28 quotes found
“The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man”
“Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.”
“I am I and my circumstance; and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself.”
“We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.”
“Marxian Socialism and Bolshevism are two historical phenomena which have hardly a single common denominator.”
“Let others think what they like: for me, the culmination of life consists of a pure and subtly dramatic passion.”
“On the Bigotry of Culture:: it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its conc...”
“The only thing that interests the physicist is finding out on what assumptions a framework of things can be constructed which will enable us to know how to use them mechanically. Physics, as I have...”
“Man is a fantastic animal; he was born of fantasy, he is the son of "the mad woman of the house." And universal history is the gigantic and thousand-year effort to go on putting order into that hug...”
“Self-reflection or autognosis reveals that what is given in consciousness is, first and foremost, integral connectedness and organic unity of all thinking, feeling, and desiring. At the same time, ...”
“Thinking of things" is but a special way of dealing with them; but, as is obvious, it is a secondary manner of doing so and thus presupposes another [i.e., the primordial one]. The fundamental erro...”
“When this reality, the one and only power that checks and disciplines man from within, vanishes because belief in it is slackening, the social domain falls prey to passions. The ensuing vacuum is f...”
“So it happens that we must ask ourselves, with regard to truth, not for a new criterion for it, which will be better polished than earlier ones, but, peremptorily and seizing it by the lapels, "wha...”
“... every hypothesis is a construction, and because of this it is an authentic theory. In so far as they merit that exigent name, ideas are never a mere reception of presumed realities, but they ar...”
“The idea of beauty, like a slab of magnificent marble, has crushed all possible refinement and vitality from the psychology of love.”
“Since love is the most delicate and total act of a soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul. The characteristics of the person in love must be attributed to love itself.”
“We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, here and now, without any postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.”
“To meditate is to sail a course, to navigate, among problems many of which we are in the process of clearing up. After each one looms another, whose shores are even more attractive, more suggestive...”
“And such in fact is the behaviour of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forc...”
“Nine-tenths of that which is attributed to sexuality is the work of our magnificent ability to imagine, which is no longer an instinct, but exactly the opposite: a creation.”
“Next time we will look at this from a much more basic point of view and one antedating all zoology, which, glimpsed only a little after my twentieth year, made write in those days that what is most...”
“For the first time after so many years I come back to cry aloud in the desert. Because this is the mission of the intellectual who is truly a prophetto cry in the desert. The greatest of the prophe...”