Life and Existence

I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

The root of joy, as of duty, is to put all one’s powers towards some great end.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

Jazz is the music of the body.

Like the PC, the Internet is a tidal wave. It will wash over the computer industry and many others, drowning those who don’t learn to swim in its waves.

Born Originals , how comes it to pass that we die Copies ?

Born Originals , how comes it to pass that we die Copies ?

What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.

an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

If a life can have a theme song, and I believe every worthwhile one has, mine is a religion, an obsession, or a mania or all of these expressed in one word: individualism.

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.

I took the road less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

If the imagination is to yield any real product, it must have received a great deal of material from the external world.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

Life consists in molting our illusions. We form creeds today only to throw them away tomorrow. The eagle molts a feather because he is growing a better one.

But time strips our illusions of their hue, And one by one in turn, some grand mistake Casts off its bright skin yearly, like a snake.

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes in literature.

A long illness seems to be placed between life and death, in order to make death a comfort both to those who die and to those who remain.

To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.

Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching searchlights.