The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is... confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pain and pleasure are infectious. It depresses us to be much with those who have suffered long and are still suffering; it refresh...es us to be with those who have suffered little and are enjoying themselves. But it is good for us to be depressed now and then.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion.... Dogs do not ritually urinate... in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some... still subtler form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always origin...ates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nationalism ... is the worship of the collective power of a local human community. Unlike the faith in progress through science, n...ationalism is not a new religion; it is a revival of an old one. This was the religion of the city-states of the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world. It was resuscitated in the West at the Renaissance, and this resuscitation of the Greco-Roman political religion has been far more effective than the resuscitation of the Greco-Roman style of literature, visual art, and architecture. Modern Western nationalism, inspired by Greco-Roman political ideals and institutions, has inherited the dynamism and fanaticism of Christianity. Translated into practice in the American and French Revolutions, it proved to be highly infectious. Today, fanatical nationalism is perhaps 90 percent of the religion of perhaps 90 percent of mankind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What chemistry! That the winds are really not infectious,... That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me, That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it, That all is clean forever and forever,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »