Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and t...hat the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In sex we have the source of man's true connection with the cosmos and of his servile dependence. The categories of sex, male and ...female, are cosmic categories, not merely anthropological categories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realiti...es; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a large one; he is the man who lives in a tenth of the truth, a...nd thinks it is the whole. The madman cannot conceive any cosmos outside a certain tale or conspiracy or vision. Hence the more clearly we see the world divided into Saxons and non-Saxons, into our splendid selves and the rest, the more certain we may be that we are slowly and quietly going mad. The more plain and satisfying our state appears, the more we may know that we are living in an unreal world. For the real world is not satisfying. The more clear become the colours and facts of Anglo-Saxon superiority, the more surely we may know we are in a dream.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess... a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of m...y ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as t...hrough a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That which endures is not one or another association of living forms, but the process of which the cosmos is the product, and of w...hich these are among the transitory expressions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »