22 quotes found
“Imagination should be used, not to escape reality but to create it.”
“A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.”
“Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic 'feeling' about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes 'pick up' accidentally, as your radio might pick...”
“And in a flash I understood the meaning of sex. It is a craving of mingling of consciousness, whose symbol is the mingling of bodies. Every time a man and a woman slake their thirst in the strange ...”
“Man knows himself as body, and what he knows of spirit comes through grace. The poet would call it inspiration. But the spirit bloweth where it listeth. Man has no control over his inspiration. If ...”
“The nineteenth century was the Age of Romanticism; for the first time in history, man stopped thinking of himself as an animal or a slave, and saw himself as a potential god. All of the cries of re...”
“Sometimes life is intensely interesting and meaningful, and this meaning seems to be an objective fact, like sunlight. At other times it's as meaningless and futile as the wind. We accept this ecli...”
“You've a perfect right to call me as impractical as a dormouse, and to feel I'm out of touch with life. But this is the point where we simply can't see eye to eye. We've nothing whatever in common....”
“Faculty X is simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore...”
“Oh . . . I'd been getting pretty sick of the office. It made me feel dead inside. Finally, the week-ends weren't long enough to get it out of my system. I couldn't read poetry or listen to music. I...”
“There can be no doubt that the chief fault we have developed, through the long course of human evolution, is a certain basic passivity. When provoked by challenges, human beings are magnificent. Wh...”
“No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort's princ...”
“Reade drew a deep breath. He said with resignation, "All right. I'll try to explain. But it's rather difficult. You see, I've devoted my life to the problem of why certain men see visions. Men like...”
“The cultural problem was 'the fallacy of insignificance', and it was a philosophical form of this fallacy that had somehow landed existentialism in a cul de sac.”
“As a young man I was scornful about the supernatural but as I have got older, the sharp line that divided the credible from the incredible has tended to blur; I am aware that the whole world is sli...”
“These men are in prison: that is the Outsiders verdict. They are quite contented in prisoncaged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in priso...”
