Part i, canto ii.
Lucile (1860)
Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)
Preface, 1928
The Story of San Michele (1929)
Remarks Recorded for the Opening of a USIA Transmitter at Greenville, North Carolina (8 February 1963) Audio at JFK Library (01:29 - 01:40) http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKWHA-161-010.aspx · Text of speech at The American Presidency Project http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9551
1963
Variant: A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.
“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?”
Source: The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
“But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is - is that living?”
Source: The Book of Disquiet
“To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live
without mirrors is to live without the self.”
Selected Poems 1976-1986 (1987), Marrying the Hangman
Context: To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live
without mirrors is to live without the self. She is
living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and
on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice
comes through darkness and has no face. This voice
becomes her mirror.
“A man living without conflicts, as if he never lives at all.”
Source: The Analects, Other chapters
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God
Context: But if ether is nothing but an hypothesis explanatory of light, air on the other hand, is a thing that is directly felt; and even if it did not enable us to explain the phenomenon of sound, we should nevertheless always be directly aware of it, and above all, of the lack of it in moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way God Himself, not the idea of God, may become a reality that is immediately felt; and even though the idea of God does not enable us to explain either the existence or essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And the feeling, mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic sense of life is founded upon this — this feeling is a feeling of hunger for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first instance... to wish that there may be a God, to be unable to live without Him.
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 88.
