“One has to go on believing in himself, whether recognized or not, whether heeded or not. The world may seem like hell on wheels—and we are doing our best, are we not, to make it so?—but there is always room, if only in one’s own soul, to create a spot of Paradise, crazy though it may sound. When you find you can go neither backward nor forward, when you discover that you are no longer able to stand, sit or lie down, when your children have died of malnutrition and your aged parents have been sent to the poorhouse or the gas chamber, when you realize that you can neither write nor not write, when you are convinced that all the exits are blocked, either you take to believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird.”
― Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
― Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
“Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details
were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.”
―
were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.”
―
“Despite all the talk about freedom of speech, freedom of the press, electoral freedom, and so on, I dare say it would be a shock to know what the common man thinks about the problems which confront the world. The common man is always cleverly set off one against the other, children are always ruled out, young people are ordered to conform and obey, and the views of the wise, the saintly, the true servers of mankind, are forever scorned as impractical.”
― Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
― Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
“Life will continue to be a hell as long as the people who make up the world shut their eyes to reality. Switching from one ideology to another is a useless game.”
― Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
― Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
“How very like Zen is this from Whitman: “Is it lucky to be born? It is just as lucky to die.” In summarizing his pages on Whitman, Bucke makes, among others, the following statements: In no man who ever lived was the sense of eternal life so absolute. Fear of death was absent. Neither in health nor in sickness did he show any sign of it, and there is every reason to believe he did not feel it. He had no sense of sin.”
― The Books in My Life
― The Books in My Life
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