I call demonic the restlessness which is innate and essential in every human being ... (that which) drives one beyond one's limits... into the infinite, into the elemental, as though nature had left behind in every individual soul an inexpressible, restless part of its original chaos, a part that wants to return with tension and passion to the super-human super-sensual element. The demon embodies the ferment, that bubbling, torturesome, upsetting ferment, which urges an otherwise calm life to move in the direction of all that is dangerous, towards excesses, ecstasy, selfdenial, selfdestruction; in most human beings, in the mediocre, this precious but dangerous part of the soul is soon absorbed and consumed ... restrained human beings stifle the Faustian drive within them, chloroform it with morality, dull it with work, restrain it with orderliness; the middle class person is always the mortal enemy of the chaotic.... But in superior human beings, especially in those who are productive, creative restlessness prevails in the form of dissatisfaction with everyday accomplishments.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For a parent, it's hard to recognize the significance of your work when you're immersed in the mundane details. Few of us, as we r...un the bath water or spread the peanut butter on the bread, proclaim proudly, "I'm making my contribution to the future of the planet." But with the exception of global hunger, few jobs in the world of paychecks and promotions compare in significance to the job of parent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,... So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Labor came to humanity with the fall from grace and was at best a penitential sacrifice enabling purity through humiliation. Labor... was toil, distress, trouble, fatigue--an exertion both painful and compulsory. Labor was our animal condition, struggling to survive in dirt and darkness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker's body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish wit...h strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers' intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and re...vised.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »