In Their Own Words by Dennis Alvernaz

HOME

In Their Own Words 1

A person’s name is something from which one never recovers. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us. Art is anything that you can get away with. When a circuit learns your job, what are you going to do? There is absolutely no inevitability so long as there is a willingness to understand what is happening. Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity. Computers can do better than ever what needn’t be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. Technology is that which separates us from our environment. I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say. We are the genitals of our technology. We exist only to improve next years model. Ads are the cave art of the 20th century. Money is the poor man’s credit card. I don’t know who discovered water but is certainly wasn’t a fish. We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror. All advertising advertises advertising. I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt. If it works, it’s obsolete. Concepts are a provisional affair. First man made the hammer, then the hammer made the man. Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb. The artist is the only person; his antennae pick up these messages before anybody. So he is always thought of as being way ahead of his time because he lives in the present. Jobs are finished; role-playing has taken over; the job is a passe entity. Jobs belong to specialists. Kids no longer live in a specialist world. One cannot say “I’ll start here and eventually I’ll get there. Every kid knows that within three years, everything will have changed.

In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs. The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful. The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown. All modern wars, even when their aims are the traditional ones, such as territorial aggrandizement or the acquisition of scarce resources, are cast as clashes of civilizations — culture wars — with each side claiming the high ground, and characterizing the other as barbaric. The enemy is invariably a threat to "our way of life," an infidel, a desecrator, a polluter, a defiler of higher or better values. The current war against the very real threat posed by militant Islamic fundamentalism is a particularly clear example. "Old" and "new" are the perennial poles of all feeling and sense of orientation in the world. We cannot do without the old, because in what is old is invested all our past, our wisdom, our memories, our sadness, our sense of realism. We cannot do without faith in the new, because in what is new is invested all our energy, our capacity for optimism, our blind biological yearning, our ability to forget — the healing ability that makes reconciliation possible. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send the pictures to their buddies and family. What is revealed by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality. Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal.

HOME

In Their Own Words 2

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" Vanity asks the question, "Is it popular?" Conscience asks the question "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but because it is right. I believe today that there is a need for all people of good will to come together with a massive act of conscience and say "We aren't going to study war any more." This is the challenge facing modern man. The strong one holds in a living blend strongly marked opposites. The idealists are usually not realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony. Jesus recognized the need for blending opposites. He gave them a formula for action, "Be ye therefore as wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." We must combine the toughness of the serpent with the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart. Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness, the kind that Jesus placed on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn't stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy, but with him, he administered first aid, and helped the man in need.

Virtue debases itself in justifying itself. Quite a heavy weight, a name too quickly famous. All men are equal; it is not their birth, but virtue itself that makes the difference. The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture for wild beasts to fight in. Almost everything is imitation. The idea of The Persian Letters was taken from The Turkish Spy. Boiardo imitated Pulci. Ariosto imitated Boiardo. The most original writers borrowed from one another. Where there is friendship, there is our natural soil. The secret of being a bore is to tell everything. Use, do not abuse; the wise man arrange things so. I flee Epictetus and Petronius alike. Neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy. May we not return to those scoundrels of old, the illustrious founders of superstition and fanaticism, who first took the knife from the altar to make victims of those who refused to be their disciples? It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one. It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong. A minister of state is excusable for the harm he does when the helm of government has forced his hand in a storm; but in the calm he is guilty of all the good he does not do. Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.

HOME

In Their Own Words 3

It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different animals, and all the planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch humans struggle for good and evil — which is religion’s view. The stage is too big for the drama. You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next. A poet once said "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imaginations adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secret of the universe's age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are there in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that Nature does not know it! Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

But tell me, this physician of whom you were just speaking, is he a moneymaker, an earner of fees, or a healer of the sick? When there is an income tax, the just man will pay more and the unjust less on the same amount of income. Humans censure injustice fearing that they may be the victims of it, and not because they shrink from committing it. Until the wise are presidents, or the presidents and leaders of this world have the spirit and power of wisdom, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils. Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent. Democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequaled alike, sooner or later passes into despotism. You cannot conceive the many without the one. You cannot conceive the one without the many. The good are not willing to govern either for money or for fame. They do not wish to be paid for their service and be styled hirelings nor to take it by stealth and be called thieves, nor even for the sake of fame, for they do not covet fame. When the better sort go into it, they do so not in the expectation of enjoyment nor as to a good thing, but as a necessary evil and because they are unable to turn it over to better than themselves or to their like. For we may say that, if there should ever be a city of the good, immunity from office-holding would be as eagerly contended for as office is now.

HOME

In Their Own Words 4

Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.

Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'

Liberty without learning is always in peril; learning without liberty is always in vain.

This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything is going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings The American, by nature, is optimistic. He is experimental, an inventor and a builder who builds best when called upon to build greatly. The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence. The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth. The opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent. In short, we must face problems which do not lend themselves to easy or quick or permanent solutions. And we must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, that we are only six percent of the world's population, that we cannot impose our will upon the other ninety-four percent of mankind, that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity, and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem. Terror is not a new weapon. Throughout history it has been used by those who could not prevail, either by persuasion or example. But inevitably they fail, either because men are not afraid to die for a life worth living, or because the terrorists themselves came to realize that free men cannot be frightened by threats, and that aggression would meet its own response.

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it's just wonderful. And . . . the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. Generally, old media don't die. They just have to grow old gracefully. Guess what, we still have stone masons. They haven't been the primary purveyors of the written word for a while now of course, but they still have a role because you wouldn't want a TV screen on your headstone. My absolute favorite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

HOME

In Their Own Words 5

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one's desires, but by the removal of desire.

A lawyer who has been well paid in advance will find the cause he is pleading all the more just.

Humans are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take on them.

Anyone who found the secret of rejoicing when things go well without being annoyed when they go badly would have found the point.

If any be unhappy, let them remember that they are unhappy by reason of themselves alone.

Equality of possessions is no doubt right, but, as men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might. God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. It is not certain that everything is uncertain. One must have deeper motives and judge everything accordingly, but go on talking like an ordinary person. That something so obvious as the vanity of the world should be so little recognized that people find it odd and surprising to be told that it is foolish to seek greatness; that is most remarkable. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher. True morality makes fun of morality. Wisdom leads us back to childhood. People never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. It is man's sickness to believe he possesses the Truth. The last thing one knows in writing an essay is what to put first.

Permit nothing to grow in you that may give you agony when it is torn away. Get rid of the judgment, get rid of the 'I am hurt,' you are rid of the hurt itself. Everything is right for me, which is right for you, Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which comes in due time for you. Everything is fruit to me which your seasons bring. From you are all things, in you are all things, to you all things return. If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your existence pure, as if you were bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, but satisfied to live now according to nature, speaking heroic truth in every word which you utter, you will live happy. And there is no one able to prevent this. How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life! Look at how soon we're all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those applauding hands. The people who praise us; how capricious they are, how arbitrary. And the tiny region in which it takes place. The whole earth, among the smallest of points in the universe. The point is, not how long you live, but how nobly you live.

HOME

In Their Own Words 6

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent. The difficulty lies, not in new ideas, but in escaping from old ones. By a continuing process of inflation, governments confiscate, secretly and unobserved, the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest of men will do the wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone. If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has. The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. The love of money as a possession will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semipathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to specialists in mental disease ... But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.

Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage. People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel. A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed. There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth. You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it. We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders. Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it. Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influenceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminishâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; it is an imponderably valuable gift.

HOME

In Their Own Words 7

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the aristocratic colors breaking through. What is the most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class. In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own. I know of no country in which there is as little independence of mind and discussion as in America. As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in? He was as great as a man can be without morality. Step back in time; look at the child in arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first words which arouse the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of his prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life. The entire man, so to speak, comes fully formed in the wrappings of his cradle. The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money. The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than other nations, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering; the capacity for self-indulgence changes hands. My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting. An artist is the magician put among men to gratify — capriciously — their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships — and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes — husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer. Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation. I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead. I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

HOME

In Their Own Words 8

Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice.

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonable says that it is too painful and harassing to think of the danger, since it is not a man's power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events; and that it is therefore better to turn aside from the painful subject till it has come, and to think of what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally yields to the first voice; in society to the second.

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.

All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.

Nor is it given to any man to know whether, when evening comes, he will need boots for his body or slippers for his corpse.

Money doesn't change men, it merely unmasks them. If a man is naturally selfish or arrogant or greedy, the money brings that out, that's all.

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it. A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large. A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.

Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services.

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

I know that most men â&#x20AC;&#x201D; not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems â&#x20AC;&#x201D; can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty â&#x20AC;&#x201D; conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.

You will find men who want to be carried on the shoulders of others, who think that the world owes them a living. They don't seem to see that we must all lift together and pull together.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.

HOME

In Their Own Words 9

Great problems call for many small solutions. Whether we know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do. A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, the people who share the place define and limit the each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves. Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war. We haven't accepted, we can't really believe, that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but it is so. We still think and behave as though we face an unspoiled continent, with thousands of acres of living space for every one. We still sing 'America the Beautiful' as though we had not created in it, by strenuous effort, at great expense, and with dauntless self-praise, an unprecedented ugliness. Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism. The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner. A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony. The most alarming sign of the state of our society now is that our leaders have the courage to sacrifice the lives of young people in war, but have not the courage to tell us that we must be less greedy and less wasteful.

When we look through telescopes and microscopes, or when we look at nature, we have a problem. Somehow the idea of God from the scriptures doesn't seem to fit the world around us, just as you wouldn't ascribe a composition by Stravinsky to Bach. The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe. It's hard to conceive of the author of one as the author of the other. Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them. You see, many of the troubles going on in the world right now are being supervised by people with very good intentions whose attempts are to keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this, and to prevent that. The more we try to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes. Maybe I should not say anything at all about the folly of trying to put things to right but simply, on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise. There is a place for awe and astonishment at existence. That is also a basis for respect for existence. We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have much of it in this culture though we call it materialistic. Today we are bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gases. This is a materialist culture that has no respect for material. I am amazed that Congressmen can pass a bill imposing severe penalties on anyone who burns the American flag, whereas they are responsible for burning that for which the flag stands: the United States as a territory, as a people, and as a biological manifestation. That is an example of our perennial confusion of symbols with realities.

HOME

In Their Own Words 10

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.

A poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit

The claim of the Jews to the land of Israel cannot be a realistic political claim. If all nations would suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers had lived two thousand years ago, this world would be a madhouse. I believe that, politically speaking, there is only one solution for Israel, namely, the unilateral acknowledgement of the obligation of the State towards the Arabs, not to use it as a bargaining point, but to acknowledge the complete moral obligation of the Israeli State to its former inhabitants of Palestine.

Dumb As old medallions to the thumb

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

Leaving, as the moon releases Twig by twig the night-entangled trees, Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves, Memory by memory the mind -

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone Of casement ledges where the moss has grown A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs

Care and responsibility are elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness.

A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs

Selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either.

A poem should be equal to: Not true

Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. "Patriotism” is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by "patriotism” I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one’s own nation, which is the concern with the nation’s spiritual as much as with its material welfare — never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.

For all the history of grief An empty doorway and a maple leaf

Reason is our instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence our instrument for manipulating the world successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter is the animal part.

For love The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea A poem should not mean But be.

The Pyrrhonist thinks that life should not mean but be.

HOME

In Their Own Words 11

Riches are a good handmaid, but the worst mistress. No one has yet been found so firm of mind and purpose as resolutely to sweep away all theories and common notions, and to apply the understanding, thus made fair and even, to a fresh examination of particulars. If one begin with certainties, one shall end in doubts; but if one will be content to begin with doubts one shall end in certainties. Seek first the virtues of the mind; and other things either will come, or will not be wanted. Being the servant and interpreter of Nature, one can do and understand so much and so much only as observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature. Beyond this one neither knows anything nor can do anything. The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. Human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it. The greatest error of all the rest is the mistaking or misplacing of the last or farthest end of knowledge: for some have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true account of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of others. Prosperity best discovers vice, but adversity best discovers virtue.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death. Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but rather memory. It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end. Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous. The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present. The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions. He who possesses most must be most afraid of loss. Experience shows us that the air must have darkness beyond it and yet it appears blue. If you produce a small quantity of smoke from dry wood and the rays of the sun fall on this smoke, and if you then place behind the smoke a piece of black velvet on which the sun does not shine, you will see that all the smoke which is between the eye and the black stuff will appear of a beautiful blue color. And if instead of the velvet you place a white cloth smoke, that is too thick smoke, hinders, and too thin smoke does not produce, the perfection of this blue color. Hence a moderate amount of smoke produces the finest blue. We see the most striking example of humility in the lamb which will submit to any animal; and when they are given for food to imprisoned lions they are as gentle to them as to their own mother, so that very often it has been seen that the lions forbear to kill them. Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen.

HOME

In Their Own Words 12

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

To be ignorant of the past is to forever be a child.

Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose public records to be true.

We are not born for ourselves alone.

That the Jews assumed a right exclusively to the benefits of God will be a lasting witness against them. The same will it be against Christians. When nations grow old, the arts grow cold, and commerce settles on every tree. Active evil is better than passive good. Those who never alter their opinions are like standing water, and breed reptiles of the mind. The fool sees not the same tree that the wise see. No bird soars too high, if it soars with its own wings. If a fool persists in folly, the fool will become wise. The cistern contains. The fountain overflows. You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

One is never less at leisure than when at leisure. A friend is, as it were, a second self. Genius is fostered by energy. Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others. While there's life, there's hope. The welfare of the people is the ultimate law. We denounce with indignation and dislike those who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasures of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish.

Those who bind to themselves a joy do the wingĂ¨d life destroy; those who kiss the joy as it flies by, live in eternal sunrise.

In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammeled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided.

Those who would do good to others must do it in minute particulars; general good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.

But in other times and owing to the claims of duty or obligation it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted.

Both of us read the scriptures day and night, but you read black where I read white.

The wise therefore always hold in these matters to this principle of selection: to reject pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else to endure pains to avoid worse pains.

A robin redbreast in a cage puts the skies into a rage.

HOME

In Their Own Words 13

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run. A crowded police docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty. A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother. We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter. You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does -- but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you'll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it's the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it's the sickening grammar they use. Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world — and never will. To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.

Old women snore violently. They are like bodies into which bizarre animals have crept at night; the animals are vicious, bawdy, noisy. How they snore! There is no shame to their snoring. Old women turn into old men. It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim. If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework — you can still be writing, because you have that space. Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality. When poets — write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider’s delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

The only reason why God created man is because he was disappointed with the monkey.

When you’re 50 you start thinking about things you haven’t thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity, but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.

It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.

I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.

There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect my own.

HOME

In Their Own Words 14

Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don’t they try to understand bird song? Why do they love a night, a flower, everything which surrounds man, without attempting to understand them? Where painting is concerned, they want to understand. Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; that he is a minute element of the world to whom one should ascribe no more importance than so many things in nature which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves. Those who attempt to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time. Gertrude Stein told me some time ago that she had finally understood what my picture represented: three musicians. It was a stilllife!! Art is not made to decorate rooms. It is an offensive weapon in the defense against the enemy. For a long time I limited myself to one color — as a form of discipline. It is not what the artist does that counts. But what he is. Cezanne would never have interested me if he had lived and thought like Jaques-Emile Blanche, even if the apple he had painted had been ten times more beautiful. What interests us is the anxiety of Cézanne, the teaching of Cézanne, the anguish of Van Gogh, in short the inner drama of the man. The rest is false. Abstract art is only painting. And what’s so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint. It is what aroused the artist, stimulated his ideas and set of his emotions. These ideas and emotions will be imprisoned in his work for good.. ..Whether he wants it or not, man is the instrument of nature; she imposes on him character and appearance.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself. In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulsequickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up. The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. When I was a boy, the bestselling books were Steinbeck, Hemingway, some Faulkner. Faulkner had, considering how hard he is to read, quite a middle-class readership. But certainly someone like Steinbeck was a bestseller as well as a Nobel Prize-winning author of high intent. You don't feel that now. I don't feel that we have the merger of serious and pop — it's gone, dissolving. Tastes have coarsened. People read less, they're less comfortable with the written word.

HOME

In Their Own Words 15

The temple is holy because it is not for sale. To make the best of persons. It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth. Literature is news that stays news. I have learned that to be with those I like is enough. The man of understanding can no more sit quiet while his country lets literature decay than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts. After you have exhausted business, politics, conviviality, etc. and have found that none finally satisfy, or permanently wear, Nature remains. Real education must ultimately be limited to one who insists on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding. I say to mankind, Be not curious about God. For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God - I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least. Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music. We Americans have yet to learn our own antecedents, and sort them, to unify them. They will be found ampler than has been supposed, and in widely different sources. Impressed by New England writers and schoolmasters, we abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States has been fashioned from the British Islands only, and essentially form a second England only â&#x20AC;&#x201D; which is a very great mistake. Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. There are no facts, only interpretations. The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness. We are always in our own company. We have art in order not to die of the truth. The future influences the present just as much as the past. The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. What is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions â&#x20AC;&#x201D; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.

HOME

In Their Own Words 16

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

The elimination of conventional tests is necessary because, as soon as they are used as judgement-making instruments, the whole process of schooling shifts from education to training intended to produce passing grades on tests.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of arrested development.

"Courses" turn out to be contingent upon testing. A "course" generally consists of a series of briefings for the great Trivia contest. It's a kind of rigid quiz show. And it seems to work only if the contestants value the "prize." The prize, of course, is a "grade." An appropriate grade entitles the participant to continue playing the Trivia game. All the while, let's not forget, very little, if any, substantive intellectual activity is going on.

When you and I met, the meeting was over shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till thenâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it."

In plain, what passes for a curriculum in today's schools is little else than a strategy of distraction. It is largely defined to keep students from knowing themselves and their environment in any realistic sense; which is to say, it does not allow inquiry into most of the critical problems that comprise the content of the world outside the school.

God whispers to us in pleasures, speaks in consciences, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

One of the main differences between the "advantaged" student and the "disadvantaged" is that the former has an economic stake in giving his attention to the curriculum while the latter does not. In other words, the only relevance of the curriculum for the "advantaged" student is that, if he does what he is told, there will be a tangible payoff.

When they have really learned to love their neighbors as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbors. 100 % of us die. The percentage cannot be increased. We are far too easily pleased. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.

What is it that students do in the classroom? Well, mostly they sit and listen to the teacher. Mostly, they are required to believe in authorities, or at least pretend to such belief when they take tests. Mostly they are required to remember. They are almost never required to make observations, formulate definitions, or perform any intellectual operations that go beyond repeating what someone else says is true. They are rarely encouraged to ask substantive questions, although they are permitted to ask about administrative and technical details. (How long should the paper be? Does spelling count? When is the assignment due?) It is practically unheard of for students to play any role in determining what problems are worth studying or what procedures of inquiry ought to be used.