How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun. – John D. Rockefeller

Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. – Professor William James of Harvard

Education is the ability to meet life’s situations. – Dr. John G. Hibben, former president of Princeton University

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action. – Herbert Spencer

If you teach a man anything, he will never learn. – Bernard Shaw

• Learning is an active process. We learn by doing… Apply these rules at every opportunity… Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.

Part One: Fundamental Techniques in Handling People

Principle 1: Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.

• Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because of it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.

As much as we thirst for approval, we dread condemnation. – Hans Selye

Don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances. – Lincoln

• When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

I will speak ill of no man and speak all the good I know of everybody. – Benjamin Franklin

• Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.
• Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness.
  • To know all is to forgive all.

God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days. – Dr. Johnson

Principle 2: Give honest and sincere appreciation.

The desire to be important. – Dr. Dewey

Everybody likes a compliment. The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. – William James

I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. – Charles Schwab

• Appreciation is sincere – it comes from the heart out and it is unselfish.
  • Flattery is insincere – it comes from the teeth out and it is selfish.

I shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

Principle 3: Arouse in the other person an eager want.

• The only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.
  • Before you speak, pause and ask yourself: “How can I make this person want to do it?”
  • Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own. – Henry Ford

• Customers like to feel that they are buying – not being sold.

People who can put themselves in the place of other people, who can understand the workings of their mind, need never worry about what the future has in store for them. – Owen D. Young

First, arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way. – Professor Overstreet

Self-expression is the dominant necessity of human nature. – William Winter

• When we have a brilliant idea, instead making others think it is ours, why not let them cook and stir the idea themselves. They will then regard it as their own; they will like it and maybe eat a couple of helpings of it.

Part Two: Six Ways to Make People Like You

1. Become genuinely interested in other people.

It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring. – Alfred Adler

• A tactic to show interest in other people: stage a debate and ask someone for his/her expertise.

We are interested in others when they are interested in us. – Publilius Syrus

2. Smile.

• Actions speak louder than words, and a smile says, “I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you.”

Actions seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. – William James

• Happiness does not depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.

There is nothing either good or bad. But thinking makes it so. – Shakespeare

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. – Abe Lincoln

Whenever you go out-of-doors, draw the chin in, carry the crown of the head high, and fill the lungs to the utmost; drink in the sunshine; greet your friends with a smile, and put soul into every handclasp. Do not fear being misunderstood and do not waste a minute thinking about your enemies. Try to fix firmly in your mind what you would like to do; and then, without veering off direction, you will move straight to the goal. Keep your mind on the great and splendid things you would like to do, and then, as the days go gliding away, you will find yourself unconsciously seizing upon the opportunities that are required for the fulfillment of your desire, just as the coral insect takes from the ruining tide the element it needs. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful person you desire to be, and the thought you hold is hourly transforming you into that particular individual… Thought is supreme. Preserve a right mental attitude – the attitude of courage, frankness, and good cheer. To think rightly is to create. All things come through desire and every sincere prayer is answered. We become like that on which our hearts are fixed. Carry your chin in and the crown of your head high. We are gods in the chrysalis. – Elbert Hubbard

3. Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. – Emerson

• The name sets the individual apart; it makes him or her unique among all others.

4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.

Few human beings are proof against the implied flattery of rapt attention. – Jacky Woodford, Strangers in Love

There is no mystery about successful business intercourse… Exclusive attention to the person who is speaking to you is very important. Nothing else is so flattering as that. – Charles W. Elliot, former Harvard president

• If you aspired to be a good conversationalist, be an attentive listener. To be interesting, be interested. Ask questions that other persons will enjoy answering.

5. Talk in terms of the other person’s interest.

• The royal road to a person’s heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most.

6. Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.

• The law is this: Always make the other person feel important.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. – John Dewey

• Little courteous phrases that oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life:
  • I’m sorry to trouble you
  • Would you be so kind to … ?
  • Would you mind?

Talk to people about themselves and they will listen for hours. – Disraeli

Part Three: How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking

1. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.

A man convinced against his will
Is of the same opinion still.

• … the more I argued against it, the more my prospect argued in favor of it; and the more he argued, the more he sold himself on my competitor’s product.

Hatred is never ended by hatred but by love. – Buddha

• A misunderstanding is never ended by an argument but by tact, diplomacy, conciliation and a sympathetic desire to see the other person’s viewpoint.

Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite. – Lincoln

2. Show respect for the other person’s opinions.  Never say “You’re wrong.”

• … but you will not alter their opinion, for you have hurt their feelings.

Men must be taught as if you taught them not
And things unknown proposed as things forgot. – Alexander Pope

A third kind of thinking is stimulated when anyone questions our belief and opinions. We sometimes find ourselves changing our minds without any resistance or heavy emotion, but if we are told that we are wrong we resent the imputation and harden our hearts. We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem, which is threatened… The little word “my” is the most important one in all human affairs, and properly to reckon with it is the beginning of wisdom. It has the same force whether it is my dinner, my dog, and my house, or my faith, my country, and my God. We not only resent the imputation that our watch is wrong, or our car shabby, but that our conception of the canals of Mars, of the pronunciation of “Epictetus”, of the medicinal value of salicine, or the date of Sargon I, are subject to revision… Few of us take the pains to study the origin of our cherished convictions; indeed, we have a natural repugnance to so doing. We like to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to them. The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do. – James Harvey Robinson, The Mind in the Making

I have found it of enormous value when I can permit myself to understand the other person. The way in which I have worded this statement may seem strange to you… Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what the meaning of the statement is to the other person. – Carl Rogers

3. If you’re wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.

• There is a certain degree of satisfaction in having the courage to admit one’s errors.  It not only clears the air of guilt and defensiveness, but often helps solve the problem created by the error.
• Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes – and most fools do – but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exultation to admit one’s mistakes.

By fighting you never get enough, but by yielding you get more than you expected.

4. Begin in a friendly way.

If you come at me with your fists doubled, I think I can promise you that mine will double as fast as yours; but if you come to me and say, ‘Let us sit down and take counsel together, and if we differ from each other, understand why it is that we differ, just what the points at issue are,’ we will presently find that we are not so far apart after all, that the points on which we differ are few and that if we only have patience and the candor and the desire to get together, we will get together. – Woodrow Wilson

• If a man’s heart is rankling with discard and ill feeling toward you, you can’t win him to your way of thinking with all the logic in Christendom. Scolding parents and domineering bosses and husbands and nagging wives ought to realize that people don’t want to change their minds. They can’t be forced or driven to agree with you or me. But they may possibly be led to, if we are gentle and friendly, ever so gentle and ever so friendly.

It is an old and true maxim that “a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.” So with men, if you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart; which, says what you will, is the great high road to his reason. – Lincoln

5. Get the other person saying “Yes, Yes” immediately.

• In talking with people, don’t begin by discussing the things on which you differ. Begin by emphasizing – and keep emphasizing – the things on which you agree.
• The skillful speaker gets, at the outset, a number of “Yes” responses. This sets the psychological process of the listeners moving in the affirmative direction.

He who treads softly goes far. – Chinese proverb

6. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.

• Almost every successful person likes to reminiscent about his early struggles.

7. Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.

• Example: I want you to do me a little favor. Here are some uncompleted sketches. Won’t you please tell me how we could finish them up in such a way that you could use them?
• Example: They are not perfect. We know that, and we want to improve them. So we should be deeply obligated to you if you could find time to look them over and give us your ideas about how they can be made more serviceable to your profession.

The reason why rivers and seas receive the homage of a hundred mountain streams is that they keep below them.  Thus they are able to reign over all the mountain streams.  So the sage, wishing to be above men, putteth himself below them; wishing to be before them, he putteth himself behind them.  Thus, though his place be above men, they do not feel his weight; though his place be before them, they do not count it an injury. -  Laozi

8. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.

• … by becoming interested in the cause, we are less likely to dislike the effect.

Starting your conversation by giving the other person the purpose or direction of your conversation, governing what you say by what you would want to hear if you were the listener, and accepting his or her viewpoint will encourage the listener to have an open mind to your idea. – Dr. Gerald S. Nirenberg, Getting Through to People

9. Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.

10. Appeal to the nobler motives.

• If you are satisfied with the result you are now getting, why change? If you are not satisfied, why not experiment?
• … people are honest and want to discharge their obligations.

11. Dramatize your ideas.

• Merely stating a truth isn’t enough. The truth has to be made vivid, interesting, dramatic. You have to use showmanship.

12. Throw down a challenge.

All men have fears, but the brave put down their fears and go forward, sometimes to death, but always to victory. – Motto of the King’s Guard in ancient Greece

• Every successful person loves: the game. The chance for self-expression… The desire to excel.

Part Four: Be a leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment

1. Begin with praise and honest appreciation.

• A barber lathers a man before he shaves him…

2. Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.

• Change the word from “but” to “and.”

3. Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.

4. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.

• “You might consider this,” or “Do you think that would work?” “What do you think of this?”
• [Always giving people the opportunity to do things themselves and let them learn from their mistakes] A technique like this saves a person’s pride and gives him or her a feeling of importance. It encourages cooperation instead of rebellion.
• Asking questions not only makes an order more palatable; it often stimulates the creativity of the persons whom you ask. People are more likely to accept an order if they have had a part in the decision that caused the order to be issued.

5. Let the other person save face.

I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes.  What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself.  Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.  – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

6. Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement.  Be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.”

Praise is like sunlight to the human spirit; we cannot flower and grow without it. And yet, while most of us are only too ready to apply to others the cold wind of criticism, we are somehow reluctant to give our fellows the warm sunshine of praise. – Jess Lair

• … when criticism is minimized and praise emphasized, the good things people do will be reinforced and the poorer things will atrophy for lack of attention.
• Because he had singled out a specific accomplishment, rather than just making general flattering remarks, his praise became much more meaningful to the person to whom it was given.
  • Specific praise comes across as sincere.
  • Remember, we all crave appreciation and recognition, and will do almost anything to get it.  But nobody wants insincerity.  Nobody wants flattery.
  • Abilities wither under criticism; they blossom under encouragement.

7. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.

Assume a virtue, if you have it not. – Shakespeare

• If you want to improve a person in a certain respect, act as though that particular trait were already one of his or her outstanding characteristics.
  • It might be well to assume and state openly that other people have the virtue that you want them to develop.
  • Give them a fine reputation to live up to, and they will make prodigious efforts rather than see you disillusioned.
  • Example: I have respected the fact that you are always willing to listen and are big enough to change your mind when the facts warrant a change.

8. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.

9. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

• Always make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

Keep the following guideline in mind when it is necessary to change attitudes or behavior:

1. Be sincere.  do not promise anything that you cannot deliver.  Forget about the benefits to yourself and concentrate on the benefits to the other person.
2. Know exactly what it is that you want the other person do.
3. Be empathetic.  Ask yourself what it is the other person really wants.
4. Consider the benefits that person will receive from doing what you suggest.
5. Match those benefits to the other person’s wants.
6. When you make your request, put it in a form that will convey to the other person the idea that he personally will benefit. (e.g. If it is done now, we won’t be faced with it later.)

There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

— Richard Shaull, drawing on Paulo Freire

Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you…

- JD Salinger

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

- Robert Frost

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

- Mark Twain

A school is a place where one learns about the totality, the wholeness of life. Academic excellence is absolutely necessary, but a school includes much more than that. It is a place where both the teacher and the student explore, not only the outer world, the world of knowledge, but also their own thinking, their own behavior.

- J. Krishnamurti

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

[Click here for more on Metaphysics of Quality]

• Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere.
• We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.
• One does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term.
• Mass hypnosis. In a very orthodox form known as “education.”
• Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind…Science is only in your mind too.
• The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination.
• If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything.
• It was an intrusion on his reality. I just blew a hole right through his whole groovy way of looking at things and he would not face up to it because it seemed to threaten his whole lifestyle.
• The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate.
  • Art does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience.
• We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
  • We divide the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts.
• Instead of just dwelling on what is killed it’s important also to see what’s created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity that neither good nor bad, but just is.
• I look at the shapes of the steel now and I see ideas. He thinks I’m working on parts. I’m working on concepts.
• To tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.
• Two kinds of logic:
  • Induction – reasoning from particular experiences to general truth.
  • Deduction – start with general knowledge and predict a specific observation.
• Actually the physical labor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic doe. By far the greatest part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking.

In the temple of science are many mansions…and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. – Albert Einstein

Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience. The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. – Albert Einstein

• The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
  • If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.
  • The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truth.
  • Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones.

Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest. – Albert Einstein

• Did Einstein really mean to state that truth was a function of time?
  • The whole history of science is a clear story of continuously new and changing explanation of old facts.
• The cause of our current social crises is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself…Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world.
  • Emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless, and spiritually empty.
  • It can’t be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem. The only ones who’re solving it are solving it at a personal level by abandoning ‘square’ rationality altogether and going by feelings alone.
• Institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.
• He discovered that the science he’d once thought of as the whole world of knowledge is only a branch of philosophy, which is far broader and far more general.
• If all of human knowledge, everything that’s known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all. Few people travel here. There’s no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people make the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile.
• Empiricist – one who believes all knowledge is derived exclusively from the senses.
  • The scientific method of experimentation is carefully controlled empiricism.
• The a priori concepts (time, space) have their origins in human nature so that they’re neither caused by the sense object nor bring it into being, but provide a kind of screening function for what sense data we will accept.
• Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.
  • The illusion of separation of subject from object is best removed by the elimination of physical activity, mental activity and emotional activity -> Meditation
• Because he’d given up, the surface of life was comfortable for him.
• The real University is a state of mind…The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.
• You are never dedicated to something you have complete confident in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
• If you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from among many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That’s why you need the peace of mind.
• The only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know.
  • Same thing occurs with whole civilizations when expansion’s needed at the roots.
• If you do not imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade.
• Eliminate the whole degree-and-grading system and then you’ll get real education.
  • The student’s biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, “If you don’t whip me, I won’t work.”
  • He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work. And the cart of civilization, which he supposedly was being trained to pull, was just going to have to creak along a little slower without him.
  • He’d no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He’d be a free man.
  • The real purpose of withholding the grades was to force them to look within themselves, the only place they would ever get a really right answer.
• Grades really cover up failure to teach.
• Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow. But of course, without the top you can’t have any sides. It’s the top that defines the sides.

No one ever travels so high as he who knows not where he is going. – Oliver Cromwell

• It made the kids at camp much more enthusiastic and cooperative when they had ego goals to fulfill, but ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.
• When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it’s a hollow victory.
  • In order to sustain the victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other ways…driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out.
  • He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be “here.” What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step is an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
• Definitions are the foundation of reason. You cannot reason without them.
• It was a certain basic attitude about the way the world was, a presumptive vision that it ran according to laws – reason – and that man’s improvement lay chiefly through the discovery of these laws of reason and application of them toward satisfaction of his own desires. It was this faith that held everything together.
• We have proved that quality, though undefined, exists.
• In today’s world, ideas that are incompatible with scientific knowledge don’t get off the ground.
• The present is our only reality.
  • Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal. Reality is always the moment of vision before the intellectualization takes place. There is no other reality.
• The ones who have the easiest time seeing this Quality are small children, uneducated people and culturally “deprived” people. These have the least predisposition toward intellectuality from cultural sources and have the least formal training to instill it further into them. That is why squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.
• Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to intellectualize.
  • We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our previous experiences. We build up our language in terms of these analogues. We build up our whole culture in term of these analogues.
• People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience.
• The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates.
  • Quality cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.
• We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum.
• Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man.
• One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
  • Conventional nature of concepts of science, such as space and time – there isn’t one way of measuring these entities that is more true than another; that which is generally adopted is only more convenient.
• Classic beauty, which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp, which gives structure to romantic beauty and without which life would be only vague and fleeting, a dream from which one could not distinguish one’s dreams because there would be no basis for making the distinction. It is the quest of this special classic beauty, the sense of harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony. It is not the facts but the relation of things that results in the universal harmony that is the sole objective reality.
• Selection of facts before you “observe” them is “whatever you like” only in a dualistic, subject-object metaphysical system!
• The past cannot remember the past. The future can’t generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.
• Value is the predecessor of structure. It’s the preintellectual awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is preselected on the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality required an understanding of the value source form which it’s derived.
• Reality is, in its essential nature, not static but dynamic. And when you really understand dynamic reality you never get stuck. It has forms but the forms are capable of changes.
• The solution to the problem often at first seems unimportant or undesirable, but the state of stuckness allows it, in time, to assume its true importance.
• It’s the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don’t know where to start because no one has ever told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not style…Real quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.
• We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the results is not just bad, it is ghastly.
• Inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding:
  • Physical quietness
  • Mental quietness
  • Value quietness – one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire.
• When one isn’t dominated by feelings of separateness from what he’s working on, then one can be said to “care” about what he’s doing.
• Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all – a material reflection of a spiritual reality.
• The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
• The effort of fathoming what is in another’s mind creates a distortion of what is seen.
• If your values are rigid you can’t really learn new facts.
• If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. You ego isolates you from the Quality reality…When false information makes you look good, you are likely to believe it.
• My favorite cure for boredom is sleep. It’s very easy to get to sleep when bored and very hard to get bored after a long rest.
• When cleaning I do it the way people go to church – not so much to discover anything new, although I am alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. It’s nice sometimes to go over familiar paths.
• Impatience is close to boredom but always results from one cause: an underestimation of the amount of time the job will take.
  • Impatience is best handled by allowing an indefinite time for the job, particularly new jobs that require unfamiliar techniques…
• Science grows by mu answers more than by its yes or no answers. Yes or no confirms or denies a hypothesis. Mu says the answer is beyond the hypothesis. Mu is the “phenomenon” that inspires scientific inquiry in the first place!
• …thus making an art out of what he is doing, he’s likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too.
• A good student seeks knowledge fairly and impartially.
• People who can’t stand Aristotle’s endless specificity of detail are natural lovers of Plato’s souring generalities. People who can’t stand the eternal lofty idealism of Plato welcome the down-to-earth of Aristotle. Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and again in each generation, moving onward and upward toward the “one.” Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the “many.”

The world exists as a conflict and tension of opposites. There is a One and there is a Many and the One is the universal law which is immanent in all things. – Heraclitus

• Virtue, if implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for his broadmindness, but not for his virtue.

What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism is not a sense of duty as we understand it – duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself. – Kitto

• Arete (excellence) implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency – or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.
  • Arete is dead and science, logic and the University as we know it today have been given their founding charter: to find and invent an endless proliferation of forms about the substantive elements of the world and call these forms knowledge, and transmit these forms to future generations. As “the system.”
• We always condemn most in others that which we most fear in ourselves.
• Happiness and good are not objective terms. We cannot deal with them scientifically. An since they aren’t objective they just exist in your mind. So you want to be happy just change your mind. Ha-ha, ha-ha.
• Since the One is the source of all things and includes all things in it, it cannot be defined in terms of those things, since no matter what thing you use to define it, the thing will always describe something less than the One itself.
• When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.
• The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What’s really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.
• I survived mainly by pleasing others. You do that to get out. To get out you figure out what they want you to say and then you say it with as much skill and originality as possible and then, if they’re convinced, you get out.
• Material success was the American dream.
• I go on living, more from force of habit than anything else.

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda

Para mi solo recorrer los caminos que tienen corazon, cualquier camino que tenga corazon. Por ahi yo recorro, y la unica prueba que vale es atravesar todo su largo.Y por ahi yo recorro mirando, mirando, sin aliento.

- Don Juan

…nothing more can be attempted than to establish the beginning and the direction of an infinitely long road. The pretension of any systematic and definitive completeness would be, at least, a self-illusion. Perfection can here be obtained by the individual student only in the subjective sense that he communicates everything he has been able to see.

- George Simmel

• Three hallucinogenic plants: peyote, Jimson weed, psychedelic mushroom
• Power rests on the kind of knowledge one holds. What is the sense of knowing things that are useless?
• There is nothing wrong with being afraid. When you fear, you see things in a different way.
• You dwell upon yourself too much. That is the trouble. And that produces a terrible fatigue.
• A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it will live to regret his steps.
• Every time a man sets himself to learn he has to labor hard…the limits of his learning are determined by his own nature.
• I’m never angry at anybody! No human being can do anything important enough for that. You get angry at people when you feel that their acts are important. I don’t feel that way any longer.
• A man of knowledge is one who has followed truthfully the hardships of learning. A man who has, without rushing, or without faltering, gone as far as he can in unraveling the secrets of power and knowledge.
  • When a man start to learn, he is never clear about his objectives. His purpose is faulty; his intent is vague. He hopes for rewards that will never materialize for he knows nothing of the hardships of learning.
• Learning is never what one expects. Every step of learning is a new task, and the fear the man is experiencing begins to mount mercilessly, unyieldingly. His purpose becomes a battlefield.

The four natural enemies of a man of knowledge:

1. Fear - It is not possible for a man to abandon himself to fear for years, then finally conquer it. If he gives in to fear he will never conquer it, because he will shy away from learning and never try again. But if he tries to learn for years in the midst of his fear, he will eventually conquer it because he will never have really abandoned himself to it. Therefore he must not run away. He must defy his fear, and in spite of it he must take the next step in learning, and the next, and the next. He must be fully afraid, and yet he must not stop. That is the rule! [One had to be conscious of being afraid and duly to evaluate that sensation - one was capable of conquering fear only by facing it.]
2. Clarity - That clarity of mind, which is so hard to obtain, dispels fear, but also blinds. It forces the man never to doubt himself. It gives him the assurance he can do anything he pleases, for he sees clearly into everything. And he is courageous because he is clear, and he stops at nothing because he is clear. But all that is a mistake; it is like something incomplete. If the man yields to this make-believe power, he has succumbed to his second enemy and will be patient when he should rush. And he will fumble with learning until he winds up incapable of learning anything more…He will be clear as long as he lives, but he will no longer learn, or yearn for, anything.
3. Power - Power is the strongest of all enemies. And naturally the easiest thing to do is to give in; after all, the man is truly invincible. He commands; he begins by taking calculated risks, and ends in making rules, because he is a master…A man who is defeated by power dies without really knowing how to handle it. Power is only a burden upon his fate. Such a man has no command over himself, and cannot tell when or how to use his power.
4. Old age - If he gives in totally to his desire to lie down and forget, if he soothes himself in tiredness, he will have lost his last round, and his enemy will cut him down into a feeble old creature. His desire to retreat will overrule all his clarity, his power, and his knowledge.

• The twilight is the crack between the worlds.
• Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary.

A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen

• How and why do we numb ourselves to our own experiences? How and why do we deafen ourselves to the voices of others?
• We are too afraid to explore the potential for life and love and happiness we each carry inside.

You may not destroy someone’s world unless you are prepared to offer a better one. – Franz Kafka

Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves. – R.D. Laing

• When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party. We try to stay out of harm’s way, afraid they will go off, shatter our delusions, and leave us exposed to what we have done to the world and to ourselves, exposed as the hollow people we have become. And so we avoid these truths, these self-evident truths, and continue the dance of world destruction.
• Silencing is central to the workings of our culture. The staunch refusal to hear the voices of those we exploit is crucial to our domination of them.

The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. – Judith Herman

• We live in a world of make-believe.
  • …he created the reality that he required in order to continue his behavior.
  • In attempting to describe the world in make-believe terms, we have forgotten what is real what isn’t. We pretend the world is silent, whereas in reality it is filled with conversations.
  • We pretend death is an enemy, although it is an integral part of life.
  • We pretend that anything we do not understand – anything that cannot be measured, quantified, and controlled – does not exist.
  • We pretend the animals are resources to be conserved or consumed, when, in reality, they have purposes entirely independent of us.
• By substituting the illusion of disembodied thought from experience, by substituting mathematical equations for living relations, and most importantly by substituting control, or the attempt to control, for the full participation in the wild and unpredictable process of living, Descartes became the prototypical modern man.
  • Single most important rule of Western philosophy: if it doesn’t fit the model, it doesn’t exist.
• We live our lives, grateful that things aren’t worse than they are. But there has to be a threshold beyond which we can no longer ignore the destructiveness of our way of living.

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. – R.D. Laing

The rite of passage into the scientific (modern) way of being centers on the ability to apply the knife to the vocal cords, not just of the dog on the table, but of life itself. Inwardly, he [the modern human] must be able to sever the cords of his own consciousness. Outwardly, the effect must be the destruction of the larynx of the biosphere, an action essential to the transformation of the world into a material object. – Neil Evernden

We are the land…That is the fundamental idea of Native American life: the land and the people are the same. – Paula Gunn Allen

• Whether we are electrifying a kitten or petting a cat, if the purpose is specifically to collect data we’re still objectifying the cat…But the point is pursuing a relationship, not gathering data.

Today we took a little snake. I had to apologize to her for cutting her life off so suddenly and so definitely; I did what I did knowing that my own life will also be cut off someday in very much the same fashion, suddenly and definitely. – Jack Forbes

• We have come to believe that violence equals aggression, and we have come to base our model of sexuality on our model of violence. This goes a long way toward explaining the prevalence of rape scenes in horror movies, art films, and blockbusters alike, the woman pushing at her attacker’s chest, until, by the end of the scene she has her arms wrapped around him, pulling him close to her. By enacting this transition, the filmmakers convert an act of aggression into an act of consensual sexuality. The ubiquity of rape in real life attests to the desire of many members of our culture to attempt this same transition.
• To kill without emotion and without respect, or to ignore the intimacy inherent in the act, is to rob it of its dignity, and to rob the life you are ending of its significance.

All through school and University I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no interpreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps. – E.F. Schumacher

Sufficiently severe and enduring social isolation reduces these animals to a social-emotional level in which the primary social responsiveness is fear. – Harry Harlow

• What is real? It is always possible to consciously or unconsciously “see” almost anything we want.
  • Perception is of course intimately tied to preconception.
• It is up to us to determine for ourselves how closely the patterns we’ve been handed by our culture fit our experience of the world.
• When my teacher told me how, I wanted to know why, and when they gave me abstractions, I asked them to make the lessons real.
  • To ask how without asking why might be dangerous.
• The God of our culture has always been jealous, and whether going by the name of God the Father, Yahweh, Jesus Christ, Civilization, Capitalism, Science, Technology, Profit, or Progress, He has never been less than eager to destroy all those He cannot control.
• Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam…Anyone who lives in this region and who knows anything about salmon knows the dams must go. And anyone who knows anything about politics knows the dams will probably stay. Scientists study, politicians and businesspeople lie and delay, bureaucrats hold sham public hearings, activists write letters and press releases, I write books and articles, and still the salmon die. It’s a cozy relationship for all of us but the salmon.

God does not send us despair in order to kill us; he sends it in order to awaken us to new life. – Hermann Hesse

Don’t look at my finger, look at the moon. – Buddhist saying

• I will no longer forget. I have learned that whether I choose to feel or not, pain exists, and whether we choose to acknowledge them or not, atrocities continue. I have grown to understand that in the shadow of the unspeakable I can and must speak and act against our culture’s tangled web of destructiveness, and stop the destruction at its roots.

The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. – Hannah Arendt

• Scientific verification is impossible [for interspecies communication], because science is by definition the study of objects, and a conversation is an interaction between two or more subjects.
• The nature of physical reality is not determined by popular vote. Many people sharing the same delusion does not make the delusion true, whether we are talking about interspecies communication, modern science, Christianity, or capitalism.

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where the interests are involved. – Henry Adams

Art is whatever you can get away with. – John Cage

• The price of admission to public discourse is an optimistic denial pushed to absurd lengths.
• When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.
• …it is no longer possible to be lonely…and it is only our own fear that sets us apart.
• Take responsibility for one’s own action, and to fight for egalitarianism. It is easier to listen to the voice of God than it is to listen to the voice of one’s conscience, suffering and outrage.
• “A claim to virtue” – It is not possible to commit deforestation, or any other mass atrocity – mass murder, genocide, mass rape, the pervasive abuse of women or children, institutionalized animal abuse, imprisonment, wage slavery, systematic impoverishment, ecocide – without first convincing yourself and others that what you’re doing is beneficial
  • First, the pattern itself is horrifying, too terrible to think about. Second, if we allow ourselves to recognize the pattern and fully internalize its implications, we would have to change it.
  • Rational discussion presupposes rational motivations, yet claims to virtue are always attempts to place rational masks over nonrational urges.
  • The way out of from these destructive frames of mind is to step in – experience, not thought or rationalization.
    • Thought divorced from experience is nonsense.
• Fearing death, fearing life, fearing love, and fearing most of all the loss of control, we create social rules and institutions that mirror our fears and reinforce our destructive behaviors.
• Perhaps in taking the world into our bodies we also need to dive into the body of the world, to dive down deep and let it pull us deeper still, until at last we not only consume but are consumed, until at last we are no longer separate – standing alone and lonely on the darksome heights to which only men aspire – but instead, simply living in commune with the rest of the world.
• The primary function of grades is to offer an external reinforcement to coerce people to perform tasks they’d rather not do.
  • Grades, as is true once again for wages in later life, are an implicit acknowledgement that the process of schooling is insufficiently rewarding on its own grounds for people to participate of their own volition.
• [School] Systematically – inherent in the process – direct personal experience is subsumed to external authority, and at every turn creativity, critical thought, and the questioning of fundamental assumptions are discouraged.
  • A primary purpose of school – and this is true for our culture’s science and religion as well – is to lead us away from our own experience.
  • The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings – as education should but never will so long as it springs from the collective consciousness of our culture – but instead it teaches us to value abstract rewards at the expense of our autonomy, curiosity, interior lives, and time.
  • Through the process of schooling, each fresh child is attenuated, muted, molded, made – like aluminum – malleable yet durable, and so prepared to compete in society, and ultimately to lead this society where it so obviously headed. Schooling as it presently exists, like science before it and religion before that, is necessary to the continuation of our culture and to the spawning of a new species of human, ever more submissive to authority, ever more pliant, prepared, by thirteen years of sitting and receiving, sitting and regurgitating, sitting and waiting for the end, prepared for the rest of their lives to toil, to propagate, to never make waves, and to live each day with never an original thought nor even a shred of hope.
• We should not be surprised that our culture as a whole must destroy all life and that we as individuals must not dwell upon the horrors we visit not only upon others but upon ourselves, that we dwell instead upon the daily earning of our bread, and beyond that pile upon ourselves project after project to keep ourselves always occupied, always unconscious of the fact that we do not have to live this way, always blinded to alternatives. For if we looked we might see, if we saw we might act, and if we acted we might take responsibility for our own lives. If we did that, what then?

When the oppressors give me two choices, I always take the third. – Meir Berliner

• One method Nazis used to control Jews was to present them a series of meaningless choices…In making these choices victims felt the illusion of control over their destinies, and often failed to reject the entire system. Resistance to exploitation was diminished.
• I sometimes called in sick when it was a nice day, rationalizing the lie by telling myself I was sick of work, which was true enough.
• Selling the hours of my life was no different from selling my fingers one by one. We’ve only so many hours, so many fingers; when they’re gone, they’re gone for good.
• It should not be terribly surprising that people would ignore the world to rationalize exploitation. In order to exploit, we must deafen ourselves to the voices of those we are victimizing. The justification of this exploitation would demand that we continue with our selective deafness, selective blindness, and selective stupidity.
• We all – humans and nonhuman alike – are refugees from the war zone that is civilization – that we cannot longer survive unless we cooperate with those around us.

The world of the concentration camps…was not an exceptionally monstrous society. What we saw there was the image, and in a sense the quintessence, of the infernal society into which we are plunged every day. – Eugene Lonesco

• In a concentration camp, it is better to be the killer than the killed, better to be a collaborator than a resister, a guard than a collaborator, a supervisor than a guard, and better still to be the boss. But of course it would be better to not be in the camp at all.
• In order to make equations manageable (thus allowing the pretension that life is manageable) economists must disregard or fudge variables that may be difficult or impossible to quantify.
• Not much that we do in our personal lives makes much economic sense, just as most things we do for money make no sense in personal terms.
• Our economics, as is true for our science, represents the triumph of product over process, and form over content. It is the triumph of selective deafness and blindness over conscience and relationship.
  • One of the problems with our economic system is that money is valued over all else.
  • So long as money is valued – and in fact necessary – a great percentage of people will end up spending a great deal of time doing things they don’t want to do.
• Because our cash economy is predicated on the idea of a society composted of atomistic individuals pulling in selfish directions, it can do no other than reward selfish behaviors.
• Our economics promises a life of increasing ease…For those of us rich enough to reap its benefits, our economic system offers a life devoid of experience; as though life, and experience, were a hassle.
• Negative experiences can lead to joy and understanding. Life is untidy. When we reject this messiness – and in doing so reject life – we risk perceiving the world through the lens of our economics or our science. But if we celebrate life with all its contradictions, embrace it, experience it, and ultimately live with it, there is the chance for a spiritual life filled not only with pain and untidiness, but also with joy, community, and creativity.
• To believe any one thing is “the problem” would be to believe that if we simply reform our economic system, everything will be okay, or if we reform science, or Christianity, then everything will suddenly be fine.
  • We need to look beyond, to the urges that inform, to the hidden wounds and presumptions that lead first to the conceptualization and late implementation of our economics, our science, our religion, our misogyny and child abuse.
  • An economics like ours can emerge only from a consciousness like ours, and only a consciousness like ours can give rise to an economics like ours.
  • We must fundamentally change our consciousness, and in so doing fundamentally change the way we perceive the world.
• It is unavoidable: so long as we value money more highly than living beings and more highly than relationships, we will continue to see living beings as resources, and convert them to cash; objectifying, killing, extirpating.
  • If monetary value is attached to something it will be exploited until it’s gone.
  • Money perfectly manifests the desires of our culture. It is safe. It neither lives, dies, nor rots. It is exempt from experience. It is meaningless and abstract. By valuing abstraction over living beings, we seal not only our own fate, but the fates of all those we encounter.

It’s life that matters, nothing but life – the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• Your faith must be strong enough that you can walk the path blindfolded.
  • Wherever you put your foot, there is the path. You become the path.
• Develop – to cause to become gradually fuller, larger, better.
• I’m more of a practical man, so rather than write papers about being kaitiaki, I just do it. I don’t trust words. I’m frightened of the intellectualism that can insulate us from action and turn the problems and solutions into puzzles or fantasies…The work has got to be done.
• We rescue a piece of beautiful wood out of an old building, and as we restore it and put it in place, we rescue and restore ourselves.
• We are suffering from a great illness, and the way to get better is serve others. We should all be in service. It makes us well. I serve the birds and trees, the earth, the water.
• As with everything else, our lawns manifest our cultural desire: they are static, they are artificial, and they are kept sexually immature.
• How much richness do we deprive ourselves of by accepting the default decisions handed to us by our elders?
• The tree had made it clear to me that the price of diversity is death.
  • Transitions by definition involve pain, loss, sorrow, and even death.
• Part of their personal identities includes their habitat – their human and nonhuman surroundings. Thus they are not working to save something out there, but responding in defense of their own lives.
• Activation energy – the amount of energy that must be present before a certain reaction can proceed.
  • How much – and what – will it take for you to  begin to act?
• Violations come not only in paroxysms of rage, spasms of violence and violent orgasms. They come more often with constant erosion, with an incessant imparting of the full knowledge that there is nothing, no one, nowhere, no thought, no action, that the violator will not seek out and attempt to control.
• The central question of our time: What are sane and appropriate responses to insanely destructive behavior?
  • Gandhi wrote a letter to Hitler asking him to stop committing atrocities, and was mystified that it didn’t work.
• It is desperately true that we each need to look inside, to make ourselves right.
  • The Old One says you must put your house in order before you can have guests.

You didn’t set up the system. Do what you can, but don’t identify with the problem. If you internalize what is not yours, you fight not only them but yourself as well. Take responsibility only for that which you’re responsible – your own thoughts and actions. – Jeannette Armstrong

• We’re responsible not only for what we do, but also for what is in our power to stop.

We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, affliction, or infamy. We kill when, because it is easier, we countenance, or pretend to approve of atrophied social, political, educational, and religious institutions, instead of resolutely combating them. – Hermann Hesse

• Because life feeds off life, and because every action causes a killing, the purpose of existence cannot be to simply avoid taking lives. That isn’t possible. What is possible, however, is to treat others, and thus ourselves, with respect, and to not unnecessarily cause death or suffering.
• The finitude of the planet guarantees that running away is no longer a sufficient response. Those who destroy must be stopped.
• …but their democracy is our dictatorship…
• I asked what the MRTA wants for Peru. He replied, “I am not sure what you mean. We are Peru. We want nothing from Peru. There are others who want plenty from Peru: our oil, wood, fish, gold. Our lives. Capitalism is taking away what is elemental to our lives: our land, rivers, forests are being violated by institutions and individuals who have deafened themselves to the meanings they have for us.”
• The children of Peru continued to starve, the forests continued to fall, and the fisheries continued to be depleted. In other words, Fujimori continued his policy of committing genocide and ecocide to benefit transnational corporations. In other words, it was business as usual in the civilized, industrialized world.
• Time and again we show ourselves willing to die or to live to support ecological and economical justice and sanity, and time and again our enemies – the indecent ones, the destroyers – show themselves willing to lie and to kill to maintain control.

When those in power lie, the only way to conduct a meaningful dialogue with them is to have in your hands a way to force them to be accountable. Even then you can only be sure they will remain true so long as you continue to hold them tightly in your hands. – Isaac Velazco

• Readers may more closely recognize our own culture in Fromm’s description of the Dobus, Kwaikutl, Aztecs, and others he put into the category of “destructive.” These cultures, he said, are “characterized by much interpersonal violence, destructiveness, aggression, and cruelty, both within the tribe and against others, a pleasure in war, maliciousness, and treachery. The whole atmosphere of life is one of hostility, tension, and fear. Usually there is a great deal of competition, great emphasis on private property, strict hierarchies, and a considerable amount of war-making.”
• The social forms and institutions of nonaggressive cultures positively reinforces acts that benefit the group as a whole while negatively reinforcing acts (and eliminating goals) that harm some members of the group.
  • The social forms of aggressive cultures, on the other hand, reward actions that emphasize individual gain, even or especially when that gain harms others in the community.
• One of the primary problems with our system of social rewards is its tautological nature. We grant communal responsibility and esteem to those who have accumulated and maintained power; but the primary motivation for those who are responsible for decisions affecting the larger community lies in the accumulation and maintenance of power.
• Although I cannot predict the future, I do know that any culture that consumes its natural environmental base will eventually collapse under the weight of its own strengths.
• Cultural convention is merely cultural invention. It does not have to be this way, that not all cultures have as their trajectory centralized control and ultimate annihilation.

What I fear is being in the presence of evil and doing nothing. I fear that more than death. – Otilia deKoster

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others. – Thomas Jefferson, Owner of Slaves

• I’m not certain the language is raw enough. My language is too fine, the sentences too lyrical, to describe things neither child nor adult should have to describe at all.
  • It is not the writing that must change, but the reality.
• I understand now that somewhere inside of each of us – some more than others – still survives that person who would not and will not rape, who would not and will not coerce, that person who understands what it means to be alive and to be a part of a relationship, a family, a community of both human and nonhuman.

Happiness is love, nothing else. A man who is capable of love is happy. – Herman Hesse

• It was the bees who provided me my first real somatic understanding of cooperation and compliance: work against bees and they sting; work with them as they work with themselves and they reward you with honey, joy, and sore muscles.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. – Abraham Lincoln

• We’re so good at getting along that we do so at the expense of actions that would in a meaningful sense bring a change in those original circumstances that cause our suffering.
• What you value is what you create.
  • We do what we reward, and we reward what we value.
• Underlying the different forms of coercion is a unifying factor: Silence. The necessity of silencing victims before, during, and after exploitation or annihilation, and the necessity at these same times of silencing one’s own conscience and one’s conscious awareness of relationship is undeniable.
  • The perpetrators of these atrocities share a deeply unifying belief in their own separateness and superiority, and a tightly rationalized belief in the rightness of their actions.
  • Fearful of life, the perpetrators forget that one can affect another with love, by allowing another’s life to unfold according to its own nature and desires and fate, and by giving to the other what it needs to unfold. One can affect another by merely being present and listening intently to that other.
• Our religion, philosophy, science, economics, politics, and so on are manifestations of cultural desire, that means these fields have as their purpose the rationalization of exploitation, what makes you think we could expect anything different from a revolution that comes from this same culture?

The greatest virtue between heaven and earth is to live. – ‘The Great Treatise’ of the I Ching

• Economic production requires that resources be funneled toward producers, while ecosystemic production requires that resources be returned to all members of the natural community, including, especially, the ground.

Our goal should be not the emulation of the ancients and their ways, but to experience for ourselves the aspects of human existence out of which arose those ancient forms which we we see them elicit such a feeling of longing. Otherwise the modern will remain forever superficial while the real will remain ancient, far away, and therefore, outside of ourselves. – Mr. Aoki

On the terms imposed by technocratic society, there is no hope for mankind except by ‘going with’ its plans for accelerated technological progress, even though man’s vital organs will all be cannibalized in order to prolong the megamachine’s meaningless existence…But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out. – Lewis Mumford

• For an entire community to disentangle itself from that web may be well-nigh impossible, given the modern economy’s interconnected nature as well as overpopulation, resource depletion, and environment degradation that comes with civilization.

The advantage of one individual becomes a victory over another, and the majority who are not victorious must shift as they can. – Ruth Benedict

• An emphasis on production requires an emphasis on private ownership requires a means to protect this ownership requires, in the end, murder.
• When a slave rebels without challenging the entire notion of slavery, he merely encounters a new boss. But if all the blood is painfully squeezed away, what emerges is a free man, and not even death can stop those who are free.
• Like an iceberg, or the entrance to a cave, or like the ocean itself, there is so much more beneath only hinted at by the surface.

The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence, ‘at bottom’ the psyche is simply ‘world.’ – Carl Jung

• For scientists to give up predictability means they have to give up control, which means they have to give up Western culture, which means it’s not going to happen until civilization collapses under the weight of its own ecological excesses.
• There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of the earth, and it is the language of our bodies. It is the language of dreams, and of action. It is the language of meaning, and of metaphor.
  • This language of symbol is the umbilical cord that binds us to the beginning, to whatever is the source of who we are, where we come from, and where we return.
  • We suffer from misperceiving the world. We believe ourselves separated from each other and from all other by words and by thoughts. We believe – rationally, we think – that we are separated by rationality, and that to perceive the world “rationally” is to perceive the world as it is. But perceiving the world “as it is” is also to misperceive it entirely, to blind ourselves to an even greater body of truth.

A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake. – George Gurdjieff

• Everyone understands that for there to be growth, there must always be a dying away.
  • To let part of your life die so another may emerge.

The part of the mind that is dark to us in this culture, that is sleeping in us, that we name ‘unconsciousness,’ is the knowledge that we are inseparable from all other beings in the universe. – Susan Griffin

• It is no more possible to cheat fate than it is to resolve the nonrational through the purely rational.

The significant problems of the world cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness at which they were created. – Albert Einstein

All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble…They can never be solved, but only outgrown. This ‘outgrowing’ proved on further investigation to require a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest appeared on the patient’s horizon, and through this broadening of his or her outlook the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms but faded when confronted with a new and stronger life urge. – Carl Jung

• We do not easily give up our acquired ways of being, even when they’re killing us.
  • Only when that mindset had, like a plant in a too-small pot, exhausted its own possibilities did I begin casting about for another way to be; only when I no longer had any real choice, far past the time when what little choice there was – death or change – had become all-too-painfully obvious, did I begin to reject the earlier mindset. This is why I don’t think our culture will stop before the world has been impoverished beyond our most horrifying imaginations.

It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential, and has little or no significant influence on behavior…I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning. Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another. As soon as the individual tries to communicate such experience directly, often with a quite natural enthusiasm, it becomes teaching, and its results are inconsequential… When I try to teach, as I do sometimes, I am appalled by the results, which seem a little more than consequential, because sometimes the teaching seems to succeed. When this happens I find that the result is damaging. It seems to cause the individual to distrust his [or her] own experience, and to stifle significant learning. Hence I have come to feel that the outcomes of teaching are either unimportant or hurtful. When I look back at the results of my past teaching, the real results seem the same – either damage was done, or nothing significant occurred… As a consequence, I realize that I am only interested in being a learner, preferable learning things that matter, that have some significant influence on my own behavior… I find that one of the best, but most difficult ways for me to learn is to drop my own defensiveness, at least temporarily, and to try to understand the way in which experience seems and feels to the other person. I find that another way of leaning is for me to state my own uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to the meaning that my experience actually seems to have…It seems to mean letting my experience carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience. – Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person

• The people in my class, including me, did not need to be controlled, managed, nor even taught. What we needed was to be encouraged, accepted, and loved just for who we are…to be given time in a supportive space to explore who we were and what we wanted, with the assistance of others who had our best interests at heart.
  • All we want, whether we are honeybees, salmon, trash-collecting ants, ponderosa pines, coyotes, human beings, or stars, is to love and be loved, to be accepted, cherished, and celebrated simply for being who we are. Is that so very difficult?

The great way has no gate; there are a thousand paths to it. If you pass through the barrier, you walk the universe alone. – Wu-Men

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. – Milan Kundera

• Isolated from the rest of nature, isolated from each other by walls of fear, isolated from our own bodies, and isolated most of all from our own horrifying experience, is it any wonder that we are all crazy?

Atrocities are actions so horrifying they go beyond words. For people who witness or experience atrocities, there is a kind of silencing that comes from not knowing how to put these experience into speech. At the same time, atrocities are the crimes perpetrators most want to hide. This creates a powerful convergence of interest: no one wants to speak about them. No one wants to remember them. Everyone wants to pretend they didn’t happen. – Dr. Judith Herman

• In order to escape accountability the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting.
  • The more extreme the crimes, the more determined the efforts to deny the crimes happened.
• Once you’ve forced a person to violate his or her moral codes, to break faith with him or herself – the fact that it’s done under duress does not remove the shame or guilt of the experience – you may never again even need to use threats. At that point the victim’s self-hatred, self-loathing, and shame will be so great that you don’t have to beat her up, because she’s going to do it herself.
  • A man who had knowingly compromised himself did not revolt against his masters, no matter what idea had driven him to collaboration: too many mutual skeletons in the closet.

The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not objects to be exploited. Everything has its own voice. Thunder and lightning and stars and planets, flowers, birds, animals, trees – all these have voices, and they constitute a community of existence that is profoundly related. – Thomas Berry

The future of mankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibility to all living things. – Vine Deloria, Jr.

• All of us who participate in a system that “makes” money at the expense of our ecological base – upon which not only our economics but our lives depend – are signing our own death warrants. Allowing our crazy system to destroy our land base is not merely unethical and unwise but suicidal.

Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself? – Tao Te Ching

• Perhaps we will awaken in an exterior landscape that is barren and lonely enough to match the landscape of our hearts and minds.
• It is not possible to recover from atrocity in isolation. It is, in fact, precisely this isolation that induces the atrocities. If we wish to stop the atrocities, we need merely step away from the isolation. There is a whole world waiting for us, ready to welcome us home. It has missed us sorely as we have missed it. And it is time to return. Godspeed.

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

Magic Theatre

Entrance Not for everybody

For Madmen Only!

Price of Admittance your mind

• …he had created within himself with positive genius a boundless and frightful capacity for pain.
• Most men will not swim before they are able to. Is not that witty? Naturally, they won’t swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for water. And naturally they won’t think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go for in it, but he has bartered with solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.
• Ever age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evil.
  • Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.
• He belongs to those whose fate it is to live the whole riddle of human destiny heightened to the pitch of a personal torture, a personal hell.
• Was all that we called culture, spirit, soul, all that we called beautiful and sacred, nothing but a ghost long dead, which only a few fools like us took for true and living? Had it perhaps indeed never been true and living? Had all that we poor fools bothered our heads about never been anything but a phantom?
• What others chose to think about it or what he chose to think himself was not good to him at all. It left the wolf inside him just the same.
• …although it may have seemed so to himself all the same, insomuch as every man takes the sufferings that fall to his share as the greatest.
• And even the unhappiest life has its sunny moments and its little flowers of happiness between sand and stone…And they had to because Harry wished, as every sentient being does, to be loved as a whole and therefore it was just with those whose love he most valued that he could least of all conceal and belie the wolf.
• …these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment’s happiness is flung so high and dazzling over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own.
  • To them, too, however, the other thought has come that man is perhaps not merely a half-rational animal but a child of the gods and destined to immortality.
• He never sold himself for money or an easy life or to women or to those in power; and had thrown away a hundred times what in the world’s eye was his advantage and happiness in order to safeguard his liberty.
• The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seekers by pleasure.
• …that he is always in his own eyes exposed to an extraordinary risk, as though he stood with the slightest foothold on the peak of a crag whence a slight push from without or an instant weakness from within suffices to precipitates him into the void.
• In this aspect suicides present themselves as those who are overtaken by the sense of guilt inherent in individuals, those soul that find the aim of life not in the perfecting and molding of the self, but in liberating themselves by going back to the mother, back to God, back to the all.
• …the Steppenwolf stood entirely outside the world of convention, since he had neither family life nor social ambitions.
• Brought up, as he was, in a cultivated home in the approved manner, he never tore apart of his soul loose from its conventionalities even after he had long since individualized himself to a degree beyond its scope and freed himself from the substance of its ideals and beliefs.
• It is open to man to give himself up wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after God, to the ideal of saintliness. On the other hand, he can equally give himself up entirely to the life of instinct, to the lusts of the flesh, and so direct all his effort to the attainment of momentary pleasures.
  • He will never be a martyr or agree to his own destruction. On the contrary, his ideal is not to give up but to maintain his own identity. He strives neither for the saintly nor its opposite. The absolute is his abhorrence. He may be ready to serve God, but not by giving up the fleshpots. He is ready to be virtuous, but likes to be easy and comfortable in this world as well.
• A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self.
  • Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly consuming inner fire. The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creatures of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for responsibility.
• To live in the world as though it were not the world, to respect the law and yet to stand above it, to have possessions as though “ one possessed nothing,” to renounce as though it were no renunciation, all these favorite and often formulated propositions of an exalted worldly wisdom, it is in the power of humor alone to make efficacious.
• If I say “above” or “below,” that is already a statement that requires explanation, since an above and a below exist only in thought, only as abstraction. The world itself knows nothing of above or below.
• Harry finds in himself a human being, that is to say, a world of thoughts and feelings, of culture and tamed or sublimated nature, and besides this he finds within himself also a wolf, that is to say, a dark world of instinct, of savagery and cruelty, of unsublimated or raw nature.
  • His life oscillates as everyone’s does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands.
• Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and even in the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications – and most of all himself.
• As a body everyone is single, as a soul never.
• The beast and the body are indeed one, but the souls that dwell in it are not two, nor five, but countless in number. Man is onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads…The human merry-go-around sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.
• But things are not so simple as in our thoughts, nor so rough and ready as in our poor idiotic language…
• Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspicions to the contrary on the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the ancients). He is much more an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His inner most destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature, the mother. Between the two forces his life hangs tremulous and irresolute.
• The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life.
• The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All.
• I stood outside all social circles, alone, beloved by none, mistrusted by many, in unceasing and bitter conflict with public opinion and morality; and though I lived in a bourgeois setting, I was all the same an utter stranger to this world in all I thought and felt.
• I had played Don Quixote often enough in my difficult, crazed life, had put honor before comfort, and heroism before reason.
• …so it is with the majority of men, day by day and hour by hour in their daily lives and affairs. Without really want to at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed it is this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being, like me, the critics of their own lives and recognizing the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waster of the lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity grinning over it all. And they are right, right a thousand times to live as they do, playing their games and pursuing their business, instead of resisting the dreary machine and staring into the void as I do, who have left the track.
• He believes in the studies whose servant he is; he believes in the value of mere knowledge and its acquisition, because he believes in progress and evolution.
• …it would be better for our country and the world in general, if at least the few people who were capable of thought stood for reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with a blind obsession for a new war.
• I could not bear this tame, lying, well-mannered life any longer.
• My nature had much of the child in it, its curiosity and love for idleness and play.
• We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don’t mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time…In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.
• To be religious you must have time, and even more, independence of time. You can’t be religious in earnest and at the same time live in actual things and still take them seriously, time and money and the Odéon Bar and all that.
• All of a sudden there were things that concerned me again, which I could think of with joy and eagerness. All of a sudden a door was thrown open through which life came in. Perhaps I could live once more and once more be a human being. My soul that had fallen asleep in the cold and nearly frozen breathed once more, and sleepily spread its weak and tiny wings.
• But in this Hermine was like life itself, one moment succeeding to the next and not one to be foreseen.
• No, her surrender to the moment was so simple and complete that the fleeting shadows and agitation to the very depths of the soul came to her no less than every pleasurable impulse and were lived as fully.
• Well, look at an animal, a cat, a dog, or a bird, or one of those beautiful great beasts at the zoo, a puma or a giraffe. You can’t help seeing that all of them are right. They’re never in any embarrassment. They always know what to do and know to behave themselves. They don’t flatter and they don’t intrude. They don’t pretend. They are as they are, like stones or flowers or stars in the sky.
• Are ideals attainable? Do we live to abolish death? No – we live to fear it and then again to love it, and just for death’s sake it is that our spark of life glows for an hour now and then so brightly.
• Everyone risks being laughed at when he addresses a girl.
• We intellectuals, instead of fighting against this tendency like men, and rendering obedience to the spirit, the Logos, the Word, and gaining a hearing for it, are all dreaming of a speech without words that utter the inexpressible and gives form to the formless.
• There was nothing to be made of us intellectuals. We were superfluous, irresponsible lot of talented chatterboxes for whom reality had no meaning.
• Others, and Maria was one of them, were unusually gifted in love and unable to do without it. They lived solely for love and bedsides their official and lucrative friends had other love affairs as well. Assiduous and busy, care-ridden and light-hearted, intelligent and yet thoughtless, these butterflies lived a life at once childlike and raffiné; independent, not to be bought by every one, finding their account in good luck and fine weather, in love with life and yet clinging to it far less than the bourgeois, always ready to follow a fairy prince to his castle, always certain, though scarcely conscious of it, that a difficult and sad end was in store for them.
• That night, however, for the first time since my downfall gave me back the unrelenting radiance of my own life and made me recognize chance as destiny once more and see the ruins of my being as fragments of the divine. My soul breathed once more. My eyes were opened.
• Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.
• And perhaps, I mean, it has always been the same and always will be, and what is called history at school, and all we learn by heart there about heroes and geniuses and great deeds and fine emotions, is all nothing but a swindle invented by the schoolmasters for educational reasons to keep children occupied for a given number of years. It has always been so and always will be. Time and the world, money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death.
• And eternity was nothing else than the redemption of time, its return to innocence, so to speak, and its transformation again into space.
• All the women of this fevered night, all that I had danced with, all whom I had kindled or who had kindled me, all whom I had courted, all who had clung to me with longing, all whom I had followed with enraptured eyes were melted together and had become one, the one whom I held in my arms.
• You have a longing to forsake this world and its reality and to penetrate to a reality more native to you, to a world beyond time. You know, of course, where this other world lies hidden. It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery bur your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. I can help you to make your own world visible. That is all.
• True humor begins when a man ceases to take himself seriously.
• But granting that the conception of duty is no longer known to me, I still know the conception of guilt – perhaps they are the same thing. In so far as a mother bore me, I am guilty. I am condemned to live. I am obliged to belong to a state, to serve as a soldier, to kill and to pay taxes for armaments. And now at this moment the guilt of life has brought me once more to the necessity of killing the people as it did in the war. And this time I have no repugnance. I am resigned to the guilt. I have no objection to this stupid congested world going to bits. I am glad to help and glad to perish with it.
• It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are not susceptible of rational treatment.
• As the playwright shapes a dram form a handful of characters, so do we from the pieces of the disintegrated self build up ever new groups, with ever new interplay and suspense, and new situations that are eternally inexhaustible.
• Each belonged recognizably to the same world and acknowledged a common origin. Yet each was entirely new.
• Just as madness, in higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizomania the beginning of all art and all fantasy.
• Each gave me what she alone had to give and to each I gave what she alone knew how to take.
• …you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine.
• Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.
• You are to learn to listen to the cursed music of life and to reverence the spirit behind it and to laugh at its distortions.
• You broke through the humor of my little theater and tried to make a mess of it, stabbing with knives and spattering our pretty picture-world with the mud of reality.