
“Temper us in fire, and we grow stronger. When we suffer, we survive.”
Source: City of Heavenly Fire
2005
“Temper us in fire, and we grow stronger. When we suffer, we survive.”
Source: City of Heavenly Fire
The Paris Review interview
Context: Poems get to the point where they are stronger than you are. They come up from some other depth and they find a place on the page. You can never find that depth again, that same kind of authority and voice. I might feel I would like to change something about them, but they’re still stronger than I am and I cannot.
Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 22–27.
Collected Works
1960s, Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution (1965)
Source: No Way Out (2002), Ch. 2: Nothing To Be Transformed
Context: Whether you are interested in moksha, liberation, freedom, transformation, you name it, you are interested in happiness without one moment of unhappiness, pleasure without pain, it is the same thing. Whether one is here in India or Russia or in America or anywhere, what people want is to have one without the other. But there is no way you can have one without the other. This demand is not in the interest of the survival of this living organism.
Deming: The Way We Knew Him http://books.google.com/books?id=VKBz5RW5yFcC&pg=PA125&dq=%22learning+is+not+compulsory%22+%22+survival%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=fcqtUtH0BYbioATs44HQAw&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBjgy#v=onepage&q=%22learning%20is%20not%20compulsory%22%20%22%20survival%22&f=false (1995)
This quote is often cited as “Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival.”
“We live and learn, but not the wiser grow.”
Reason: A Poem, 1700.