A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.
America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.
We're creators by permission, by grace as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world, and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world.
He saw that science had become as great a hoax as religion, that nationalism was a farce, patriotism a fraud, education a form of leprosy, and that morals were for cannibals
I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live - if what others are doing is called living - but to express myself.
The history of the world is the history of the privileged few.
'Life', said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day." If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine.
Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes.
Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.
The most wonderful opportunity which life offers is to be human.
It is our destiny to live with the wrong as well as the right kind of citizens, and to learn from them, the wrong-minded ones, as much or more as from others. If we have not yet succeeded -after how many centuries?- in eliminating from life the elements which plague us perhaps we need to question life more closely. Perhaps our refusal to face reality is the only ill we suffer from, and all the rest but illusion and delusion. (p.26)
Day by day. No yesterdays and no tomorrows. The barometer never changes, the flag is always at half-mast.
Until we lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.
The goal of life is not to possess power but to radiate it.
For the moment I can think of nothing— except that I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world.
To make living itself an art, that is the goal.
Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.
Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.
Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.
It is silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites.
The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.
Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.
Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.
All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.
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