Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the la...bors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally sterile mind.... He does not have to struggle ... with the crowded ...pulsations of a fecund imagination. On the contrary he is almost devoid of imagination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ...ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Formerly they had a heaven adorned with a vast wealth of thoughts and imagery. The meaning of all that is, hung on the thread of l...ight by which it was linked to that heaven. Instead of dwelling in this world's presence, men looked beyond it, following this thread to an other-worldly presence, so to speak. The eye of the Spirit had to be forcibly turned and held fast to the things of this world; and it has taken a long time before the lucidity which only heavenly things used to have could penetrate the dullness and confusion in which the sense of worldly things was enveloped, and so make attention to the here and now as such, attention to what has been called 'experience', an interesting and valid enterprise. Now we seem to need just the opposite; sense is so fast rooted in earthly things that it requires just as much force to raise it. The Spirit shows itself as so impoverished that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mere mouthful of water, it seems to crave for its refreshment only the bare feeling of the divine in general. By the little which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The spirit of God, like the sun, always gives all its light at once. The spirit of man resembles the pale moon, which has its phas...es, its absences and its returns, its lucidity and its spots, its fullness and its disappearance, which borrows all its light from the rays of the sun, and which still dares to intercept them on occasion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You say you are incapable of expressing your thought. How then do you explain the lucidity and brilliance with which you are expre...ssing the thought that you are incapable of thought?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be jud...ged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »