For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not f...or the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ant's; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it... to man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist w...hen the aesthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The proud person rationalizes his faults, since to acknowledge them would threaten his sense of superiority. The humble person, on... the other hand, readily admits guilt and patiently listens to the reproofs and anger even of his enemies. Our enemies do not seek to protect our self-image with falsehoods and often monitor our behavior more accurately than does many a friend. Therefore, our enemies' admonishments are often of greater value to us in exposing our faults than are the kind and soothing words of a friend.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the doctors cure then the sun sees it.... If the doctors kill then the earth hides it. The doctors should fear arrogance more than cardiac arrest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've begun to appreciate the generational patterns that ripple out from our lives like stones dropped in water, pulsing outward ev...en after we are gone. Although we have but one childhood, we relive it first through our children's and then our grandchildren's eyes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is indeed typical that you Earth people refuse to believe in the superiority of any world but your own. Children looking into a... magnifying glass, imagining the image you see is the image of your true size.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling... race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden ... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »