It is the blankness that follows gaiety, and Everyman must depart Out there into stranded night, for his destiny... Is to return unfruitful out of the lightness That passing time evokes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him... who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It follows that man has his actual substantive life in the state, in learning, and so forth, as well as in labor and struggle with... the external world and with himself so that it is only out of his diremption that he fights his way to self-subsistent unity with himself. In the family he has a tranquil intuition of this unity, and there he lives a subjective ethical life on the plane of feeling. Woman, on the other hand, has her substantive destiny in the family, and to be imbued with family piety is her ethical frame of mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A quibble is to Shakespeare what luminous vapours are to the traveller: he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him ou...t of his way and sure to engulf him in the mire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My advice to people today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you... take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics. The former is supple and lifelike, it follows our experience. The latter ...is abstract and rigid, more ideal. The latter is perfectly necessary, perfectly reliable: the former is only sometimes reliable and hardly ever systematic. But the logic of mathematics achieves necessity at the expense of living truth, it is less real than the other, although more certain. It achieves certainty by a flight from the concrete into abstraction. Doubtless, to an idealist, this would seem to be a more perfect reality. I am not an idealist. The logic of the poet--that is, the logic of language or the experience itself--develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"All is quiet at Harper's Ferry," say the journals. What is the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slavehol...der prevail? I regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out, with glaring distinctness, the character of this government. We needed to be thus assisted to see it by the light of history. It needed to see itself. When a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, it reveals itself a merely brute force, or worse, a demoniacal force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Behold the difference between the Oriental and the Occidental. The former has nothing to do in this world; the latter is full of a...ctivity. The one looks in the sun until his eyes are put out; the other follows him prone in his westward course.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Out of the element of participation follows the certainty of faith; out of the element of separation follows the doubt in faith. A...nd each is essential for the nature of faith. Sometimes certainty conquers doubt, but it cannot eliminate doubt. The conquered of today may become the conqueror of tomorrow. Sometimes doubt conquers faith, but it still contains faith. Otherwise it would be indifference.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »