“It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.”
―
―
“But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”
― Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
― Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
“Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.”
― Meditations on First Philosophy
― Meditations on First Philosophy
“Even as a child she had lived her own small life within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.”
― The Awakening
― The Awakening
100 Books To Read Before You Die
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— last activity Mar 29, 2024 08:10AM
There are many lists out there of the best books of all time, the '100 books to read before you die', all time books, must read books, greatest books. ...more
elle ’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at elle ’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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