I had heard so much about how hard it was supposed to be that, when they were little, I thought it would be horrible when they got... married and left. But that's silly you know. . . . By the time they grow up, they change and you change. Eventually, they're not the same little kids and you're not the same mother. It's as if everything just falls into a pattern and you're ready.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drif...t across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Philosophy offers the rather cold consolation that perhaps we and our planet do not actually exist; religion presents the contradi...ctory and scarcely more comforting thought that we exist but that we cannot hope to get anywhere until we cease to exist. Alcohol, in attempting to resolve the contradiction, produces vivid patterns of Truth which vanish like snow in the morning sun and cannot be recalled; the revelations of poetry are as wonderful as a comet in the skies--and as mysterious. Love, which was once believed to contain the Answer, we now know to be nothing more than an inherited behavior pattern.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The resemblance between the two movements covers far more than the speed and extent of their conquests. It can be argued that in s...ome measure both are great Christian heresies. And like Communism, the Moslem faith in its relations with Europe has tended to follow the pattern of relentless pressure on all weak points and undefended frontiers and to advance its banners wherever there were found to be no defenders at the gate.... Islam derived its power to attract educated and intellectual groups from the use it made of ideas deeply congenial to the Oriental mind. Its rejection of the Greek and Christian heritage of humanism and incarnation in favor of a purely transcendent deity accorded well with the other-worldly tradition of Oriental religious thought. At the same time, the Moslem appeal to the people at large lay in the social evils which it promised to redress. Mohammedanism was in part a harking back to traditional intellectual and religious ideas, in part an outburst of social protest against an unjust and unstable social order. Modern Communism has something of the same character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is commonplace that a problem stated is well on its way to solution, for statement of the nature of a problem signifies that th...e underlying quality is being transformed into determinate distinctions of terms and relations or has become an object of articulate thought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. If... we are to continue talking about "data" in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only thing that is unqualifiedly given is the total pervasive quality; and the objection to calling it "given" is that the wor...d suggests something to which it is given, mind or thought or consciousness or whatever, as well possibly as something that gives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his si...lence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought, he will regain his tongue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »