Van > Van's Quotes

“The space between Heaven and Earth---is it not like a bellows?”
― Lao-Tzu

“Man cannot remain with no way out.”
― Pope John Paul II

“...the faith state...is the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending-desires to one direction... [p.272]”
― William James

“One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges...”
― Charles Darwin

“...there is something fluid about [packs] during the course of any individual manifestation. [p. 127]”
― Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

“Trapped inside a metaphor, I've often felt the need to re-describe it, to change the terms. This isn't so much a balloon, I've wanted to say, as a bubble within which I'm simultaneously exposed and sealed off.... depriving me of reality, reducing me to an abstraction....
[NY, Dec. 1991; Columbia Graduate School Of Journalism Speech]”
― Salmon Rushdie

“The inner, subtle essences can be contemplated only by sucking, not by knowing. [p. xxix]”
― Daniel Matt

“...seizing and incorporating...There is nothing about us which is more strongly primitive. [p. 203]”
― Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

“The hand which scoops up the water is the first vessel. The fingers of both hands intertwined are the first basket. [p. 217]”
― Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

“And with a little pin bores through his castle wall and farewell king.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II

“But my hand was too small to do the gathering. [Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 79]”
― Herbert Mason

“...our moral and practical attitude....impulses, inhibitions.... how it contains and moulds us by its restrictive pressure almost as if we were fluids pent with the cavity of a jar.... It becomes our subconscious. [p. 287]”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

“The fabric of archetypal canon which used to support the average man has given way... [p. 439]”
― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. [p. 32]”
― Marshall McLuhan, La galaxia Gutenberg: Génesis del homo typographicus

“The great obstacle to the 'struggle toward clear vision of the universal' is the human trait that Mondrian variously calls 'individuality,' 'personality'... [p.73]”
― Roger Lipsey, An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art

“To trace the development of mind from earliest times...requires...not a categorical concept, but a functional one.... The most promising operational principle for this purpose is the principle of individuation.[p. 310]" "[yet she also says:]...we have no physical model of this endless rhythm of individuation and involvement, we do have its image in the world of art, most purely in dance;...this dialectic of vital continuity...[p. 355]”
― Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling [Abridged Edition]

“One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments. [p.111]”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“And so the light that warms us all is carefully poured from day to night and back again, in a mysterious song of balance and shared purpose. [from Princess Ruby And The Moonman]”
― Dana Simson

“I don’t suppose there’ll be a tree left standing, for ever so far around, by the time we’re finished.’” Tweedledum to tweedledee [They are fighting over a rattle]. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, p. 156”
― Lewis Carroll

“Why did Erasmus[…] transform the image of a woman yielding to the temptation of an enormous storage jar into the image of a woman carrying with her a small pyxis [box] ?” Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box: The changing aspects of a Mythical Symbol, p. 18”
― Dora and Erwin Panofsky

“A stream of ideal tendency embedded in the external structure of the world.”
― William James

“…our aim has been to provide anyone who is seriously interested with an introduction to the world of the archetypes, and to make this introduction as simple as possible. For this reason we have included… a number of schemas, or diagrams, which as experience has shown, make things much easier for most people, though by no means for all.” Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, p.xii.”
― Erich Neumann

“[John] Harrison [could not] express himself clearly in writing.... No matter how brilliantly ideas formed in his mind, or crystallized in his clockworks, his verbal descriptions failed to shine with the same light.... The first sentence [of his last published work] runs on, virtually unpunctuated, for twenty-five pages." Dava Sobel, Longitude, p66”
― Dava Sobel

“For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.”
― Margaret Mead

“For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a professional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot. He unites them in himself, but they dissolve him, so that he is really nothing more than a small basin hollowed out by these many streamlets that trickle into it and drain out of it again, to join other such rills in filling some other basin. Which is why every inhabitant of the earth also has a tenth character that is nothing else than the passive fantasy of spaces yet unfilled [....] prevent[ing] precisely what should be his true fulfillment.”
― Robert Musil

“[...] a number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume I

“There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses [....] The truth by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume I

“Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scott-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.”
― W. B. Yeats

“Genius is childhood recovered at will.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”
― Dorothy Parker