She never knew where he was, in what city or on what continent, the day after she had seen him. He always came to her unexpectedly – and she liked it, because it made him a continuous presence in her life, like the ray of a hidden light that could hit her at any moment.
The man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises – because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him.
The anti-mind is the anti-life.
Such would have been our life, had we not committed our crime which changed all things for us. And it was our curse which drove us to our crime.
Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtues, not of vices.
The crowd had stared at him and given up angrily, finding no satisfaction. He did not look crushed and he did not look defiant. He looked impersonal and calm. He was not like a public figure in a public place; he was like a man alone in his own room, listening to the radio.
As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art.
She stopped for the duration of a glance around her, as if to recapture the place, but there was no recognition of persons in her eyes, the glance merely swept through the room, as if making a swift inventory of physical objects.
It was new to feel protected, and to feel that it was right to accept the protection, to surrender – right, because this peculiar sense of safety was... not the protection of being spared from battle, but of having won it, not a protection granted to her weakness, but to her strength...
She thought of the world’s code that worshipped white lies as an act of mercy – she felt a stab of revulsion against that code...
There was no action she could take against the men of undeined thought, of unnamed motives, of unstated purposes, of unspecified morality. There was nothing she could say to them – nothing would be heard or answered. What were the weapons, she thought, in a realm where reason was not a weapon any longer? It was a realm she could not enter.
Just as a concept becomes a unit when integrated with others into a wider concept, so a genus becomes a single unit, a species, when integrated with others into a wider genus. For instance, “table” is a species of the genus “furniture,” which is a species of the genus “household goods,” which is a species of the genus “man-made objects.” “Man” is a species of the genus “animal,” which is a species of the genus “organism,” which is a species of the genus “entity.
She did not smile, but her face had the lovely serenity that can become a smile without transition.
Have you ever been in a temple and seen men kneeling silently, reverently, their souls raised to the greatest height they can reach? To the height where they know they are clean, and clear, and perfect? When their spirit is the end and the reason of all things? Then have you wondered why that has to exist only in a temple? Why men can’t carry it also into their lives? Why, if they can know the height, they can still want to live less than the highest? That’s what we want to live, you and I.
He stood looking up at her; it was not a glance, but an act of ownership. She thought she must let her face give him the answer he deserved. But she was looking, instead, at the stone dust on his burned arms, the wet shirt clinging to his ribs, the lines of his long legs. She was thinking of those statues of men she had always sought; she was wondering what he would look like naked. She saw him looking at her as if he knew that.
You knew better than that. And it’s such an old one to me. My antisocial stubbornness is so well-known that I didn’t think anyone would waste time trying to tempt me again.
Our first rule here... is that one must always see for oneself.
We have followed you,” they said, “and we shall follow you wherever you go. If danger threatens you, we shall face it also. If it be death, we shall die with you. You are damned, and we wish to share your damnation.
Ask yourself what it is that a code of moral values does to a man’s life, and why he can’t exist without it, and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the evil is the good.
Toil, comrade,” he said, “is the highest aim of our lives. Who does not toil, shall not eat.” The book was filled. The official applied his rubber stamp to the last page. The stamp bore a globe overshadowed by a crossed sickle and hammer.