Words, Words, Words

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Accordingly, he stripped him of mythologic gear, of horns, cloven foot, harpoon tail, brimstone and blue-fire, and instead of looking in books and pictures, looked for him in his own mind, in every shade of coldness, selfishness and unbelief that, in crowds or in solitude, darkens over the human thought,- and found that the portrait gained reality and terror by every thing he added and by every thing he took away. He found that the essence of this hobgoblin which had hovered in shadow about the habitations of men ever since there were men, was pure intellect, applied,- as always there is a tendency,- to the service of the senses [...]

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as 'empty,' 'meaningless,' or 'dishonest,' and scorn to use them. No matter how pure their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

Robert Heinlein

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Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves in, the narratives of the past.

Stuart Hall

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Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

Lionel Trilling

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In order to remember it, one must have known it.

Joan Didion

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They are, moreover—even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.

James Baldwin

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With the execution of Louis XVI in the following January the men of the Convention made their irrevocable commitment, challenging the monarchies of Europe, horrifying public opinion in France itself, consciously appealing from the world in which they formed a revolutionary minority to the world of the future which they hoped to create. We are of that world. We are the posterity on whose judgement they relied. Whether or not we can give them a perfectly fair judgement, we can at least give them understanding.

R. R. Palmer

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[...] the abstract symbolic value of an artistic achievement should never prevail over its beautiful burning life.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.

Rebecca West

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Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not [...] No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.

Hannah Arendt

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Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself [...] You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow [...]

Kahlil Gibran

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It’s worth noting that Dybowski’s faith in art has practically vanished in America today, where artists desperately graft ephemeral politics on to works of art out of the fear of irrelevance.

David Auerbach

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One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as "that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right." If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.

Saul Alinksy

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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

Hannah Arendt

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Our new temptation is no longer to mimic venerable old Europeans but to learn the jargon of post-colonial studies, or to discuss our hyphenated identity in terms acceptable to gatekeepers.

P. Kishore Saval

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On the porous borderlines of memories and dreams, facts self-evident and fantasies made significant, realities banal and passing feeding their own transmutations into enduring signposts of a meaningful life, and then above all visions of things otherwise unseen, dwells a knowledge of self as the microcosmic evidence of the universe one inhabits.

Hamid Dabashi

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For they are bearers of the divine will, and yet they are fallible, subject to misfortune and humiliation—and in the midst of misfortune and in their humiliation their acts and words reveal the transcendent majesty of God. There is hardly one of them who does not, like Adam, undergo the deepest humiliation—and hardly one who is not deemed worthy of God’s personal intervention and personal inspiration. Humiliation and elevation go far deeper and far higher than in Homer, and they belong basically together. The poor beggar Odysseus is only masquerading, but Adam is really cast down, Jacob really a refugee, Joseph really in the pit and then a slave to be bought and sold. But their greatness, rising out of humiliation, is almost superhuman and an image of God’s greatness.

Erich Auerbach