If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.
--Henry Miller (1891-1980), U.S. author. The Colossus of Maroussi, pt. 3 (1941).
Anger is one of the sinews of the soul; he that wants it hath a maimed mind.
--Thomas Fuller (1608-61), English cleric. The Holy State and the Profane State, bk. 3, "Of Anger" (1642).
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
--Samuel Butler (1835-1902), English author. Notebooks, "Mind and Matter" (1912).
Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn't in us. It's almost as if we're put here on earth to show how silly they aren't.
--Russell Hoban (b. 1925), U.S. author. George Fairbairn, in Turtle Diary, ch. 42 (1975).
From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.
--Victor Hugo (1802-85), French poet, dramatist, novelist. Les Misérables, pt. 1, bk. 5, ch. 5 (1862).
The surprise of animals . . . in and out, cats and dogs and a milk goat and chickens and guinea hens, all taken for granted, as if man was intended to live on terms of friendly intercourse with the rest of creation instead of huddling in isolation on the fourteenth floor of an apartment house in a city where animals occurred behind bars in the zoo.
--Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913), U.S. author. Accident on Route 37, "Steven Benedict" (1964).
I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason--as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal.
--Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German philosopher. The Gay Science, aph. 224 (rev. ed. 1887).
In a few generations more, there will probably be no room at all allowed for animals on the earth: no need of them, no toleration of them. An immense agony will have then ceased, but with it there will also have passed away the last smile of the world's youth.
--Ouida [Marie Louise de la Ramée] (1839-1908), English novelist. Critical Studies, "The Quality of Mercy" (1900).
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.
--Mark Twain (1835-1910), U.S. author. Old Man, in "What Is Man?," sct. 6 (1906; repr. in Complete Essays, ed. by Charles Neider, 1963).
There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents, each link of which hangs upon the former. The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace. Evil may at some future period bring forth good; and good may bring forth evil, both equally unexpected.
--Joseph Addison (1672-1719), English essayist. Interesting Anecdotes, Memoirs, Allegories, Essays, and Poetical Fragments, "Happiness Not Independent" (1794).
Get it into your head once and for all, my simple and very fainthearted fellow, that what fools call humaneness is nothing but a weakness born of fear and egoism; that this chimerical virtue, enslaving only weak men, is unknown to those whose character is formed by stoicism, courage, and philosophy.
--Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), French author. Dolmancé, in Philosophy in the Bedroom, "Dialogue the Seventh" (1795).
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature.
--Jacob Bronowski (1908-74), British scientist, author. "The Creative Mind," lecture, delivered 26 Feb. 1953, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (published in Science and Human Values, sct. 4, 1961).
The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.
--Rachel Carson (1907-64), U.S. marine biologist, author. The Silent Spring, ch. 17 (1962).
That man's best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature's infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.
--Lydia M. Child (1802-80), U.S. abolitionist, writer, editor. Letter, 17 March 1843 (published in Letters from New York, vol. 1, Letter 38, 1843).
We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.
--G. C. Lichtenberg (1742-99), German physicist, philosopher. Aphorisms, "Notebook J," aph. 65 (written 1765-99; tr. by R. J. Hollingdale, 1990).
Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.
--Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934), Belgian Situationist philosopher. The Revolution of Everyday Life, ch. 9, sct. 2 (1967; tr. 1983).
For the alchemist the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter. Only as a secondary consideration does he hope that some benefit may accrue to himself from the transformed substance as the panacea, the medicina catholica, just as it may to the imperfect bodies, the base or "sick" metals, etc. His attention is not directed to his own salvation through God's grace, but to the liberation of God from the darkness of matter. By applying himself to this miraculous work he benefits from its salutary effect, but only incidentally. He may approach the work as one in need of salvation, but he knows that his salvation depends on the success of the work, on whether he can free the divine soul. To this end he needs meditation, fasting, and prayer; more, he needs the help of the Holy Ghost as his paredroz [ministering spirit]. Since it is not man but matter that must be redeemed, the spirit that manifests itself in the transformation is not the "Son of Man" but as Khunrath very properly puts it, the filius macrocosmi. Therefore, what comes out of the transformation is not Christ but an ineffable material being named the "stone," which displays the most paradoxical qualities apart from possessing corpus, anima, spiritus, and supernatural powers. One might be tempted to explain the symbolism of alchemical transformation as a parody of the Mass were it not pagan in origin and much older than the latter.
The substance that harbors the divine secret is everywhere, including the human body. It can be had for the asking and can be found anywhere, even in the most loathsome filth.
--C.G. Jung (1875-1961), Swiss pioneer in psychology and psychiatry. Psychology and Alchemy (1944), translated by R.F.C. Hull. Bollingen Series XX, Vol. 12 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), pp. 299-300.
A key is offered to the character of Socrates in that remarkable phenomenon known as "the daemon of Socrates." When in certain situations his prodigious intellect began to vacillate, he would recover assurance from a divine voice that addressed him only at such times. And whenever this voice was heard, it warned against. That is to say, in the case of this altogether abnormal character, instinctive wisdom asserted itself only occasionally, and then, in restraint of his conscious judgment. Whereas in all productive people it is precisely instinct that is the creative, urging force and the conscious mind that plays the critical, warning role, in the case of Socrates, instinct is the critic and consciousness the creator--which is truly a monstrosity per defectum! Moreover, what his case in fact represents is a monstrous occultation of the mystical faculty; so that Socrates must be viewed as the specific pattern of the non-mystic, in which the logical facility has become as exorbitantly developed by superfetation as instinctive wisdom in the mystic. Furthermore, for the logical talent of Socrates to turn against itself was altogether impossible. In that unbridled verbal torrent of his there is manifest such a power of nature as we otherwise encounter with awestruck amazement only in the most grandiose manifestations of instinct. Whoever, while reading the Platonic dialogues, has received any impression at all of the divine simplicity and assurance of Socrates' way of life, must also have gotten a sense of the way the prodigious driving wheel of logical Socratism is revolving, as it were, behind Socrates and is to be seen through Socrates as through a shadow. And that he himself had some suspicion of this is evident in the noble earnestness with which he everywhere avouched his divine calling, even before his final judges. To confute him in this was ultimately as impossible as to call his disintegrating influence on the instincts good.
--Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900), German philosopher and poet. The Birth of Tragedy (1872), translated by Joseph Campbell. Paragraph 13.
"That the Renaissance brought all those things into the world that are called liberalism, individualism, humanistic citizenship, I am well aware," said the acrid Naphta to his humanist antagonist; "but the striving, heroic age of your ideals already is long past. Those ideas are dead; or, at least, they lie today gasping their last, and the feet of those who will deal the finishing kicks are already at the door. If I am not mistaken, you call yourself a revolutionary. But if you think freedom is to be the issue of future revolutions, you are wrong. The principle of freedom has, in the past five hundred years, fulfilled its course and outlived itself. Any method of pedagogy that still considers itself to be a child of the Enlightenment and regards as proper aims for itself a development of the critical facilities, liberation and cultivation of the individual, and thereby the dissolution of modes of life eternally fixed--may still enjoy for a while an apparent rhetorical success: but to those who know, the reactionary character of such teaching is beyond question. All truly serious educational orders have known forever what the one and only possible principle of all pedagogy must be: namely the absolute command, the iron bond, in the name of discipline, sacrifice, denial of ego, subjugation of the personality. And finally, it is an unloving misunderstanding of youth to suppose that it finds its pleasure in freedom. Its deepest pleasure is obedience. . . .
"No!" he continued. "Not liberation and development of the individual are the secret and requirement of this age. What it needs, what it yearns for, and what it will create for itself is--the Terror."
--Thomas Mann (1875-1955), German novelist. The Magic Mountain (1924), translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. Abridgement of pp. 510-511.
Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. . . . It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. . . . Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American essayist and poet. "Self Reliance" from the first series of Essays (1841). Collected in Works (1883), Vol. II, pp. 51-52.
Sisyphus watches while the stone, in a few minutes, rolls down to that lower field again, from which he is going to have to push it up, once more, to the top. And he goes down again to the plain.
It is during his return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stone is itself already stone. I see that man going down again with heavy but steady tread, to the torment of which he will know no end. This hour, which is like a breath of relief and returns as surely as his woe, is the hour of consciousness. At each of these moments, when he leaves the heights and makes his way, step by step, toward the retreats of the gods, he is superior to his destiny, stronger than his rock.
If this myth, then, is tragic, it is because its hero is conscious. For where, in fact, would the agony be, if at each step he were sustained by hope of success? The laboring man of today works every day of his life at the same tasks, and that destiny is no less absurd. However, it is not tragic, save in those uncommon moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, impotent and rebellious, the proletarian of the gods, knows the whole extent of his miserable condition. It is of this that he thinks at the time of his descent. And yet, this foreknowledge, which was to have been his torment, simultaneously crowns his victory: there is no destiny that is not overcome by disdain.
If on certain days the descent is made in sorrow, it can also be made in joy. The term is not too strong. I again imagine Sisyphus returning to his rock. The sorrow was only at the beginning. For it is when the scenes of earthly life weigh in the memory too strongly, when the call of happiness becomes too urgent, that sorrow surges to the human heart: that is the victory of the rock, that is the rock itself. The weight of sorrow is too heavy to be borne. Those are the nights of our Gethsamane. However, Oedipus obeyed his destiny, at first without knowing. And from the moment he knew it, his tragedy commenced. Yet, at the same instant, blind and despairing, he realized that the only bond that held him to the world was the cool fresh hand of a young girl. And it was then that a remark resounded, immeasurably great: "In spite of all these trials, my advanced age and the grandeur of my soul lead me to conclude that all is well." . . .
In a man's attachment to his life, there is something stronger than all the miseries of the world.
--Albert Camus (1913-1960), French novelist, essayist, and playwright. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), translated by Joseph Campbell. Pages 163-165.
[Speaking about compassion:] An act can be said to have genuine moral worth only so far as it stems from this source; and conversely, an act from any other source has none. The weal and woe of another comes to lie directly on my heart in exactly the same way--though not always to the same degree--as otherwise only my own would lie, as soon as this sentiment of compassion is aroused, and therewith, the difference between him and me is no longer absolute. And this really is amazing...even mysterious. It is, in fact, the great mystery inherent in all morality, the prime integrant of ethics, and a gate beyond which the only type of speculation that can presume to venture a single step must be metaphysical. [He later goes on to examine the common metaphysical realization that all beings are actually one, a realization with the standard Sanskrit formula "Thou art that", tat tvam asi.]
--Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German philosopher. "On the Foundation of Morality", Section 22, translated by Joseph Campbell. From Volume 7 of his collected works, pp. 290-294.
Everyone, during the course of his lifetime, becomes aware of certain events that, on the one hand, bear the mark of a moral or inner necessity, because of their especially decisive importance to him, and yet, on the other hand, have clearly the character of outward, wholly accidental chance. The frequent occurrence of such events may lead gradually to the notion, which often becomes a conviction, that the life course of the individual, confused as it may seem, is an essential whole, having within itself a certain self-consistent, definite direction, and a certain instructive meaning--no less than the best thought-out of epics. . . .
Is a complete misadjustment possible, between the character and the fate of an individual? Or is every destiny on the whole appropriate to the character that bears it? Or, finally, is there some inexplicable, secret denominator, comparable to the author of a drama, that always joins the two appropriately, one to the other?
But this is exactly the point at which we are in the dark. And in the meantime we go on imagining ourselves to be, at every moment, the masters of our own deeds. It is only when we look back over the completed portions of our lives and review the unluckier steps together with their consequences that we marvel at how we could have done this, or failed to do that; and it then may seem to us that an alien power must have guided our steps. . . .
Life has long been recognized and often declared to resemble dream. And indeed, this comparison with dream permits us to perceive, even if only as at a misty distance, how the hidden power that directs and moves us toward its intended goals by means of the outward circumstances affecting us, might yet have its roots within the very depths of our own unfathomable being.
For in dreams too the circumstances that motivate our acts seem to befall us from without, as independent, often repulsive, completely accidental occurrences, and yet there is a concealed, purposeful continuity throughout: for there is a hidden power, to which all those accidents of the dream conform, which is actually directing and coordinating its incidents--and always with exclusive reference to ourselves. But the must extraordinary thing is this: that this hidden power can finally be nothing other than our own will--operating from a standpoint, however, that is not embraced in the horizon of our dreaming consciousness. That is why it happens that the occurrences in our dreams so often go completely against the wishes of which we are aware in our dreams; surprise, depress, and even frighten us nearly to death; while the dream-fate that we ourselves are covertly directing sends us neither rescuer nor relief. Or, comparably: we inquire eagerly about something, and receive an answer that sets us in amazement. Or again: we ourselves are being questioned, as though in an examination, and are unable to find the reply, whereupon another, to our humiliation, answers perfectly. And in both of these cases the answer can have come only from our own resources. . . .
May it not be, now, that the Fate that appears in the world of reality, the design that probably everyone has had occasion to observe in the development of his own life, may have something about it analogous to the relationship here observed in the dream?
Sometimes it happens that we draw up a plan and set our hearts upon its accomplishment, until later it becomes apparent that the plan was not for our true good at all. And in the meantime, trying our best to carry it out, we have found that Fate had somehow cursed it, setting all its machinery into motion against it; so that ultimately, entirely against our will, we find ourselves pressed back into what for us is the better path. In the face of such apparently intentional opposition, people are accustomed to saying: "It wasn't meant to be!" Some call it ominous, others a sign from God; but all share the opinion that when Fate with obvious determination thus sets itself against a project, we had better give it up. The project being one that does not befit our unconscious destiny, it will never be brought to fulfillment, and in sticking to it stubbornly with stiff-necked persistence, we are only inviting Fate to deal us stiffer and stiffer pokes in the ribs, until finally we are got back into our proper channel. Or if, on the other hand, we at last succeed in forcing the project through, it will only redound to our injury and distress. In this, the above quoted ducunt volentum fata, nolentem trahunt finds its adequate justification.
Often it becomes apparent, after the struggle is over, that the defeat was for our good. But is it not possible that the defeat may have been for our good even when its benefits never become apparent--particularly when we consider our true good from the metaphysical-moral point of view?
And if we look back now to the main conclusion of my entire philosophy; namely, that what the phenomenon of the world embodies and represents is the Will, the very same Will that lives and struggles in each separate individual; and if we consider the generally recognized similarity of life and dream; then, summarizing our entire discussion, we may permit ourselves to imagine that, just as each of us is the secret director of his own dreams, so, in analogous fashion, may the fate that governs each of our lives proceed ultimately from that Will, which, though it is our own, yet works its influence from a region far beyond the horizon of our individual perceiving consciousness. Still, it is this limited perceiving consciousness that furnished the motives to our empirically knowable, individual will. Naturally, then, this latter must frequently come into violent conflict with that other will of ours which appears to us as our Fate, as our guiding genius, as our "Spirit, dwelling outside of us, his throne the highest stars," whose vision, far outdistancing that of the individual consciousness, reveals itself as an inexorable outer coercion, preparing and controlling what, though it cannot be revealed to the individual, he must never get wrong. . . .
But now, if, in order to make our point a bit more comprehensible, we have called upon the well-known similarity of the individual life to dream, let it not be forgotten, on the other hand, that in dreams the relationship is one-sided; that is to say, that only one ego actually wills and experiences while the others are nothing but phantoms, whereas in the great dream of life there exists a reciprocal relationship: each not only appears in the other's dream precisely as there required, but also experiences the other in a similar way in his own dream; so that, by virtue of an actual harmonia praestabilita, each dreams only what is appropriate to his own metaphysical guidance, and yet all the life dreams are interwoven so artfully that, while each experiences only what redounds to his own increase, he performs what the others require. Hence, a vast world event conforms to the destiny-requirements of many thousands, befitting each in his own way.
Every event in every individual life must then be implicated in two fundamentally different orders of relationship: first, in the objective, causal order of the course of nature, and second, in a subjective order relevant only to the experiencing individual himself and as subjective, consequently, as his dreams--where the sequence and content of the occurrences are as predetermined as the scenes of a drama, and indeed, in the same way, namely, by plan of the author. However, that these two sorts of relationship should exist together, and in such a way that every event must be a link simultaneously in two completely different chains with the two conjoining perfectly, the fate of each thus harmonizing with the fate of every other, each the hero of his own drama and yet an actor in all the rest: this is certainly something that surpasses our comprehension, and can be imagined as possible only in terms of the most miraculous harmonia praestabilita.
But, on the other hand, would it not be an act of narrow-minded cowardice to maintain that it would be impossible for the life paths of all mankind in the complex interrelationships to exhibit as much concert and harmony as a composer can bring into the many apparently disconnected and haphazardly turbulent voices of his symphony? Our timidity before this colossal prospect may be allayed if we remind ourselves that the Subject of this great dream of life is, in a certain sense, only one, namely the Will to Life itself; and furthermore, that all of this multiplicity of the phenomena is conditioned by time and space. It is a vast dream, dreamed by a single being; but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Hence, everything interlocks and harmonizes with everything else.
--Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German philosopher. "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual", translated by Joseph Campbell. From Volume 8 of his collected works, pp. 208-225.
Christianity proffered a fixed revelation of absolute, unchanging Being and truth; and the revelation was elaborated into a system of definite rules and ends for the direction of life. Hence "morals" were conceived as a code of laws, the same everywhere and at all times. The good life was one lived in fixed adherence to fixed principles.
In contrast with all such beliefs, the outstanding fact in all branches of natural science is that to exist is to be in process, in change. . . .
Victorian thought conceived of new conditions as if they merely put in our hands effective instruments for realizing old ideals. The shock and uncertainty so characteristic of the present marks the discovery that the older ideals themselves are undermined. Instead of science and technology giving us better means for bringing them to pass, they are shaking our confidence in all large and comprehensive beliefs and purposes.
Such a phenomenon is, however, transitory. The impact of the new forces is for the time being negative. Faith in the divine author and authority in which Western civilization confided, inherited ideas of the soul and its destiny, of fixed revelation, of completely stable institutions, of automatic progress, have been make impossible for the cultured mind of the Western world. It is psychologically natural that the outcome should be a collapse of faith in all fundamental organizing and directive ideas. Skepticism becomes the mark and even the pose of the educated mind. It is the more influential because it is no longer directed against this and that article of the older creeds bit is rather a bias against any kind of far-reaching ideas, and a denial of systematic participation on the part of such ideas in the intelligent direction of affairs.
It is in such a context that a thoroughgoing philosophy of experience, framed in the light of science and technique, has its significance. . . .
A philosophy of experience will accept at its full value the fact that social and moral existences are, like physical existences, in a state of continuous if obscure change. It will not try to cover up the fact of inevitable modification, and it will make no attempt to set fixed limits to the extent of changes that are to occur. For the futile effort to achieve security and anchorage in something fixed, it will substitute the effort to determine the character of changes that are going on and to give them in the affairs that concern us most some measure of intelligent direction. . . .
Wherever the thought of fixity rules, that of all-inclusive unity rules also. The popular philosophy of life is filled with desire to attain such an all-embracing unity, and formal philosophies have been devoted to an intellectual fulfillment of the desire. Consider the place occupied in popular thought by search for the meaning of life and the purpose of the universe. Men who look for a single purport and a single end either frame an idea of them according to their private desires and tradition, or else, not finding any such single unity, give up in despair and conclude that there is no genuine meaning and value of life's episodes.
The alternatives are not exhaustive, however. There is no need of deciding between no meaning at all and one single, all-embracing meaning. There are many meanings and many purposes in the situations in which we are confronted--one, so to say, for each situation. Each offers its own challenge to thought and endeavor, and each presents its own potential value.
--John Dewey (1859-1952), American philosopher, psychologist, and educator, co- founder of Pragmatism. Living Philosophies (1931), pp. 26-27.
The nihilist's question, "Why?" is a product of his earlier habitude of expecting an aim to be given, to be set for him, from without--i.e. by some superhuman authority or other. When he has learned not to believe in such a thing, he goes on, just the same, from habit, looking for another authority of some kind that will be able to speak unconditionally and set goals and tasks by command. The authority of Conscience now is the first to present itself (the more emancipated from theology, the more imperative morality becomes) as compensation for a personal authority. Or the authority of Reason. Or the Social Instinct (the herd). Or History, with an immanent spirit that has a goal of its own, to which one can give oneself. One wants, by all means, to get around having to will, to desire a goal, to set up a goal for oneself: one wants to avoid the responsibility (--accepting fatalism). Finally: Happiness, and with a certain tartuffery, the Happiness of the Majority.
One says to oneself: 1. a definite goal is unnecessary, 2. is impossible to foresee.
And so, precisely when what is required is Will in its highest power, it is at its weakest and most faint-hearted, in Absolute Mistrust of the Organizational Force of the Will-to-be-a-Whole. . . .
Nihilism is of two faces:
A. Nihilism, as a sign of a heightened power of the spirit: active nihilism.
B. Nihilism, as a decline and regression of the power of the spirit: passive nihilism.
Attempts to escape from nihilism without transvaluing earlier values only bring about the opposite of escape: a sharpening of the problem.
--Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900), German philosopher and poet. "The European Nihilists" from The Will of Man (18??), translated by Joseph Campbell. Book I, Paragraphs 20, 22, and 28. Pages 155-56 and 160 of Works (1922), Volume 15.
The group ethic as distinct from personal ethic is faceless and obscure. It is whatever its leaders choose it to mean; it destroys the innocent and justifies the act in terms of the future. . . .Progress secularized, progress which pursues only the next invention, progress which pulls thought out of the mind and replaces it with idle slogans, is not progress at all. It is a beckoning mirage in a desert over which stagger the generations of men. Because man, each individual man among us, possesses his own soul and by that light must live or perish, there is no way by which Utopias--or the lost Garden itself--can be brought out of the future and presented to man. Neither can he go forward to such a destiny. Since in the world of time every man lives but one life, it is in himself that he must search for the secret of the Garden."
--Loren Eiseley (1907-1977), American anthropologist and writer. The Firmament of Time (1962), pp. 137, 140.
We of the Occident are about to arrive at a crossroads that was reached by the thinkers of India some seven hundred years before Christ. This is the real reason why we become both vexed and stimulated, uneasy and interested, when confronted with the concepts and images of Oriental wisdom. This crossing is one to which the people of all civilizations come in the typical course of the development of their capacity and requirement for religious experience, and India's teachings force us to realize what its problems are. But we cannot take over the Indian solutions. We must enter the new period our own way and solve its questions for ourselves, because though truth, the radiance of reality, is universally one and the same, it is mirrored variously according to the mediums in which it is reflected. Truth appears differently in different lands and ages according to the living materials out of which its symbols are hewn.
Concepts and words are symbols, just as visions, rituals, and images are; so too are the manners and customs of daily life. Through all of these a transcendent reality is mirrored. They are so many metaphors reflecting and implying something which, though thus variously expressed, is ineffable, though thus rendered multiform, remains inscrutable. Symbols hold the mind to truth but are not themselves the truth, hence it is delusory to borrow them. Each civilization, every age, must bring forth its own.
We shall therefore have to follow the difficult way of our own experiences, produce our own reactions, and assimilate our sufferings and realizations. Only then will the truth that we bring to manifestation be as much our own flesh and blood as is the child its mother's; and the mother, in love with the Father, will then justly delight in her offspring as His duplication. The ineffable seed must be conceived, gestated, and brought forth from our own substance, fed by our blood, if it is to be the true child through which its mother is reborn: and the Father, the divine Transcendent Principle, will then also be reborn--delivered, that is to say, from the state of non-manifestation, non-action, apparent non-existence. We cannot borrow God. We must effect His new incarnation from within ourselves. Divinity must descend, somehow, into the matter of our own substance and participate in this peculiar life-process.
--Heinrich Zimmer, American educator and writer. Philosophies of India (1942), pp. 1-2.
God is the simultaneous mutual implication of all things, even the contradictory ones.
--Nicolaus Cusanus (1401-1464), philosopher, Apologica doctae ignorantiae [Apology for Learned Unknowing].
Deus est sphaera infinita, cujus centrum est ubique, circumferentia nusquam.
God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
--Anonymous, Liber XXIV philosophorum [The Book of the Twenty- four Philosophers, a 12th Century handbook by and for alchemists], Proposition II, translated from the German [Latin?] by Joseph Campbell. Cusanus is one of many to have quoted it.
He [the heathen astrologer Flegetanis] tells of a thing called the Grail, whose name he had read in the constellations. 'A host of angels left it on the earth.' Flegetanis tells, 'then flew off, high above the stars.
--Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170-1230), Middle High German poet and Minnesinger. Parzival, IX. 454: lines 17-25. Translated by Joseph Campbell.
Its name is lapis exilis [the philosopher's stone: "the uncomely stone, the small or paltry stone"]. By the power of that stone, the phoenix burns and becomes ashes, but the ashes restore it speedily to life. So the phoenix molts and thereafter very brightly shines. Moreover, there never was a man so ill that, if he saw the stone, would not live, unable to die within a week of that day. Nor in complexion would he ever change: one's appearance, whether maid or man, remains the same as one the day that stone is seen, or as at the commencement of the years of one's prime. And should one look upon that stone for two hundred years, nought but one's hair would gray. Such virtue does it communicate to man that flesh and bones grow young at once. The stone is also known as the Grail.
--Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170-1230), Middle High German poet and Minnesinger. Parzival, IX. 469: lines 7-28. Translated by Joseph Campbell.
Truth is that form of error without which a thinking subject cannot live.
--Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900), German philosopher and poet. Human, All-Too-Human (1878), translated by Joseph Campbell. Aphorisms, #11. Works (1922), Volume 1.
Logic rests on presuppositions to which nothing in the actual world corresponds.
--Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900), German philosopher and poet. Human, All-Too-Human (1878), translated by Joseph Campbell. Aphorisms, #11. Works (1922), Volume 1.
FAUSTUS: Where are you dammed?
MEPHISTOPHILIS: In hell.
FAUSTUS: How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
MEPHISTOPHILIS: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it:
Think'st thou that
I who saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,
Am not
tormented with ten thousand hells,
In being deprived of everlasting
bliss?
--Christopher Marlow (1564-1593), English dramatist. The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus (1604), Scene III.
The known myths cannot endure. The known God cannot endure. Whereas formerly, for generations, life so held to established norms that the lifetime of a deity could be reckoned in millenniums, today all norms are in flux, so that the individual is thrown, willy-nilly, back upon himself, into the inward sphere of his own becoming, his forest adventurous without way or path, to come through his own integrity in experience to his own intelligible Castle of the Grail--integrity and courage, in experience, in love, in loyalty, and in act. And to this end the guiding myths can no longer be of any ethnic norms. No sooner learned, these are outdated, out of place, washed away. There are today no horizons, no mythogenetic zones. Or rather, the mythogenetic zone is the individual heart. Individualism and spontaneous pluralism--the free association of men and women of like spirit, under protection of a secular, rational state with no pretensions to divinity--are in the modern world the only honest possibilities: each the creative center of authority for himself, in Cusanus's circle without circumference whose center is everywhere, and where each is the focus of God's gaze.
--Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), American mythologist. Masks of God: Volume IV, Creative Mythology (1967), page 677.
This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.
--Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American writer. Walden (1854).
He [Thoreau] would see that today ten thousand engineers are busy making sure that the world shall be convenient even if it is destroyed in the process, and others are determined to increase its usefulness even though its beauty is lost somewhere along the way.
--E. B. White (1899-1985), American writer. "Walden--1954", Yale Review (1954).
Sadness and languor along the oak tables
Steady the minds of
the sitters and readers;
Sleep and despair, and the stealth of hunters,
And (in the man at the end of the row) anger.
Books are the door of escape from the forest,
Books are the wilderness,
too, for the scholar;
Walled in the past, drowning in fables,
Out of
the weather we sit, steady in languor.
Which are the ones that belong, properly?
Which are the hunters, which
the harried?
Break not the hush that surrounds this miracle--
Mind
against mind, coupling in splendor--
Step on no twig, disturbing the
forest.
Enter the aisles of despair. Sit down and be quiet.
--E. B. White (1899-1985), American writer. "Reading Room" (entire), The New Yorker.
The games of little boys at play,
I-Spy
and Run-Sheep-Run,
Trouble the street the livelong day
And all is for the fun.
And when the lads grow up in fame
And make a subtler
noise,
They plot and plan and play the game
They
played when they were boys.
In darkling street they seek and hide,
The game
grows wild and drunken;
They spy upon the other side,
Keep secrets in a punkin.
So let us think on little boys
And love-of-fire that
lingers,
On simple and remembered joys
And how to
burn the fingers.
The street grows dark, the night is hot,
And so the
game has trended.
Whether we know it, lads, or not,
The game is nearly ended.
Run, sheep, run! Run wild and fast--
A game to end
the day with.
Look at the sky! A fire at last
Too
big for boys to play with!
--E. B. White (1899-1985), American writer. "I Spy" (entire), The New Yorker. See also "The Door".
Morality is not properly the doctrine how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
--Immanual Kant (1724-1804), German philosopher. Critique of Practical Reason (1788), page 227.
Without qualities of an unsocial kind ... man might have led an Arcadian shepherd life in complete harmony, contentment, and mutual love; but in that case all their talents would have forever remained hidden in their germ. ... Thanks be then to nature for this unsociableness, for this envious jealousy and vanity, for this unsatiable desire for possession and for power. ... Man wishes concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; and she wills discord, in order that man may be impelled to a new exertion of his powers, and to the further development of his natural capacities.
--Immanual Kant (1724-1804), German philosopher. "The Natural Principle of the Political Order considered in connection with the Idea of a Universal Cosmopolitical History".
It is indeed true that I think many things with the clearest conviction, ... which I never have the courage to say; but I will never say anything I do not think.
--Immanual Kant (1724-1804), German philosopher. Letter to Moses Mendelssohn (1766), quoted in Immanual Kant, by F. Paulson, page 53.
For as the phenonemon of will becomes more complete, the suffering becomes more and more apparent. In the plant there is yet no sensibility, and therefore no pain. A certain very small degree of suffering is experienced by the lower species of plant life--Infusoria and Radiata; even in insects the capacity to feel and suffer is still limited. It first appears in a high degree with the complete nervous system of vertebrate animals, and always in a higher degre the more intelligence develops. Thus, in proportion as knowledge attains to distinctness, as consciousness ascends, pain also increases, and reaches its highest degree in man. And then, again, the more directly a man knows--the more intelligent he is--the more pain he has; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all.
--Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), German philosopher. The World as Will and Idea (1819), I, page 400.
Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the highest truth, lest it should be too much in advance of the time, may reassure himself by looking at his acts from an impersonal point of view. Let him remember that opinion is the agency through which character adapts external arrangements to itself, and that his opinion rightly forms part of this agency--is a unit of force constituting, with other such units, the general power which works out social changes; and he will perceive that he may properly give utterance to his innermost conviction; leaving it to produce what effect it may. It is not for nothing that he has in him these sympathies with some principles and repugnance to others. He, with all his capacities, and aspirations, and beliefs, is not an accident but a product of the time. While he is a descendant of the past he is a parent of the future; and his thoughts are as children born to him, which he may not carelessly let die. Like every other man he may properly consider himself as one of the myriad agencies through whom works the Unknown Cause; and when the Unknown Cause produces in him a certain belief, he is thereby authorized to profess and act out that belief. ... Not as adventitious therefore will the wise man regard the faith that is in him. The highest truth he sees he will fearlessly utter; knowing that, let what may come of it, he is thus playing his right part in the world--knowing that if he can effect the change he aims at--well; if not--well also; though not so well.
--Herbert Spenser (1820-1903), English philosopher. First Principles (1862), Part I, conclusion.
Does anybody at last understand, will anybody understand what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values, the attempt undertaken with all means, all instincts and all genius to make the opposite values, the noble values triumph ... I see before me a possibility perfectly magical in its charm and glorious coloring. ... Caesar Borgia as Pope. ... Do you understand me?
--Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900), German philosopher and poet. Antichrist (1895), page 228. If you don't know how truly wrong it was for Ceasar Borgia to have been Pope, you definitely need to read a history of Italy during the Rennaisance.
Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher; and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately, it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance.
--Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), English mathematician and philosopher. Mysticism and Logic (1910's), page 106.
I believe there is nothing immortal. ... No doubt the spirit and energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us; and, cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moved.
--George Santayana (1863-1952), Spanish-American poet and philosopher. Winds of Doctrine (1913), page 199.
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
--George Santayana (1863-1952), Spanish-American poet and philosopher. Reason in Religion (1913), page 240.
We commit the blotted manuscript of our lives more willingly to the flames, when we find the immortal text half engrossed in a fairer copy.
--George Santayana (1863-1952), Spanish-American poet and philosopher. Reason in Society (1915), page 258.
But for the excellence of the typical single life no nation deserves to be remembered more than the sands of the sea.
--George Santayana (1863-1952), Spanish-American poet and philosopher. Reason in Society (1915), page 52.
That life is worth living, is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
--George Santayana (1863-1952), Spanish-American poet and philosopher. Reason in Common Sense (1911), page 252.
What is the part of wisdom? To dream with one eye open; to be detatched from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are.
--George Santayana (1863-1952), Spanish-American poet and philosopher. Quoted from an article by Herbert W. Smith in American Review, March 1923. Page 191.
If there be any life that it really better that we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really better for us to believe in that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it incidentally clashed with other greater vital benefits.
--William James (1842-1910), American psychologist and philosopher. Pragmatism (1907), page 78.
I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history, the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangent to the wider life of things.
--William James (1842-1910), American psychologist and philosopher. Pragmatism (1907), page 299.
There is no conclusion. What has conclused that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told and there is no advice to be given. Farewell.
--William James (1842-1910), American psychologist and philosopher. Message on a paper written shortly before his death.
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted.
--Plutarch (c. 46 - after 119 AD), Greek biographer.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
--Nelson Mandela (1918 - ), South African political leader.