Robert

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“Just remember: He’s scared and he can’t afford for anyone to see that. He’s not the enemy. His ideas are the enemy. He’s doing his best."

“So I should be nice to him?”

“Be however you need to be to do what feels right. He signed up for the game, too, and it’s not your job to make his game easier. Your job is to tell your truth. That’s everybody’s job.”
― Chris Crutcher, The Sledding Hill

“Wir sprechen überhaupt viel zu viel. Wir sollten weniger sprechen und mehr zeichnen. Ich meinerseits möchte mir das Reden ganz abgewöhnen und wie die bildende Natur in lauter Zeichnungen fortsprechen. [...] Je mehr ich darüber nachdenke, es ist etwas so unnützes, so Müßiges, ich möchte fast sagen Geckenhaftes im Reden, daß man vor dem stillen Ernste der Natur und ihrem Schweigen erschrickt, sobald man sich ihr vor einer einsamen Felsenwand oder in der Einöde eines alten Berges gesammelt entgegenstellt!”
― J.W. Goethe

“We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell