Great Throughts Treasury

"There is simply too much to think about."

"There is simply too much to think about. It is hopeless ? too many kinds of special preparation are required. In electronics, in economics, in social analysis, in history, in psychology, in international politics, most of us are, given the oceanic proliferating complexity of things, paralyzed by the very suggestion that we assume responsibility for so much. This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive."

"There is something funny about the human condition, and civilized intelligence makes fun of its own ideas."

"There is today an extraordinary interest with the data of modern experience per se. Our absorption in our contemporary historical state is very high right now. It's not altogether unlike a similar situation in seventeenth century Holland, where wealthy merchants wanted their portraits done with all their blemishes included. It is the height of egotism, in a sense, to think even one's blemishes are of significance. So today Americans seem to want their writers to reveal all their weaknesses, their meannesses, to celebrate their very confusions. And they want it in the most direct possible way - they want it served up neat, as it were, without the filtering and generalizing power of fiction."

"There was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it it got even stronger."

"There were people who believed Herzog was rather simple, that his humane feelings were childish. That he had been spared the destruction of certain sentiments as the pet goose is spared the axe."

"There?s a kind of emptiness at the center of life ... nothing to form your life on, or by."

"There?s the big advantage of backwardness. By the time the latest ideas reach Chicago, they?re worn thin and easy to see through. You don?t have to bother with them and it saves lots of trouble."

"Therefore we didn't talk of genuine things."

"There's something that remains barbarous in educated people, and lately I've more and more had the feeling that we are non-wondering primitives. And why is it that we no longer marvel at these technological miracles? They've become the external facts of every life. We've all been to the university, we've had introductory courses in everything, and therefore we have persuaded ourselves that if we had the time to apply ourselves to these scientific marvels, we would understand them. But of course that's an illusion. It couldn't happen. Even among people who have had careers in science. They know no more about how it all works than we do. So we are in the position of savage men who, however, have been educated into believing that they are capable of understanding everything. Not that we actually do understand, but that we have the capacity."

"These were his friends of the business community; a man in business had to have such, and he visited and entertained but neither touched nor was touched, ever."

"These, said Conrad, knew the world by systematic examination. To begin with the artist had only himself; he descended within himself and in the lonely regions to which he descended, he found the terms of his appeal. He appealed, said Conrad, to that part of our being which is a gift, not an acquisition, to the capacity for delight and wonder... our sense of pity and pain, to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation - and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts... which binds together all humanity - the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."

"Things that you write are in some degree autobiographical, but the first thing you find out about autobiography is that it's the hardest thing in the world to write. It's hard because it's very difficult to be absolutely factual about yourself. So ... when you write, you may draw on facts from your own life, but if they?re not in harmony with your story, they're worse than useless. You just stumble over them."

"This development is possibly related to the fact that so much of value has been absorbed by technology itself. It is good to electrify a primitive area. Civilization and even morality are implicit in technological transformation... New techniques are in themselves bien pensant and represent not only rationality but benevolence... Romantic individuals (a mass of them by now) accuse this mass civilization of obstructing their attainment of beauty, nobility, integrity, intensity. I do not want to sneer at the term Romantic. Romanticism guarded the inspired condition, preserved the poetic, philosophical, and religious teachings... uring the greatest and most rapid of transformations, the most accelerated phase of modern scientific and technical transformation."

"This time she wasn?t up the stump, as she spoke of it. Eventually she was able to give Frazer better news. But she made him wait for it. She wanted him to worry, or to give him practice in learning to worry about her and not about himself. She was not easy toward him. She knew it was unequal, that she loved him more than he could her or anyone. But neither was love his calling, as it was hers. And she was very severe and exalted about this. She too could have lived in desert wilderness for the sake of it, and have eaten locusts."

"To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead."

"To rip off a piece of lover's temper was a pleasure in her deepest vein of enjoyment."

"To tell the truth I never had it so good. But I lacked the strength of character to bear such joy."

"Tocqueville predicted that in democratic countries the public would demand larger and larger doses of excitement and increasingly stronger stimulants from its writers. He probably did not expect that public to dramatize itself so extensively, to make the world scene everybody's theatre, or, in the developed countries, to take to alcohol and drugs in order to get relief from the horrors of ceaseless intensity, the torment of thrills and distractions. A great many writers have done little more than meet the mounting demand for thrills. I think that this demand has, in the language of marketing, peaked."

"Towards the end of your life you have something like a pain schedule to fill out?a long schedule like a federal document, only it's your pain schedule. Endless categories. First, physical causes?like arthritis, gallstones, menstrual cramps. New category, injured vanity, betrayal, swindle, injustice. But the hardest items of all have to do with love. The question then is: So why does everybody persist? If love cuts them up so much...."

"Unfortunately for the betterment of mankind it is not always the fair-minded who are in the right."

"Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is."

"Unless you're completely exploded, there's always something to be grateful for."

"Was she not so simple and free of ulterior motives as she looked? Well, neither was I."

"We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it ? the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it."

"We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next."

"We are free to withdraw (to withdraw our minds where we cannot withdraw our bodies) from situations in which our humanity or lack of it is defined for us."

"We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire."

"We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals."

"We never learn anything, never in the world, and in spite of all the history books written. They?re just the way we plead or ague with ourselves about it, but it?s only light from the outside that we?re supposed to take inside. If we can. There?s a regular warehouse of fine suggestions and if we?re not better it isn?t because there aren?t plenty of marvelous and true ideas to draw on, but because our vanity weighs more than all of them put together."

"We take foreigners to be incomplete Americans ? convinced that we must help and hasten their evolution."

"We took the coal-and-ice dealers into taverns and drank beer and swapped talk, in those sleepy and dark with heat joints where the very flies crept rather than flew, seeming doped by the urinal camphors and malt sourness, and from the heated emptiness and woodblock-knocking of the baseball broadcast that gave only more constriction to the unlocatable, undiagnosed wrong."

"We were friends, somehow. But in the end, somehow, he intended to be a mortal enemy. All the while that he was making the gestures of a close and precious friend he was fattening my soul in a coop till it was ready for killing"

"Well I gave a lot of time to women and if I had my time again I don't think I would do it that way. I was letting my neurosis monopolize my life."

"Well, don't build me up so, and you won't have to tear me down."

"Well, I need a job. Something that'll leave me the free time I want."

"What art thou?' Nothing. That's the answer. Nothing. In the heart of hearts- Nothing! So of course you can't stand that and want to be Something, and you try. But instead of being this Something, the man puts it over on everybody instead."

"What do I care what happened with Oliver? None of my business, I said. I want to get married. Clem had insisted on an engagement of six months, knowing my nature and my personality. But this advice was fine for the shopkeepers of life, not for those who had spent his entire life with one big goal. Sure, she said, I want to get married, if you love me. I swore to him with all the heart. If you still love me after lunch, she said, ask me again."

"What do women really want? They eat green salad and drink human blood."

"What I seem to do, thought Herzog, is to inflame myself with my drama, with ridicule, failure, denunciation, distortion, to inflame myself voluptuously, esthetically, until I reach sexual climax. And that climax looks like a resolution and an answer to many higher problems."

"What is art but a way of seeing?"

"What is imposed on us by birth and environment is what we are called upon to overcome."

"What makes me say these things is that I see how much you care about the way people look at you. It matters too much to you. And there are people who take advantage of that. They haven't got anything of their own and they'll leave you nothing for yourself. They want to put themselves in your thoughts and in your mind, and that you should care for them. It's a sickness. But they don't want you to care for them as they really are. No, that's the whole stunt. You have to be conscious of them, but not as they are, only as they love to be seen. They live through observation by the ones around them, and they want you to live like that too. Augie darling, don't do it. They will make you suffer from what they are. And you don't really matter to them."

"What this means is not a single Tower of Babel plotted in common, but hundreds of thousands of separate beginnings, the length and breadth of America. Energetic people who build against pains and uncertainties, as weaker ones merely hope against them."

"What use was war without also love?"

"What was the matter that pureness of feeling couldn?t be kept up? I see I met those writers in the big book of utopias at a peculiar time. In those utopias, set up by hopes and art, how could you overlook the part of nature or be sure you could keep the feelings up?"

"When finally you?re done speaking you?re dumb forever after, and when you?re through stirring you go still, but this is no reason to decline to speak and stir or to be what you are."

"When I didn't argue he was satisfied he had persuaded me, and was not the first to make that mistake."

"When I finish something, I generally put it on the shelf, and I very seldom look at it unless somebody mentions it to me, and then I open the book, and I read it, and I say, "Did I do that?""

"When I opened my eyes 82 years ago I found myself suddenly here, in existence, which struck me as marvelous, tremendously moving and energizing. I'm here, this is my life! And these people coming at me, these strange, beautiful, marvellous people! You want to get a grip on that, to clutch that sense of what it is to be in the world."