“One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.”
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Karen Blixen 67
Danish writer 1885–1962Related quotes
Source: The Importance of Living (1937), p. 332
The Captive Mind (1953)
Context: Human material seems to have one major defect: it does not like to be considered merely as human material. It finds it hard to endure the feeling that it must resign itself to passive acceptance of changes introduced from above.
Beyond the Veil
Context: Life passes, but the conditions of life do not. Air, food, water, the moral sense, the mathematical problem and its solution. These things wait upon one generation much as they did upon its predecessor. What, too, is this wonderful residuum which refuses to disappear when the very features of time seem to succumb to the law of change, and we recognize our world no more? Whence comes this system in which man walks as in an artificial frame, every weight and lever of which must correspond with the outlines of an eternal pattern?
Our spiritual life appears to include three terms in one. They are ever with us, this Past which does not pass, this Future which never arrives. They are part and parcel of this conscious existence which we call Present. While Past and Future have each their seasons of predominance, both are contained in the moment which is gone while we say, "It is here."
So the Eternal is with us, whether we will or not, and the idea of God is inseparable from the persuasion of immortality; the Being which, perfect in itself, can neither grow nor decline, nor indeed undergo any change whatever. The great Static of the universe, the rationale of the steadfast faith of believing souls, the sense of beauty which justifies our high enjoyments, the sense of proportion which upholds all that we can think about ourselves and our world, the sense of permanence which makes the child in very truth parent to the man, able to solve the deepest riddle, the profoundest problem in all that is. Let us then willingly take the Eternal with us in our flight among the suns and stars.
Experience is our great teacher, and on this point it is wholly wanting. No one on the farther side of the great Divide has been able to inform those on the hither side of what lies beyond.
Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 103-104, quoting from Seth Session 16
“One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.”
My Life (1975), p. 231
“He that works and does some Poem, not he that merely says one, is worthy of the name of Poet.”
Introduction to Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845).
1840s
letter to wife Louie (Louisa Wanda Strentzel) (July 1888); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 15: Winning a Competence
1880s
Notebook entry (1951), published in Partisan Review: 50th Anniversary Edition, ed. William Philips (1985)