“How many lives we live in one,
And how much less than one, in all.”
Alice Cary (1820–1871) American writer
Life's Mysteries; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 442.
“People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.”
Source: Conversations with Saul Bellow
Last update Oct. 3, 2023. History
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature." by Saul Bellow?
Saul Bellow103
Canadian-born American writer 1915–2005Related quotes
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer
Source: The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937) British Marxist literary critic, journalist and writer
Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949), Chapter IV: Consciousness: A Study in Bourgeois Psychology
“Rock is much more malleable than ideas.”
Kim Stanley Robinson book The Years of Rice and Salt
Book 6: "Widow Kang", Ch. 3
The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
Lawrence Lessig book Free Culture
Free Culture (2004)
Context: A simple idea blinds us, and under the cover of darkness, much happens that most of us would reject if any of us looked. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in ideas that we don't even notice how monstrous it is to deny ideas to a people who are dying without them. So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we don't even question when the control of that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture democratically. Blindness becomes our common sense. And the challenge for anyone who would reclaim the right to cultivate our culture is to find a way to make this common sense open its eyes.
So far, common sense sleeps. There is no revolt. Common sense does not yet see what there could be to revolt about.
Ce n'est pas la première fois que je remarque combien, en France particulièrement, les mots ont plus d’empire que les idées.
Indiana, pt. 1, ch. 2 (1832); Sylvia Raphael (trans.) Indiana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 23
Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist
As quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America (1983) by W.C, Seitz, p. 88
1970s and later
“It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die.”
Steve Biko (1946–1977) anti-apartheid activist in South Africa
Quoted in Scott MacLeod, "South Africa: Extremes in Black and Whites" http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,975037,00.html, Time, March 9, 1992, p. 38 <br class="br">Quoted in "The Mind of Black Africa" (1996) by Dickson A. Mungazi, p. 159