The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.
They can send death at once, but life is slower...
A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist can’t hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.
And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.
It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.
Sometimes one’s very angry and preaches, but I know that to clinch a point is to close it. To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that’s the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.
All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people .
Statesmen remember things selectively.
The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours.
Ignorant power is a bane!
Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it’s simply meaningless. We don’t live in order to die, we live in order to live.
The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.
A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.
What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing.
The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it’s an easy name to call another man.
The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.
Hope is a slow business.
Very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.
Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.
Where there’s property, there’s theft.