I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.
A wise man adapts himself to circumstances, as water shapes itself to the vessel that contains it.
On the Bigotry of Culture: : it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to...
Memory deludes me. I have just remembered something that I completely forgot after it happened. I remembered it again when I was about sixteen, and then I forgot it again. And this morning I remembered not the event itself but the previous recollecti...
Isn't it time that, in love, we freed ourselves from the loved one and, trembling, endured: as the arrow endures the string, collecting itself to be more than itself as it shoots?
Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats it...
History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.
If there is nothing new under the sun, at least the sun itself is always new, always re-creating itself out of its own inexhaustible fire.
By itself, tofu is like wet foam rubber, but you'd no more eat it by itself and expect fine dining than you would stare at a blank canvas and expect to see fine art.
Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.
Sense is a line, the mind is a circle. Sense is like a line which is the flux of a point running out from itself, but intellect like a circle that keeps within itself.
The final hour when we cease to exist does not itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way.
Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it's caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.
When you don't change, history repeats itself. Then you have to decide if changing is for the best, or you keep seeing repeats because you're doing something right.
Growing up, I was encouraged to get a good education, get a real job doing something I enjoyed, and, should the opportunity present itself, consider public service as just that: a chance to serve, not an end in itself.
If there is an authoritarian structure at St. Hill it has been brought into being by the government itself. St. Hill is trying to correct itself. It doesn't know what it's trying to correct because nobody has told it what to correct.
If liberalism discredited itself, Obama woulda never gotten elected, and the New Deal woulda gone by the wayside, and LBJ woulda never gotten the Great Society. Liberalism does not discredit itself. It has to be explained and beaten back.
If thou desire the love of God and man, be humble, for the proud heart, as it loves none but itself, is beloved of none but itself. Humility enforces where neither virtue, nor strength, nor reason can prevail.
Realization is not about you, the wave, realizing it is ocean. The ocean realizes itself in you and reveals itself to have never been just a wave. Nothing changes except the falling away of a false belief.
A voice expressing emotion in a musical way moves on. It's like the finale of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - the world turns in on itself, as a universe unto itself, in the shape of one human being.
