“I hadn’t gone into the subject of dorm living too deeply with him, not because I hesitated to probe his tender spots but because I would have been probing my own. This is called tact, and is reputed to be a virtue.”
Source: Rite of Passage (1968), Chapter 7 (p. 97).
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Alexei Panshin 13
American writer and critic 1940Related quotes

Marshall McLuhan: the man and his message, edited by George Sanderson and Frank MacDonald, Fulcrum, 1989, p. 32
1980s and later
“No matter how much I probe and prod,
I cannot quite believe in God”
"Agnostic".
Rhymes for the Irreverent (1965)
Context: No matter how much I probe and prod,
I cannot quite believe in God;
But oh, I hope to God that He
Unswervingly believes in me.
Cited in: Dr Ronald Blythe (2013) The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-1958. Chapter 5.

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5<!-- The sense of the ineffable, p. 87 -->
Context: In our reflection we must go back to where we stand in awe before sheer being, faced with the marvel of the moment. The world is not just here. It shocks us into amazement.
Of being itself all we can positively say is: being is ineffable. The heart of being confronts me as enigmatic, incompatible with my categories, sheer mystery. My power of probing is easily exhausted, my words fade, but what I sense is not emptiness but inexhaustible abundance, ineffable abundance. What I face I cannot utter or phrase in language. But the richness of my facing the abundance of being endows me with marvelous reward: a sense of the ineffable.

Diary entry (Munich, 1901), # 136, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918; University of California Press, 1968, p. 48
1895 - 1902