The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are... the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the "easy life of the gods" would be a lifeless life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the human condition to question one god after another, one appearance after another, or better, one apparition after another..., always pursuing the truth of the imagination, which is not the same as the truth of appearance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . .... I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A few days ago, while seated snugly in an airplane seat on my way back to New York from Chicago,... it occurred to me that a rathe...r striking similarity existed between the situation I found myself in then, flying in a modern airplane, and what I've often felt as I watch television. To begin with, both experiences are largely passive, or at any rate they have been transformed into passive experiences. But this shared passivity is itself more complicated than it seems, for though it produces in both cases an obvious condition of quiet and inactivity, it also demands from the passenger or viewer a very definite emotional commitment. One might call it a commitment to specifically nonaggressive and uninvolved behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an... inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey ...his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too "personal" style.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The condition that is now called gay was then called queer. The operative word was faggot and, later, pussy, but those epithets re...ally had nothing to do with the question of sexual preference: You were being told simply that you had no balls.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Intuition, like the rays of the sun, acts only in an inflexibly straight line; it can guess right only on condition of never diver...ting its gaze; the freaks of chance disturb it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »