If we ask ourselves what is this wisdom which experience forces upon us, the answer must be that we discover the world is not cons...tituted as we had supposed it to be. It is not that we learn more about its physical elements, or its geography, or the variety of its inhabitants, or the ways in which human society is governed. Knowledge of this sort can be taught to a child without in any way disturbing his childishness. In fact, all of us are aware that we once knew a great many things which we have since forgotten. The essential discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information about the names, the locations, and the sequence of facts; it is the acquiring of a different sense of life, a different kind of intuition about the nature of things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are... the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the "easy life of the gods" would be a lifeless life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipo...litical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The discussion of the whole problem of technology ... has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upo...n the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful.... But ... homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and equipment in order to erect a world, not ... to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... we have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and pr...oviding for their bundance. Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of "making a living;" such is the verdict of society, and the number of people, especially in the professions who might challenge it, has decreased rapidly. The only exception society is willing to grant is to the artist, who, strictly speaking, is the only "worker" left in a laboring society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and provid...ing for their abundance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product rema...ins closest to the thought that inspired it.... Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The real essence, the internal qualities, and constitution of even the meanest object, is hid from our view; something there is in... every drop of water, every grain of sand, which it is beyond the power of human understanding to fathom or comprehend. But it is evident ... that we are influenced by false principles to that degree as to mistrust our senses, and think we know nothing of those things which we perfectly comprehend.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The gods of the earth and sea Sought through nature to find this tree.... But their search was all in vain: There grows one in the human brain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »