The stage is a concrete physical place which asks to be filled, and to be given its own concrete language to speak. I say that this concrete language, intended for the senses and independent of speech, has first to satisfy the senses, that there is a poetry of the senses as there is a poetry of language, and that this concrete physical language to which I refer is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language. These thoughts are what words cannot express and which, far more than words, would find their ideal expression in the concrete physical language of the stage. It consists of everything that occupies the stage, everything that can be manifested and expressed materially on a stage and that is addressed first of all to the senses instead of being addressed primarily to the mind as is the language of words...creating beneath language a subterranean current of impressions, correspondences, and analogies. This poetry of language, poetry in space will be resolved precisely in the domain which does not belong strictly to words...Means of expression utilizable on the stage, such as music, dance, plastic art, pantomime, mimicry, gesticulation, intonation, architecture, lighting, and scenery...The physical possibilities of the stage offers, in order to substitute, for fixed forms of art, living and intimidating forms by which the sense of old ceremonial magic can find a new reality in the theater; to the degree that they yield to what might be called the physical temptation of the stage. Each of these means has its own intrinsic poetry.
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Paradoxically, all these wonderful dimensions that we want for our being are completely missing, being a hope, a dream about the perfection of the being. Then this hope and dream of perfection is materialized in the vision we have on our soul mate. Moreover, if we are under the impression that we know what we would want as perfection, it always remains a mere false impression and nothing more, because then the event of a Great Love occurs, we realize that what we thought to be perfection is false, and the novelty of the new imagine on the perfection embodies by the lover makes us feel that intense feeling of suffocating love, precisely because we find our new standard for perfection, which becomes this way superior to the old one.
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Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
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The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.
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America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.
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The moral authority of our most cherished institutions comes from their voluntary nature: the value of advice from a priest, a teacher or a loved one depends in large part on the fact that we are free to ignore it. But judges' pieces of 'advice' are court orders, enforceable ultimately by the raw physical power of imprisonment. It is precisely because of the awesomely enforceable nature of our powers that we must be so circumspect in exercising them. It is one thing for a co-worker, family member, doctor, or clergyman to confront someone about a perceived drug problem; it is quite another thing for a judge to compel drug treatment. Drug courts not only fail to recognize this important institutional distinction, but their very purpose is to obliterate it.
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Many of the rites of passage, those rituals of growing up found in our society, are in the form of such comic, practical joking affairs--which we ignore in the belief that they possess no deeper significance. Yet it is precisely in their being regarded as unimportant that they take on importance. For in them we ritualize and dramatize attitudes which contradict and often embarrass the sacred values which we proclaim through our solemn ceremonies and rituals of nationhood.
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The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.
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I took one drought of life I'll tell you what I paid Precisely an existence The market price, they said.
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Man has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much-the wheel, New York, wars and so on-while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man-for precisely the same reason.
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My darling girl, Unfortunately this earth is not a fairy-land, but a struggle for life, perfectly natural and therefore extremely harsh. All the same, or precisely for this reason, it is happiness and comfort for us men to have a precious sweetheart -- and I have the most precious, the dearest and best of all!
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Sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life. If one were to yield to a first impression, one would say that sublimation is a vicissitude which has been forced upon the instincts entirely by civilization. But it would be wiser to reflect upon this a little longer. In the third place, finally, and this seems the most important of all, it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression or some other means?) of powerful instincts. This ââ?¬Ë?cultural frustrationââ?¬â?¢ dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings;we know already that it is the cause of the antagonism against which all civilization has to fight.
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What we call personality (...) has become the most impersonal thing in the world. Its pale and featureless face appears like a ghost at every corner and in every crowd. ... Individualism kills individuality, precisely because individualism has to be an 'ism' quite as much as Communism or Calvinism. The economic and ethical school which calls itself individualist ended by threatening the world with the flattest and dullest spread of the commonplace. Men, instead of being themselves, set out to find a self to be: a sort of abstract economic self identified with self-interest. But while the self was that of a man, the self-interest was generally that of a class or a trade or even an empire. So far from really remaining a separate self, the man became part of a communal mass of selfishness.
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'Exactly,' he said, while he leant forward excitedly, for all the world like a Jack-in-the-box let loose. 'Precisely; and you are a journalist - call yourself one, at least - and it should be part of your business to notice and describe people. I don't mean only the wonderful personage with the clear Saxon features, the fine blue eyes, the noble brow and classic face, but the ordinary person - the person who represents ninety out of every hundred of his own kind - the average Englishman, say, of the middle classes, who is neither very tall nor very short, who wears a moustache which is neither fair nor dark, but which masks his mouth, and a top hat which hides the shape of his head and brow, a man, in fact, who dresses like hundreds of his fellow-creatures, moves like them, speaks like them, has no peculiarity.'
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One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.
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To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.
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All of this are the image of Knowledge, the image of the Matrix Word of Knowledge in which the Matrix Word of Love is reflected, and not the Matrix Word of Knowledge itself, because it is made definitive by the Absolute Truth and Absolute Truth is precisely non-Knowledge, so the true face of Knowledge is precisely non-Knowledge, which is the Mirror in which Love is reflected and not the image of love in this mirror of Knowledge. The Mirror itself is non-Knowledge thus defined by the Absolute Truth, while the image given by the reflection of the Matrix Word of Love in this Mirror which is the Self of the Matrix Words of Knowledge represents the image of our worlds, of the worlds which have a Destiny, where nothing in Knowledge, but the Image of Love reflected in Knowledge. Thus, when man knows a new universe, he creates his image of love reflected in the mirror of Knowledge, an image of love he references to this mirror of Knowledge that is precisely non-Knowledge.
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If you cry 'Forward' you must without fail make plain in what direction to go. Don't you see that if, without doing so, you call out the word to both a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in directions precisely opposite
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And then, what is the spiritual being that does not know its Sacred Self? But knowing it means to refer to non-Knowledge and be an Image from the non-Knowledge as well. Then I ask again: what is the spiritual being that does not refer its Sacred Self to non-Knowledge? Is it the Spiritual Being that no longer is an image of its own destiny in non-Knowledge? Is this being truly spiritual when the Absolute Truth of Knowledge consists precisely of non-Knowledge? Or in not knowing it?
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The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
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If the propositions of this Discourse are tenable, the 'state of progressive collapse' is precisely that state in which alone we are warranted...
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Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been misused so much. Certainly it is the most burdened of all human words. Precisely for that reason it is the most imperishable and unavoidable. And how much weight has all erroneous talk about God's nature and works (although there never has been nor can be any such talk that is not erroneous) compared with the one truth that all men who have addressed God really meant him? For whoever pronounces the word God and really means Thou, addresses, no matter what his delusion, the true Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other and to whom he stands in a relationship that includes all others.
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I am deeply distressed by what I only can call in our Christian culture the idolatry of the Scriptures. For many Christians, the Bible is not a pointer to God but God himself... God cannot be confined within the covers of a leather-bound book. I develop a nasty rash around people who speak as if mere scrutiny of its pages will reveal precisely how God thinks and precisely what God wants.
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I am sticking as closely to my subject as I can; for my subject is precisely this, that it is the masses, the majority
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The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities.
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'Any person who had to endure certain experiments carried out on animals which perish slowly in the laboratories would regard death by burning at the stake as a happy deliverance. Like everyone else in my profession, I used to be of the opinion that we owe nearly all our knowledge of medical and surgical science to animal experiments. Today I know that precisely the opposite is the case, in surgery especially, they are of no help to the practitioner, indeed he is often led astray by them.' -----(Hans Ruesch, One Thousand Doctors (and many more) Against Vivisection.)
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The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
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The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, and not fostered.
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In the life of children there are two very clear-cut phases, before and after puberty. Before puberty the child's personality has not yet formed and it is easier to guide its life and make it acquire specific habits of order, discipline, and work after puberty the personality develops impetuously and all extraneous intervention becomes odious, tyrannical, insufferable. Now it so happens that parents feel the responsibility towards their children precisely during this second period, when it is too late then of course the stick and violence enter the scene and yield very few results indeed. Why not instead take an interest in the child during the first period
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