Sage Advice

     "Be so occupied in the Path of God as if you had forgotten all other things. Seek solitude. It is better to pray for men in their absence than to meet them and talk to them. Who knows, when you meet them and talk to them, you may be tempted to introduce an element of exhibition in your actions."
— Owais bin Aamir Qarni, from #12, in A Rosary of Islamic Readings, G. Allana (ed.), pp. 14-15.

In writing this book on the history of the Muwallid poets, I have given such of their poems as I myself thought to be their most representative and best work. In making my choice and my selection, I proceeded with the utmost care and to the best of my ability. The wise ones say that a man's intelligence is indicated by that which he chooses, and that the faculty to choose well proceeds from an abundance of understanding. Some of them have also said that a man's poetry is a part of his discourse, that the opinions he holds are a part and parcel of his understanding, and that the faculty of choosing is a part of his acquired knowledge.
— Harun ibn Ali al-Munajjim (861-901), Ibid., #175, p. 135.

     I remember, being pious in my childhood, rising in the night, addicted to devotion and abstinence. One night I was sitting with my father, remaining awake and holding the Holy Qur'an in my hands, while the people around us were all asleep. I said, "Not one of these people lifts his head or makes a bow. They sleep as if they were dead."
     He replied, "Darling of thy father! Would thou wert also asleep, rather than disparaging people."
     The pretender sees no one but himself
     Because he has the veil of conceit in front;
     If he were endowed with a God-discerning eye,
     He would see that no one is weaker than himself.
— Shaikh Sa'di (1184-1292), Ibid., #361, p. 270.

If those that are educated do not impart knowledge to the uneducated, then the ignorance will lead the latter to Hell.
     And if of a people the uneducated commit sins through ignorance, then God will throw those that were educated among them into Hell.
     As I happen to be one of them, I say most unambiguously that on the Day of Judgement God will say, "You were the educated. Why did you not stop the ignorant ones from straying into sin?" Thus on Judgement Day the educated will be held responsible.
     When God on the Day of Judgement calls the uneducated ones to account, they will say, "There was one among us who was educated, but he did not teach us."
     Thus will God hold us, those that are well-informed and endowed with knowledge, all the more responsible for our lapses and dereliction of duty.
     It is for this fear, as well as out of respect and love for our Holy Prophet, that I have decided to inform you and to warn you, so that you do not fall into sin. God has in His mercy enabled me to understand the Holy Book. I am therefore writing this book for your guidance.
— Sayyid Sultan (1550-1646), Ibid., #438, p. 321.

Old Wisdom New

     The natural desire of good men is knowledge.
     I know that many will call this a useless work, and they will be those of whom Demetrius said that he took no more account of the wind that produced the words in their mouths than that of the wind that comes out of their hinder parts: men whose only desire is for material riches and luxury and who are entirely destitute of the desire of wisdom, the sustenance and the only true riches of the soul. For as the soul is more worthy than the body so much are the soul's riches more worthy than those of the body. And often when I see one of these men take this work in hand I wonder whether he will not put it to his nose like the ape and ask me whether it is something to eat.
— The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Proem, C.A. 119 v.a, Edward  MacCurdy (arranger and tr.), p. 58.

     Two weaknesses leaning together create a strength. Therefore the half of the world leaning against the other half becomes firm.
— Ibid., C.A. 244 v.a, p.65.

     While I thought I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
— Ibid., C.A. 252 r.a, p. 65.

     Every part of an element separated from its mass desires to return to it by the shortest way.
— Ibid., C.A. 273 r.b, p. 65.

     One ought not to desire the impossible.
— Ibid., from "Of What Force Is," E. 31 v., p. 69.

     I have so many words in my mother-tongue that I ought rather to complain of the lack of a right understanding of things, than of a lack of words with which fully to express the conception that is in my mind.
— Ibid., from "Personalia," Quaderni II 16 r., p. 1130.

     I have wasted my hours.
— Leonardo da Vinci, Ibid., Quaderni III 12 v., p. 1130.

Just Wisdom

     Said the Hafetz Hayyim: "An infant in his cradle imagines that he can do anything, but in reality he is helpless. The same is true of the grown man."
— Aryeh Pupko, Mikhtevei ha-Rav Hafetz Hayyim, p. 100, in Maggidim and Hasidim: Their Wisdom, Louis I. Newman, p. 141.

     Said the Dubner: "A thief broke into a delicatessen store one night and stole some of the provisions. He left the door ajar, and others who chanced to pass by early in the morning also helped themselves. Then dogs and cats entered and added to the damage. The original thief was caught and offered restitution for what he had stolen. The owner refused the offer, however, saying: 'You must be punished severely because you left the door open and considerable loss resulted as a consequence.'
     "From this we learn: 'the transgression of a man who points out the way or who is respected and imitated by others, must be expiated much more thoroughly than the offense of an ordinary person.'"
— Israel J. Zevin, Alle Meshalim von Dubner Maggid, i, pp. 306-307, in Ibid., pp. 180-181.

     The Dubner Maggid was asked: "Why does a rich man prefer to aid a needy cripple more than a needy learned man?"
     "Because," replied the Maggid, "the wealthy man is not sure that he may not become a cripple himself some day. But it is a certainty that he will never become a learned man."
— Ibid., i., 46, in Ibid., p. 187.

     Said the Besht: "Just as a man cannot fully appreciate the taste of a new article of food until he has tasted it, so he cannot comprehend the estate of being attached to God in reverence and love before he has attained this state. No amount of explanation in words will avail."
     "An unclean thought breeds an unclean view of life. It is a spiritual hybrid."
     "Your body was given to your soul as a gift. Keep it clean and do not castigate it."
     "God has sent you into this world on an appointed errand. It is His will that you accomplish your errand in a state of joy. Sadness implies an unwillingness on your part to do God's will."
     "A man is in error if he declares that the world is without meaning. On the contrary this world is beautiful and good if you behave properly therein."
     "If a man engages in severe fasting and imagines that thereby he has achieved much, he is mistaken, for the soul becomes no purer by such conduct."
     "Your prayer is worthier if you do not move your body during it. But you are permitted to pray thus if no foreign thoughts assail you."
     "There are two ways to serve the Lord. One is to separate yourself from people and from mundane affairs, and to devote yourself wholly to a study of religious books. This is the safe way. The other way is to mingle with people, to engage in the affairs of the world, and, at the same time, to seek to teach godliness by example. This is the dangerous way, but it is by all means the worthier."
     The Besht observed a man completely absorbed in studying a religious book. He remarked: "This man is so deeply buried in his studies that he forgets there is a God in the world."
     Said the Besht: "My Disciples will be as numerous as the leaves on a tree, and each one will act differently from the other. Yet every one will maintain that he truly imitates and follows my ways."
— Z. S. Srebrak, Sippure Zaddikim, p. 18, in Ibid., pp. 235-236.

Present Holiness

Men take their misfortunes to heart, and keep them there. A gambler does not talk about his loses; the frequenter of brothels, who finds his favorite engaged by another, pretends to be just as well off without her; the professional street-brawler is quiet about the fights he has lost; and a merchant who speculates in goods will conceal the loses he may suffer. All act as one who steps on dog dung in the dark.
— Anthology of Japanese Literature, Donald Keene (ed.), p. 350, Theodore de Bary (tr.).

     One evening, more than twenty years ago, Giacometti was hit by a car while crossing the Place d'Italie. Though his leg was twisted, his first feeling, in the state of livid swoon into which he had fallen, was a kind of joy: "Something has happened to me at last!" I know his radicalism: he expected the worst. The life which he so loved and which he would not have changed for any other was knocked out of joint, perhaps shattered, by the stupid violence of chance: "So," he thought to himself, "I wasn't meant to be a sculptor, nor even to live. I wasn't meant for anything." What thrilled him was the menacing order of causes that was suddenly unmasked and the act of staring with the petrifying gaze of a cataclysm at the lights of the city, at human beings, at his own body lying flat in the mud: for a sculptor, the mineral world is never far away. I admire the will to welcome everything. If one likes surprises, one must like them to that degree, one must like even the rare flashes which reveal to devotees that the earth is not meant for them.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words (autobiography), pp. 232-233.

     What I like about my madness is that it has protected me from the very beginning against the charms of the "élite": never have I thought that I was the happy possessor of a "talent"; my sole concern has been to save myself — nothing in my hands, nothing up my sleeve — by work and faith. As a result, my pure choice did not raise me above anyone. Without equipment, without tools, I set all of me to work in order to save all of me. If I relegate impossible Salvation to the proproom, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Ibid., last paragraph, p. 235.

