Socratic man believes that all virtue is cognition, and that all that is needed to do what is right is to know what is right. This... does not hold for Mosaic man who is informed with the profound experience that cognition is never enough, that the deepest part of him must be seized by the teachings, that for realization to take place his elemental totality must submit to the spirit as clay to the potter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and... by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist--a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimi...st--only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Masculinity can only be experienced, achieved, recognized, and embodied in opposition to femininity. When men posit sex, violence,... and death as elemental erotic truths, they mean this--that sex, or fucking, is the act which enables them to experience their own reality, or identity, or masculinity most concretely; that violence, or sadism, is the means by which they actualize that reality, or identity, or masculinity; and that death, or negation, or nothingness, or contamination by the female is what they risk each time they penetrate into what they imagine to be the emptiness of the female hole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandston...e and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature,--here they are, side by side, god and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who shall set a limit to the influence of a human being? There are men, who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations with ...them, and lead the activity of the human race. And if there be such a tie, that, wherever the mind of man goes, nature will accompany him, perhaps there are men whose magnetisms are of that force to draw material and elemental powers, and, where they appear, immense instrumentalities organize around them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When this immediate evil power has been defeated, we shall not yet have won the long battle with the elemental barbarities. Anothe...r Hitler, it may be an invisible adversary, will attempt, again, and yet again, to destroy our frail civilization. Is it true, I wonder, that the only way to escape a war is to be in it? When one is a part of an actuality does the imagination find a release?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This war no longer bears the characteristics of former inter-European conflicts. It is one of those elemental conflicts which ushe...r in a new millennium and which shake the world once in a thousand years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental fo...rces of his own psyche. This is the World Power that vastly exceeds all other powers on earth. The Age of Enlightenment, which stripped nature and human institutions of gods, overlooked the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[In the old religion of the Indians in New Mexico] the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into direct contact with the e...lemental life of the cosmos.... To come into immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy. This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »