Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you get rained out.
Art absorbs the whole of man. One sees, not with the eyes, but with the organism as a whole. One paints, not with the hand, but with the organism as a whole — the historical, the psychophysical organism as a whole.
Touch with your eyes, see with your hands.
There is neither creation nor destruction, neither destiny nor free will, neither path nor achievement; this is the final truth.
The only gift is a portion of oneself.
It is the mark of the wise man that he can listen to fools and learn from them, although their speech is folly.
He [God] rather likes people who fight Him. Fighting God, fighting Judaism means that you are active, not passive, within it. If I don’t care about it, then I have no questions, and if I have no questions, then I have no problems. If I do care about it, then I’ll be questioning it, and I’ll definitely have more problems with it because the questions lead to problems, not answers. In a certain way the difference between a saint and someone who is surely not a saint is not that the saint has no problems, but that he has more, and more elaborate, problems. It is an incessant struggle.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
When one is pretending the entire body revolts.
Whether one walks, rides a camel, flies, or dives deep into the sea, it is for the sole purpose of crossing a frontier beyond which man ceases to feel himself the master, sure of his techniques, upheld by his inheritance, backed by the crowd. The more powerless he is, the more his spirit permeates his being. The horizon of the world and the horizon of thought coincide within him. Then the water, the rocks and the sand become vital nourishment, and perhaps a poem.
A happy childhood can’t be cured. Mine’ll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that’s all, instead of a noose.
Who sees variety and not the unity wanders on from death to death.
Even as radio waves are picked up wherever a set is tuned in to their wavelength, so the thoughts which each of us think each moment of the day go forth into the world to influence for good or bad each other human mind.
Nothing can fill the gap when we are away from those we love, and it would be wrong to try and find anything. We must simply hold out and win through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, since leaving the gap unfilled preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; he does not fill it, but keeps it empty so that our communion with one another may be kept alive, even at the cost of pain.
It takes a long time to become young.
The alienation of Western man is partly due to his having lost contact with all natural functions: the reality of being alive. There are no ends in life, only processes. Change. Spiritual reality is physical reality, clearly seen. We are all here alive together in this world at this time so what are we going to do?
