To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to inter...
I have never, I think, wanted to 'belong' to a group whose interests were not mine, nor have I resented exclusion. Why should thet accept me? All I have ever asked is that others should go their way a...
Always the following wind of historyOf others' wisdom makes a buoyant airTill we come suddenly on pockets where Is nothing loud but us; where voices seemAbrupt, untrained, competing with no lieOur fat...
The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.
The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the ot...
Some thirty inches from my noseThe frontier of my Person goes,And all the untilled air betweenIs private pagus or demesne.Stranger, unless with bedroom eyesI beckon you to fraternize,Beware of rudely...
I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?
To save your world, you asked this man to die:Would this man, could he see you now, asked why?
We are, for all our polish, of littlestature, and, as human lives,compared with authentic martyrs,of no account.
Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originali...
After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, she produces another law by which any alien who conspires against the life of a Venetian citizen for...
In accepting and defending the social institution of slavery, the Greeks were harder-hearted than we but clearer-headed; they knew that labor as such is slavery, and that no man can feel a personal pr...
Drama is based on the Mistake.
As for Iago’s jealousy, one cannot believe that a seriously jealous man could behave towards his wife as Iago behaves towards Emilia, for the wife of a jealous husband is the first person to suffer. N...
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both partners run out of goods.But if the see...
He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietz
The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