     Said the Hafetz Hayyim: "We read in the Exodus 3:5 : 'Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.' Every man needs to attain a higher position in the realm of goodness. Do not say: 'I can uplift myself only under different circumstances.' No, the place whereon thou standest is holy ground, namely available for moral uplift. It is necessary only to put off thy uncleanness, and to strive to ascend to holier ground."
— Aryeh Pupko, Mikhtevei ha-Hafetz Hayyim, p. 94, in Maggidim and Hasidim: Their Wisdom, Louis I. Newman, p. 9.

     Once when the Rabbi of Tzanz was studying intently the subject of Emanation (a term of the Kabbalah) he began to cough violently. His son brought him a cup of hot tea and urged his father to drink it. The old Rabbi exclaimed: "In the World of Emanation tea is not drunk."
     "True, father," replied the son, "but in the World of Emanation one does not cough."
— Yeshua Raker, Der Sanger, Reb Hayyim Halberstamm, p. 100, in Ibid., p. 42.

     Rabbi Akiba Eger, the illustrious Rabbi of Posen, explained the Talmudic saying: "If the Former Teachers (Rishonim) were angels, we are men; if, however, they were men, we are donkeys." He said: "If we consider the words of the Former Sages as words of angels who cannot err, then we are men, and we labor to comprehend them. But if we consider the Former Sages to be mere men, liable to error, we ourselves behave like donkeys. Everytime we find a difficulty in their words, we remark: it is an error, and we do not labor to clarify the matter."
— S. Sopher, Hut Hameshulash, p. 60, in Ibid., p. 132.

Write Hear

Letter to a writer who asked: "Why does one write?"

     Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me: the world of my parents, the world of Henry Miller, the world of Gonzalo, or the world of wars. I  had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art. The artist is the only one who knows the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materilization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it, he hopes to impose this particular vision and share it with others. When the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others.
     We also write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth, we write to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write. Because our culture has no use for any of that. When I don't write I feel my world shrinking, I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 5: 1947-1955, pp. 149-150.

     The mind turns and works
     In accordance with ten thousand situations.
     Wherever it may turn,
     It is mysteriously serene.

     I raise my hand, and the sun and moon lose their light under my hand. I lift my foot, and the vastness of the earth is altogether gone under my foot. There is no room at all here for intellect.
— from Zenkei's Teisho on Mumon's Poem to Koan #8, in Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, Zenkei Shibayama, p. 75.

     The top of a pole one hundred feet high is the summit of the highest mountain; which signifies the purest spirituality in which no thought has started to move. To be at the top means that he has opened his spiritual eye. If he settles down there, however, it turns out to be a cave. He has to go into the defiled world, hiding his brilliance. With his face covered with sweat and his head with dust, he has to live and work on the busy and crowed street. A Zen man of real attainment and capability is one who has cast off the holy smack of satori. If you have any satori at all, cast away every bit of it! This is why humble attitudes and compassionate working are to be developed. To talk about such a Zen life may be easy, but to live up to it in actuality is not easy at all, and that is why Master Mumon stresses this point in the koan.
— from Zenkei's Teisho on Mumon's Koan #46, in Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, Zenkei Shibayama, p. 312

"A hundred men scrambling to fetch a gourd by cart will accomplish less than one man holding it in his hand and walking purposefully. For if the hundred actually manage to get it aboard their wagon you may be quite sure that the gourd would be split asunder when it arrived....
— from Intrigues of the Warring States, I (c. 200 B.C.), J. I. Crump, (tr.), in Anthology of Chinese Literature, Cyril Birch (ed.), p. 39.

Start There Here

The exceptional is always usual
     And the Usual exceptional.
To choose what is difficult all one's days
As if it were easy, that is faith, Joseph, praise.
— W. H. Auden, For the Time Being, on pp. 131-197 of Collected Longer Poems of W. H. Auden, p. 153.

....began myself to put into practice very insistently, and even with a constant self-derision, that religious philosophical principle known by men for centuries, and according to which our ancestors and even some contemporary people who reached, thanks to their good life, a certain degree of self-consciousness, dedicated a third of each year of their life — depending on which part would least interfere with the obligation of their ordinary life, — for self-perfection or, as they say, for "saving their souls"; this principle could be formulated in this way: "TO - BE - PATIENT - TOWARDS - EVERY - BEING - AND - NOT - TO- ATTEMPT - BY - THE - POSSIBILITY - IN - OUR - POWER - TO - ALTER - THE - CONSEQUENCES - OF - THE - EVIL - DEEDS - OF - OUR - NEIGHBORS," .....
— G. Gurdjieff, Herald of the Coming Good, p. 67.
cf. Christ's "resist not evil."

     "Marshlands," I began, "is the story of the neutral ground which belongs to everybody... — or, to put it better, it's about the normal man, the foundation on which everyone begins — it's the story of the third person, he of whom one speaks, — who lives in each of us, but dies not when we die. — In Virgil he is called Tityrus — and we are expressly told that he is lying down — 'Tityrus recubans.'" Marshlands is the story of the man who lies down."
     "I say," said Petras, "— I thought it was the story of a bog."
     "Sir," said I, "opinions differ, the essence endures. Try to understand I beg of you, that the way of telling the same thing to everyone — I say, mark you, the same thing, is to change its form to suit each new mind that receives it. — At the present moment, Marshlands is the story of Angela's drawing-room."
— André Gide, Marshlands and Pronetheus Misbound (Two Satires), Painter (tr.), p. 50.

....Art consists in depicting a particular subject with sufficient power for the generality on which it depended to be comprehended in it. This can only be expressed very badly in abstract terms, because it is itself an abstract thought — but you will, assuredly, take my meaning, if you think of all the enormous landscape that passes through a keyhole, as soon as the eye gets near enough to the door. A person who sees nothing there but a keyhole, would see the whole world through it, if only he thought of bending down. It is enough that there should be the possibility of generalization; to make that generalization is the part of the reader, the critic."
— André Gide, Ibid., pp. 51-52.

Where dost thou stand behind them all, my lover, hiding thyself in the shadows? They push thee and pass thee by on the dusty road, taking thee for naught. I wait here weary hours spreading my offerings for thee, while passers by come and take my flowers, one by one, and my basket is nearly empty.
     The morning time is past, and the noon. In the shade of evening my eyes are drowsy with sleep. Men going home glance at me and smile and fill me with shame. I sit like a beggar maid, drawing my skirt over my face, and when they ask me, what it is I want, I drop my eyes and answer them not.
     Oh, how, indeed, could I tell them that for thee I wait, and that thou hast promised to come. How could I utter for shame that I keep for my dowry this poverty. Ah, I hug this pride in the secret of my heart.
     I sit on the grass and gaze upon the sky and dream of the sudden splendour of thy coming — all the lights ablaze, golden pennons flying over the car, and they at the roadside standing agape, when they see thee come down from thy seat to raise me from the dust, and set at thy side this ragged beggar girl a-tremble with shame and pride, like a creeper in a summer breeze.
     But time glides on and still no sound of the wheels of thy chariot. Many a procession passes by with noise and shouts and glamour of glory. Is it only thou who wouldst stand in the shadow silent and behind them all? And only I who would wait and weep and wear out my heart in vain longing?
— Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali (Song Offerings), 41, pp. 32-34.

Inward Peace

Activity is better than inertia. Act, but with self-control. If you are lazy, you cannot even sustain your own body.
     The world is imprisoned in its own activity, except when actions are performed as worship of God. therefore you must perform every action sacramentally, and be free from all attachment to results.
— Bhagavad-Gita (The Song of God), Prabhavanada and Isherwood (trs.), p. 52.

     As for those others, the devotees of God the manifest, indefinable and changeless, they worship that which is omnipresent, constant, eternal, beyond thought's compass, never to be moved. They hold all the senses in check. They are tranquil-minded, and devoted to the wellfare of humanity. They see Atman in every creature. They also will certainly come to me.
     But the devotees of the unmanifest have a harder task, because the unmanifest is very difficult for embodied souls to realize.
— Ibid., p. 128.

When the mind and the heart
Are freed from delusion,
United with Brahman,
When steady will
Has subdued the senses,
When sight and taste
And sound are abandoned
Without regretting,
Without aversion;
When man seeks solitude,
Eats but little,
Curbing his speech,
His mind and his body,
Ever engaged
In his meditation
On Brahman the truth,
And full of compassion;
When he casts from him
Vanity, violence,
Pride, lust, anger
And all his possessions,
Totally free
From the sense of ego
And tranquil of heart:
That man is ready
For oneness with Brahman.

And he who dwells
United with Brahman,
Calm in mind,
Not grieving, nor craving,
Regarding all men
With equal acceptance:
He loves me most dearly.

To love is to know me,
My innermost nature,
The truth that I am:
Through this knowledge he enters
At once to my Being.

All that he does
Is offered before me
In utter surrender:
My grace is upon him,
He finds the eternal,
The place unchanging.
— Ibid., pp. 170-171.

Honestly, Slander Honest?!

     I am well aware that the problem barely begins at this point; for Vae soli.... [footnote 3: "...Woe to him that is alone..." Ecclesiastes, iv, 10.] I was accused of trying to distinguish myself. My mind is as little inclined to controversy as a mind can be. Instead of standing up to my opponent, I wear myself out trying to understand him. It always seems to me that between men of good faith equally concerned with the public welfare there must eventually be agreement. But they are not of good faith, as I am reluctantly obliged to admit. — Are you now speaking of Communists or Catholics [Gide's friends who converted]? — In the beginning I was thinking only of the latter, then let myself be carried away; because it is true for the one group as it is for the other the moment they believe that the end justifies the means. From that specious doctrine have been born, and are born even today, the most abominable errors. Bad faith consists in pretending to lay one's cards on the table while keeping the winning trumps up one's sleeve. What is the use of discussing in such a case? You merely waste your ink, your time, and your patience. The only thing to do is to carry on and to act as if it were nothing....
— André, So Be It or The Chips are Down, Justin O'Brien (tr.), p. 46.

....It is certain that the man who wonders as he takes up his pen: what service can be performed by what I am about to write? is not a born writer, and would do better to give up producing at once. Verse or prose, one's work is born of a sort of imperative one cannot elude. It results (I am now speaking only of the authentic writer) from an artesian gushing-forth, almost unintentional, on which reason, critical spirit, and art operate only as regulators. But once the page is written, he may wonder: what's the use? ... And when I turn to myself, I think that what above all urged me to write is an urgent need of understanding.... But I know that today many seek their way gropingly and don't know in whom to trust. To them I say: believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it; doubt everything, but don't doubt yourself. There is more light in Christ's words than in any other human word. This is not enough, it seems to be a Christian: in addition, one must believe. Well, I do not believe. Having said this, I am your brother.
— André Gide, Ibid., pp. 145-146.

     No, I cannot assert that with the end of this notebook all will be finished; that all will be over. Perhaps I shall have a desire to add something. To add something or other. To make an addition. Perhaps. At the last moment, to add something still ... I am sleepy, to be sure. But I don't feel like sleeping. It strikes me that I could be even more tired. It is I don't know what hour of the night or of the morning .... Do I still have something to say?
     My own position in the sky, in relation to the sun, must not make me consider the dawn any less beautiful.
[— last lines, written on 13 Ferruary 1951, six days before death; O'Brien ]
— André Gide, Ibid., p. 166.

Accept Acceptance

....Not a word too many; not a line, not one of the remarks in the dialogue, that is not revelatory. It is a perfect object. [La Fontaine's The Wolf and the Lamb] But the taste for perfection is being lost, and I foresee a time when it will even cause people to smile indulgently as one smiles at children's games, when the "quod decet," harmonious ponderation, the nuance, and art, in short, will yield to qualities of impact and to practical considerations, when the fact alone will matter. "Somber pleasure of a melancholy heart," it will be all up with you! Here begins the virile age, the age of reality.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide: Volume IV: 1939-1949, 1943, p. 216.

     And likewise for the mollusk and its shell. Likewise constantly and everywhere in nature the solution is inseparable from the problem. Or rather: there is no problem; there are only solutions. Man's mind invents the problem afterward. He sees problems everywhere. It's screaming.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1947, from Autumn Leaves, p. 276.

     Take things, not for what they claim to be, but for what they are.
     Play the game with the hand one has.
     Insist upon oneself as one is.
     This does not keep one from struggling against all the lies, falsifications, etc., that men have contributed to and imposed on a natural state of things, against which it is useless to revolt. There is the inevitable and the modifiable. Acceptance of the modifible is in no wise included in amor fati.
     This does not keep one, either from demanding of oneself the best, after one has recognized it as such. For one does not make oneself any more lifelike by giving precedence to the less good.
— André Gide, Ibid., p. 280.

....And it is in this regard that the leaders of the new generation, who gauge a work according to its immediate efficacy, differ most from us. They also aim for an immediate success, whereas we considered it quite natural to remain unknown, unappreciated, and disdained until after forty-five. We were banking on time, concerned only with forming a lasting work like those we admired, on which time has but little hold and which aspire to seem as moving and timely tomorrow as today.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1948, p. 288.

     I once wrote, I don't know now just where [footnote: Chiefly in Les Nouvelles Nourritures of 1935....], that I was certainly not indifferent to the fate of the world after I should cease to be here to suffer from or enjoy it. This  is true, and I have often shown myself (or more precisely pretended) to be more optimistic than I was in reality. Some days, if I let myself go, I should screame with despair. But a few glimmers of true virtue, self-sacrifice, nobility, and dignity are enough to obliterate the discouraging accumulation of stupidity, gluttony, and abjection. The sparks of virtue seem to me more dazzling by contrast. And I am willing to admit that, without them, our sorry world would be but an incoherent tissue of absurdities. But there they are, nevertheless, and I intend to count on them.
— André Gide, So Be It or The Chips are Down, Justin O'Brien (tr.),
p. 44.

Tea Parties ARE Mad

     What they are seeking and hoping for is a return to the past, and that past, however pleasant it was for some, did not seem very respectable to me. It may even be said that people took pleasure in a rather shameful state of affairs. Humanity seemed to me rather to deserve slavery; and if only the slavery that threatened us, and still threatens us, had been a submission to nobler values, I am not sure that I might not have gone so far as to welcome it. Liberty seems to me deserved solely by the man who could utilize it for an end other than himself or who would demand of himself some exemplary development. The stagnation of the greatest possible number of representatives of a second-rate humanity in a second-rate everyday happiness is not an "ideal" to which I can lose my heart. We can and must aim toward something better.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, Volume IV: 1939-1949, 16 January, 1941, pp. 58-59.

     It is independently of our will that ideas take shape in us and develop. There exists for them a sort of "struggle for life," of survival of the fittest, and some of them die of exhaustion. The sturdiest are those that feed not on abstraction, but on life; they are also the ones that are hardest to formulate.
     The history of an idea would be interesting to write. It may also be that an idea dies. Yes, it would be a fine subject: the birth, life, and death of an idea. If only I could count on enough time to write it.... (sic)
— André Gide, Ibid., 1942, p. 106.

     There are those who would like to ameliorate men and there are those who hold that that cannot be done without first ameliorating the conditions of their life. But it soon appears that one cannot be divorced from the other, and you don't know where to begin. Some days humanity strikes me as so miserable that the happiness of a few seems impious.
— André Gide, Ibid., pp. 125-126.

     One reads in a note to Sainte-Beuve's Port-Royal (Book III, Chapter vii): "A keen student of mankind has pointed out that sometimes quoting one's own remark as coming from another shows it off to advantage and succeeds better." A device of which he often made use himself, of which he doubtless makes use even here when he speaks of "a keen student of mankind," who is probably none other than he.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1943, p. 178.

Just consider what rosebushes become in bad soil and without sun and attention. You accuse people; I accuse only their poverty and those who caused it and maintain it for their own profit. — It is essential to know whether one is for the greater number or for the choice few. Their interests seem opposed. But are they really? ... This is not merely a question of humanity, of humanitarianism; art and culture are at stake.
— André Gide, Ibid., p. 207.

Wandering Wonderment

     I wonder whether ... No, I don't wonder anything. The whole world, and I to begin with, is merely a series of replies to questions that, all things considered, it is not really necessary, nor even expedient, to ask. Since the question can only come too late.
     Understanding is asking yourself a certain question to which what you understand becomes the very exact reply.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide: Volume III: 1928-1939, Justin O'Brien (tr.), 18 May, 1929, p. 53.

     The love of truth is not the need of certainty and it is very unwise to confuse one with the other.
     One can love the truth all the more while not believing it ever possible to reach an absolute toward which nevertheless that fragmentary truth leads us.
     I have often been in a position to observe that certain religious minds, and notably the Catholics, are less inclined to pay attention to that partial truth (the only one, however, that we can ever seize) the more they think themselves in possession of a superior Truth to which the whole tangible world and whatever knowledge we can have of it are subordinate. And this is very easily understandable. He who believes the bolt hurled by a God does not observe the lightning; nor the germination of a seed, nor the metamorphosis of an insect, if he is satisfied to recognize in all these natural phenomena a constant miracle and mere obedience to a continuous divine intervention. Likewise he who thinks he is in possession of a dogmatic truth will consider to be in error all those for whom the dogma does not furnish a sufficient reply to their interrogations. All knowledge has as starting-point a skepticism, against which faith stands opposed.
— André Gide, Ibid.,  p. 73.

     My reality always remains slightly fantastic. After all, I never succeed in completely believing in it (any more than in life) and have never been able to subscribe to Gautier's remark: "The artist is a man for whom the outer world exists." How much more often the artist, always somewhat of a mystic, is he who does not believe, not completely, in the reality (in the single reality, at least) of the outer world.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1930, p. 114.

     That self-indulgence to which love invites us, drawing from us not the best but what is most likely to please others; you do not so much raise him as he debases you. The leveling process is of necessity effected at the expense of the superior one.
     What a masterpiece I should write on this subject if only I were  thirty and with the experience of my sixty years! But a whole lifetime is not too much to realize, once awakened from that deception, that you have been tricked. And. naturally, the noblest ones make the best dupes.
— André Gide, Ibid., p. 129.

     "The only ones who should write," writes Poulaille, "are those who have something to say." Id est: something to relate. Those who have seen something.
     What an illusion! And how readily one feels, upon reading this or that reportage, for instance, that — however important and passionately interesting it may be — outside of what he has seen, the author has nothing to say to us. The question begins precisely where Poulaille leaves off.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1935, p. 324.

     There is a certain way of adoring God that strikes me as blasphemy. There is a certain way of negating God that approaches adoration.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1937, p.375.

Right Writing Rite

"Bookish" is a reproach that is often directed at me; I lay myself open to it by my habit of always quoting those to whom my thought seems related. People think I took that thought from them; this is false; that thought came to me of itself; but I enjoy, and the more so the bolder the thought is, thinking that it has already inhabited other minds. When, reading them later on, I recognize my thoughts in them, as it happened with Blake, I  go crying their name everywhere and publishing my discovery. I am told that I am wrong. I don't care. I take pleasure in quoting and persuade myself, like Montaigne, that only in the eyes of fools do I appear any less personal for it.
     Those on the contrary who gather the ideas of others take great care to hide their "sources." — There are examples of this among us.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, Volume II: 1914-1927, Justin O'Brien (tr.), 10 January, 1923, p. 320.

... Thus it is that all the events of life, as the events of the war did likewise, serve only to push each person farther in his own direction, so that nothing is more empty and illusory than what is commonly called "experience." — An experience teaches only the good observer; but far from seeking a lesson in it, everyone interprets the conclusion in his own way.
— André Gide, Ibid., p. 321.

     It is very bold to assert that you would have thought just the same without having read certain authors who will later seem to have been yout initiators. Yet it seems to me that had I not known Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Freud, X., or Z., I should have thought just the same, and that I found in them rather an authorization than an awakening. Above all, they taught me to cease doubting myself, not to be afraid of my thought, and to let myself be led by it, since moreover I found them in it.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1924, p. 347.

     I intend to give to those who read me strength, joy, courage, defiance, and perspicacity — but I am above all careful not to give them directions, judging that they can and must find them only by themselves (I was about to say "in themselves"). Develop at one and the same time the critical faculty and energy, those two contraries. Generally we find among intelligent people nothing but the stiff-jointed, and among men of action nothing but fools.
— André Gide, Ibid., p. 350.

     These words of Emanuel Fäy, which his brother repeated to me, these words which were almost his novissima verba, haunt me, obsess me: "There is no fun in playing in a world in which everyone is cheating."
— André Gide, Ibid., p. 422.

     Do not turn away, through cowardice, from despair. Go through it. It is beyond that it is fitting to find a motive for hope. Go straight ahead. Pass beyond. On the other side of the tunnel you will find light again.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, Volume III: 1928-1939, Justin O'Brien (tr.), 1928, p. 33.

Gide's Good Read

     Piano-practice. It is useless, even harmful, to persist in working too long at one time over the same passage. It is better to return to it often; this is what constitutes real patience. Nothing is less romantic. To a vehement capture by assault, it prefers a slow and methodical siege.
     Likewise, for profound difficulties in artistic creation. Likewise in piety and knowledge of God: the apparently most sudden revelation is preceeded by a gradual, slow preparation. The work of art is always the result of an unsatisfied perseverance.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide: Volume II: 1914-1927, Justin O'Brien (tr.), 1916, p. 129.

     What do I care about the controversies and quibbles of the doctors? In the name of science they can deny the miracles; in the name of philosophy, the doctrines; and in the name of history, the facts. They can cast doubt on His very existence, and through philological criticism throw suspicion on the authenticity of the texts. It even pleases me that they should succeed in doing so, for my faith in no wise depends on that.
     I hold this little book in my hand, and no argument either suppresses it or takes it away from me; I hold it fast and can read it when I will. Wherever I open it, it shines in quite divine fashion, and anything that can be brought against it will do nothing against that. This is where Christ escapes the very ones who have come to lay hold of Him, and not through cunning or force and where they, back among the chief priests, when the chief priests and Pharisees ask them: Why have ye not brought him? — Quare non adduxitis illum? — reply: Nunquam sic locutus est homo. — Never man spake thus — sicut hic homo — like this man. (John, vii, 46.)
     I read, in the preface to the Gospels in my Vulgate, that if "instead of making of the apostles witnesses who are reporting what they have seen and heard, one tried to make of them, as the rationalists suppose, writers who are inventing what they say, it would be appropriate to say with Rousseau that the inventor is much more surprising than the hero." I did not know that Rousseau had said that, but I think it also, and that it is not so much a question of believing in the words of Christ because Christ is the Son of God as of understanding that He is the Son of God because His word is divine and infinitely above everything that the art and wisdom of man offers us.
     This divinity is enough for me. My mind and heart are satisfied with this proof. Anything you contribute in addition obscures it.
.... O Lord, it is not because I have been told that you were the Son of God that I listen to your word; but your word is beautiful beyond any human word, and that is how I recognize that you are the Son of God.
— André Gide, Ibid., from Numquid et tu...? (1916-1919), pp. 169-170.

     Et nunc ...
     It is in eternity that right now one must live. And it is right now that one must live in eternity.
     What care I for eternal life without awareness at every instant of the duration?
     Just as Jesus said: I Am the way, the truth, He says: I am the resurrection and the life.
     Eternal life is not only to come. It is right now wholly persent in us; we live it from the moment that we consent to die to ourselves, to obtain from ourselves this renunciation which permits resurrection in eternity. He that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto eternal life. (John, xii, 25.)
     Once more, there is neither prescription nor command here. Simply it is the secret of the higher felicity that Christ, as everywhere else in the Gospels, reveals to us.
     If ye know these things, happy are ye, says Christ later. (John, xiii, 17.) Not: Ye shall be happy — but: happy ARE ye. It is right now and immediately that we can share in felicity.
     What tranquillity! Here truly time stops. Here breathes the Eternal. We enter into the Kingdom of God.
— André Gide, Ibid., from Numquid et tu...? (1916-1919), pp. 172-173.

A Patient Weight

     When I hear myself in conversation, I feel like becoming a Trappist. And all the disgust and exasperation I feel does not correct anything in me. The indulgence others must have to have, at times, to put up with me! There are certain shortcomings of my mind that I know and loathe but that I cannot overcome. If at least I could not be aware of them!
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, Volume I: 1889-1913, Justin O'Brien (tr.), 1912, p. 313.

     If I were to disappear right now, no one could suspect, on the basis of what I have written, the better things I still have to write. What temerity, what assumption of a long life, has allowed me always to keep the most important for the end?! Or, on the contrary, what shyness, what respect for my subject and fear of not yet being worthy of it! ... Thus I put off La Porte etroite [Straight is the Gate, 1909] from year to year. Whom could I persuade that that book is the twin of L'Immoraliste [The Immoralist, 1902] and that the two subjects grew up concurrently in my mind, the excess of one finding a secret permission in the excess of the other and together extablish a balance.
— André Gide, Ibid., Wednesday, 7 February, 1912, p. 318.

     That abominable effort to take one's sin with one to paradise.
     Beware of artistic protestations; the real artist does not sport a red waistcoat and is not eager to talk of his art. Among those who shout so loud, you can be sure that there are not many who, to the immediate success of Pradon, preferred the attentive perfection of the other Phédre.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1913, p. 343.

     The truth is that, as soon as the need to provide for it ceases to force us, we don't know what to do with our life and we waste it wantonly.
 — André Gide, Ibid., p. 344.

     I have never produced anything good except by a long succession of slight efforts. No one has more deeply meditated or better understood than I Buffon's remark about patience. [Footnote 8: Buffon is reported to have said: "Genius is but a greater aptitude for patience."] I bring it not only to my work but also to the silent waiting that precedes good work.
     All the same, by dint of waiting, I wonder if I have given all that I might have. At times it seems to me that everything I have produced up to now was only to prepare for the rest, merely to train my hand, and that everything important remains to be said. (I have already expressed this idea elsewhere, but I feel the need of repeating it as I do so often to myself." At times it strikes me painfully that I have delayed too much and that many of the books that remain to be written should already have been written.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, Volume II: 1914-1927, 4 October, 1915, p. 104.

     If I had to formulate a credo, I should say God is not behind us. He is to come. He must be sought, not at the beginning, but at the end of the evolution. He is terminal and not initial. He is the supreme and final point toward which all nature tends in time. And since time does not exist for Him, it is a matter of indifference to Him whether that evolution of which He is the summit follows or precedes, and whether He determines it by propulsion or attraction.
     It is through man that God is molded. This is what I feel and believe and what I understand in the words: "Let man be created in Our image." What can all the doctrines of evolution do against that thought?
     This is the gate through which I enter into the holy place, this is the series of thoughts that lead me back to God, to the Gospels, etc. ...
     Will I some day succeed in setting this forth clearly?
     For a long time already I have believed this without knowing it, and now it becomes clear to me through a series of successive illuminations. The reasoning follows.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1916, p. 122.

The Great Good Gide

RULE OF CONDUCT
     Pay no attention to appearing. Being is alone important.
     And do not long, through vanity, for a too hasty manifestation of one's essence.
     Whence: do not seek to be through the vain desire to appear; but rather because it is fitting to be so.
— André Gide, The Journals of André Gide, Volume I: 1889-1913, 1890, Justin O'Brien (tr.), p. 8.

     Human laziness is infinite. It is the triumph of inertia over more delicate laws. It is sometimes called wisdom; it prevents what is coming from arriving too quickly.
     Very few people really love life; the horror of any change is a proof of this. The thing they least like to change, with their lodging, is their thought. Wife, friends come afterwards; but lodging and thought involve too great an effort. There you have squatted and there you stay. You furnish the surroundings to your taste, making everything resemble you as closely as possible. You avoid any opportunity for anything to contradict. It is a mirror, a prepared approbation. In this environment you don't live; you take root. Very few, I assure you, really love life.
     Listen to people talk. Who listens to another? The contradictors? Not at all. You listen only to those who repeat your thoughts. The more it is expressed as you would have expressed it yourself, the more willingly you listen. The skill of popular journalists lies in making the imbecile who reads them say: "That's exactly what I was thinking!" We want to be flattered, not rubbed the wrong way. Oh, how slow is the succession of time! What long efforts to move from one place to another! And how we rest between struggles! How, at the least slope, we sit down!
— André Gide, Ibid., 1896, pp. 84-85.

     Gourmont does not understand that all intelligence is not on the side of free thought, and all stupidity on the side of religion; that the artist needs liesure for his work and that nothing keeps the mind so busy as free inquiry and doubt. Skepticism is perhaps sometimes the beginning of wisdom, but it is often the end of art.
— André Gide, Ibid., 3 November, 1905, p. 153.

....He is young and has time to return to nature. But I am frightened by an artist who starts from the simple; I fear that he will end up, not with the complex, but with the complicated.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1908, p. 237.

     Locating the idea of perfection, not in equilibrium and the middle path, but in the extreme and exaggeration is perhaps what will most set off our period and distinguish it most annoyingly.
     To succeed on this plane, one must agree never to be embarrassed by anything. The "quod decet" of art is thc first obstacle to be forgotten....
     The work of art blossoms forth only with the participation, the connivance of all the virtuous elements of the mind.
— André Gide, Ibid., 1910, p. 270.

Says Who?!

     Huxley: "After all, it is better to be a good bourgeois like the others than a bad bohemian, a false aristocrat, or a second-rate intellectual...."
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942, p. 72.

     Decadence! Speeches about decadence! The third century B.C. was a "decadent" century for Greece. With Euclid, Archimedes, Aristarchus, and Hipparchus, it gave the world geometry, physics, astronomy, and trigonometry.
— Albert Camus, Ibid., p.207.

     Gide dinner. Letters from young writers who ask if they should go on. Gide replies: "What? You can keep yourself from writing and you hesitate to do so?"
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951, p. 201.

     If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but the long and painful bringing forth. When the soul is ready, created by us and suffering, death comes along.
— Albert Camus, Ibid., p. 224.

     S. Weil is right; it's not the human being that must be protected, but the possibilities within him. Moreover, she says, "one doesn't enter truth without having passed through one's own annihilation, without having lived at length in a state of total and extreme humiliation." The misfortune (a chance can wipe me out) is that state of humiliation, not anguish. And again: "The spirit of justice and the spirit of truth are one."
— Albert Camus, Ibid., p. 265.

....The kind of faith I had in my predestination as a poet made me welcome whatever happened to me and look at everything I met upon my path as if it had been sent providentially and had been singled out by some divine choice on purpose to win me over, assist and perfect me. I still retain something of this disposition, and in the worst adversities instinctively look round for what may amuse or instruct me. I even push the amor fati so far that I cannot bring myself to believe that any other event, any other issue, would have suited me better. Not only do I consider whatever is is good, I consider it best.
— André Gide, If It Die... (Gide's autobiography), p. 211.

Internal Dialogue

     Every time a man (myself) gives way to vanity, every time he thinks and lives in order to show off, this is a betrayal. Every time, it has always been the great misfortune of wanting to show off which has lessened me in the presence of the truth. We need to reveal ourselves to others, but only to those we love. For then we are no longer revealing ourselves in order to seem but in order to give. There is much more strength in a man who reveals himself only when it is necessary. I have suffered from being alone, but because I have been able to keep my secret I have overcome the suffering of loneliness. To go right to the end implies knowing how to keep one's secret. And, today, there is no greater joy than to live alone and unknown. My deepest joy is to write. To accept the world and to accept pleasure — but only when I am stripped bare of everything. I should not be worthy to love the bare and empty beaches if I could not remain naked in the presence of myself. For the first time I can understand the meaning of the word happiness without any ambiquity. It is a little different from what men normally mean when they say: "I am happy."
     A certain persistence in despair finally gives birth to joy....
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942, from the entry for September 15, 1937 (while in Italy), pp. 58-59.

     I ought not to have writen: if the world were clear, art would not exist — but if the world seemed to me to have a meaning I should not write at all. There are cases when one must be personal, out of modesty. In addition, the remark would have forced me to think it over and, in the end, I should not have written it. It is a brilliant truth, without basis.
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951, p. 39.

     Living with one's passions amounts to living with one's sufferings, which are the counterpoise, the corrective, the balance, and the price. When a man has learned and not on paper — how to remain alone with his suffering, how to overcome his longing to flee, the illusion that others may share, then he has little left to learn.
— Albert Camus, Ibid., p. 41.

     Do not forget: illness and decrepitude. There's not a minute to be wasted — which is perhaps the contrary of "one must hurry."
— Albert Camus, Ibid., p. 79.

     It requires bucketsful of blood and centuries of history to lead to an imperceptible modification in the human condition. Such is the law. For years heads fall like hail, Terror reigns, Revolution is touted, and one ends up by substituting constitutional monarchy for legitimate monarchy.
....
     I am not made for politics because I am inescapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.
— Albert Camus, Ibid., p. 119.

Reasonable Doubt

      Another way of looking at it: you must be simple, truthful, not go in for literary declamations — accept and commit yourself. But we do nothing else.
     If you are convinced of your despair, you must either act as if you did hope after all — or kill yourself. Suffering gives no rights.

    An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts."
     I prefer to keep my eyes open.
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942, May 1936, p. 28.

     Once he has reached the absurd and tries to live accordingly, a man always perceives that consciousness is the hardest thing in the world to maintain. Circumstances are almost always against it. He must live his lucidity in a world where dispersion is the rule.
     So he perceives that the real problem, even without God, is the problem of psychological unity (the only problem really raised by the operation of the absurd is that of metaphysical unity of the world and the mind) and inner peace. He also perceives that such peace is not possible without a discipline difficult to reconcile with the world. That's where the problem lies. It must indeed be reconciled with the world. It is a matter of achieving a rule of conduct in secular life.
     The great obstacle is his past life (profession — marriage — previous opinions, etc.). What has already taken place. Not to elude any of the elements of this problem.
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942-1951, pp. 10-11.

     Modern intelligence is in utter confusion. Knowledge has become so diffuse that the world and the mind have lost all point of reference. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism. But the most amazing things are the admonitions to "turn backward." [an allusion to speeches/writings of the Vichy period] Return to the Middle Ages, to primitive mentality, to the soil, to religion, to the arsenal of worn-out solutions. To grant a shadow of efficacy to those panaceas, we should have to act as if our acquired knowledge had ceased to exist, as if we had learned nothing, and pretend in short to erase what is inerasable. We should have to cancel the contribution of several centuries and the incontrovertible acquisitions of a mind that has finally (in its last step forward) recreated chaos on its own. That is impossible. In order to be cured, we must make our peace with this lucidity, this clairvoyance. We must take into account the glimpses we have suddenly had of our exile. Intelligence is in confusion not because knowledge has changed everything. It is so because it cannot accept that change. It hasn't "got accustomed to the idea." When that does happen, the confusion will disappear. Nothing will remain but the change and the clear knowledge that the mind has of it. There's a whole civilization to be reconstructed.
— Albert Camus, Ibid., pp. 15-16.

Cynical Cynosure?

The frequency of virtues common to all is not more to be wondered at than the multiplicity of vices peculiar to each.
— Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé, #30, Vol. 2, p. 193, in The Maxims of Marcel Proust, Justin O'Brien (ed. and tr.), p. 132.

Not only do we fail to grasp at once really rare works of art, but even within each of those works we first notice the least valuable parts. Unlike life, those great masterpieces do not disappoint us by giving us their best first.
— Marcel Proust, Ibid., #30, Vol. I, p. 143, in Ibid., p. 351.

The time at our disposal every day is elastic: the passions we experience stretch it; those we awaken in others shrink it; and habit fills it.
— Marcel Proust, Ibid., #30, Vol. II, p. 19, in Ibid., p. 397.

We passionately want there to be another life in which we would be the same as we are here on earth. But we do not stop to think that after a few years we are unfaithful, right in this life, to what we were and wanted to remain throughout eternity. We dream much of paradise or rather of many paradises in succession, but long before we die they are all lost paradises in which we would feel lost.
— Marcel Proust, Ibid., #15, Vol. II, pp. 95-96, in Ibid., p. 408.

In the end, such a civilization can produce only a mass man: .... The handsomest encomium for such creatures is: "They do not make trouble." Their highest virtue is: "They do not stick their necks out." Ultimately, such a society produces only two groups of men: the conditioners and the conditioned; the active and the passive barbarians. The exposure of this web of falsehood, self-deception, and emptiness is perhaps what made Death of a Salesman so poignant to the metropolitan American audiences that witnessed it.
— Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life, p. 16.

....But it is in such moments that life seems irradiated in every direction: moments detached from all preparatory activity or further result, moments so intensely good in themselves, so complete, so all-satisfying that neither further emergence nor transcendence seem needed, since they are present in the experience itself. These are the moments when art seems poignantly to encompass all of life's possibilities, or, by the same token, when life reveals the significance of art.
     Without such consummations, without such precious moments, man would be but the traditional donkey, flayed by a stick behind, lured by a deceptive carrot in front of him. To be alert to seize such moments of high insight, unconditioned action, and perfect fulfillment is one of the main lessons of life: endless activity, without this detachment and contemplation and ultimate delight, cannot bring life's fullest satisfaction. What man creates in art and thought justifies itself, not only by contributing to life's development and the emergence of new values, but by the production of significant moments. Those who have encountered these moments, who have held them close, can never be altogether cheated or frustrated, even by life's worst misfortunes or by its untimely curtailment. An education or a general mode of life that does not lead — though by indirection — to such moments and heighten their savor, falls short of man's needs.
— Lewis Mumford, Ibid., pp.169-170.

Inner Movement

     Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear and vivid and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtile magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, p. 26.

....Great passions are for the great of soul, and are on a level with them. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough that is what makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought — the Zeitqeist of an age that has no soul and send them back soiled at the end of each week — so they always try to get their emotions on credit, or refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. We must pass out of that conception of life; as soon as we have to pay for an emotion we shall know its quality and be the better for such knowledge. remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed sentimentality is merely the bank-holiday of cynicism. And delightful as cynicism is from its intellectual side, now that it has left the tub for the club, it never can be more than the perfect philosophy for a man who has no soul. It has its social value, and to an artist all modes of expression are interesting, but in itself it is a poor affair, for to the true cynic nothing is ever revealed.
— Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (Epistola: in Carcere et Vinculis) [Letter to Lord Alfred Douglas], p. 135.

We hear in retrospect when we have understood.
— Marcel Proust, La Prisonniére (2 vols.), 2, 187, in The Maxims of Marcel Proust, Justin O'Brien (ed. & tr.), p. 5.

The one thing more difficult than following a regime is keeping from imposing it on others.
— Marcel Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe: II (3 vols.), 3, p. 191, in Ibid., p. 15.

We have only amorphous, fragmentary visions of the universe, which we fill out by means of arbitrary associations of ideas that create dangerous suggestions.
— Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue (2 vols.), 2, p. 33, in Ibid., p. 24.

The universe is true for all of us and different for each of us.
— Marcel Proust, Du coté de chez Swann (2 vols.), 1, p. 260, in Ibid., p. 68.

For every malady that doctors cure with medicine, they produce ten in healthy people by inoculating them with that virus which is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
— Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé (2 vols.), 2, p. 270, in Ibid., p. 126.

Reflexive Irony

     When the soul drifts uncertain between life and dream, between the mind's disorder and the return to cool reflection, it is in religious thought that we should seek consolation; such I have never found in a philosophy which only gives us egotistical maxims or, at most, those twin tenets, empty experience and bitter doubt; it struggles against moral anguish by annihilating sensibility; like surgery, it can only cut out the suffering organ. But for us, born in the day of revolution and storms, when every belief was broken, brought up at best in a vague tradition satisfied by a few external observances, the indifferent adhesion to which is perhaps worse than impiety and heresy — for us it is very difficult, when we feel the need of it, to ressurect that mystic ediface already built in their ready hearts by the innocent and the simple. "The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life!" And yet, can we cast out of our spirits all the good or evil poured into them by so many learned generations? Ignorance cannot be learned.
     I hope better of the goodness of God. Perhaps we are approaching the predicted time when science, having completed its cycle of analysis and synthesis, of belief and negation, will be able to purify itself and raise up the marvellous city of the future out of the confused ruins ... we must not hold human reason so cheap as to believe it gains by complete self-humiliation, for that would be to impeach its divine origin ... God will no doubt appreciate purity of intention; and what father would like to see his son give up all reason and pride in front of him? The apostle who had to touch to believe was not cursed for his doubt!
— Gérard de Nerval, Aurélia - Life and the Dream, Part II, I, in Selected Writings - Gérard de Nerval, Geoffrey Wagner (tr.), pp. 147-148.

Those novelists deceive us who show the individual's development without taking into account the pressure of surroundings. The forest fashions the tree. To each one how small a place is given! How many buds are atrophied! One shoots one's branches where one can. The mystic bough is due more often than not to stifling. The only escape is upwards....
— André Gide, The Counterfeiters (1919-1925), "Edouard's Journal: Pauline," p. 275.

    The originality which we ask from the artist is originality of treatment, not of subject. It is only the unimaginative who ever invent. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.
— Oscar Wilde, as a reviewer, in Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde, Alvin  Redman (ed.), p. 59.

     Philosophy may teach us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of our neighbours, and science resolve the moral sense into a secretion of sugar, but art is what makes the life of each citizen a sacrament.
— Oscar Wilde, A Lecture in America, in Ibid., p. 61.

     The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.
— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, in Ibid., p. 62.

A Hopeful Sanity

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's self.

     Love is one aspect of what I have called the productive orientation: the active and creative relatedness of man to his fellow man, to himself and to nature. In the realm of thought, this productive orientation is expressed in the proper grasp of the world by reason. In the realm of action, the productive orientation is expressed in productive work, the prototype of which is art and craftsmanship. In the realm of feeling, the productive orientation is expressed in love, which is the experience of union with another person, with all men, and with nature under the condition of retaining one's sense of integrity and independence.
— Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, p. 37.

Just as a sensitive and alive person cannot avoid being sad, he cannot avoid feeling insecure. The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself, is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity, without panic and undue fear.
....
Free man is by neccesity insecure; thinking man by necessity uncertain.
— Erich Fromm, Ibid., p. 174.

     Having no faith, being deaf to the voice of conscience, and having a manipulating intelligence but little reason, he [alienated man] is bewildered, disquieted and willing to appoint to the position of a leader anyone who offers him a total solution.
— Erich Fromm, Ibid., p. 182.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead. In the nineteenth century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the twentieth century it means schizoid self-alienation. The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become "Golems," they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.
— Erich Fromm, Ibid., p. 312-313.

Every moment existence confronts us with the alternatives of resurrection or death; every moment we give an answer. This answer lies not in what we say or think, but in what we are, how we act, where we are moving.
— Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope, p. 18.

There are those, like Marcuse, who think that in a cybernated and "non-represive" society that is completely satisfied materially there would be no more human conflicts like those expressed in the Greek or Shakespearean drama or the great novels. I can understand that completely alienated people see the future of human existence in this way, but I am afraid they express more about their own emotional limitations than about future possibilities. The assumption that the problems, conflicts, and tragedies between man and man will disappear if there are no materially unfulfilled needs is a childish daydream.
— Erich Fromm, Ibid., p. 111.

Too Write

I am the best and sharpest critic of my own work. I know myself what is and what is not well written. Anyone who doesn't write doesn't know how wonderful it is; I used to bemoan the fact that I couldn't draw at all, but now I am more than happy that I can at least write. And if I haven't any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.
     I want to get on; I can't imagine that I would have to lead the same sort of life as Mommy and Mrs. Van Daan and all the women who do their work and are then forgotten. I must have something besides a husband and children, something that I can devote myself to!
     I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me.
     I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. But, and that is the great question, will I ever be able to write anything great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer? I hope so, oh, I hope so very much, for I can recapture everything when I write, my thoughts, my ideals and my fantasies.
     I haven't done anything more to "Cady's Life" for ages; in my mind I know exactly how to go on, but somehow it doesn't flow from my pen. Perhaps I never shall finish it, it may land up in the wastepaper basket, or the fire ... that's a horrible idea, but then I think to myself, "At the age of fourteen and with so little experience, how can you write about philosophy?"
     So I go on again with fresh courage; I think I shall succeed, because I want to write!

Yours, Anne

— Anne Frank, from entry "Tuesday, 4 April, 1944," in Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl, Mooyart-Doubleday (tr.), p. 175.

If I am not for myself, who will be?
If I am for myself only, what am I?
If not now — when?
— Talmudic saying, Mishnah, Abot

....But although many rational doubts have been solved by rational answers, the irrational doubt has not disappeared and cannot disappear as long as man has not progressed from negative freedom to positive freedom. The modern attempts to silence it, whether they consist in a compulsive striving for success, in the belief that unlimited knowledge of facts can answer the quest for certainty, or in submission to a leader who assumes the responsibility for "certainty' — all these solutions can only eliminate the awareness of doubt. The doubt itself will not disappear as long as man does not overcome his isolation and as long as his place in the world has not become a meaningful one in terms of his human needs.
— Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom, pp. 97-98.

     What we can observe at the kernel of every neurosis, as well as of normal development, is the struggle for freedom and independence. For many normal persons this struggle has ended in a complete giving up of their individual selves, so that they are thus well adapted and considered to be normal. The neurotic person is the one who has not given up fighting against complete submission, but who, at the same time, has remained bound to the figure of the magic helper, whatever form or shape "he" may have assumed. His neurosis is always to be understood as an attempt, and essentially an unsucessful one, to solve the conflict between that basic dependency and the quest for freedom.
— Erich Fromm, Ibid., p. 201.

The uniqueness of the self in no way contradicts the principle of equality. The thesis that men are born equal implies that they all share the same fundamental human qualities, that they share the basic fate of human beings, that they all have the same inalienable claim on freedom and happiness. It furthermore means that their relationship is one of solidarity, not one of dominance-submission. What the concept does not mean is that all men are alike.
— Erich Fromm, Ibid., pp. 290-291.

Helpful Urge

     To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.
      I am pessimistic in that I experience in its full weight what we conceive to be the absence of purpose in the course of world-happenings. Only at quite rare moments have I felt really glad to be alive. I could not but feel with a sympathy full of regret all the pain that I saw around me, not only that of men but that of the whole creation. From this community of suffering I have never tried to withdraw myself. It seemed to me a matter of course that we should all take our share of the burden of pain which lies upon the world. Even while I was a boy at school it was clear to me that no explanation of the evil in the world could ever satisfy me; all explanations, I felt, ended in sophistries, and at bottom had no other object than to make it possible for men to share in the misery around them, with less keen feelings. That a thinker like Liebnitz could reach the miserable conclusion that though this world is, indeed, not good, it is the best that was possible, I have never been able to understand.
     But however much concerned I was at the problem of the misery of the world, I never let myself get lost in broodings over it; I always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of it to an end. Thus I came gradually to rest content in the knowledge that there is only one thing we can understand about the problem, and that is that each one of us has to go his own way, but as one who means to help to bring about deliverance.
— Albert Schweitzer, from Out of My Life and Thought, pp. 279-280, in Albert Schweitzer: An Anthology, Charles R. Jay (ed.), pp. 120-121.

No one should compel himself to show to others more of his inner life than he feels it natural to show. We can do no more than let others judge for themselves what we inwardly and really are, and do the same ourselves with them. The one essential thing is that we strive to have light in ourselves. Our strivings will be recognized by others, and when people have light in themselves it will shine out from them. Then we get to know each other as we walk together in the darkness, without needing to pass our hands over each other's faces, or to intrude into each other's hearts.
— Albert Schweitzer, from Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, pp. 93-94, in Ibid., p. 140.

....Thus we no longer rely on bridges formed by ordinary logical thought. Our path leads into the region of naïveté and of paradox. We tread it resolutely and with confidence. We hold to the absolutely and profoundly ethical religion as to the one thing needful, though philosophy may go to rack and ruin. That which appears to be naïveté in Christianity is in reality its profundity.
     There are two kinds of naïveté: one which is not yet aware of all the problems and has not yet knocked at all the doors of knowledge; and another, a higher kind, which is the result of philosophy having looked into all problems, having sought counsel in all the spheres of knowledge, and then having come to see that we cannot explain everything but have to follow convictions whose inherent value appeals to us in an irresistible way.
— Albert Schweitzer, from Christianity and the Religions of the World, pp. 70-71, in Ibid., pp. 210-211.

One realizes that he is but a speck of dust, a plaything of events outside his reach. Nevertheless, he may at the same time discover that he has a certain liberty, as long as he lives. Sometime or another all of us must have found that happy events have not been able to make us happy, nor unhappy events to make us unhappy. There is within each of us a modulation, an inner exaltation, which lifts us above the buffetings with which events assail us. Likewise, it lifts us above dependence upon the gifts of events for our joy. Hence, our dependence upon events is not absolute; it is qualified by our spiritual freedom. Therefore, when we speak of resignation it is not sadness to which we refer, but the triumph of our will-to-live over whatever happens to us. And to become ourselves, to be spiritually alive, we must have passed beyond this point of resignation.
— Albert Schweitzer, from The Ethics of Reverence for Life, p. 229, in Ibid., p. 254.

[Ménalque to the protagonist, Michel:]
....But most of them believe that it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn't even choose the pattern he imitates; he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don't dare to — they don't dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone — that is what they suffer from — and so they don't find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia — the most odious cowardice, I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything — but they don't want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value — and that is the very thing people try to suppress. they go on imitating. And yet they think they love life.
— André Gide, The Immoralist, pp. 89-90.

A Story

Picture This

513/1,000ths of a Thought

By James Hauck

     I had already put a lot of thought into the writing of a story that would be 513 words in length and contain in some fashion or other the words “privilege,” “licentious,” “impeccable,” “model,” “system,” “diverse,” “lexicon,” “excited,” and “dance,” when as I was sitting in the Members Lounge of the Art Institute of Chicago the other day, I quite suddenly happened to notice for the first time, having just taken a comfortable seat on one of the many couches — one I hadn’t sat on before I’d arrived on this particular visit — that I could see through a small round window placed high in the far wall the top floors of the Willis Tower, previously named the Sears Tower, where I had had the privilege of taking, several years previously, a series of classes based on the mystical and geometric schema called the Enneagram that in its original incarnation was used only as a dynamic device for demonstrating the interactions of the nine major and numerous minor personality types by arranged them around a nine pointed geometric device — not the licentious black magical sigil that some later commentators had mistakenly and unfoundedly tried to make it out to be — which probably had been developed over the years by medieval Middle Eastern Islamic scholars and later expanded in predictive power by the mysterious magus named G. I. Gurdjieff, that series of informal classes being freely offered by one of the principals of an investment bankers organization that then occupied one and a half floors of said tower back when it was still being leased out to the Sears Roebuck Corporation, being a gentleman who had somehow, unfortunately to my way of thinking never revealing his impeccable core methodology, been over the course of many years developing a way to model with the dynamic mechanics of this ancient system such diverse aspects of the world, a veritable lexicon of the categories of knowledge, such as, the Arabic numbering system, the nine major personality types, the amino acid series, the universe’s excited dance of cosmological constants, and diverse other fields of study that have occupied countless numbers of the world’s brightest and most inventive scientists and philosophers since time immemorial in trying to align such diverse streams of data without ever really tying up all the loose ends or even providing much of an integrated insight into which direction the proper course of study might lie or whether an entirely new paradigm could lead to a more fruitful outcome, perhaps even consolidation of the four major forces which are currently believed to explain the cumulative operation of Nature herself, especially as these appear to be only partially explained at the present time, for instance by the fact that we haven’t nailed down seventy percent of the mass in the universe or ninety percent of the energy, although the Einsteinian formulation such that E, which is energy, is equal to m, which is mass, times the speed of light, c, which has been raised to the second power has covered the bases for lo these many years.

Energized Thought

The identification of immediate with past experience, the recurrence of past action or reaction in the present, amounts to a participation between the ideal and the real, imagination and direct apprehension, symbol and substance. Such participation frees the essential reality that is denied to the contemplative as to the active life. What is common to present and past is more essential than either taken separately. Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic. Imagination, applied — a priori — to what is absent, is exercised in vacuo and cannot tolerate the limits of the real. Nor is any direct and purely experimental contact possible between subject and object, because they are automatically separated by the subject's consciousness of perception, and the object loses its purity and becomes a mere intellectual pretext or motive. But, thanks to this reduplication, the experience is at once imaginative and empirical, at once an evocation and a direct perception, real without being merely abstract, the ideal real, the essential, the extratemporal. But if this mystical experience communicates an extratemporal essence, it follows that the communicant is for the moment an extratemporal being. Consequently the Proustian solution consists, in so far as it has been examined, in the negation of Time and Death, the negation of Death because the negation of Time. Death is dead because Time is dead. (At this point a brief impertinence, which consists in considering Le Temps Retrouvé almost as inappropriate a discription of the Proustian solution as Crime and Punishment of a masterpiece that contains no allusion to either crime or punishment. Time is not recovered, it is obliterated....)
— Samuel Beckett, Proust, pp. 55-56.

The deepest thinking is humble. It is only concerned that the flame of truth which it keeps alive should burn with the strongest and purest heat; it does not trouble about the distance to which its brightness penetrates.
— Albert Schweitzer, Indian Thought and Its Development, p. 257, in Albert Schweitzer: An Anthology, Charles R. Jay (ed.), p. 3.

Every conviction which possesses real value is nonrational and enthusiastic in character, since it cannot be the product of knowledge about the universe, but arises from the reflective experience of the will-to-live, in virtue of which we leave behind all mere intellectual knowledge of the world. This is what rational thought, when continued to its final conclusion grasps and understands as the real truth, in the strength of which we have to live. The way to true mysticism leads us through and beyond rational reflection to profound experience of the world and of our will-to-live. We must all venture once more to become "thinkers," in order to attain to that mysticism which is the only immediate and the only profound world-view. We must all make pilgrimage through the realm of knowledge until we reach the point where it passes into actual experience of the world's essential being. We must all become religious as the result of reflection.
— Albert Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics, p. xviii, in Ibid., pp. 10-11.

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.
— Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 401, in Ibid., p. 88.

Christianity cannot definitely choose between pessimism and optimism. It is pessimistic, not only because, like Brahmanism and Buddhism, it realizes that imperfection, pain, and sorrow are essential features of the natural world, but for this additional and still more important reason, that in man it finds a will which does not answer to the will of the ethical God and which, therefore, is evil.
     Again, Christianity is optimistic, because it does not abandon the world, does not, as do Brahmanism and Buddhism, withdraw from it in negation of life and of the world, but assigns to man a place in this world and commands him to live in and to work in it in the spirit of the ethical God. Further, Christianity gives him the assurance that thereby God's purpose for the world and for man is being fulfilled; it cannot, however, explain how. For what significance have the ethical character and the ethical activity of the religious individual in the infinite happenings of the universe? What do they accomplish? We must admit that the only answer we have to this question is that thereby the will of God is fulfilled.
— Albert Schweitzer, Christianity and the Religions of the World, pp. 73-74, in Ibid., pp. 96-97.

Alone? Depend On It!

An incarnation of the Godhead and, to a lesser degree, any theocentric saint, sage or prophet is a human being who knows Who he is and can therefore effectively remind other human beings of what they have allowed themselves to forget: namely, that if they choose to become what potentially they already are, they too can be eternally united with the Divine Ground.
— Aldous Huxley, Introduction to Bhagavad-Gita (Prabhavananda and Isherwood), p. 13.

     You who travel with the wind, what weather-vane shall direct your course?
     What man's law shall find you if you break your yoke but upon no man's prison door?
     What laws shall you fear if you dance but stumble against no man's iron chain.
     And who is he that shall bring you to judgment if you tear off your garment yet leave it in no man's path?
— Kahlil Gibran, "On Laws," in The Prophet, p. 53.

     You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief,
     But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.
— Kalil Gibran, "On Freedom," in Ibid., pp. 54-55.

     Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows — then let your heart say in silence, "God rests in reason."
     And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, — then let your heart say in awe, "God moves in passion."
     And since you are a breath in God's sphere, and a leaf in God's forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.
— Kalil Gibran, "On Reason and Passion," in Ibid., pp.58-59.

     But if love, for Proust, is a function of man's sadness, friendship is a function of his cowardice; and, if neither can be realised because of the impenetrability (isolation) of all that is not cosa mentale, at least the failure to possess may have the nobility of that which is tragic, whereas the attempt to communicate where no communication is possible is merely a simian vulgarity, or horribly comic, like the madness that holds a conversation with the furniture. Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned. Friendship is a social expedient, like upholstery or the distribution of garbage buckets. It has no spiritual significance. For the artist, who does not deal in surfaces, the rejection of friendship is not only reasonable, but a necessity. Because the only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication. Even on the rare occasions when word and gesture happen to be valid expressions of personality, they lose their significance on their passage through the cataract of the personality that is opposed to them. Either we speak and act for ourselves — in which case speech and action are distorted and emptied of their meaning by an intelligence that is not ours, or else we speak and act for others — in which case we speak and act a lie.
— Samuel Beckett, Proust, pp. 46-47.

"Man," writes Proust, "is not a building that can receive additions to its superficies, but a tree whose stem and leafage are an expression of inward sap." We are alone. We cannot know and we cannot be known. "Man is the creature that cannot come forth from himself, who knows others only in himself, and who, if he asserts the contrary, lies."
— Samuel Beckett, Ibid., pp. 48-49.

Both Sides — Now

What matters in the end, both for values and for art, is the depth of life as a felt thing; and it is this, and not some intellectual explanation, that is lost whenever we say that the meaning of life has been lost. And if our young writers now experience the life around them as meaningless, it is this meaning they have lost.
— William Barrett, "American Fiction and American Values," in The American Novel Since World War II, by Marcus Klein (ed.), pp. 62.

The theme of art is the theme of life itself. This artificial distinction between artists and human beings is precisely what we are all suffering from. An artist is only someone unrolling and digging out and excavating the areas normally accessible to normal people everywhere, and exhibiting them as a sort of scarecrow to show people what can be done with themselves.
— Lawrence Durrell, in Writers at Work: Paris Review Interviews, Second Series, Van Wyck Brooks (ed.), pp. 276-277.

The volume of judgments one is called upon to make depends upon the receptivity of the observer, and if one is very receptive, one has a terrifying number of opinions to render — ....I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.
— Saul Bellow, in Ibid., p. 190.

     As Blake wrote in his Vision of the Last Judgment: "'What,' it will be Question'd, 'When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a guinea?' 'O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, "Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God Almighty!" I Question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro' it, and not with it.'"
     It is part of the poet's work to give each man his own view of the world — show him what he sees but does not know that he sees. The poet, like the painter, harmonizes what seems to the "Vegetative Eye" irreconcilable aspects of the world, into a great design, a great balance. He shows the quintessence of reality. In Carl Jung's words, "Imagination is a concentrated extract of all the forces of life."
— From "The Poet's Vision," by Edith Sitwell, in Adventures of the Mind (Saturday Evening Post essays), p. 109.

     The theological standpoint of Nicholas [of Cusa, 1401-1446] is set forth in his work De Docta Ignoranta, which has nothing to do with the absurdity of erudition, as its name might be thought to imply, but concerns itself with man's essential incapacity to attain to absolute truth. It was followed by the De Conjecturis, in which he comes to the conclusion that all knowledge is but conjecture and that man's wisdom is to recognise that he can know nothing. From this attitude of apparently pure scepticism he escapes by the mystic way. God, about whom we can know nothing by experience or reasoning, can be apprehended by a special process (intuition), a state in which all intellectual limitations disappear. We need follow Nicholas no further on his theological path, but we may remark that he seems dimly to have foreseen the approaching clash between the scientific and the religious standpoints, and that he solved the difficulty in the way chosen by many other scientific men since his day. He accepted the existence of two forms of experience: an outer, subject to natural law, about which we can reason, and an inner, which has no relation to such law and is above and beyond reason.The position, if rigidly maintained, is quite impregnable from the scientific side. Between it and science there could never be any real conflict.
— From "10. The Close of the Middle Ages," of Historical Relations of Religion and Science, by Charles Singer, in Science, Religion & Reality, by Joseph Needham (ed.), p. 129.