The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders,... its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light... I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There's a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:... We grow sea-green at last and coldly die In brininess and volubility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dost thou ask what I mean by emancipation?... 1. It is "to reject with indignation, the wile and guilty phantasy, that man can hol...d property in man." 2. To pay the laborer his hire, for he is worthy of it. 3. No longer to deny him the right of marriage, but to "let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband," as saith the apostle. 4. To let parents have their own children, for they are the gift of the Lord to them, and no one else has any right to them. 5. No longer to withhold the advantages of education and the privilege of reading the bible. 6. To put the slave under the protection of equitable laws. Now, why should not all this be done immediately? Which of these things is to be done next year, and which the year after? and so on. Our immediate emancipation means, doing justice and loving mercy to-day--and this is what we call upon every slaveholder to do. I have seen too much of slavery to be a gradualist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I kno...w? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In every philosophical school, three thinkers succeed one another in the following way: the first produces out of himself the sap ...and seed, the second draws it out into threads and spins a synthetic web, and the third waits in this web for the sacrificial victims that are caught in it--and tries to live off philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do ...we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and given them an idea of something better. A better state of one's feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one's self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »