
Thoughts. Translation by J.G. Nichols [Hesperus Press, 2002, ISBN 9781843910121], p. 6
Aphorisms
Preface to Zen in the Art of Writing (1990)
Context: And what, you ask, does writing teach us?
First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.
So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
Thoughts. Translation by J.G. Nichols [Hesperus Press, 2002, ISBN 9781843910121], p. 6
Aphorisms
“If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life”
Special Message to the Congress on the Threat to the Freedom of Europe (1948)
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis
Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual (1894)
Context: Man, by means of his physical power, his mechanical resources, his mental ingenuity, may set things side by side. A composition, literally so called, will result, but not a great art work, not at all an art work in fact, but merely a more or less refined exhibition of brute force exercised upon helpful materials. It may be as a noise in lessening degrees of offensiveness, it can never become a musical tone. Though it shall have ceased to be vulgar in becoming sophistical, it will remain to the end what it was in the beginning: impotent to inspire — dead, absolutely dead.
It cannot for a moment be doubted that an art work to be alive, to awaken us to its life, to inspire us sooner or later with its purpose, must indeed be animate with a soul, must have been breathed upon by the spirit and must breathe in turn that spirit. It must stand for the actual, vital first-hand experiences of the one who made it, and must represent his deep-down impression not only of physical nature but more especially and necessarily his understanding of the out-working of that Great Spirit which makes nature so intelligible to us that it ceases to be a phantasm and becomes a sweet, a superb, a convincing Reality.