It is not for us to like or dislike history; it is for us to forget or remember. And he who has no stomach to this fight, let him depart. Behold, his passport has been made and crowns for convoy have been put into his purse.
Honesty, utilized to effect an end, produces little fruit.
First the sensuality of touch must be understood, and explored because this is always the prior sensation. Here aestheticism has its roots; in pleasure and pain. Next we should focus on taste and smell; and finally on the higher faculties of hearing and sight. After exploring the faculties of the flesh we can turn our attention to the motions of the mind. To proceed otherwise is to build cathedrals in clouds.
That trust and trustworthiness are primarily found in the eyes cannot be understood until one has made clear to oneself, through observation, to what extent the eye can and must speak, and to what extent keep silent.
The form of a poem exists in the mind conjoined with the images and their temporal relations before the poem is actualized. In a sense the words precipitate from the living language and fill the form while the poet, like a Maxwellean demon, controls their every collision and general decent.
We must learn to bear the full weight of our history. We inherit every drop of blood our ancestors shed in the same will by which we came into their land and learning. As much as we feel the pride of their accomplishments we must feel the heavy shame of their crimes. The words we speak are full, in every sentence, with the best expressions and deepest curses that were ever voiced in our tongue. Those who think they can shirk the responsibility of their blood are the same fools who think their children will not suffer for their folly.
If it is necessary for the philosopher to urge abstinence in the case of pleasure and pain then it is the poets prerogative to be the great advocate of indulgence in their excess. Although these roles have become confounded of late it remains true that the poet who is too weak for pleasure or too mild for pain can never take life by the limbs and shake her fruit to the ground.
I have never been sure whether evolution will be impeded or succeeded by technology. I have seen city squirrels bury peanuts in flower pots.
There are three great arts: Poetry, Philosophy, and Mathematics. There are three great arts and the world is full of sciences.
Under the influence of the greatest thinkers of the last two centuries the modern outlook has become increasingly historical as to both objects and ideas. This outlook has created the rival camps of those who wish us to remember and those who wish us to forget, moreover both of these fractions are only symptoms of a general malady which view history as a tool for explanation and excuse.The process of making links, usually with a causal implication or statement, between moments of the past and those that follow them can only be of interest in a definite interpretation of the present which no one seems to see the need of explicating. This stance towards history allows value judgments to creep in unseen, in which mode they can be most tenacious. In order to avoid these pitfalls a different framework should be developed for historical study.
Any one who accepts their modernity will learn to see death as a privilege and madness as an honor.
The mind and the heart are not at odds, they are in love. What we take to be conflicts are the minor squabbles of lovers, the pangs of jealousy, the subtle voicing of dissatisfactions.
Pliny, in his descriptions of the great statues of the Greeks, makes mention of the stains of lust found on a Venus and a Cupid, not to evince the madness of the lovers, but to exonerate the skill of the artist.
I now believe that I was born with an innate sense of what I thought was right and what I thought was wrong. But there was something else in me, something I was not born with, but still deep and strong, that forced me to doubt my own convictions. This sense of self-doubt and insecurity was so pervasive that it drove me, and still drives me, to test the strength and verity of each and every one of my convictions.Whenever I have made test of my convictions, I have always found that for me they hold true. Nevertheless my sense of self-doubt is so extreme, my need for first-hand experience so absolute, that for every one of my convictions that I try there spring up a wealth of new ones that I have not examined, and now must.
Actions which are done for the sake of morality are most often those that have in them nothing of the moral.
What we love most in Sapho are those passages that the ravages of time have left to our imaginations: the lacunae, the enclosed spaces full of her love, the false starts and abrupt conclusions, the unsolved hints, the moot suggestions.