“Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.”
Countryman: A Summary of Belief, Lippincott, 1965, p. 99
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Hal Borland 3
American journalist and writer 1900–1978Related quotes
form her speech at Rock in Rio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DdSVT2qOo0, 2006
General Quotes
As quoted in Stevie Wonder (1978) by Constanze Elsner, and Jet Vol. 53, No. 22 (16 February 1978), p. 60
1970s
Context: Sometimes I think I would love to see … just to see the beauty of flowers and trees and birds and the earth and grass. … Being as I've never seen, I don't know what it's like to see. So in a sense I'm complete. Maybe I'd be incomplete if I did see. Maybe I'd see some things that I didn't want to see... the beauty of the earth compared to the destruction of man. You see, it's one thing when you are blind from birth, and you don't know what it's like to see, anyway, so it is just like seeing. The sensation of seeing is not one that I have and not one that I worry about.
Session 426, Page 25
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 9
“I know that I can never truly understand it, and I haven't the words to say.”
Feeling Rational http://lesswrong.com/lw/hp/feeling_rational/ (April 2007)
Context: Ever since I adopted the rule of "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be," I've also come to realize "That which the truth nourishes should thrive." When something good happens, I am happy, and there is no confusion in my mind about whether it is rational for me to be happy. When something terrible happens, I do not flee my sadness by searching for fake consolations and false silver linings. I visualize the past and future of humankind, the tens of billions of deaths over our history, the misery and fear, the search for answers, the trembling hands reaching upward out of so much blood, what we could become someday when we make the stars our cities, all that darkness and all that light — I know that I can never truly understand it, and I haven't the words to say.
Address to the Montgomery Dexter Avenue Baptist Church (1979), as quoted in "George Wallace – From the Heart" (17 March 1995), The Washington Post.
1970s
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), An Absurd Reasoning
Context: I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me — that I understand. And these two certainties — my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle — I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions? <!-- 175
lecture I: "The Uncertainty of Science"
The Meaning of It All (1999)