[b]Sin is a spiritual sickness that is born in human nature. Although it may have a material, physical aspect, it is not to be sought for in matter, which merely provides a medium for its presence, but in man himself, and, as it is in him, it has a life, a character, and a destiny of its own. The suffering, pain, weakness, etc., which we all experience, belong to this essential and ineradicable consciousness of the human condition, which can no more be gotten rid of than the human self itself.
The purpose of art is not, in a sense, to convey knowledge. This can be done in history, and science, and biography, and almost in any kind of description. Art is not even the attempt to say the unsayable. It is the attempt to create a new reality. Art is the most powerful creative power in the world, and it is because of its power that it is so easily corrupted. The artist is always more inclined to play the devil’s advocate, and the writer is the devil’s advocate par excellence. In him there is always present what Goethe calls a spirit of negation.
The writer has always to consider the public, which has no more right to know about the writer’s life than he has to know about the private life of another. The writer’s life is his secret. He must not show anyone in it more than what is shown in the daily life of people, and the public has the right to expect the same simplicity and purity from him as from other people. The writer should be able to give a completely satisfactory account of his own life, but not more than that.
The writer should make a sacrifice of his own life to that which he creates. He does this in two ways, to God and to himself. The first duty he owes to himself is to keep all that is false and all that is worthless in himself from appearing in his work. To do this he must be as pure as he can. And he will achieve this through hard work. If he has already done his best to be honest and to be sincere, this will be a much easier task. There will be no more trouble in remaining so. It is for this reason that the artist who has had a great success, who has become rich and well-known, is so often disappointed. Many years later, after he has had some more successes, he may have doubts of his former sincerity. There is nothing wrong in this. It is a natural reaction of the spirit. But only a writer who has once tasted the bitterness of this is cured of it. A second way to show the writer his sacrifice is to sacrifice himself to the public. He gives up his own life, so that his work may live. He has to put aside everything that is unworthy. He has to become a beggar. But in doing this he earns the right to live.
All art should be born from the artist’s heart. But it should also have a public; the artist must have a public. It is not enough for an artist to have only a few faithful friends; an artist needs also a very large public. And in this public must come the understanding and the criticism of life. This criticism and understanding is the salt which gives life to the art. Only the artist who lives in a small, obscure corner of the universe can survive without this salt, this public, without the salt of the great masses of humanity.
The mind, the soul of the mind, the spirit, the intelligence, the understanding, the reason- with all the fine-meshed and multifaceted nets of thought that would catch and confine its power to the most distant, the most remote of all that comes within range of the senses- even this, that most powerful of all mental tools, must necessarily remain at the mercy of chance.
It is the duty of the thinker, at the moment of creation, to live within himself to
reach the fullness of his idea, the truth which he has conceived.
It is the nature of the intellect not to spoil or to defile what it
loves, and to purify what it respects.
You may not have the power to alter what destiny has ordained; but you can
determine what kind of person you are.
The greatest misfortune for a soul is to be forced into a definite position, to be reduced
to a thing.
The greatest miracle of love is its capacity to endure.
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
Life is too brief. The reason we write is to stretch out our life if only a little longer, to taste
the marrow of our days.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts;
it is made up of our thoughts; it is strengthened by our thoughts; and it is transformed
by our thoughts.
The most intimate act of a woman is to offer to her lover the mirror in which she
remembers him, it is her gift to him in parting.
You make a great mistake when you say to yourself:
‘What I really want is just beyond the horizon, and the road to my desire
runs straight ahead and does not branch out; you will never be able to reach
it unless you cut right across the field in your stride, and when you see it, it
will be too late.’
The most dreadful of evils is that which cannot be foreseen; in all our
affairs, whether small or great, the greatest is death. Now, if our life should be brought to
an end by disease, it is possible to foresee this: but if our life should be brought to an end
by the stroke of a dagger, it is not possible for us to foresee this.
Man is always the product of his past, but he cannot become its grave.
There are no limits to the happiness and beauty of the world, but there are limits to the
intelligence of man.
In every person, at any given moment, there is an entire world of the past, of
things and of events which have left no trace.
Every flower that blooms has a soul. The soul of a flower is its perfume, and its fragrance,
which is released by the breath of nature’s affection.
It takes man as much to do evil as to do good.
If a man has not learned how to live with himself, he will never be able to live with another.
A great artist is never satisfied. To him there are always new things to discover, new things to invent. In the midst of all the difficulties that confront him, he knows that they are but so many keys to unlock the doors of another world.
The fisherman is a dreamer, a visioner, he who, in his own realm, the ocean, hears with
the ears of a seer, and sees with the eyes of the Creator. He who has spent his life in the
water can become one with the waters, can become an incarnation of the water and the
universe. He understands things in a manner not known to others. The
undertow, the wave, the rock, the boat, the sun. All these are for him, and he is a
worshipper of the universe. The ocean is his temple, and the waters are his living
altar.
Who is to give, who to receive?
The One and the All;
God, but a pun; love, an oxymoron.
Who is to receive, and who to give?
The All and the One;
Love, the perfect contradiction.
As a philosopher, I cannot help but see love in the light of freedom. Love is not only a word, an affection, a feeling, a sentiment; it is a way of seeing and of understanding the universe.
The problem with a great number of young poets is that they still have this romantic idea of the artist. The real artist doesn’t think of himself as the creator, but the interpreter of his fellow men. The real artist is not a hero, a man of God, or a teacher. He is a writer who is a witness, someone who feels the weight of another’s silence and can bring it out into words. He is the one who is able to make other men aware of their own suffering, of what is wrong with life. That is the role of an artist. The heart of the poet is only one heart, one in which many hearts speak.
Every one of us has known moments of deep communion, moments of the fullness of being, of the infinite, of the absolute, and that is when we speak to God. It is also what the masters call “the silence of the heart” and is the moment of contact with the truth of the universe. You don’t have to search, you don’t have to go find anything. You don’t have to seek anything at all. It is in yourself that you can find the divine.
As an artist in his own right, the writer becomes a medium not only of his words but of his images, images of life and of death, the world in which we live and the world that we prepare to enter. All of his images have the quality of a double vision.
The man who is truly artist is not concerned about the world. He is not a politician or a reformer or a preacher. He is not concerned with the social welfare. He is not even much concerned with the things that happen to his own person. He is not concerned with pleasure. He is not concerned with profit.
All art which is not the expression of a secret, obscure, almost invisible and secret need, all art which merely speaks about the visible, which merely sings the praise of the great and useful—is a lie.
In our time, the old prayer can find audience with a new God.
No one has ever been given a duty to which he was not suited.
The secret of life is to be able to receive without losing the ability to give.
I am as much and as little as I had the opportunity to be.
To die is to die away from life; to live is to live away from death.
Death has no touch upon the imagination, except to arouse it.
The heart is a river where a man can not swim.
And yet I find in my heart a perpetual discontent. My work is but its laborious
perpetual recreation, a perpetual play at being born and at dying.
Our free will is to be found in this fact; that, as we are finite, we can make no determination, and gain no knowledge, of the infinite; as we are infinite, we cannot be determined by the finite.
When we say, “There is nothing we love more than our own selves,” we do not say anything
more than, “It is we who have most difficulty seeing another’s self.”
Any artist should want to have a large public, and to this end he should be as broad-minded as possible about those things in his own past which are going to limit his public. In this he should take for his model men such as Donne, and Eliot, and the poets of modern poetry. Such a poet is a man, not of a few moods, but with an inner richness, an entire world.
Every thought is but a reflection in the
depths of the waters, of the source from which it originates.
The world lives but because we live, and in like manner it dies only because we die; it is
a drama, all of it, and though this man or that has died, the drama goes on; the human
experience of time, in this sense, as in so many others, is a false experience; it is the
whole world which lives and dies. Man is only the valediction which speaks itself in the silence.
The human being loves by the threefold love of the eye, of the ear, and of the lips; and it is
in the love of the eye that we come nearest to the nature of the bee, that honey-loving and
honey-seeking insect, which, we are told, never knows how much honey it has got, but goes to
search for more.
What is beauty? the harmony of the soul with its own object, an object which it
possesses, and with which it is possessed.
Prophecy has gone. But inspiration will always be.
Like the notes of the song
themselves which singly seem but an incoherent cacophony of sounds, yet when the song is
whole and complete are but an expression of the harmony of the universe, so do we,
regardless of the discordant sounds which we hear about us, find the harmony of the soul
upon the whole and within ourselves.
The aim of the poet is to bring to life what has been created before, and to make new what has been created before in us. The artist, like the child, has no language of his own. He uses the words of the past, but those words must be broken so that they can be used again in new forms.
The artist’s life is a long pilgrimage on which he is the victim of many misfortunes, but which ends in joy.
Our soul cannot be happy unless it is in harmony with itself.
In art, beauty alone is not enough; truth is necessary as well.
One must not judge art by what is obvious; we cannot recognize art from its outward form; we must look into the soul of the artist.
The artist has always something to reveal.
If the first note is a sigh, and the last a farewell, then is the whole life’s span a
serenade.
The artist’s soul is a flame that will consume himself, but at the same time, it is a flame of warmth that penetrates and gives life to the things he creates.
The world is but a picture of the soul. We may see nothing in the world but as we
see it in our own self. A man should seek no truth beyond himself, for all things that
exist, and all things that do not exist, as much as he thinks, are but the self-same image of
the human mind, the mirror of his own existence. In the universe there is but one thing essential;
that is our own idea, the idea in which our consciousness has expressed itself in the eternal
and ever-present unity of a human mind, just as the face of mankind is expressed in a
thousand separate faces, so are all things but a thousand ideas which, no matter how
dissimilar they may seem to one man, still exist as one, are united by the eternal force which
binds them together. The true effort of Mind is always to expand, and the true life of the Ideas is
unity.
Science has proved to be a means of man’s enslavement. So long as the understanding of
man’s relation to reality is one-sided, it will only produce conflict. It is only when the
true relationship between knowledge and reality is clearly seen that there will arise a great
movement towards the true life.
The world is still in the period of ignorance. Man has not yet been able to live in the
world as a complete living organism. He has separated from his environment.
For every joy, there is also sorrow; for every gain, there is also loss. The heart of man is restless and fickle; he is like a ceaseless surging sea, now lifted up, now lulled to rest, like the ebb and flow of the ocean.
Desire is an insistent and a contradictory instinct, for, according to the judgment of the ancients, as soon as desire is satisfied, there arises within it a new desire
On n’a pas besoin de Dieu, pour aimer. [For some reason it wrote this one in French. It means, you don’t need God in order to love.]
No matter how hard he thinks, no matter how high his intellectual aim, the human being is
not entirely free from passion. The very effort to be free from passion inevitably
brings on a new passion of pride and egoism.
A man should be like a piece of metal, hard but uniform; the more he is tempered and
softened, the more he betrays himself.
The way to a greater freedom is to become more aware of the boundaries that confine you.
The soul is a labyrinth, the monster that guards it is but itself, the Ariadne’s thread it clings
to that it might find its way is but itself, and the world into which it even emerges is still only itself.
Love is to the essence of the moral individual what freedom is to the intellectual.
Every writer who has made of his work a kind of prayer and who has made his life an offering to God, who has given his work that purity of being which comes from a great and secret dedication, from sacrifice and the love that we sacrifice everything to, will always be able to speak from his heart to the hearts of others and to speak as an oracle. But artists are not prophets. They are the mouthpieces of the invisible. They are the interpreters of life. But the more they try to be their own interpreters, the more they will feel themselves to be strangers to the universe, to life.
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