“Adventure is making the distant approach nearer but romance is having what is where it is which is not where you are stay where it is.”
An American and France (1936)
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Gertrude Stein 160
American art collector and experimental writer of novels, p… 1874–1946Related quotes
“The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.”
The Unnamable (1954)
Context: What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity. A pity I should have to give tongue at the same time, it prevents it from bleeding in peace, licking the lips.
“Let the wrong which is done by a man stay there where the wrong was done.”
VII, 29
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VII
Context: Wipe out the imagination. Stop pulling the strings. Confine thyself to the present.... Divide and distribute every object into the causal [formal] and the material.... Let the wrong which is done by a man stay there where the wrong was done.
“Make no judgments where you have no compassion.”
Jace to Clary, pg. 204
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)
"New Maps of Hyperspace" (1989); originally published in Magical Blend magazine, also in The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History (1992) http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/mckenna_terence/mckenna_terence_maps_hyperspace.shtml
Context: There is a spiritual obligation, there is a task to be done. It is not, however, something as simple as following a set of somebody else's rules. The noetic enterprise is a primary obligation toward being. Our salvation is linked to it. Not everyone has to read alchemical texts or study superconducting biomolecules to make the transition. Most people make it naively by thinking clearly about the present at hand, but we intellectuals are trapped in a world of too much information. Innocence is gone for us. We cannot expect to cross the rainbow bridge through a good act of contrition; that will not be sufficient.
We have to understand. Whitehead said, "Understanding is the apperception of pattern as such"; to fear death is to misunderstand life. Cognitive activity is the defining act of humanness. Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton. We humans may be released into a realm of pure self-engineering. The imagination is everything. This was Blake's perception. This is where we came from. This is where we are going. And it is only to be approached through cognitive activity.