One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.
Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.
Children all over the world consort quite naturally with animals. They don’t see any dividing line. That is something they have to be taught, just as they have to be taught it is all right to kill and eat them.
Temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict.
It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet.
His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.
So it has come, the day of testing. Without warning, without fanfare, it is here, and he is in the middle of it. In his chest his heart hammers so hard that it too, in its dumb way, must know. How will they stand up to the testing, he and his heart?
Can desire grow out of admiration, or are the two quite distinct species? What would it be like to lie side by side, naked, breast to breast, with a woman one principally admires?
The barbarians come out at night.
It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from ‘the wise man’s mouth’ but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.
Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn’t change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it.
When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring.
The spark of true poetry flashes when ideas are juxtaposed that no one has yet thought of bringing together.
Censorship is not an occupation that attracts intelligent, subtle minds. Censors can and often have been outwitted. But the game of slipping Aesopian messages past the censor is ultimately a sterile one, diverting writers from their proper task.
The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself.
I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded.
It is a world of words that creates a world of things.
Reason is simply a vast tautology.
I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.
Was it serious? I don’t know. It certainly had serious consequences.