a tumblrful of Soma

It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

“The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.”

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

If you want a classier explanation, I'd say you saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties' comic art. They're semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing. But you saw a different kind of ghost, that's all. That plane was part of the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow. The important thing is not to worry about it.

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded. Someone sober will worry about events going badly. Let the lover be.

Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us.

Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer.

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, So what. That's one of my favorite things to say. So what.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

All that is is all that is not is not that that is is not that that is not that is all.

I suspect they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too-much clarity.