Reader 246

“When we are lonely we not only react more intensely to the negatives; we also experience less of a soothing uplift from the positives.”
― John T. Cacioppo, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection

“A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter
it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth,
and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed
by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty
of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of
riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, — and duplicity and falsehood
take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of
the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words
are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed,
when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and
words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds
of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time
believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of
themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously
on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely,
who hold primarily on nature.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works

“Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage. He could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively.”
― Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us

“These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider in this book has told us so in a different language; but he knows it. His desire is to escape. But a prison-break is not an easy matter; you must know all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years in tunnelling, like the Abbe in The Count of Monte Cristo, and only find yourself in the next cell.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider