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What are the consequences of working for change, even with the best of intentions?
The magic persists.
what will the mind do, each morning, waking?
He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heavy ground of existence.
Anyway, so what if he was crazy? What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.
Of course, Haber thought, a man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes’ witness, if those with him saw nothing.
a mystery is merely a problem we haven’t solved yet!…
I haven’t any strength, I haven’t any character, I’m a born tool. I haven’t any destiny. All I have is dreams. And now other people run them.
The murder of six billion nonexistent people.
Nothing will keep a man from dreaming, he had said, but death.
Don’t be afraid of your unconscious mind! It’s not a black pit of nightmares. Nothing of the kind! It is the wellspring of health, imagination, creativity. What we call ‘evil’ is produced by civilization, its constraints and repressions, deforming the spontaneous, free self-expression of the personality.
He could not face his grief, his bereavement. Dream-grief. The loss of a woman who had never existed.
He tried to taste his food, to watch other people. But the food had no taste and the people were all gray.
You are afraid of losing your balance. But change need not unbalance you; life’s not a static object, after all. It’s a process. There’s no holding still. Intellectually you know that, but emotionally you refuse it. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, you can’t step into the same river twice. Life—evolution—the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy—existence itself—is essentially change.”
“Then this world will be like heaven, and men will be like gods!”
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
In fact it was, the endless warm drizzle of spring—the ice of Antarctica, falling softly on the heads of the children of those responsible for melting it.
mankind cannot bear very much reality;
A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
