... throughout the ages down to modern times, conditions of imprisonment, what with overcrowding, idleness, and all their attendan...t evils, have been such that not only the person but also to a deplorable extent the personality has been "confined or restrained." The problem of the betterment of our physical prison conditions goes hand in hand ... with the problem of re-creating and releasing personality "deep-dungeoned in self," of giving scope to the forces that tend upward, of counteracting and rendering harmless the already dominant tendencies toward evil.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
'Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents...; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probin...gs at the very axis of reality;Mthese are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Under equal conditions, the feminine psyche is closer to potential contraction than the masculine; for the simple reason that the ...woman has a more centripetal, integrated, and elastic mind. As we noted, the function charged with giving the mind its structure and cohesion is the attention. A highly unified mind presupposes a highly concentrated manner of attention. One could say that the feminine mind tends to have a single axis of attention, which at each phase of her life is set toward one thing alone.... In contrast to the concentric structure of the feminine mind there are always epicenters in that of the man. The more masculine one is, in a spiritual sense, the more his mind is disjointed in separate compartments. One part of us is deeply dedicated to politics or business, while another devotes itself to intellectual curiosity and another to sexual pleasure. There is lacking, then, a tendency toward one unified gravitation of the attention. In fact, the contrary predominates, which leads to dissociation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: i...t is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it... earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time--this one, for instance--as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He is the essence that inquires. He is the axis of the star;... He is the sparkle of the spar; He is the heart of every creature; He is the meaning of each feature; And his mind is the sky, Than all it holds more deep, more high.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not on...ly of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Egotism erects its center in itself; love places it out of itself in the axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotism ...at solitude. Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot in a devastated creation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »