“Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.”

Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XVII

The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts) (1899)

Source: Storm Front

"Human Nature is Defective", speech to the Young People's Socialist League, The Chicago Tribune, 20 Oct. 1910

Section 1.10 <!-- p. 32 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.
We can give a child a self-image. But is this a good idea? Hitler did a devastating job at that kind of thing. So does Chairman Mao. … I haven't defined a self, nor do I want to. A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.

"Glow, Big Glowworm", p. 264
Bully for Brontosaurus (1991)

Article 1
"Declaration of Rights" http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/PShelley/declarat.html (1812)

The Usurpation Of Language (1910)
Context: How can the Universe tell its own story save by making use of human speech; how convey its meanings to finite minds save by employing a thinker to declare them? So long as the story remains unspoken, unwritten, can we say it exists at all? Does not the significance of things become a story by the very process which ends in the movement of an intelligently guided pen over a sheet of paper, in the reading of printed types, in the utterance of recognised vocables; and until this process has been accomplished is not the “meaning” a mere promise or unrealized potency? Can we learn the history of the world, and of human life, otherwise than by reading, or hearing it spoken? How, then, can we receive it without the intermediation of a writer, a speaker?