We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow-men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.
The body’s pain and the pain on the streets are not the same but you can learn from the edges that blur O you who love clear edges more than anything watch the edges that blur
I am certainly not radical enough. One can never be radical enough; that is, one must always be as radical as reality itself.
Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed, and in the sight of all. . . . But active love is labor and fortitude.
The role of the artist is tragic today because, while the world’s horizons have been extended, the human heart is as small as ever.
Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?
Each one of us, as long as life stirs in him, may play a part in extricating himself from the power system by asserting his primacy as a person in quiet acts of mental or physical withdrawal — in gestures of non-conformity, in abstentions, restrictions, inhibitions, which will liberate him from the domination of the pentagon of power.
A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and industries mend their ways.
There will be less external discipline, the more internal discipline there is.
And I recall an account of Trollope going up to London to pick up a rejected manuscript from a publisher, getting on the train to return home, laying the bulky bundle on his lap face down, and beginning a new book on the back pages of the rejected one.
Home is not where you live but where they understand you.
. . . to bring something new into the wretched sleep of man, to trouble that sleep with a tremendous dream that finally stirs him into an instant of awakening.
I believe that every man and woman represents humanity. We are different as to intelligence, health, talents. Yet we are all one. We are all saints and sinners, adults and children, and no one is anyone’s superior or judge. We have all been awakened with the Buddha, crucified with Christ, and we have all killed and robbed with Genghis Khan, Stalin and Hitler.
I believe that man can visualize the experience of the whole universal man only by realizing his individuality and never by trying to reduce himself to an abstract, common denominator. Man’s task in life is the paradoxical one of realizing his individuality and at the same time transcending it to arrive at the experience of universality. Only the fully developed self can drop the ego.
I do not ask of God that he should change anything in events themselves, but that he should change me in regard to things, so that I might have the power to create my own universe, to govern my dreams, instead of enduring them.
You are here to aid in the great expansion of consciousness. You are not here to cry about the miseries of the human condition but to change them when you do not find them to your liking through the joy, strength and vitality that is within you; to create the spirit as faithfully and beautifully as you can in flesh.
