“It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life?”
Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 2
Context: It is not proper to project our feelings onto things or to attribute our own sensations and passions to them. Can it also be improper to see in them a guide, a way of life? To learn the art of remaining motionless amid the agitation of the whirlwind, to learn to remain still and to be as transparent as this fixed light amid the frantic branches — this may be a program for life. <!-- But the bright spot is no longer an oval pool but an incandescent triangle, traversed by very fine flutings of shadow. The triangle stirs almost imperceptibly, until little by little a luminous boiling takes place, at the outer edges first, and then, with increasing fury, in its fiery center, as if all this liquid light were a seething substance gradually becoming yellower and yellower. Will it explode? The bubbles continually flare up and die away, in a rhythm resembling that of panting breath. As the sky grows darker, the bright patch of light dims and begins to flicker; it might almost be a lamp about to go out amid turbulent shadows. The trees remain exactly where they were, although they are now clad in another light.
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Octavio Paz 71
Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Lite… 1914–1998Related quotes
Source: Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging
“If we can see our difficulties, there is a way of resolving them, or the hope of a way.”
The Glass Forest (1986)
A speech given at Manchester UK (18 October 1897) https://ivu.org/history/besant/text.html
from her 1989 piece for 'Artspace', 'The Current of the River of Life Moves Us'
1980 - 2000
Pages 12-13
Other writings, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921)
Context: There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals. All their lives, forces which they do not recognize and cannot name, have been tugging at them — inherited instincts, traditional beliefs, acquired convictions; and the resultant is an outlook on life, a conception of social needs. … In this mental background every problem finds it setting. We may try to see things as objectively as we please. None the less, we can never see them with any eyes except our own.
Source: Leopold II, Het hele Verhaal, Johan Op De Beeck Horizon, 2020 https://klara.be/leopold-ii-aflevering-6 ISBN 9789463962094 Stanley writes this on his first expidition commissioned by King Leopold II of Belgium after describing with horror the horrible scenes of atrocities and cannibalism that take place in Congo.
“I've twisted and turned them every way,
And can see no ending to our play.”
Sade, epilogue
Marat/Sade (1963)
Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), Chapter 9, “...And Then You Die” (p. 207)