He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.
I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.
Die Wahrheit wird nicht im Zorn gesprochen. Die Wahrheit, wenn sie denn gesprochen wird, wird im Geist der Liebe gesprochen.
I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire. Is he blind?
We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself!
All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I own proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world.
When all else fails, philosophize.
All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?
Because a women’s beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.
We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.
In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.
Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.
Unbelief is a belief.
The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.
I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.