
“We're extremely fortunate
not to know precisely
the kind of world we live in.
One would have
to live a long, long time,
unquestionably longer
than the world itself.”
"We're Extremely Fortunate"
Poems New and Collected (1998), The End and the Beginning (1993)
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Wisława Szymborska 92
Polish writer 1923–2012Related quotes


Fore-knowledge of Death
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XXIII - Death

[199804161805.LAA18882@wall.org, 1998]
Usenet postings, 1998

Commencement address at Lindsey Wilson College (14 May 2005) http://www.lindsey.edu/index.cgi?id=10379.
Context: The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining … to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare — warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.

Talks in Europe 1968, 5th Public Talk, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (22 May 1968) Collected Works, Vol. XV
1960s
Context: We need tremendous energy to bring about a psychological change in ourselves as human beings, because we have lived far too long in a world of make-belief, in a world of brutality, violence, despair, anxiety. To live humanly, sanely, one has to change. To bring about a change within oneself and therefore within society, one needs this radical energy, for the individual is not different from society — the society is the individual and the individual is the society. And to bring about a necessary radical, essential change in the structure of society — which is corrupt, which is immoral — there must be change in the human heart and mind. To bring about that change you need great energy and that energy is denied or perverted, or twisted, when you act according to a concept; which is what we do in our daily life. The concept is based on past history, or on some conclusion, so it is not action at all, it is an approximation to a formula. So one asks if there is an action which is not based on an idea, on a conclusion formed by dead things which have been.