Words ... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in 'f...oreign commerce' on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves--this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was a heavy burden on the conscience to know that while you sat in Music 101, some contemporary--as "worthy" of a college educa...tion as you were, but one who had been denied the opportunity because he was poor, or black, or both--was getting his head blown off in Vietnam. Many students believed that such inequity was wrong, but couldn't bring themselves to redress it personally by refusing the student deferment. It's a dreadful combination: to act for self-protection yet at the same time to loathe oneself for acting that way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking--and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a ...way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom--such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must brin...g with it--those quarter-hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When philosophers use a word--"knowledge," "being," "object," "I," "proposition," "name"--and try to grasp the essence of the thin...g, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?--What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know t...heir sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »