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animal consciousness does not extend beyond the given moment nor into the idea that its victims may become extinct…the animal destroys and does not produce…animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual…the human requires a background grid through which to see his universe…focused
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
A world is supported by four things….” She held up four big-knuckled fingers. “…the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing….” She closed her fingers into a fist. “…without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!”
She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.
play on the certain knowledge of their superiority, the mystique of secret covenant, the esprit of shared suffering. It can be done. It has been done on many worlds in many times.”
“What delicious abandon in the sleep of a child.”
There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh.
Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.
There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.
“But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.”
There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.
Nefud was addicted to semuta, the drug-music combination that played itself in the deepest consciousness.
What terrible things we do to those we love!
“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
The real wealth of a planet is in its landscape, how we take part in that basic source of civilization—agriculture.
which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.
A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.”
“Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”
The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture—it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.
“Mankind has ah only one mm-m-m science,”
“It’s the um-m-m-ah-h science of ah-h-h discontent,”
The hands move, the lips move— Ideas gush from his words, And his eyes devour! He is an island of Selfdom.
“To accept a little-death is worse than death itself,”
But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace—those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such
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am a theater of processes,
I am a prey to the imperfect vision, to the race consciousness and its terrible purpose.
When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong—faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.”
A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed.”
