being a man without any prejudices; and this pretension itself is a very great prejudice.”
9. "History books that contain no lies are extremely dull."
10. ”I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being.”
11. "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
12. “I freely acknowledge that it is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.”
13. “If the path is beautiful, let us not ask where it leads.”]“In art as in love, instinct is enough.”
14. ”Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.”
15. “Intelligent women always marry fools.”
16. ”I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.”
17. “It is almost systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no difference between right and wrong."
18. “It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.”
19. “It is in the ability to deceive oneself that one shows the greatest talent.
20. “It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be.”
21. “It is his reasonable conversation which mostly frightens us in a madman.”
22. “Justice is the means by which established injustices are sanctioned.”
23. "Lovers who love truly do not write down their happiness."
24. “Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe.”
25. ”Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labour by taking up another.”
26. “Never lend books, for no one ever returns them. The only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me.”
27. "Nine tenths of education is encouragement."
28. ”Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.”
29. "Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal."
30. "One must never lose time in vainly regretting the past or in complaining against the changes which cause us discomfort, for change is the essence of life."
31. “One thing above all gives charm to men's thoughts, and this is unrest. A mind that is not uneasy irritates and bores me.”
32. ”Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.”
33. "The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you cannot understand them."
34. “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
35. ”The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.”
36. “Those who have given themselves the most concern about the happiness of peoples have made their neighbors very miserable.”
37. "To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe."
38. ”To die for an idea is to set a rather high price upon conjecture.”
39. "To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all."
40. ”We do not know what to do with this short life, yet we want another which will be eternal.”
41. "We reproach people for talking about themselves; but it is the subject they treat best."
42. “When a thing has been said, and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.”
43. "Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom."
44. ”Without the Utopias of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first city . . . Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.”
(All quotations by Anatole France)
The slightest thought has consequences
Until the nexus between thoughts is severed, everything we think, say, or does leaves a residue of conditioning in the mind. The slightest thought has consequences, as does the slightest act. Over the years it is the sum of al these consequences, large and small, that shapes our lives.
Eknath Easwaran
Eknath Easwaran
Finest lives
The finest lives, in my opinion, are those who rank in the common model, and with the human race, but without miracle, without extravagance.
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
Little things
Oh, it's just the little homely things, The unobtrusive friendly things, The "won't you let me help you" things That make our pathway light; And it's just the jolly joking things, The "never mind the trouble" things, The "laugh with me, it's funny" things, That make the world seem bright. For all the countless famous things, The wondrous record breaking things, Those never-can-be-equalled things That all the papers cite, Are not like little human things The"just because I like you" things That make us happy quite. So here's to all the little things, The "done and then forgotten" things, Those "Oh, it's simply nothing" things, That make life "worth the fight."
Grace Haines
Grace Haines
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
D.H. Lawrence
Salzburg, Austria - 20071. “After all, the world is not a stage -- not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be. Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it -- if he wants a safe seat in the audience -- let him read someone else.”
2. “All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.”
3. "Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen, always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people's motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology."
4. “A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.”
5. “And if tonight my soul may find her peacein sleep, and sink in good oblivion,and in the morning wake like a new-opened flowerthen I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.”
6. “And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything as you like it, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose, and it's always daisy-time.”
7. »A real individual has a spark of danger in him, a menace to society. Quench this spark and you quench the individuality, you obtain a social unit, not an integral man. All modern progress has tended, and still tends, to the production of quenched social units: dangerless beings, ideal creatures!«
8. »Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth.«
9. »A thing that you sincerely believe in cannot be wrong, because belief does not come at will. It comes only from the Holy Ghost within. Therefore a thing you truly believe in, cannot be wrong.«
10. »Bah! Enough of the squalor of democratic humanity. It is time to begin to recognise the aristocracy of the sun. The children of the sun shall be lords on the earth.«
11. ”Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts.”
12. “Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.”
13. “Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning was not a Word, but a chirrup.”
14. “But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.”
15. »But where is the point to life? Where is the point to love? Where, if it comes to the point, is the point to a bunch of violets? There is no point. Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.«
16. »Civilisations rise in waves, and pass away in waves. And not till science, or art, tries to catch the ultimate meaning of the symbols that float on the last waves of the prehistoric period; that is, the period before our own; shall we be able to get ourselves into right relation with man as man is and has been and will always be. In the days before Homer, men in Europe were not mere brutes and savages and prognathous monsters: neither were they simple-minded children. Men are always men, and though intelligence takes different forms, men are always intelligent: they are not empty brutes, or dumb-bells en masse.«
17. “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.”
18. »Damn all absolutes. Oh damn, damn, damn all absolutes!«
19. ”Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.”
20. "Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes."
21. ”Even the rainbow has a bodymade of the drizzling rainand is an architecture of glistening atomsbuilt up, built upyet you can't lay your hand on it,nay, nor even your mind.”
22. “Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.”
23. »Every goal is a grave, when you get there.«
24. “Everyman has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.”
25. ”Every race which has become self-conscious and idea-bound in the past has perished.”
26. »Every Religion, every philosophy, and science itself, each has a clue to the cosmos, to the becoming aware of the cosmos. Each clue leads to its own goal of consciousness, then is exhausted. So religions exhaust themselves, so science exhausts itself, once the human consciousness reaches its own limit. The infinite of the human consciousness lies in an infinite number of different starts to an infinite number of different goals; which somehow, we know when we get there, is one goal. But the new start is from a point in the hitherto unknown.«
27. »Evil, what is evil? There is only one evil, to deny life.«
28. »For God's sake, let us be men not monkeys minding machines or sitting with our tails curled while the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.«
29. “For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.”
30. "God is only a great imaginative experience."
31. "How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression."
32. »However smart we be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or spiritual or impeccable, it doesn't help us at all. The real power comes in to us from the beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless, and from below, where we do not understand. And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and honour and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue empty. We may have length of days. But an empty tin can lasts longer than Alexander lived.«
33. "I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of shameful."
34. »I am convinced that the majority of people today have good, generous feelings which they can never know, never experience, because of some fear, some repression. I do not believe that people would be villains, thieves, murderers and sexual criminals if they were freed from legal restraint. On the contrary, I think the vast majority would be much more generous, good-hearted and decent if they felt they dared be. I am convinced that people want to be more decent, more good-hearted than our social system of money and grab allows them to be. The awful fight for money, into which we are all forced, hurts our good nature more than we can bear. I am sure this is true of a vast number of people.«
35. “I am here myself; as though this heave of effortAt starting other life, fulfilled my own:Rose-leaves that whirl in colour round a coreOf seed-specks kindled lately and softly blown By all the blood of the rose-bush into being--Strange, that the urgent will in me, to setMy mouth on hers in kisses, and so softlyTo bring together two strange sparks, beget Another life from our lives, so should sendThe innermost fire of my own dim soul out-spinningAnd whirling in blossom of flame and being upon me!That my completion of manhood should be the beginning Another life from mine! For so it looks.The seed is purpose, blossom accident.The seed is all in all, the blossom lentTo crown the triumph of this new descent. Is that it, woman? Does it strike you so?The Great Breath blowing a tiny seed of fireFans out your petals for excess of flame,Till all your being smokes with fine desire? Or are we kindled, you and I, to beOne rose of wonderment upon the treeOf perfect life, and is our possible seedBut the residuum of the ecstasy? How will you have it?--the rose is all in all,Or the ripe rose-fruits of the luscious fall?The sharp begetting, or the child begot?Our consummation matters, or does it not? To me it seems the seed is just left overFrom the red rose-flowers' fiery transience;Just orts and slarts; berries that smoulder in the bushWhich burnt just now with marvellous immanence. Blossom, my darling, blossom, be a roseOf roses unchidden and purposeless; a roseFor rosiness only, without an ulterior motive;For me it is more than enough if the flower unclose.”
36. »I am in love - and, my God, it's the greatest thing that can happen to a man. I tell you, find a woman you can fall in love with. Do it. Let yourself fall in love, if you haven't done so already. You are wasting your life.«
37. “I believe a man is born first unto himself--for the happy developing of himself, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering manhood; then they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ceasing murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers.”
38. “I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.”
39. »I believe in the living extending consciousness of man. I believe the consciousness of man has now to embrace the emotions and passions of sex, and the deep effects of human physical contact. This is the glimmering edge of our awareness and our field of understanding, in the endless business of knowing ourselves.«
40. “I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.”
41. "I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies -- thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us."
42. ”I cannot get any sense of an enemy - only of a disaster.”
43. “I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.”
44. “I can't do with mountains at close quarters -- they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.”
45. “If a woman hasn't got a tiny streak of a harlot in her, she's a dry stick as a rule.”
46. "I don't like your miserable lonely single ''front name.'' It is so limited, so meager; it has no versatility; it is weighted down with the sense of responsibility; it is worn threadbare with much use; it is as bad as having only one jacket and one hat; it is like having only one relation, one blood relation, in the world. Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind."
47. »I feel I cannot touch humanity, even in thought, it is abhorrent to me. But a work of art is an act of faith, as Michael Angelo says, and one goes on writing, to the unseen witnesses.«
48. »I feel quite anti-social, against this social whole as it exists. I wish one could be a pirate or a highwayman in these days. But my way of shooting them with noiseless bullets that explode in their souls, these social people of today, perhaps is more satisfying. But I feel like an outlaw. All my work is a shot at their vey innermost strength, these banded people of today. Let them cease to be. Let them make way for another, fewer, stronger, less cowardly people.«
49. »If I take my whole, passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work.«
50. “If only we could have two lives: the first in which to make one's mistakes, which seem as if they have to be made; and the second in which to profit by them.”
51. “I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor.”
52. “I like to write when I feel spiteful; it's like having a good sneeze.”
53. "I'm not sure if a mental relation with a woman doesn't make it impossible to love her. To know the mind of a woman is to end in hating her. Love means the pre-cognitive flow. it is the honest state before the apple."
54. “In every living thing there is the desire for love.”
55. “In the ancient recipe, the three antidotes for dullness or boredom are sleep, drink, and travel. It is rather feeble. From sleep you wake up, from drink you become sober, and from travel you come home again. And then where are you? No, the two sovereign remedies for dullness are love or a crusade.”
56. ”In the end, for congenial sympathy, for poetry, for work, for original feeling and expression, for perfect companionship with one's friends - give me the country.”
57. “I shall always be a priest of love.”
58. ”I think more of a bird with broad wings flying and lapsing through the air, than anything, when I think of metre.”
59. “It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.”
60. "It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence."
61. ”It's all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.”
62. ”It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them.”
63. “It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.
64. "I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality. Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us."
65. “I want to live my life so that my nights are not full of regrets.”
66. »Law is a very, very clumsy and mechanical instrument, and we people are very, very delicate and subtle beings.«
67. »Let us hesitate no longer to announce that the sensual passions and mysteries are equally sacred with the spiritual mysteries and passions. Who would deny it any more? The only thing unbearable is the degradation, the prostitution of the living mysteries in us. Let man only approach his own self with a deep respect, even reverence for all that the creative soul, the God-mystery within us, puts forth. Then we shall be sound and free. Lewdness is hateful because it impairs our integrity and our proud being. The creative, spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us. These promptings are our true fate, which it is our business to fulfil. A fate dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstances, is a false fate. ... Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad.«
68. “Let us prepare now for the death of our present "little" life, and the re-emergence in a bigger life, in touch with the moving cosmos. It is a question, practically, of relationship. We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual, and the re-awakening. We must once more practice the ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of the kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath, and the last. This is an affair of the individual and the household, a ritual of day. The ritual of the moon in her phases, of the morning star and the evening star is for men and women separate. Then the ritual of the seasons, with the Drama and the Passion of the soul embodied in procession and dance, this is for the community, an act of men and women, a whole community, in togetherness. And the ritual of the great events in the year of stars is for nations and whole peoples. To these rituals we must return: or we must evolve them to suit our needs. For the truth is, we are perishing for lack of fulfilment of our greater needs, we are cut off from the great sources of our inward nourishment and renewal, sources which flow eternally in the universe. Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe. It means a return to ancient forms. But we shall have to create these forms again, and it is more difficult than the preaching of an evangel. The Gospel came to tell us we were all saved. We look at the world today and realise that humanity, alas, instead of being saved from sin, whatever that may be, is almost completely lost, lost to life, and near to nullity and extermination.”
69. »Liberty is all very well, but men cannot live without masters. There is always a master. And men either live in glad obedience to the master they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine.«
70. "Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless."
71. »Life is only bearable when the mind and the body are in harmony, and there is a natural balance between the two, and each has a natural respect for the other.«
72. “Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.”
73. »Life is so wonderful and complex, and always relative. A man's soul is a perpetual call and answer. He can never be the call and the answer in one. This is truth, for ever: the relation between the call and the answer: between the dark God and the incarnate man: between the dark soul of woman, and the opposite dark soul of man: and finally, between the souls of man and man, strangers to one another, but answerers. So it is forever, the eternal weaving of calls and answers, and the fabric of life woven and perishing again. But the calls never cease, and the answers never fail for long. And when the fabric becomes grey and machine-made, some strange clarion-call makes men start to smash it up. So it is.«
74. "Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon."
75. »Man creates a god in his own image, and the god grows old along with the men that made him. But storms sway in heaven, and the god-stuff sweeps high and angry over our heads. Gods die with men who have conceived them. But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard. Like the sea in storm, that beats against the rocks of living, stiffened men, slowly to destroy them. Or like the sea of the glimmering, ethereal plasm of the world, that bathes the feet and the knees of men as earth-sap bathes the roots of trees. - Ye must be born again. Even the gods must be born again. We must be born again.«
76. »Man is a thought-adventurer. Man is a great venture in consciousness. Where the venture started, and where it will end, nobody knows.«
77. »Man must destroy as he goes, as trees fall for trees to rise. The accumulation of life and things means rottenness. Life must destroy life, in the unfolding of creation. We save up life at the expence of the unfolding, till all is full of rottenness. Then at last, we make a break. What's to be done? Generally speaking, nothing. The dead will have to bury their dead, while the earth stinks of corpses. The individual can but depart from the mass, and try to cleanse himself. Try to hold fast to the living thing, which destroys as it goes, but remains sweet. And in his soul fight, fight, fight to preserve that which is life in him from the ghastly kisses and poison-bites of the myriad evil ones. Retreat to the desert, and fight. But in his soul adhere to that which is life itself, creatively destroying as it goes: destroying the stiff old thing to let the new bud come through. The one passionate principle of creative being, which recognises the natural good, and has a sword for the swarms of evil. Fights, fights, fights to protect itself. But with itself, is strong and at peace.«
78. ”Man's ultimate love for man? Yes, yes, but only in the separate darkness of man's love for the present, unknowable God.”
79. »Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealised purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was.«
80. »Men live and see according to some gradually developing and gradually withering vision. This vision exists also as a dynamic idea or metaphysics - exists first as such. Then it is unfolded into life and art. Our vision, our belief, our metaphysic is wearing woefully thin, and the art is wearing absolutely threadbare. We have no future; neither for our hopes nor our aims nor our art. It has all gone grey and opaque. We've got to rip the old veil of a vision across, and find what the heart really believes in after all: and what the heart really wants, for the next future. And we've got to put it down in terms of belief and of knowledge. And then go forward again, to the fulfilment in life and art.«
81. ”Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil.”
82. “My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.”
83. »My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge. All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what not.«
84. “My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind -- intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.”
85. "Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description."
86. “Naught is possessible, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing: It is mine. Say only: It is with me.”
87. “Never have ideas about children -- and never have ideas for them.”
88. “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”
89. ”No absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb unless the lamb is inside.”
90. »No man is or can be purely individual. The mass of men have only the tiniest touch of individuality: if any. The mass of men live and move, think and feel collectively, and have practically no individual emotions, feelings or thoughts at all. They are fragments of the collective or social consciousness. It has always been so, and will always be so.«
91. ”Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me! / A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.”
92. »Now I absolutely flatly deny that I am a soul, or a body, or a mind, or an intelligence, or a brain, or a nervous system, or a bunch of glands, or any of the rest of these bits of me. The whole is greater than the part. And therefore I, who am man alive, am greater than my soul, or spirit, or body, or mind, or consciousness, or anything else that is merely a part of me. I am a man, and alive. I am man alive, and as long as I can, I intend to go on being man alive.«
93. »Now the great and fatal fruit of our civilisation, which is civilisation based on knowledge, and hostile to experience, is boredom. All our wonderful education and learning is producing a grand sum-total of boredom. Modern people are inwardly thoroughly bored. Do as they may, they are bored. They are bored because they experience nothing. And they experience nothing because the wonder has gone out of them. And when the wonder has gone out of a man he is dead. He is henceforth only an insect.«
94. ”Once I had a lover bright like running water, Once his face was laughing like the sky; Open like the sky looking down in all its laughter On the buttercups -- and buttercups was I.”
95. "One sheds one's sicknesses in books -- repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them."
96. "Oh literature, oh the glorious Art, how it preys upon the marrow in our bones. It scoops the stuffing out of us, and chucks us aside. Alas!"
97. »Oh what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhytm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table.«
98. “One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.”
99. ”One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, like any knight of the grail, and the journey is always towards the other soul, not away from it. . . . To love you have to learn to understand the other, more than she understands herself, and to submit to her understanding of you. It is damnably difficult and painful, but it is the only thing which endures.”
100. “One's action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be mere rushing on.”
101. “One sheds one's sicknesses in books--repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.”
102. “One watches them on the seashore, all the people, and there is something pathetic, almost wistful in them, as if they wished their lives did not add up to this scaly nullity of possession, but as if they could not escape. It is a dragon that has devoured us all: these obscene, scaly houses, this insatiable struggle and desire to possess, to possess always and in spite of everything, this need to be an owner, lest one be owned. It is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease. One feels a sort of madness come over one, as if the world had become hell. But it is only superimposed: it is only a temporary disease. It can be cleaned away.”
