What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, events and gestures.... ordinariness i...s the most precious thing we struggle for, what the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto fought for. Not noble causes or abstract theories. But the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and a sense of self-worth--an ordinary life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agree...d that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... if there are no waving flags and marching songs at the barricades as Walter marches out with his little battalion, it is not b...ecause the battle lacks nobility. On the contrary, he has picked up in his way, still imperfect and wobbly in his small view of human destiny.... He becomes, in spite of those who are too intrigued with despair and hatred of man to see it, King Oedipus refusing to tear out his eyes, but attacking the oracle instead. He is that last Jewish patriot manning his rifle at Warsaw.... He is Anne Frank, still believing in people; he is the nine small heroes of Little Rock; he is Michelangelo creating David and Beethoven bursting forth with the Ninth Symphony. He is all these things because he has finally reached out in his tiny moment and caught that sweet essence which is human dignity, and it shines like the old star-touched dream that is in his eyes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometime after the Enlightenment, science and religion came to a gentleman's agreement. Science was for the real world: machines, ...manufactured things, medicines, guns, moon rockets. Religion was for everything else, the immeasurable: morals, sacraments, poetry, insanity, death, and some residual forms of politics and statesmanship. Religion became, in both senses of the word, immaterial. Science and religion were apples and or anges. So the pact said: render unto apples the things that are Caesar's, and unto oranges the things that are God's. Just as the Maya kept two calendars, one profane and one priestly, so Western science and religion fell into two different conceptions of the universe, two different vocabularies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Surrealism is not a school of poetry but a movement of liberation.... A way of rediscovering the language of innocence, a renewal ...of the primordial pact, poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order. Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a society of little economic development, universal inactivity accompanies universal poverty. You survive not by struggling aga...inst nature, or by increasing production, or by relentless labour; instead you survive by expending as little energy as possible, by striving constantly to achieve a state of immobility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »