Source: Letters to a Young Poet
Im allgemeinen freilich haben die Weisen aller Zeiten immer dasselbe gesagt, und die Toren, d.h. die unermessliche Majorität aller Zeiten, haben immer dasselbe, nämlich das Gegenteil getan; und so wird es denn auch ferner bleiben.
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Maxims
On Contradiction (1937)
Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book Two, Part I: Hard Times
Source: The Slow Regard of Silent Things
“Does being a man make all things forgivable and being a woman all things unforgivable?”
Portrayal of Women in Premchands Stories A Critique
“People and things are processes. Judgements convert them into fixed states.”
Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
Context: You cannot avoid making judgements but you can become more conscious of the way in which you make them. This is critically important because once we judge someone or something we tend to stop thinking about them or it. Which means, among other things, that we behave in response to our judgements rather than to that to which is being judged. People and things are processes. Judgements convert them into fixed states. This is one reason that judgements are often self-fulfilling. If a boy, for example, is judged as being "dumb" and a "nonreader" early in his school career, that judgement sets into motion a series of teacher behaviors that cause the judgement to become self-fulfilling. What we need to do then, if we are seriously interested in helping students to become good learners, is to suspend or delay judgements about them. One manifestation of this is the ungraded elementary school. But you can practice suspending judgement yourself tomorrow. It doesn't require any major changes in anything in the school except your own behavior.
“Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.”
Source: Earthsea Books, The Tombs of Atuan (1971), Chapter 11, "The Western Mountains"
