Prisms Quotes

“Go into the fear, deal with it, lest you live a fugitive life.”
― James Hollis, Prisms: Reflections on This Journey We Call Life

“Life is a loan, and we have to return it to the universe.”
― James Hollis, Prisms: Reflections on This Journey We Call Life

“Man is a reed, the weakest of nature, but he is a thinking reed. It is not necessary that the entire universe arm itself to crush: a vapor, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than what kills him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage that the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing of this.”
― James Hollis, Prisms: Reflections on This Journey We Call Life

“Having done so, he then raises a disturbing challenge to his own project: Were it possible to “understand Hitler,” would it make him less culpable, his monstrous misdeeds less evil? (As the old French proverb has it, “Tout comprendre, tout pardonner.”)”
― James Hollis, Prisms: Reflections on This Journey We Call Life

“Ezra Pound’s lines evoke the paradox that we, fleeting beings in fleeting moments on a speck of dust in oceans of dark space, also embody something that persists.”
― James Hollis, Prisms: Reflections on This Journey We Call Life

“for what we have most to share with them is not our learning or our techniques, but rather who we have become and what darkness we have faced in the world and in ourselves.”
― James Hollis, Prisms: Reflections on This Journey We Call Life