Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life..., which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yes, but what are all these guises, aspects presentations? Only manifestations of what we all are at different times, according to... how these needs are pulled out of us. I write in these bald words the deepest lessons of my life, the truest substance of what I have learned. I am not only a Chronicler of Zone Three, or only partially, for I also share in Al*Ith's condition of being ruler insofar as I can write of her, describe her. I am woman with her (though I am a man) as I write of her femaleness--and Dabeeb's. I am Ben Ata when I summon him into my mind and try to make him real. I am ... what I am at the moment I am that.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The redwood forest, the remains of a virgin sequoia forest. The interiors of certain Gothic cathedrals--Strasbourg, for example--r...eplicate man's smallness and helplessness in his middle zone between hell and heaven, amid the columns of the primeval forests which still covered large areas of Europe when the cathe drals were built. But Europe never had trees like the redwoods, whose life span number over two thousand years. This forest is the idea of forest, a prototype drawn by God; no church columns attain that height, and never does a church's semi-darkness contrast so sharply with a ray slanting in from above the reach of sight.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood.... ...What a perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature. What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the poke!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although there is no universal agreement as to a definition of life, its biological manifestations are generally considered to be ...organization, metabolism, growth, irritability, adaptation, and reproduction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I always get back to the question, is it really necessary that men should consume so much of their bodily and mental energies in t...he machinery of civilised life? The world seems to me to do much of its toil for that which is not in any sense bread. Again, does not the latent feeling that much of their striving is to no purpose tend to infuse large quantities of sham into men's work?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the great thing to learn about life is, first, not to do what you don't want to do, and, second, to do what you do want to do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life seems to be an experience in ascending and descending. You think you're beginning to live for a single aim--for self-developm...ent, or the discovery of cosmic truths--when all you're really doing is to move from place to place as if devoted primarily to real estate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have always rebelled against the unadorned, the unbefitting, the unawakened, the unresisting, the undesirable, the unplanned, th...e unshapely, the uncommitted, the unattempted--all leading to the unintended. I believe in the unsubmissive, the unfaltering, the unassailable, the irresistible, the unbelievable--in other words, in an art of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I feel more charity for a Mormon who has been taught from his birth that it is not only his right but his duty to God to enter int...o plural marriages, and that the man who has the greatest number of wives stands highest in God's favor, than I do for the man who has been taught from his cradle that the unpardonable sin is the desecration of womanhood; whose religious training and the moral code of civilization in which he is reared make it a crime to violate the Seventh Commandment and the established law of monogamy. Yet, judging from the testimony we see all about us--our ... lying-in and foundling hospitals and our fallen womanhood--the married or single man who lives a pure life is rare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »