How We Live Now (2005)
Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“This show is our own personal beliefs.”
Paley Center interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpSw0j8-4_o&feature=SeriesPlayList&p=C889CCEBD1303E1D, in response to an audience question, "How do you keep your own personal beliefs from showing up in the show?"
The Last September (1929)
Ian Hacking (1975), Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, p. 7.
Source: The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), I Philosophy, p. 91
Context: He who suffers time to slip away and does not grow in virtue the more one thinks about him the sadder one becomes. No man has a capacity for virtue who sacrifices honour for gain. Fortune is powerless to help one who does not exert himself. That man becomes happy who follows Christ. There is no perfect gift without great suffering. Our triumphs and our pomps pass away; gluttony and sloth and enervating luxury have banished every virtue from the world; so that as it were wandering from its course our nature is subdued by habit. Now and henceforth it is meet that you cure yourself of laziness. The Master has said that sitting on down or lying under the quilts will not bring thee to fame. He who without it has frittered life away leaves no more trace of himself upon the earth than smoke does in the air or the foam on the water.
“Belief in God is a matter of personal conviction and faith.”
Morarji Desai speaks about life and celibacy
“Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense.”
Why I Wrote 'The Crucible in The New Yorker (21 October 1996) https://archive.is/20130630000741/www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?020422fr_archive02
Context: Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.
The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)
Context: We are, the great spiritual writers insist, most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that has been called God, Nirvana, Brahman, or the Tao.
What I now realize, from my study of the different religious traditions, is that a disciplined attempt to go beyond the ego brings about a state of ecstasy. Indeed, it is in itself ekstasis. Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, or self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.
Before showing test footage from the movie The Lost World, based upon his novel, as a trick at the annual meeting of the Society of American Magicians in 1922. The New York Times ran a story the next day: DINOSAURS CAVORT IN FILM FOR DOYLE SPIRITIST MYSTIFIES WORLD-FAMED MAGICIANS WITH PICTURES OF PREHISTORIC BEASTS — KEEPS ORIGIN A SECRET — MONSTERS OF OTHER AGES SHOWN, SOME FIGHTING, SOME AT PLAY, IN THEIR NATIVE JUNGLES
Context: These pictures are not occult, but they are psychic because everything that emanates from the human spirit or human brain is psychic. It is not supernatural; nothing is. It is preternatural in the sense that it is not known to our ordinary senses. It is the effect of the joining on the one hand of imagination, and on the other hand of some power of materialization. The imagination, I may say, comes from me — the materializing power from elsewhere.
