The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in ...it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults--a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide ...from us our favorite sin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For spring had entered the capital Walking on gigantic feet.... The smell of witch hazel indoors Changed to narcissus in the street.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was continuing to shrink. To become, what? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being, or was I the man of the future?...... So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite, but suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle. I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens. The universe, worlds beyond number, God's silver tapestry spread across the night. And in that moment I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon nature. That existence begins and ends is man's conception, not nature's, and I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation--it had to mean something. And then I meant something, too. Yes, smaller than the smallest--I meant something, too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist. Even athletes need to sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages,--leaf after leaf,--never returning one. One leaf she lays do...wn, a floor of granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a thousand ages, and a measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of marl and mud; vegetable forms appear; her first misshapen animals, zoophyte, trilobium, fish; then, saurians,--rude forms, in which she has only blocked her future statue, concealing under these unwieldy monsters the fine type of her coming king. The face of the planet cools and dries, the races meliorate, and man is born. But when a race has lived its term, it comes no more again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... we often ask ourselves here despairingly: "What, oh, what is the use of the war? Why can't people live peacefully together? Wh...y all this destruction?" The question is very understandable, but no one has found a satisfactory answer to it so far. Yes, why do they make still more gigantic planes, still heavier bombs and, at the same time, prefabricated houses for reconstruction? Why should millions be spent daily on the war and yet there's not a penny available for medical services, artists, or for poor people?... Oh, why are people so crazy?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometimes they are little cats mewing and scratching at the door, sometimes they are her grandmother's voice,... and sometimes they are gigantic men of light whispering to her to get up, to get up, to get up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »