Source: The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971
“It appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again. The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer’s voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons.”
Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 58
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Hermann Hesse 168
German writer 1877–1962Related quotes
“His indivisibility judges their hedging and trimming. His honesty judges their watchfulness.”
"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)
Context: A life is one kind of biography and the letters are another kind of life, but the internal story, the true story is in the Collected Poems. The recent attempts by Motion and others to pass judgement on Larkin look awfully green and pale, compared with the self-examinations of the poetry. They think they judge him? No, he judges them. His indivisibility judges their hedging and trimming. His honesty judges their watchfulness.
“No one should be judge in his own cause.”
Maxim 545
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave
Address on the 25th anniversary of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft (January 1936), as quoted in Surviving the Swastika : Scientific Research in Nazi Germany (1993) ISBN 0-19-507010-0
The History of Aurangazeb. Vol. 3, pp. 161-169 by Sir Jadunath Sarkar; published by Orient Longman 1972
Letter to Gerrit Smith, (Feb. 7, 1835), The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, vol. 1, Walter M. Merrill, edit., Belknap Press-Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 445
“His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright the next.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
"The Ethics of Human Beings Toward Non-human Beings", pp. 281–282
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship