Source: Plain Tales from the Hills
The Mask and Mirror (1994), The Dark Night of The Soul
Source: Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians
“Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously.”
"A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women : The Reinvention of Nature (1991), pp.149-181.
“Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves.”
1977
The First Three Minutes (1977; second edition 1993)
“One must speak about serious things seriously.”
Letter to A.N. Pleshcheev (September 9, 1888)
Letters
1930s, Mein Weltbild (My World-view) (1931)
Context: In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others'. This feeling mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralyzing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humor, above all, has its due place.
