Internal Movement

"Those folks who are concerned with freedom, real freedom — not the freedom to say "shit" in public or to criticize their leaders or to worship God in the church of their choice, but the freedom to be free of language and gods — well, they must use style to alter content. If style is masterful, if it is fluid and at the same time complete, then we can re-create ourselves, or rather, we can re-create the Infinite Goof within us. We can live on top of content, float above predictable responses, social programming and hereditary circuitry, letting the bits of color and electricity and light filter up to us, where we may incorporate them at will into our actions. That's what the voices said. They said that content is what man harbors but does not parade. And I love a parade"
— Tom Robbins, spoken by character Amanda, in Another Roadside Attraction (1971), Part III, p. 250.

Everybody wants to be somebody, but nobody wants to grow.
— Wolfgang Goethe

"It was pity made you cry," she said. "Pity, not for this person or that person who is suffering, but for all things — for the very nature of things. Unless a man has pity he is inhuman and not yet truly a man, for out of pity comes the balm which heals. Only good men weep. If a man has not wept at the world's pain he is less than the dirt he walks upon because the dirt will nourish seed, root, stalk, leaf and flower, but the spirit of a man without pity is barren and will bring forth nothing — or only pride which must finally do murder of one sort or another — murder of good things, or murder even of human lives." Now Mrs. Macauley returned to the sink of the kitchen where she began new work — work which even Homer knew was unnecessary.
     "There will always be pain in things," Mrs. Macauley said. "Knowing this does not mean that a man shall despair. The good man will seek to take pain  out of things. The foolish man will not even notice it except in himself. And the evil man will drive pain deeper into things and spread it about wherever he goes. But each man is guiltless, for the evil man no less than the foolish man or the good man did not ask to come here and did not come alone, from nothing, but from many worlds and from multitudes. The evil do not know they are evil and are therefore innocent. The evil man must be forgiven every day. He must be loved, because something of him is in each of us. He is ours and we are his. None of us is separate from any other. The peasant's prayer is my prayeer, the assassin's crime is my crime. Last night you cried because you began to know these things."
— William Saroyan, The Human Comedy, pp. 188-189.

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the srtarkest madness.
'Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, — you're straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.
— Emily Dickinson