In Their Own Words 1
A person’s name is something from which one never
recovers. We shape our tools and then our tools
shape us. Art is anything that you can get away with.
When a circuit learns your job, what are you going to
do? There is absolutely no inevitability so long as
there is a willingness to understand what is
happening.
Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries
are protected by public incredulity. Computers can do
better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making
sense is still a human monopoly.
Technology is that which separates us from our
environment. I don’t necessarily agree with
everything I say. We are the genitals of our
technology. We exist only to improve next years
model.
Ads are the cave art of the 20th century. Money is the
poor man’s credit card. I don’t know who discovered
water but is certainly wasn’t a fish.
We drive into the future using only our rearview
mirror. All advertising advertises advertising. I may
be wrong, but I’m never in doubt. If it works, it’s
obsolete. Concepts are a provisional affair. First man
made the hammer, then the hammer made the man.
Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the
idiot with dignity. The machine easily masters the
grim and the dumb. The artist is the only person; his
antennae pick up these messages before anybody. So
he is always thought of as being way ahead of his
time because he lives in the present.
Jobs are finished; role-playing has taken over; the job
is a passe entity. Jobs belong to specialists. Kids no
longer live in a specialist world. One cannot say “I’ll
start here and eventually I’ll get there. Every kid
knows that within three years, everything will have
changed.
In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty.
You get dwarfs. The camera makes everyone a tourist in
other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. So
successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the
world that photographs, rather than the world, have
become the standard of the beautiful.
The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the
role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to
give more accurate reports on reality (including works of
art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often
experienced as a letdown.
All modern wars, even when their aims are the traditional
ones, such as territorial aggrandizement or the acquisition
of scarce resources, are cast as clashes of civilizations —
culture wars — with each side claiming the high ground,
and characterizing the other as barbaric. The enemy is
invariably a threat to "our way of life," an infidel, a
desecrator, a polluter, a defiler of higher or better values.
The current war against the very real threat posed by
militant Islamic fundamentalism is a particularly clear
example.
"Old" and "new" are the perennial poles of all feeling and
sense of orientation in the world. We cannot do without
the old, because in what is old is invested all our past, our
wisdom, our memories, our sadness, our sense of realism.
We cannot do without faith in the new, because in what is
new is invested all our energy, our capacity for optimism,
our blind biological yearning, our ability to forget — the
healing ability that makes reconciliation possible.
Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they
commit, and send the pictures to their buddies and family.
What is revealed by these photographs is as much the
culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for
unapologetic brutality. Ours is a society in which secrets
of private life that you would have given nearly anything
to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to
reveal.
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In Their Own Words 2
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a
descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to
destroy. Through violence you may murder the hater,
but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely
increases hate.
Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?"
Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" Vanity
asks the question, "Is it popular?" Conscience asks
the question "Is it right?" And there comes a time
when one must take a position that is neither safe,
nor politic, nor popular, but because it is right.
I believe today that there is a need for all people of
good will to come together with a massive act of
conscience and say "We aren't going to study war
any more." This is the challenge facing modern man.
The strong one holds in a living blend strongly
marked opposites. The idealists are usually not
realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic.
The militant are not generally known to be passive,
nor the passive to be militant. But life at its best is a
creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.
Jesus recognized the need for blending opposites. He
gave them a formula for action, "Be ye therefore as
wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." We must
combine the toughness of the serpent with the
softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.
Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness, the
kind that Jesus placed on a dangerous curve between
Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain
man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a
Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They
didn't stop to help him. And finally a man of another
race came by. He got down from his beast, decided
not to be compassionate by proxy, but with him, he
administered first aid, and helped the man in need.
Virtue debases itself in justifying itself.
Quite a heavy weight, a name too quickly famous.
All men are equal; it is not their birth, but virtue itself that
makes the difference.
The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of
architecture for wild beasts to fight in.
Almost everything is imitation. The idea of The Persian
Letters was taken from The Turkish Spy. Boiardo imitated
Pulci. Ariosto imitated Boiardo. The most original writers
borrowed from one another.
Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil.
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
Use, do not abuse; the wise man arrange things so. I flee
Epictetus and Petronius alike. Neither abstinence nor
excess ever renders man happy.
May we not return to those scoundrels of old, the
illustrious founders of superstition and fanaticism, who
first took the knife from the altar to make victims of those
who refused to be their disciples?
It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn
an innocent one.
It is dangerous to be right in matters where established
men are wrong.
A minister of state is excusable for the harm he does when
the helm of government has forced his hand in a storm;
but in the calm he is guilty of all the good he does not do.
Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or
earthquakes on this little globe of ours.
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In Their Own Words 3
It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous
universe, this tremendous range of time and space
and different animals, and all the planets, and all
these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this
complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God
can watch humans struggle for good and evil —
which is religion’s view. The stage is too big for the
drama.
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages
of the world, but you'll know absolutely nothing
whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and
see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned
very early the difference between knowing the name
of something and knowing something.
When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first
shot got off safely is little comfort for the next.
A poet once said "The whole universe is in a glass of
wine." We will probably never know in what sense he
meant that, for poets do not write to be understood.
But it is true that if we look at a glass closely enough
we see the entire universe. There are the things of
physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates
depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in
the glass, and our imaginations adds the atoms. The
glass is a distillation of the Earth's rocks, and in its
composition we see the secret of the universe's age,
and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of
chemicals are there in the wine? How did they come
to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the
substrates, and the products. There in wine is found
the great generalization: all life is fermentation.
Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without
discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much
disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence
into the consciousness that watches it! If our small
minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of
wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology,
geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on —
remember that Nature does not know it! Let it give
us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!
But tell me, this physician of whom you were just
speaking, is he a moneymaker, an earner of fees, or a
healer of the sick?
When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more
and the unjust less on the same amount of income.
Humans censure injustice fearing that they may be the
victims of it, and not because they shrink from committing
it.
Until the wise are presidents, or the presidents and leaders
of this world have the spirit and power of wisdom, and
political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those
commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of
the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never
have rest from their evils.
Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty
of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.
Democracy, which is a charming form of government, full
of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality
to equals and unequaled alike, sooner or later passes into
despotism.
You cannot conceive the many without the one. You
cannot conceive the one without the many.
The good are not willing to govern either for money or for
fame. They do not wish to be paid for their service and be
styled hirelings nor to take it by stealth and be called
thieves, nor even for the sake of fame, for they do not
covet fame. When the better sort go into it, they do so not
in the expectation of enjoyment nor as to a good thing, but
as a necessary evil and because they are unable to turn it
over to better than themselves or to their like. For we may
say that, if there should ever be a city of the good,
immunity from office-holding would be as eagerly
contended for as office is now.
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In Their Own Words 4
Let us think of education as the means of developing
our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a
private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be
translated into benefit for everyone and greater
strength for our nation.
Liberty without learning is always in peril; learning
without liberty is always in vain.
Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be
solved by man. No problem of human destiny is
beyond human beings
The American, by nature, is optimistic. He is
experimental, an inventor and a builder who builds
best when called upon to build greatly.
The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the
full use of your powers along lines of excellence.
The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie,
deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth. The
opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in
such a universe is time well spent.
In short, we must face problems which do not lend
themselves to easy or quick or permanent solutions.
And we must face the fact that the United States is
neither omnipotent nor omniscient, that we are only
six percent of the world's population, that we cannot
impose our will upon the other ninety-four percent of
mankind, that we cannot right every wrong or reverse
each adversity, and that therefore there cannot be an
American solution to every world problem.
Terror is not a new weapon. Throughout history it
has been used by those who could not prevail, either
by persuasion or example. But inevitably they fail,
either because men are not afraid to die for a life
worth living, or because the terrorists themselves
came to realize that free men cannot be frightened by
threats, and that aggression would meet its own
response.
Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking,
'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting
hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In
fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to
have me in it!'
This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky
and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets
smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the
notion that everything is going to be alright, because this
world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him
in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by
surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on
the watch out for.
The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and
richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I
mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out
of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing,
is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get
some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it's
just wonderful. And . . . the opportunity to spend 70 or 80
years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as
far as I am concerned.
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a
nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be
normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our
perspective tends to be.
Generally, old media don't die. They just have to grow old
gracefully. Guess what, we still have stone masons. They
haven't been the primary purveyors of the written word for
a while now of course, but they still have a role because
you wouldn't want a TV screen on your headstone.
My absolute favorite piece of information is the fact that
young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their
own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of
trees.
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In Their Own Words 5
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not
have the time.
A lawyer who has been well paid in advance will find
the cause he is pleading all the more just.
Anyone who found the secret of rejoicing when
things go well without being annoyed when they go
badly would have found the point.
Equality of possessions is no doubt right, but, as men
could not make might obey right, they have made
right obey might.
God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere
and circumference is nowhere.
It is not certain that everything is uncertain.
One must have deeper motives and judge everything
accordingly, but go on talking like an ordinary person.
That something so obvious as the vanity of the world
should be so little recognized that people find it odd
and surprising to be told that it is foolish to seek
greatness; that is most remarkable.
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies
me.
To make light of philosophy is to be a true
philosopher.
True morality makes fun of morality.
Wisdom leads us back to childhood.
People never do evil so completely and cheerfully as
when they do it from religious conviction.
It is man's sickness to believe he possesses the Truth.
The last thing one knows in writing an essay is what
to put first.
Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one's desires,
but by the removal of desire.
Humans are disturbed not by things, but by the views they
take on them.
If any be unhappy, let them remember that they are
unhappy by reason of themselves alone.
Permit nothing to grow in you that may give you agony
when it is torn away.
Get rid of the judgment, get rid of the 'I am hurt,' you are
rid of the hurt itself.
Everything is right for me, which is right for you,
Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which
comes in due time for you. Everything is fruit to me which
your seasons bring. From you are all things, in you are all
things, to you all things return.
If you work at that which is before you, following right
reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing
anything else to distract you, but keeping your existence
pure, as if you were bound to give it back immediately; if
you hold to this, expecting nothing, but satisfied to live
now according to nature, speaking heroic truth in every
word which you utter, you will live happy. And there is no
one able to prevent this.
How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at
anything which happens in life!
Look at how soon we're all forgotten. The abyss of endless
time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those
applauding hands. The people who praise us; how
capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region in
which it takes place. The whole earth, among the smallest
of points in the universe.
The point is, not how long you live, but how nobly you
live.
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In Their Own Words 6
Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible
into the indifferent by the incompetent.
The difficulty lies, not in new ideas, but in escaping
from old ones.
By a continuing process of inflation, governments
confiscate, secretly and unobserved, the wealth of
their citizens. By this method they not only
confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while
the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches
some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of
riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence
in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest
of men will do the wickedest of things for the
greatest good of everyone.
If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a
problem. But if you owe a million, it has.
The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit
that still carries any reward.
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of
high social importance, there will be great changes in
the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves
of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have
ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have
exalted some of the most distasteful of human
qualities into the position of the highest virtues.
The love of money as a possession will be
recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting
morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-
pathological propensities which one hands over with
a shudder to specialists in mental disease ... But
beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least
another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves
and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for
foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and
precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.
Courage is the most important of all the virtues because
without courage you can't practice any other virtue
consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but
nothing consistently without courage.
People will forget what you said. People will forget what
you did. But people will never forget how you made them
feel.
A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings
because it has a song.
I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest
existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings
become more affluent, as their living standard and style
begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale
of responsibility at a commensurate speed.
There's a world of difference between truth and facts.
Facts can obscure the truth.
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be
defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the
defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise
from, how you can still come out of it.
We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us
think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in
groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity.
We use it. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a
heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute
a person with it.
Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot
influence— neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor
diminish— it is an imponderably valuable gift.
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In Their Own Words 7
The surface of American society is covered with a
layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one
can see the aristocratic colors breaking through.
What is the most important for democracy is not that
great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes
should not remain in the same hands. In that way
there are rich men, but they do not form a class.
In the United States, the majority undertakes to
supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the
use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the
necessity of forming opinions of their own.
I know of no country in which there is as little
independence of mind and discussion as in America.
As one digs deeper into the national character of the
Americans, one sees that they have sought the value
of everything in this world only in the answer to this
single question: how much money will it bring in?
He was as great as a man can be without morality.
Step back in time; look at the child in arms of his
mother; see the external world reflected for the first
time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding;
study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen
to the first words which arouse the slumbering power
of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to
undergo; only then will you comprehend the source
of his prejudices, the habits, and the passions which
are to rule his life. The entire man, so to speak,
comes fully formed in the wrappings of his cradle.
The American Republic will endure, until politicians
realize they can bribe the people with their own
money.
The greatness of America lies not in being more
enlightened than other nations, but rather in her
ability to repair her faults.
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering;
the capacity for self-indulgence changes hands.
My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have
prepared answers.
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us
many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets.
Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.
An artist is the magician put among men to gratify —
capriciously — their urge for immortality. The temples are
built and brought down around him, continuously and
contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there
is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art,
yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the
celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if
it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust.
A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants
looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken
pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes,
of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a
thousand ships — and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer,
the most human, the most complete of all heroes —
husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist,
politician, inventor and adventurer.
Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might
have gone on to achieve. I mean, if Beethoven had been
killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music
would have been very different. As would the history of
aviation.
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They
deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order,
you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that
children will speak for you when you are dead.
I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
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In Their Own Words 8
A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his
feats in it.
A business absolutely devoted to service will have
only one worry about profits. They will be
embarrassingly large.
A market is never saturated with a good product, but
it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice.
Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is
progress; working together is success.
It is not the employer who pays the wages.
Employers only handle the money. It is the customer
who pays the wages.
Money doesn't change men, it merely unmasks them.
If a man is naturally selfish or arrogant or greedy, the
money brings that out, that's all.
Speculation is only a word covering the making of
money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of
supplying goods and services.
The man who will use his skill and constructive
imagination to see how much he can give for a
dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar,
is bound to succeed.
There is one rule for the industrialist and that is:
Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest
cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.
You will find men who want to be carried on the
shoulders of others, who think that the world owes
them a living. They don't seem to see that we must all
lift together and pull together.
At the approach of danger there are always two voices that
speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very
reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the
danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more
reasonable says that it is too painful and harassing to think
of the danger, since it is not a man's power to provide for
everything and escape from the general march of events;
and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful
subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In
solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in
society to the second.
All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way.
Nor is it given to any man to know whether, when evening
comes, he will need boots for his body or slippers for his
corpse.
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most
slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them
already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the
most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he
knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid
before him.
I know that most men — not only those considered clever,
but even those who are very clever and capable of
understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or
philosophic, problems — can seldom discern even the
simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges
them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed,
perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they
are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which
they have built their lives.
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the
governments, the governments alone, independent of the
interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious
even when successful.
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In Their Own Words 9
Great problems call for many small solutions.
Whether we know it or not, Nature is party to all our
deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer
memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.
A community is the mental and spiritual condition of
knowing that the place is shared, the people who
share the place define and limit the each other's lives.
It is the knowledge that people have of each other,
their concern for each other, their trust in each other,
the freedom with which they come and go among
themselves.
Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as
classrooms and laboratories where techniques and
states of mind are prepared for the next war.
We haven't accepted, we can't really believe, that the
most characteristic product of our age of scientific
miracles is junk, but it is so. We still think and
behave as though we face an unspoiled continent,
with thousands of acres of living space for every one.
We still sing 'America the Beautiful' as though we
had not created in it, by strenuous effort, at great
expense, and with dauntless self-praise, an
unprecedented ugliness.
Individualism is going around these days in uniform,
handing out the party line on individualism.
The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a
learner. A teacher's major contribution may pop out
anonymously in the life of some ex-student's
grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on
but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but
testimony.
The most alarming sign of the state of our society
now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice
the lives of young people in war, but have not the
courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and
less wasteful.
When we look through telescopes and microscopes, or
when we look at nature, we have a problem. Somehow the
idea of God from the scriptures doesn't seem to fit the
world around us, just as you wouldn't ascribe a
composition by Stravinsky to Bach.
The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or
synagogue seems completely different from the style of
the natural universe. It's hard to conceive of the author of
one as the author of the other.
Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe.
They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them
as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to
them.
You see, many of the troubles going on in the world right
now are being supervised by people with very good
intentions whose attempts are to keep things in order, to
clean things up, to forbid this, and to prevent that. The
more we try to put everything to rights, the more we make
fantastic messes. Maybe I should not say anything at all
about the folly of trying to put things to right but simply,
on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so
that he will become wise.
There is a place for awe and astonishment at existence.
That is also a basis for respect for existence. We don’t
have much of it in this culture though we call it
materialistic. Today we are bent on the total destruction of
material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gases.
This is a materialist culture that has no respect for
material.
I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing
severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag,
whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the
flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people,
and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of
our perennial confusion of symbols with realities.
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In Their Own Words 10

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world A poem should be palpable and mute
without being saddened very often. As a globed fruit

The claim of the Jews to the land of Israel cannot be Dumb

a realistic political claim. If all nations would
suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers
had lived two thousand years ago, this world would
be a madhouse. I believe that, politically speaking,
there is only one solution for Israel, namely, the
unilateral acknowledgement of the obligation of the
State towards the Arabs, not to use it as a bargaining
point, but to acknowledge the complete moral
obligation of the Israeli State to its former inhabitants
of Palestine.
As old medallions to the thumb
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person
in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever
reaching satisfaction.
Care and responsibility are elements of love, but
without respect for and knowledge of the beloved,
love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness.
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but A poem should be equal to:
they are not capable of loving themselves either. Not true

Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is For all the history of grief
our insanity. "Patriotism” is its cult. It should hardly An empty doorway and a maple leaf
be necessary to say, that by "patriotism” I mean that
attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, For love
above the principles of truth and justice; not the The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -
loving interest in one’s own nation, which is the
concern with the nation’s spiritual as much as with A poem should not mean
its material welfare — never with its power over But be.
other nations. Just as love for one individual which
excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s
country which is not part of one’s love for humanity
is not love, but idolatrous worship. The Pyrrhonist thinks that life should not mean but be.

Reason is our instrument for arriving at the truth,

intelligence our instrument for manipulating the
world successfully; the former is essentially human,
the latter is the animal part.
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In Their Own Words 11
Riches are a good handmaid, but the worst mistress.
No one has yet been found so firm of mind and
purpose as resolutely to sweep away all theories and
common notions, and to apply the understanding,
thus made fair and even, to a fresh examination of
particulars.
If one begin with certainties, one shall end in doubts;
but if one will be content to begin with doubts one
shall end in certainties.
Seek first the virtues of the mind; and other things
either will come, or will not be wanted.
Being the servant and interpreter of Nature, one can
do and understand so much and so much only as
observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature.
Beyond this one neither knows anything nor can do
anything.
The human understanding is of its own nature prone
to suppose the existence of more order and regularity
in the world than it finds.
Human understanding is like a false mirror, which,
receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the
nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.
The greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or
misplacing of the last or farthest end of knowledge:
for some have entered into a desire of learning and
knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and
inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their
minds with variety and delight; sometimes for
ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable
them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most
times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely
to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the
benefit and use of others.
Prosperity best discovers vice, but adversity best
discovers virtue.
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used
brings happy death.
Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect
but rather memory.
It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.
Human subtlety will never devise an invention more
beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature,
because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing
is superfluous.
The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has
passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is
with time present.
The greatest deception men suffer is from their own
opinions.
He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss.
Experience shows us that the air must have darkness
beyond it and yet it appears blue. If you produce a small
quantity of smoke from dry wood and the rays of the sun
fall on this smoke, and if you then place behind the smoke
a piece of black velvet on which the sun does not shine,
you will see that all the smoke which is between the eye
and the black stuff will appear of a beautiful blue color.
And if instead of the velvet you place a white cloth smoke,
that is too thick smoke, hinders, and too thin smoke does
not produce, the perfection of this blue color. Hence a
moderate amount of smoke produces the finest blue.
We see the most striking example of humility in the lamb
which will submit to any animal; and when they are given
for food to imprisoned lions they are as gentle to them as
to their own mother, so that very often it has been seen
that the lions forbear to kill them.
Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry
is a painting which is heard but not seen.
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In Their Own Words 12
The true method of knowledge is experiment.
Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose
public records to be true.
That the Jews assumed a right exclusively to the
benefits of God will be a lasting witness against
them. The same will it be against Christians.
When nations grow old, the arts grow cold, and
commerce settles on every tree.
Active evil is better than passive good.
Those who never alter their opinions are like
standing water, and breed reptiles of the mind.
The fool sees not the same tree that the wise see.
No bird soars too high, if it soars with its own wings.
If a fool persists in folly, the fool will become wise.
The cistern contains. The fountain overflows.
You never know what is enough unless you know
what is more than enough.
Those who bind to themselves a joy do the wingèd
life destroy; those who kiss the joy as it flies by, live
in eternal sunrise.
Those who would do good to others must do it in
minute particulars; general good is the plea of the
scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.
Both of us read the scriptures day and night, but you
read black where I read white.
A robin redbreast in a cage puts the skies into a rage.
To be ignorant of the past is to forever be a child.
We are not born for ourselves alone.
One is never less at leisure than when at leisure.
A friend is, as it were, a second self.
Genius is fostered by energy.
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent
of all others.
While there's life, there's hope.
The welfare of the people is the ultimate law.
We denounce with indignation and dislike those who are
so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasures of
the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee
the the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal
blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through
weakness of will, which is the same as saying through
shrinking from toil and pain.
These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish.
In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammeled
and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we
like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain
avoided.
But in other times and owing to the claims of duty or
obligation it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be
repudiated and annoyances accepted.
The wise therefore always hold in these matters to this
principle of selection: to reject pleasures to secure other
greater pleasures, or else to endure pains to avoid worse
pains.
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In Their Own Words 13
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre,
but they are more deadly in the long run.
A crowded police docket is the surest of all signs that
trade is brisk and money plenty.
A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.
We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that
the savage has, because we know how it is made. We
have lost as much as we gained by prying into that
matter.
You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat
does -- but you let a cat get excited once; you let a
cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed,
nights, and you'll hear grammar that will give you the
lockjaw. Ignorant people think it's the noise which
fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't
so; it's the sickening grammar they use.
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you
were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain
or freed a human soul in this world — and never
will.
To create man was a fine and original idea; but to
add the sheep was a tautology.
The only reason why God created man is because he
was disappointed with the monkey.
It is curious that physical courage should be so
common in the world, and moral courage so rare.
I have been complimented many times and they
always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not
said enough.
The easy confidence with which I know another
man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect my own.
Old women snore violently. They are like bodies into
which bizarre animals have crept at night; the animals are
vicious, bawdy, noisy. How they snore! There is no shame
to their snoring. Old women turn into old men.
It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her
body that he can take possession of another human being,
so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to
make his claim.
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of
silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or
walking or doing housework — you can still be writing,
because you have that space.
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us
from superficiality.
When poets — write about food it is usually celebratory.
Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful
preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals
communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.
Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is
presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the
voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive,
teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider’s delicate web, a
kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.
When you’re 50 you start thinking about things you
haven’t thought about before. I used to think getting old
was about vanity, but actually it’s about losing people you
love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.
It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to
acknowledge, but we do love our students.
There is the expectation that a younger generation has the
opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their
elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.
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In Their Own Words 14
Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don’t
they try to understand bird song? Why do they love a
night, a flower, everything which surrounds man,
without attempting to understand them?
Where painting is concerned, they want to understand.
Let them understand above all that the artist works
from necessity; that he is a minute element of the
world to whom one should ascribe no more
importance than so many things in nature which
charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves.
Those who attempt to explain a picture are on the
wrong track most of the time. Gertrude Stein told me
some time ago that she had finally understood what
my picture represented: three musicians. It was a still-
life!!
Art is not made to decorate rooms. It is an offensive
weapon in the defense against the enemy.
For a long time I limited myself to one color — as a
form of discipline.
It is not what the artist does that counts. But what he
is. Cezanne would never have interested me if he had
lived and thought like Jaques-Emile Blanche, even if
the apple he had painted had been ten times more
beautiful. What interests us is the anxiety of Cézanne,
the teaching of Cézanne, the anguish of Van Gogh, in
short the inner drama of the man. The rest is false.
Abstract art is only painting. And what’s so dramatic
about that? There is no abstract art. One must always
begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all
semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as
the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.
It is what aroused the artist, stimulated his ideas and
set of his emotions. These ideas and emotions will be
imprisoned in his work for good.. ..Whether he wants
it or not, man is the instrument of nature; she imposes
on him character and appearance.
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they
cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating
and for earning money.
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but
toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as
hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to
learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I
could teach myself.
In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of
their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only
appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not
basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women,
too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and
possessiveness, that descent toward infantile
undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger
with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-
quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general
mix-up.
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that
children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they
provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called
an education. School is where you go between when your
parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.
When I was a boy, the bestselling books were Steinbeck,
Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner had, considering
how hard he is to read, quite a middle-class readership.
But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as
well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You
don't feel that now. I don't feel that we have the merger of
serious and pop — it's gone, dissolving.
Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they're less
comfortable with the written word.
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In Their Own Words 15
The temple is holy because it is not for sale.
To make the best of persons. It is to grow in the open
air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
Literature is news that stays news.
I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.
The man of understanding can no more sit quiet while
his country lets literature decay than a good doctor
could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant
child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the
impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.
After you have exhausted business, politics,
conviviality, etc. and have found that none finally
satisfy, or permanently wear, Nature remains.
Real education must ultimately be limited to one who
insists on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.
I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I,
who am curious about each, am not curious about God
- I hear and behold God in every object, yet
understand God not in the least.
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from
the dance; poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too
far from music.
We Americans have yet to learn our own antecedents,
and sort them, to unify them. They will be found
ampler than has been supposed, and in widely
different sources. Impressed by New England writers
and schoolmasters, we abandon ourselves to the
notion that our United States has been fashioned from
the British Islands only, and essentially form a second
England only — which is a very great mistake.
Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a
bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold
in higher esteem those who think alike than those who
think differently.
There are no facts, only interpretations.
The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.
We are always in our own company.
We have art in order not to die of the truth.
The future influences the present just as much as the past.
The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a
blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus
deceiving them concerning the value of existence.
What is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies,
and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human
relations which have been poetically and rhetorically
intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after
long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and
binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are
illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out
and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which
have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal
and no longer as coins.
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that
universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling
solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts
invented knowing. After nature had drawn a few breaths,
the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to
die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would
not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how
shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the
human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities
during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with
the human intellect, nothing will have happened.
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In Their Own Words 16
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the
good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It
would be better to live under robber barons than
under omnipotent moral busybodies.
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead
of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult
themselves. To be concerned about being grown up,
to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to
blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things
are the marks of childhood and adolescence. But to
carry on into middle life or even into early manhood
this concern about being adult is a mark of arrested
development.
When you and I met, the meeting was over shortly, it
was nothing. Now it is growing something as we
remember it. But still we know little about it. What it
will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what
it makes in me all my days till then–that is the real
meeting. The other is only the beginning of it."
God whispers to us in pleasures, speaks in
consciences, but shouts in our pains: it is his
megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
When they have really learned to love their
neighbors as themselves, they will be allowed to love
themselves as their neighbors.
100 % of us die. The percentage cannot be increased.
We are far too easily pleased.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid
"dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not
done even in concentration camps and labour camps.
In those we see its final result. But it is conceived
and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted)
in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices,
by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails
and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise
their voice.
The elimination of conventional tests is necessary because,
as soon as they are used as judgement-making
instruments, the whole process of schooling shifts from
education to training intended to produce passing grades
on tests.
"Courses" turn out to be contingent upon testing. A
"course" generally consists of a series of briefings for the
great Trivia contest. It's a kind of rigid quiz show. And it
seems to work only if the contestants value the "prize."
The prize, of course, is a "grade." An appropriate grade
entitles the participant to continue playing the Trivia
game. All the while, let's not forget, very little, if any,
substantive intellectual activity is going on.
In plain, what passes for a curriculum in today's schools is
little else than a strategy of distraction. It is largely defined
to keep students from knowing themselves and their
environment in any realistic sense; which is to say, it does
not allow inquiry into most of the critical problems that
comprise the content of the world outside the school.
One of the main differences between the "advantaged"
student and the "disadvantaged" is that the former has an
economic stake in giving his attention to the curriculum
while the latter does not. In other words, the only
relevance of the curriculum for the "advantaged" student is
that, if he does what he is told, there will be a tangible
payoff.
What is it that students do in the classroom? Well, mostly
they sit and listen to the teacher. Mostly, they are required
to believe in authorities, or at least pretend to such belief
when they take tests. Mostly they are required to
remember. They are almost never required to make
observations, formulate definitions, or perform any
intellectual operations that go beyond repeating what
someone else says is true. They are rarely encouraged to
ask substantive questions, although they are permitted to
ask about administrative and technical details. (How long
should the paper be? Does spelling count? When is the
assignment due?) It is practically unheard of for students
to play any role in determining what problems are worth
studying or what procedures of inquiry ought to be used.