103. »Our epoch is over, a cycle of evolution is finished, our activity has lost its meaning, we are ghosts, we are seed; for our word is dead and we know not how to live wordless.«
104. “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
105. “Perhaps only those people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the world.”
106. »Perhaps the greatest difference between us and the pagans lies in our different relation to the cosmos. With us, all is personal. Landscape and the sky, these are to us the delicious background of our personal life, and no more. Even the universe of the scientist is little more than an extension of our personality, to us. To the pagan, landscape and personal background were on the whole indifferent. But the cosmos was a very real thing. A man lived with cosmos, and knew it greater than himself. Don't let us imagine we see the sun as the old civilisations saw it. All we see is a scientific little luminary, dwindled to a ball of blazing gas. ... We may see what we call the sun, but we have lost Helios forever, and the great orb of the Chaldeans still more. We have lost the cosmos, by coming out of responsive connection with it, and this is our chief tragedy. What is our petty little love of nature – Nature!! – compared to the ancient magnificent living with cosmos, and being honoured by the cosmos!«
107. ”Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.”
108. »Realism is just one of the arbitrary views man takes of man. It sees us all as little ant-like creatures toiling against the odds of circumstance, and doomed to misery. It is a kind of aeroplane view. It became the popular outlook, and so today we actually are, millions of us, little ant-like creatures toiling against the odds of circumstance, and doomed to misery; until we take a different view of ourselves. For man always becomes what he passionately thinks he is; since he is capable of becoming almost anything.«
109. “Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.”
110. »Resolution: Resolve to abide by your own deepest promptings, and to sacrifice the smaller thing to the greater. Kill when you must, and be killed the same: the must coming from the gods inside you, or from the men in whom you recognise the Holy Ghost.«
111. "Science has a mysterious hatred of beauty, because it doesn't fit in the cause-and-effect chain. And society has a mysterious hatred of sex, because it perpetually interferes with the nice money-making schemes of social man. So the two hatreds made a combine, and sex and beauty are mere propagation appetite. / Now sex and beauty are one thin, like flame and fire. If you hate sex you hate beauty. If you love living beauty, you have a reverence for sex. Of course you can love old, dead beauty and hate sex. But to love living beauty you must have a reverence for sex."
112. ”Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.”
113. “Sex and beauty are inseparable, like life and consciousness. And the intelligence which goes with sex and beauty, and arises out of sex and beauty, is intuition.”
114. "Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the center of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling."
115. »Shall I expect the lion to lie down with the lamb? Shall I expect such a thing? I might as well hope for the earth to cast no shadow, or for burning fire to give no heat. It is no good, these are mere words. When the lion lies down with the lamb he is no lion, and the lamb, lying down with him, is no lamb. They are merely a neutralisation, a nothingness. If I mix fire and water, I get quenched ash. And so if I mix the lion and the lamb. They are both quenched into nothingness.«
116. "Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art -- or almost the only stuff."
117. »Take nothing, to say: I have it! For you can possess nothing, not even peace. Nought is possessible, neither gold, nor land nor love, nor life, nor peace, nor even sorrow nor death, nor yet salvation. Say of nothing: It is mine. Say only: It is with me.«
118. "That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction."
119. ”The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks into colours. I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn't crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce. The heart of the North is dead, and the fingers are corpse fingers.”
120. “The chief thing about a woman -- who is much of a woman -- is that in the long run she is not to be had... She is not to be caught by any of the catch-words, love, beauty, honor, duty, worth, work, salvation -- none of them -- not in the long run. In the long run she only says Am I satisfied, or is there some beastly dissatisfaction gnawing and gnawing inside me. And if there is some dissatisfaction, it is physical, at least as much as psychic, sex as much as soul.”
121. »The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man. ...The instinctive policy of Christianity towards all true pagan evidence has been and is still: suppress it, destroy it, deny it. This dishonesty has vitiated Christian thought from the start. It has, even more curiously, vitiated ethnological scientific thought the same. Curiously enough, we do not look on the Greeks and the Romans after about 600 B.C., as real pagans: not like Hindus or Persians, Babylonians or Egyptians or even Cretans, for example. We accept the Greeks and Romans as the initiators of our intellectual and political civilisation, the Jews as the fathers of our moral-religious civilisation. So these are "our sort". All the rest are mere nothing, almost idiots. All that can be attributed to the "barbarians" beyond the Greek pale: that is, to Minoans, Etruscans, Egyptians, Chaldeans, Persians and Hindus, is, in the famous phrase of a famous German professor: Urdummheit. Urdummheit, or primal stupidity, is the state of all mankind before precious Homer, and of all races, all, except Greek, Jew, Roman and – ourselves! ... We look at the wonderful remains of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, and old India, and we repeat to ourselves: Urdummheit! Urdummheit? We look at the Etruscan tombs and ask ourselves again, Urdummheit? primal stupidity? Why, in the oldest of peoples, in the Egyptian friezes and the Assyrian, in the Etruscan paintings and the Hindu carvings we see a splendour, a beauty, and very often a joyous, sensitive intelligence which is certainly lost in our world of Neufrechheit. If it is a question of primal stupidity or new impudence, then give me primal stupidity.«
122. “The cruelest thing a man can do to a woman is to portray her as perfection.”
