Emotions and Feelings

Since Life is but a Dream,

 

And if tonight my soul may find her peace

 

There are only two great diseases in the world today—Bolshevism and Americanism; and Americanism is the worse of the two, because Bolshevism only smashes your house or your business or your skull, but Americanism smashes your soul.

 

I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope .

 

Life seems to me like a Japanese picture which our imagination does not allow to end with the margin. We aim at the infinite and when our arrow falls to earth it is in flames.

 

The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to one’s self: “The work is done.” But just as one says that, the answer comes: “The race is over, but the work never is done while the power to work remains.” The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be, while you still live. For to live is to function. That is all there is in living.

 

I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

 

Vengeance imports a feeling of blame, and an opinion, however distorted by passion, that a wrong has been done. It can hardly go very far beyond the case of a harm intentionally inflicted: even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.

 

What a satire, by the way, is that machine [Charles Babbage’s calculating machine] on the mere mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of them!

 

Love’s pleasure lasts but a moment;

 

I do not know, but I feel it happen and am in agony.

 

Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior .

 

Odi et amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior .

 

[ On the Iran-Contra scandal :] Clearly, mistakes were made.

 

And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always— take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!

 

I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.

 

[ Explaining how to fly :] You just think lovely wonderful thoughts and they lift you up in the air.

 

[ Response to being asked, “Where do you live?” :] Second to the right and then straight on till morning.

 

The unpublished manuscript is like an unconfessed sin that festers in the soul, corrupting and contaminating it.

To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.

What a woman says to an eager lover, / write it on running water, write it on air.

The wit we wish we had spoils the wit we have.

A delicate wit is a corruption which a nation takes a long time to acquire. It is only worn-out nations that possess it.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.