Roy Lotz’s Reviews > Realms of Being > Status Update

I should prefer that something of me should subsist anonymously buried in the public mind, than that my name should remain attached for a few years to some technical curiosity.

The criterion of perfection must not be imposed from outside. On the path towards some goal which, if missed, was perhaps never really proposed, a thousand minor things may be achieved. The path of failure is strewn with little successes, no less real to a free spirit than the alleged end.

All minds belong to their time and place; such is the condition of their existence that determines their point of view; yet they are minds only in the measure in which they transcend their physical station, and can view their place from other places and their moment from other moments.

[Life without consciousness valueless.] We talk of "life" as if it were unquestionably something precious or even divine. [Inutility of consciousness.] Evidently for the preservation and welfare of an organism fit reactions suffice. [Value of consciousness.] In the very act of becoming painful, life has become worth living in its own eyes.

Spirit, in its briefest and feeblest flash, sets up a moral center for the universe. ... But why should "I" (that is, spirit in me) be condemned to lodge in this particular body, with these parents and nationality and education and ridiculous fate? Why choose this grotesque center from which to view the universe?

Happiness in the truth is like happiness in marriage, fruitful, lasting, and ironical. You could not have chosen better, yet this is not what you dreamt of.

The love of truth is often mentioned, the hatred of truth hardly ever, yet the latter is the commoner. People say they love the truth when they pursue it, and they pursue it when unknown: not because of any felt affinity to it in their souls, but because they need information for practical purposes. Where known, truth is almost always dismissed or disguised, because the aspect of it is hateful.

Convention, correctness, orthodoxy are far more intimately precious to mankind than truth. The world of things seems arid and alien compared with the inexhaustible world of talk; and a man will laugh at his mistakes about matters of fact, when shame will consume him all his life long if he has slipped into a fault of speech or of manners.

It is as little philosophical to beautify reality as to be afraid of it. The face of existence, open to an omnivorously curious mind, is sublime and fascinating enough, but it is surely more than human, less than moral, other than dialectical.

The whole of life is a predicament, complex and prolonged; and the whole of mind is the cry, prolonged and variously modulated, which that predicament wrings from the psyche.