Think, Love

....A few days before he died, the greatest of modern poets, and the most modern of great poets, William Butler Yeats, wrote to a friend that he had found what, all his life, he had been looking for. But when in that letter, he went on to spell his answer out in words, it was not an answer made of words: it was an answer made of life: "When I try to put it all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.'" Which to me means, to me at least, that man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it. It is for this reason that love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question. Love, in reason's terms, answers nothing. We say that Amor vincit omnia but in truth love conquers nothing — certainly not death — certainly not chance. What love does is to affirm. It affirms the worth of life in spite of life.
— Archibald MacLeisch, J.B., from Author's Foreword, p. 10.

     I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there's X amount of stuff in the world, that somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn't take into account the real reason for the differences between countries — that is, the development of new techniques for growing food and to do other things, and the fact that all this machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn't the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn't understand it. They didn't understand technology; they didn't understand their time.
— Richard P. Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", p. 283.

    After the dinner we went off into another room, where there were different conversations going on. there was a Princess Somebody of Denmark sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty chair at their table and sat down.
     She turned to me and said, "Oh! You're one of the Nobel-Prize-Winners. In what field did you do your work?"
     "In Physics," I said.
     "Oh. Well nobody knows anything about that, so I quess we can't talk about it."
     "On the contrary," I answered. "It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance — gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood — so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!"
     I don't know how they do it. There's a way of forming ice on the surface of the face, and she did it! She turned to talk to somebody else.
— Richard P. Feynman, Ibid., p. 310.

In a study of the management of conflict within groups ... that contained a "deviant" — a person who aggressively sought solutions to problems and forced the group to confront conflicting views and integrate them — came out with richer analysis of the problem and a better solution. When, as the next step, each group was asked to throw out one member, the "deviant" was thrown out every time!
— David J. Sica, in The Peter Pyramid, Dr. Laurence J. Peter, p. 156.

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
— Woody Allen, in Ibid., p. 169.

     Yet a way of life originating in fear may come in time to put down roots, to bear distinctive fruit, and to acquire thereby an authenticity superseding its defensive origin. One may find reason to retain a value born of fear even after gaining the courage to lay it aside. Rilke was drawn toward psychoanalysis by neurotic suffering, but turned back. "Can you understand, my friend," he wrote to the analyst, "that I am afraid of disturbing by any classification or survey, be it ever so relieving, a much higher order whose right, after all that has happened, I would have to acknowledge, even if it were to destroy me?" This is treacherous ground, deception lies in wait. One may rationalize loyalty to a limp by persuading oneself it has acquired grace. A much higher order? How can he be sure? What quarantees it? Nothing. And there's no escaping this certainty; if you mean it you must affirm it on your own authority, and at your own peril go ahead.
— Allen Wheelis, On Not Knowing How To Live, pp. 12-13.

     "A writer's life takes its sense through what he says, what he writes, what can be handed down from generation to generation.
     "What is remembered is sometimes only one phrase, one line.
     "There is the truth.
     "But what truth?
     "If a phrase or line survives the work, it is not the author who gave it this special chance (at the expense of the other): it is the reader.
     "There is the lie.
     "The writer steps aside for the work, and the work depends on the reader.
     "So truth is, in time, the absurd and fertile quest of lies, which we pay with tears and blood."
— Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions, p. 39.