All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, ep...idemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture. I had to be a defenseless, powerless witness to the most inconceivable setback of humanity, its return to a barbarism we had thought had long since passed into oblivion with its deliberate and programmatic antihumane dogma.... (We had to witness) wars ... concentration camps, tortures, mass pillaging and bombings of defenseless cities ... bestialities (which had not been known for fifty generations).... But, paradoxically, I also saw the same human race rise to technical and intellectual heights never even dreamt of ... the conquest of the air through the airplane, the one-second transmission of the human word across the globe and, thus the conquest of space, the splitting of the atom, the conquest of the most treacherous diseases ... almost daily progress in making possible what was still impossible yesterday. Never before our time did humanity as a whole act more satanically and never did it accomplish such godlike deeds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custo...dy and bring them back to their right senses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The hour of the waning of love has beset us, And weary and worn are our sad souls now;... Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us, With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But O, sick children of the world, Of all the many changing things... In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked tune that Chronos sings, Words alone are certain good.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know of the leafy paths that the witches take Who come with their crowns of pearl and their spindles of wool,... And their secret smile, out of the depths of the lake....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young And weep because I know all things now:... I have been a hazel-tree, and they hung The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough Among my leaves in times out of mind....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
his head May not lie on the breast nor his lips on the hair... Of the woman that he loves, until he dies. O beast of the wilderness, bird of the air, Must I endure your amorous cries?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In their overestimation of the role of civilization, the humanists misunderstand the primary forces of the world of primitive huma...n drives with their untamable violence. With their optimistic view of the role of culture, they (the humanists) trivialize the terrifying, hardly solvable problems of mass hatred and of the great passionate psychoses of the human race.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class.... I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish bo...ok which says "there is no wisdom without leisure."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »