I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?
The masculine imagination lives in a state of perpetual revolt against the limitations of human life. In theological terms, one might say that all men, left to themselves, become gnostics. They may swagger like peacocks, but in their heart of hearts they all think sex an indignity and wish they could beget themselves on themselves. Hence the aggressive hostility toward women so manifest in most club-car stories.
Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.
What we have not named as a symbol escapes our notice.
In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: they must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it - not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of others for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it.
The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.
A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist, an artist. This means that in order to be a good doctor a man must also have a good character, that is to say, whatever weaknesses and foibles he may have, he must love his fellow human beings in the concrete and desire their good before his own.
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they're glad to see you.
If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try.
Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.
Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.
How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.
The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.
To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself.
The ideal audience the poet imagines consists of the beautiful who go to bed with him, the powerful who invite him to dinner and tell him secrets of state, and his fellow-poets. The actual audience he gets consists of myopic schoolteachers, pimply young men who eat in cafeterias, and his fellow-poets. This means, in fact, he writes for his fellow-poets.
Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.
A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.
Sincerity is technique.
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