It's a queer sensation, this secret belief that one stands on the brink of the world's greatest catastrophe. For it means the fall... of Western Europe, as it fell in the fourth century. It recurs to me every November, and culminates every December. I have to get over it as I can, and hide, for fear of being sent to an asylum.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a p...sychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond k...nowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The contrast between Leonardo and Michelangelo is an allegory of the arts of modern times. Leonardo left copious notes of his obse...rvations on nature and the world around him, but little about his feelings or his inner life. Michelangelo, in his letters, his poetry, in biographies by his friends and students Vasari and Condivi, in conversations with Francisco de Hollanda and others, left us vivid revelations and eloquent chronicles of himself. Leonardo, the self-styled "disciple of experience," was a hero of the effort to re-create the world from the shapes and forms and sensations out there. But Michelangelo, prophet of the sovereign self, found mysterious resources within. These two greatest figures of Italian Renaissance art dramatized a modern movement from craftsman to artist. If Leonardo could be called the Aristotle--practical-minded organizer and surveyor of experience--Michelangelo would be the Plato, seeker after the perfect idea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a wonderful, but neglected precision in these words. The old English noun "travel" (in the sense of a journey) was origin...ally the same word as "travail" (meaning "trouble," "work," or "torment").... Significantly, too, the word "tour" in "tourist" was derived by back-formation from the Latin "tornus," which in turn came from the Greek word for a tool describing a circle. The traveler, then was working at something; the tourist was a pleasure-seeker. The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I read of the vain discussions of the present day about the Virgin Birth and other old dogmas which belong to the past, I fee...l how great the need is still of a real interest in the religion which builds up character, teaches brotherly love, and opens up to the seeker such a world of usefulness and the beauty of holiness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The wisest among us is very lucky never to have met the woman, be she beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, who could drive hi...m crazy enough to be fit to be put into an asylum.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. ...Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the sim...ple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »