Concepts and practices of democracy (or democratization, because it is a conduct and not necessarily a state), development, and culture overlap thus to define one another. The aesthetics of interacting with the environment, of experiences morphing through art into objects and processes of beauty, constitute the ground for ethical consciousness. Beauty--however we conceive of it (but we always recognize it)--is a way toward accessing ethical values. Conscience flows from consciousness; the other way round would constitute moral dogma.

I bet the monster was happy when they made him a maze.

Increasing our range need not cost us our focus: quite the reverse. The person without a range of reference is not more authentically human for being so. He is just more alone.

Our cameras, our wordy spokesmen or propagandists, don't seek and celebrate an old man's pride, an old woman's faith, a housewife's ingenuity and intelligence, her husband's almost desperate carpentry . . .

Mythological and philosophical constructions are obviously capers to relieve our anxiety in face of the intolerable. It is a sign of slight progress if we are able to stay fairly quiet.

That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with the years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other;

But a past act is dead, i.e. meaningless to the historian, unless he can understand the thought that lay behind it. Hence "all history is the history of thought," and "history is the re-enactment in the historian's mind of the thought whose history he is studying."

Yet in tracking the history of those dead faiths and dead eras, Quinn came to see that the way people clung to their ignorant beliefs was what shaped the conscience of their age. However dead those beliefs were now, they had once elevated men to heroism and bliss, reduced them to cowardice and sorrow.

In the society which he paints for us and in which, as soon as it is a question of moral truths, the majority of people prefer knowing less to trying to justify themselves, where they are tormented without being uneasy, nervous without really being preoccupied, where they only perceive in the act of learning the unpleasant fact of not having known, where each person willingly accuses himself of error rather than having recourse to the means of no longer having to commit it, where indifference alone engenders impartiality and in consequence makes it sterile, where contact with other people is therefore in every sense of the term extremely 'limited' owing to a general absence of curiosity...

The pardoners lived merrily; certainly after a well occupied day they must have been cheerful companions at the inn. The thought of the multitude of sins which they had remitted, of excommunications which they had taken off, of penalites which they had commuted--themselves simple vagabonds menaced with the gallows--the knowledge of their impurity, the singularity of their existence, the triumphant success of those mad harangues which gave them the keys of heaven, must have made their hearts swell inconceivably with coarse brutal merriment.

Thus love is not only for him the one spur to activity, the force which will sustain him and help him to grow old well, but is the only interior climate which is completely favorable to intellectual work.

There is a sheet of paper on which, at some time or other, I tried to begin a poem with the line "Others are bodies," but got no farther than that.

He praises a relaxed will, an easygoing enjoyment of living and its contingencies, and he dislikes erudition if it is painfully acquired. 'We would be much better off if we dropped our inquiries and let ourselves be moulded by the natural order of the world.' 'The natural order of the world' gives us the essence of Montaigne. Ecstasies and visions that may involve escaping from our corporeal selves are dangerous and not to be trusted. We cannot bootstrap ourselves into some elevated state which is not our natural setting. Each one of us has his own idiosyncracies, both of body and of mind, his own forma mentis, and the idiosyncracies are the result of countless causes and influences which will never be traced. Therefore it is foolish to publish rules and disciplines for all humanity as the Stoics did, since humanity consists of endlessly varying and diverse individuals, whose needs must be endlessly varying also.

I'm seized by laughter every time I remember how I used to think--and you apparently still think this--that one might set up a happy, honest little world and lead a peaceful, quiet, faultless life, beyond reproach, serenely doing only what is right. What nonsense! It can't be done, old thing! Any more thant one can keep fit without exercise, just by holding still. To live an honest life you must struggle, stray, do battle, make mistakes, begin, give up, start over, quit again, fight and lose without end. Peace is spiritual degradation.

Great writing involves protecting one's intuitions, even one's ignorance. Knowing, as such, is not always an advantage to making significant art. Acknowledging one's ignorance, and learning to respect personal as well as human limitations, WHILE one works with the welter of fantasies that tumble between certainty and helplessness, is not learnable in school, and can probably best be dealt with in what I would call 'neutral solitude'... For a poet, ignorance is as deep a well as knowing...

The events in the poem are as follows:

FIT I. During the revelry at King Arthur's Court one new year, the Green Knight rides in with an axe, and challenges anyone present to strike him a blow with it, provided he can give a return blow a year later. Gawain, the king's nephew, takes up the challenge and cuts off the visitor's head. The body, still living, picks up the head, which tells Gawain to look for him at the Green Chapel in a twelvemonth's time. The visitor leaves.

And if in some cases--where we are dealing, for instance, with the inaccurate language of our own vanity--the rectification of an oblique interior discourse (which deviates gradually more and more widely from the first and central impression) until it merges with the straight line which the impression ought to have produced is a laborious undertaking which our idleness would prefer to shirk, there are other circumstances--for example, where love is involved--in which this process is actually painful.

It seemed we would be capable of a great communication now, but as we walked I realized I didn't know what to say to her. We went down the street without talking. The traffic was light, evening was approaching, and as we passed below some trees the streetlights suddently came on. This moment has always amazed me. I knew the woman had seen it too, but it is always a disappointment to mention a thing like this.

grief is merely the mode in which certain ideas make their first entry into us.

; it is the source of his radiant serenity.

Style perhaps will come to us from the sensible and shrewd disenchanted, who are conscious of the limits of their art and prefer loving it in humility to reforming humanity.

Holding on with one hand to poetry, she stretches and stretches to grasp things which are best gained by letting go of poetry.

Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, large ones weaken it.

Many people are congenitally unable to appreciate the sight of a peacock. Once or twice I have been asked what the peacock is "good for"--a question which gets no answer from me because it deserves none. The telephone company sent a lineman out one day to repair our telephone. After the job was finished, the man, a large fellow with a suspicious expression half hidden by a yellow helmet, continued to idle about, trying to coax a cock that had been watching him to strut. He wished to add this exprerience to a large number of others he had apparently had. "Come on now, bud," he said, "get the show on the road, upsy-daisy, come on now, snap it up."

The peacock, of course, paid no attention to this.

"What ails him?" the man said.

"Nothing ails him, I said. "He'll pull it up terreckly. All you have to do is wait."

In later years [Proust] enjoyed frequenting a brothel, where his habits were jotted down in a notebook by one of the young men who worked there. He preferred for the man to stand naked beside the bed and masturbate. Watching him, Proust would also masturbate. If Proust had trouble reaching a climax, the man was obliged to bring in two savage rats in cages, and 'Immediately the two starving animals threw themselves at each other, emitting heart-rending cries and tearing at each other with their claws and teeth.'

Whenever she "thought of his work" she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew's doing. She asked him what his father's books were about. "Subject and object and the nature of reality," Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant. "Think of a kitchen table then," he told her, "when you're not there."