Kenneth Rexroth: Quotes about life

Kenneth Rexroth was American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector. Explore interesting quotes on life.
Kenneth Rexroth: 130   quotes 0   likes

“No one was required to believe in the gods as Christians believe in their creeds. Socrates had always been scrupulous in observance of every accepted principle and practice of community life. However, from his questioning he had developed a civic and personal morality founded on reason rather than custom.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Plato: The Trial and Death of Socrates (pp. 50-51)
Classics Revisited (1968)
Context: No one was required to believe in the gods as Christians believe in their creeds. Socrates had always been scrupulous in observance of every accepted principle and practice of community life. However, from his questioning he had developed a civic and personal morality founded on reason rather than custom. He envisioned it as subject to continuous criticism and revaluation in terms of the ever-expanding freedom of morally autonomous but cooperating persons, who together made up a community whose characteristic aim was an organically growing depth, breadth, intensity of experience — experience finally of that ultimate reality characterized by Socrates as good, true and beautiful.
The accusers were right. This is a new religion which bears scant resemblance to the old. Civic piety is founded on the recognition of ignorance and the nurture of the soil until it becomes capable of true knowledge — which is a state of being, a moral condition called freedom. The Greek city-state, not to speak of the tribal community, knew nothing of freedom in this sense, but only the liberty that distinguished the free man from the slave.

Life , God , Communication , Question

“See Life steadily, see it whole.”

Kenneth Rexroth

My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild:
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
—Matthew Arnold, "To a Friend" http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/A/ArnoldMatthew/verse/strayedreveller/friend.html from The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849)
Misattributed

Life

“You don't become a saint until you lead a good life whether in Tibet or Italy or America.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Rothenberg and Antin interview (1958)

Life

“Perhaps this is what really happens in life to most good men. They are not crucified. They simply pass through life and then die, and their passing influences just a few people to make them just a little happy.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers (p. 102)
More Classics Revisited (1989)

Life , Men , People , Happiness

“The moral issues with which Marcus struggles would be, as he points out, unchanged whether the universe were mechanical and devoid of meaning or value or ruled by deity or Providence; whether the will were in fact free or determined; whether there were or were not a future life, or any even fugitive rewards and punishments at all.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Marcus Aurelius: The Meditations (p. 82)
Classics Revisited (1968)

Life , Universe , Future

“The poet, says Baudelaire, is a decipherer, a Kabbalist of reality, a decoder. Ordinary life, if it is not a message in code, a system of symbols for something else, is unacceptable. It must be a cryptogram; it can't be what it seems. The poet's task is to decode the incomprehensible obvious. His life becomes a deliberately constructed paranoia, as Rimbaud, Breton, Artaud were to say generations later.
As we read him, we discover that Baudelaire believes in the charm, the incantation, the cryptogram, but he ceases to believe in the secret. The spirits have not risen. The code says nothing. This is the mystery concealed by the disorder of the world. The visionary experience ends in itself; the light of the illuminated comes only from and falls only on himself.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Baudelaire: Poems (p. 175)
Classics Revisited (1968)

Life , Secret , World , Reality

“All my life I have been attracted by Catholicism. But what attracted me was not its Christianity, but its paganism. The Scholastic Philosophers entertained me not because they were apologists for Jesus but because they were refinements of Aristotle. The liturgical life of the Church moved me because it echoes the most ancient responses to the turning of the year and the changing seasons, and the rhythms of animal and human life. For me the Sacraments transfigured the rites of passage, the physical facts of the human condition — birth, adolescence, sexual intercourse, vocation, sickness and death, communion, penance. Catholicism still provides a structure of acts, individual and at the same time communal, physical responses to life.”

Kenneth Rexroth

"Monastic Interlude" http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/autobio/4.htm
An Autobiographical Novel (1991)

Life , Death , Communication , Birth