Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everything ... and t...hat the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquito...us in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a ...completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was undoubtedly the feeling of exile--that sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back... to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Parenting is not logical. If it were, we would never have to read a book, never need a family therapist, and never feel the urge t...o call a close friend late at night for support after a particularly trying bedtime scene. . . . We have moments of logic, but life is run by a much larger force. Life is filled with disagreement, opposition, illusion, irrational thinking, miracle, meaning, surprise, and wonder.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process ...known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life, from beginning to end, is fear. Yes, it is pain, yes, it is desire, but more than anything it is fear; a certain amount rati...onal, an enormous amount irrational. All political cruelties stem from that overwhelming fear. To push back the threatening forces, to offer primitive sacrifices, to give up some in the hope that others will be saved ... that is the power struggle. That is the outsidedness of the poor, the feeble, the infantile. That is the outsidedness of Jews. That is the outsidedness of blacks. That is the outsidedness of women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »