Intellectual Poaching

Everyone nowadays lives through too much and thinks through too little.

Life cannot be freed from all danger, and if it were it would become intolerably tedious. Risks must be run, and those who shiver at the slightest approach of risk will, if they are successful, condemn their society to barrenness and ossification.

I think if the devil doesn't exist, then man has created him. He has created him in his own image and likeness.

Upon every accident, remember to turn toward yourself and inquire what faculty you have for its use. If you encounter a handsome person, you will find continence the faculty needed; if pain, then fortitude; if reviling, then patience. And when thus habituated, the phenomena of existence will not overwhelm you.

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.

Not that a man sees something new as the first one to do so, but that he sees something old, familiar, seen, but overlooked by everyone, as though it were new, is what distinguishes true originality.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that is a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.

And this you can know--fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.

War, though decreed by Governments, results from an accumulation of evil passions in many separate individuals. To stop war, we must not only work on Governments; we must cleanse our own hearts of the poisons that make war seem reasonable: pride, fear, greed, envy, and contempt. It is a difficult business, but if it cannot be achieved, the end is death.

To treat all men with equal benevolence and to be kind to everyone irrespective of who he is can be just as much an emanation of a profound cynicism as of a thorough philanthropy.

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them.

The man who experiences failure prefers to attribute this failure to the ill-will of another rather than to chance. His incensed feelings are relieved if he imagines a person, and not a thing, to be the cause of his failure; for one can revenge oneself on people, while the iniquities of chance must be swallowed down.

People who give us their complete trust believe they have thus acquired a right too ours. This is a false conclusion; gifts procure no rights.