AncienTrails

“You should become the person you are.”

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treausre of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”

“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike – and yet it is the most precious thing we have.”

“One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.”

“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

“Our separation from each other is an illusion of consciousness.”

“Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here involuntary and uninvited for a short stay, without knowing the whys and the wherefore. In our daily lives we only feel that man is here for the sake of others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own.”

“The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.”

“But in the mud and scum of things There always something sings…”

“But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the way-side as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says,—”Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus.”

“By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.”

“Don’t you believe that there is in man a deep that is so profound as to be hidden even to him in whom it is?”

“Few rich men own their property; the property owns them.”

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

“Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

“The power and nature of Soul encompasses heaven and guides it according to its will. To all this vast expanse, as far as it extends, it gives itself, and every interval, both large and small, is filled with Soul… Soul enlivens all things with its whole self and all Soul is present everywhere… And vast and diversified thought this universe is, it is one by the power of soul and a god because of soul. The sun is also a god, because ensouled, and the other stars, and if we ourselves partake of the Divine, this is the cause.”

“You are eternity’s hostage. A captive of time.”

“Color possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.”

“There was a child who dreamed
of a little cardboard horse.
When he opened up his eyes,
the horse was not to be seen.
The child had another dream,
of a little white horse this time.
He grabbed it by the mane …
Now you won’t get away!
No sooner was it caught
than the child woke up again.
His fist was clenched tight shut
but the horse had disappeared!
This was no laughing matter:
he thought there is no truth
in a horse you only dream of-
and he never dreamed again.
But the child became a youth
and the youth soon fell in love.
He used to ask his sweetheart:
Are you really so or not?
And when the youth grew old,
he thought: it’s all a dream-
the little horse you dream of
and the horse that’s really there.
And when it came time to die
the old man spoke to his heart:
Are you a dream? he asked.
Perhaps he woke up-who knows!”

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

“Perhaps I am no one.
True, I have a body
and I cannot escape from it.
I would like to fly out of my head,
but that is out of the question.
It is written on the tablet of destiny
that I am stuck here in this human form.
That being the case
I would like to call attention to my problem.”

“A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.”

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

“Philosophers will conduct their discussions of Locke, Hume, and empiricism without ever taking into account that there is an explicit connection in these classic writers between their ‘philosophic’ doctrines and racial theory, justifications of slavery, or arguments for colonial exploitation. These are common enough ways by which contemporary scholarship keeps itself pure.”

“Very early in my life, it was too late.”

“The body says what words cannot.”

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.”

“Art is what you can get away with.”

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”