As quoted by John Gery in Ways of Nothingness: Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry (1996)
Context: In each art the difficulty of the form is a substitution for the difficulty of direct apprehension and expression of the object. The first difficulty may be more or less overcome, but the second is insuperable; thus every poem begins, or ought to, by a disorderly retreat to defensible positions. Or, rather, by a perception of the hopelessness of direct combat, and a resort to the warfare of spells, effigies, and prophecies. The relation between the artist and reality is an oblique one, and indeed there is no good art which is not consciously oblique. If you respect the reality of the world, you know that you can approach that reality only by indirect means.
“Because of that corporate life, transfusing you, giving to you and taking from you - conditioning you as it does in countless oblique and unapparent ways - you are still compelled to react in to many suggestions which you are no longer able to respect: controlled, to the last moment of your bodily existence and perhaps afterwords, by habit, custom, the good old average way of misunderstanding the world.”
Source: Practical Mysticism (1914), Chapter X, The Mystical Life, p. 175-176
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Evelyn Underhill 28
British saint, poet, novelist 1875–1941Related quotes
Amazon's Jeff Bezos looks to the future - CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazons-jeff-bezos-looks-to-the-future/.
Source: The Seth Material (1970), p. 274
Context: It is wrong to curse a flower and wrong to curse a man. It is wrong not to hold any man in honor, and it is wrong to ridicule any man. You must honor yourselves and see within yourselves the spirit of eternal vitality. If you do not do this, then you destroy what you touch. And you must honor each other individual also, because in him is the spark of eternal vitality. When you curse another, you curse yourselves, and the curse returns to you. When you are violent, the violence returns... I speak to you because yours is the opportunity [to better world conditions] and yours is the time. Do not fall into the old ways that will lead you precisely into the world that you fear.
Ensign, June 2003, 74–75.
Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE
De Pace Fidei (The Peace of Faith) (1453)
Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010)
Source: Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words (1982), p. 95 (1994 edition)
“The way you give your name to others is a measure of how much you like and
respect yourself.”