123. “The deep psychic disease of modern men and women is the diseased, atrophied condition of the intuitive faculties. There is a whole world of life that we might know and enjoy by intuition, and by intuition alone. This is denied us, because we deny sex and beauty, the source of the intuitive life and of the insoucience which is so lovely in free animals and in plants."
124. »The essential quality of poetry is that it makes a new effort of attention, and "discovers" a new world within the known world. Man, and the animals, and the flowers, all live within a strange and for ever surging chaos. ... But man cannot live in chaos. ... Man must wrap himself in a vision, make a house of apparent form and stability, fixity. In his terror of chaos he begins by putting up an umbrella between himself and the everlasting whirl. Then he paints the under-side of his umbrella like a firmament. Then he parades around, lives and dies under his umbrella. Bequeathed to his descendants, the umbrella becomes a dome, a vault, and men at last begin to feel that something is wrong. Man fixes some wonderful erection of his own between himself and the wild chaos, and gradually goes bleached and stifled under his parasol. Then comes a poet, enemy of convention, and makes a slit in the umbrella; and lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision, a window to the sun. But after a while, getting used to the vision, and not liking the genuine draught from chaos, commonplace man daubs a simulacrum of the window that opens on to chaos, and patches the umbrella with the painted patch of the simulacrum. That is, he has got used to the vision; it is part of his house-decoration. So that the umbrella at last looks like a glowing open firmament, of many aspects. But alas! it is all simulacrum, in innumerable patches.«
125. “The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.”
126. "The future of religion is in the mystery of touch."
127. "The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action."
128. “The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.”
129. “The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death.”
130. »The human soul itself is the source and well-head of creative activity. In the unconscious human soul the creative prompting issues first into the universe. Open the consciousness to this prompting, away with all your old sluice-gates, locks, dams, channels. No ideal on earth is anything more than an obstruction, in the end, to the creative issue of the spontaneous soul. Away with all ideals. Let each individual act spontaneously from the for ever incalculable prompting of the creative well-head within him. There is no universal law. Each being is, at his purest, a law unto himself, single, unique, a Godhead, a fountain from the unknown.«
131. “The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.”
132. "The map appears more real to us than the land."
133. »The mass is for ever vulgar, because it can't distinguish between its own original feelings and feelings which are diddled into existence by the exploiter. The public is always profane, because it is controlled from the outside, by the trickster, and never from the inside, by its own sincerity. The mob is always obscene, because it is always second-hand.«
134. "The modern pantheist not only sees the god in everything, he takes photographs of it."
135. "The moon is a white strange world, great, white, soft-seeming globe in the night sky, and what she actually communicates to me across space I shall never fully know. But the moon that pulls the tides, and the moon that controls the menstrual periods of women, and the moon that touches the lunatics, she is not the mere dead lump of the astronomist. When we describe the moon as dead, we are describing the deadness in ourselves. When we find space so hideously void, we are describing our own unbearable emptiness."
136. “The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the more he is an emotional boor.”
137. »The more we intervene machinery between us and the naked forces the more we numb and atrophy our own senses. Every time we turn on a tap to have water, every time we turn a handle to have fire or light, we deny ourselves and annul our being. The great elements, the earth, air, fire, water, are there like some great mistress whom we woo and struggle with, whom we heave and wrestle with. And all our appliances do but deny us these fine embraces, take the miracle of life away from us. The machine is the great neuter. It is the eunuch of eunuchs. In the end it emasculates us all. When we balance the sticks and kindle a fire, we partake of the mysteries. But when we turn on an electric tap there is, as it were, a wad between us and the dynamic universe. We do not know what we lose by all our labour-saving appliances. Of the two evils it would be much the lesser to lose all machinery, every bit, rather than to have, as we have, hopelessly too much.«
138. »The most evil things in the world, today, are to be found under the chiffon folds of sentimentalism. Sentimentality is the garment of our vice. It covers viciousness as inevitably as greenness covers a bog.«
139. "The one woman who never gives herself is your free woman, who is always giving herself."
140. ”The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond - but I say, `Diamond, what! This is carbon.' And my diamond may be coal or soot and my theme is carbon.”
141. “The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.”
142. ”There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed ofvast ranges of experience, like the humming of unseen harps,we know nothing of, within us.Oh when man has escaped from the barbed-wire entanglementof his own ideas and his own mechanical devicesthere is a marvellous rich world of contact and sheer fluid beautyand fearless face-to-face awareness of now-naked lifeand me, and you, and other men and womenand grapes, and ghouls, and ghosts and green moonlightand ruddy-orange limbs stirring the limboof the unknown air, and eyes so softsofter than the space between the stars,and all things, and nothing, and being and not-beingalternately palpitant,when at last we escape the barbed-wire enclosureof Know Thyself, knowing we can never know,we can but touch, and wonder, and ponder, and make our effortand dangle in a last fastidious fine delightas the fuchsia does, dangling her reckless dropof purple after so much putting forthand slow mounting marvel of a little tree.”
143. “There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.”
144. »There is no such thing as sin. There is only life and anti-life.«
145. »The secret of all life is in obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us on to new gestures, new embraces, new motions, new combinations, new creations.«
146. "The source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and the meeting and mingling of these two: man-life and woman-life, man-knowledge and woman-knowledge, man-being and woman-being."
147. »The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very voice of life. But the tablets of stones he engraved them on are millstones round our necks. Commandments should fade as flowers do. They are no more divine than flowers are.«
148. “The tragedy is when you've got sex in the head instead of down where it belongs.”
149. »The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser. And as soon as you see a finer morality, the grosser becomes relatively immoral.«
150. »The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings, sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself.«
151. “The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.”
152. »The white man's mind and soul are divided between these two things: innocence and lust, the Spirit and Sensuality. Sensuality always carries a stigma, and is therefore more deeply desired, or lusted after. But spirituality alone gives the sense of uplift, exaltation, and "winged life", with the inevitable reaction into sin and spite. So the white man is divided against himself. He plays off one side of himself against the other side, till it is really a tale told by an idiot, and nauseating.«
153. »The world is wonderful and beautiful and good beyond one's wildest imagination. Never, never, never could one conceive what love is, beforehand, never. Life can be great - quite god-like. It can be so. God be thanked I have proved it.«
154. “The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.”
155. »They accuse me of barbarism: I want to drag England down to the level of savages. But it is this crude stupidity, deadness, about sex which I find barbaric and savage. ... That ghastly crudity of seeing in sex nothing but a functional act and a certain fumbling with clothes is, in my opinion, a low degree of barbarism, savagery. And as far as sex goes, our white civilisation is crude, barbaric, and uglily savage.«
156. »This feeling only what you allow yourselves to feel at last kills all capacity for feeling, and in the higher emotional range, you feel nothing at all. This has come to pass in our present century. The higher emotions are strictly dead. They have to be faked. And by higher emotions we mean love in all its manifestations, from genuine desire to tender love, love of one's fellow-men, and love of God: we mean love, joy, delight, hope, true indignant anger, passionate sense of justice and injustice, truth and untruth, honour and dishonour, and real belief in anything: for belief is a profound emotion that has the mind's connivance. All these things, today, are more or less dead. We have in their place the loud and sentimental counterfeit of all such emotion.«
157. »This is a piece of very old wisdom, and it will always be true. Time still moves in cycles, not in a straight line. And we are at the end of the Christian cycle. And the Logos, the good dragon of the beginning of the cycle is now the evil dragon of today. It will give its potency to no new thing, only to old and deadly things. It is the red dragon, and it must once more be slain by the heroes, since we can expect no more from the angels.«
158. “This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.”
159. "This is what is the matter with us, we are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and the sun and stars..."
160. “This is what I believe: "That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognise and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women."”
161. “Those that go searching for love only make manifest their own lovelessness, and the loveless never find love; only the loving find love, and they never have to seek for it.”
162. »Thought, I love thought. But not the jiggling and twisting of already existent ideas I despise that self-important game. Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness, Thought is the testing of statements on the touchstone of the conscience, Thought is gazing on to the face of life, and reading what can be read, Thought is pondering over experience, and coming to a conclusion. Thought is not a trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges, Thought is a man in his wholeness wholly attending.«
163. »To carry on a tradition, you must add something to the tradition. But to keep up a convention needs only the monotonous persistence of a parasite, the endless endurance of the craven, those who fear life because they are not alive, and who cannot die because they cannot live. The social beings.«
164. »To tell the truth, ideas are the most dangerous germs mankind has ever been interjected with. They are introduced into the brain by injection, in schools and by means of newspapers, and then we are done for. An idea which is merely introduced into the brain, and started spinning there like some outrageous insect, is the cause of all our misery today. Instead of living from the spontaneous centres, we live from the head. We chew, chew, chew at some theory, some idea. We grind, grind, grind in our mental consciousness, till we are beside ourselves. Our primary affective centres, our centres of spontaneous being, are so utterly ground round and automatised that they squeak in all stages of disharmony and incipient collapse. We are a people - and not we alone - of idiots, imbeciles and epileptics, and we don't even know we are raving.«
165. "To the Puritan, all things are impure, as somebody says."
166. “Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.”
167. "Tragedy is like strong acid -- it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth."
168. “Try to find your deepest issue in every confusion, and abide by that.”
169. »Unless we submit our will to the flooding of life, there is no life in us.«
170. “We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.”
171. “We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great gleaming nerve-centre from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time... Now all this is literally true, as men knew in the great past and as they will know again.”
172. “We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.”
173. »We don't exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.«
174. »We have curious ideas of ourselves. We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit in it, or a body with a soul in it, or a body with a mind in it. Mens sana in corpore sano. The years drink up the wine, and at last throw the bottle away: the body, of course, being the bottle. It is a funny sort of superstition. Why should I look at my hand, as it so cleverly writes these words, and decide that it is a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it? Is there really any huge difference between my hand and my brain? - or my mind? My hand is alive, it flickers with a life of its own. It meets all the strange universe, in touch, and learns a vast number of things, and knows a vast number of things. My hand, as it writes these words, slips gaily along, jumps like a grasshopper to dot an i, feels the table rather cold, gets a little bored if I write too long, has its own rudiments of thought, and is just as much me as is my brain, my mind, or my soul. Why should I imagine that there is a me which is more me than my hand is? Since my hand is absolutely alive, me alive.«
175. “We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behavior, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead.”
176. »We have lost the cosmos. The sun strengthens us no more, neither does the moon. In mystic language, the moon is black to us, and the sun is a sackcloth. Now we have to get back the cosmos, and it can't be done by a trick. The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again. It has taken two thousand years to kill them. Who knows how long it will take to bring them to life.«
177. “We need not feel ashamed of flirting with the zodiac. The zodiac is well worth flirting with.”
178. “We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do--it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.”
179. »We should ask for no absolutes, or absolute. Once and for all and forever, let us have done with the ugly imperialism of any absolute. There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute.«
180. “What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.”
181. »What is wrong then? The system. But when you've said that you've said nothing. The system, after all, is only the outcome of the human psyche, the human desires. We shout and blame the machine. But who on earth makes the machine, if we don't? And any alterations in the system are only modifications in the machine. - The system is in us, it is not something external to us. The machine is in us, or it would never come out of us. Well then, there's nothing to blame but ourselves, and there's nothing to change except inside ourselves.«
182. »What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his "soul". Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. So that my individualism is really an illusion. I am part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched. What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.«
183. »When ever the feeling of terror came over him, the feeling of being marked-out, branded, a criminal marked out by society, marked-out for annihilation, he pulled himself together, saying to himself: "I am letting them make me feel in the wrong. I am degrading myself by feeling guilty, marked-out, and I have convulsions of fear. - But I am not wrong. I have done no wrong, whatever I have done. That is, no wrong that society has to do with. Whatever wrongs I have done are my own, and private between myself and the other person. - One may be wrong, yes, one is often wrong. But not for them to judge. For my own soul only to judge. - Let me know them for human filth, all these pullers-down, and let me watch them, as I would watch a reeking hyaena, but never fear them. Let me watch them, to keep them at bay. But let me never admit for one single moment that they may be my judges. That, never. I have judged them: they are canaille. I am a man, and I abide by my own soul. Never shall they have a chance of judging me."«
184. ”When I woke, the lake-lights were quivering on the wall, The sunshine swam in a shoal across and across, And a hairy, big bee hung over the primulas In the window, his body black fur, and the sound of him cross. There was something I ought to remember: and yet I did not remember. Why should I? The running lights And the airy primulas, oblivious Of the impending bee-they were fair enough sights.”
185. “When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.”
186. »When we postulate a beginning, we only do so to fix a starting-point for our thought. There never was a beginning, and there never will be an end of the universe. The creative mystery, which is life itself, always was and always will be. It unfolds itself in pure living creatures.«
187. ”Why doesn't the past decently bury itself, instead of sitting waiting to be admired by the present?”
188. "Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him."
(All quotations by David Herbert Lawrence)
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