from The Autobiography of Henry Adams

He never reached Concord, and to Concord Church he, like the rest of mankind who accepted a material universe, remained always an insect, or something much lower—a man. It was surely no fault of his that the universe seemed to him real; perhaps—as Mr. Emerson justly said—it was so; in spite of the long-continued effort of a lifetime, he perpetually fell back into the heresy that if anything universal was unreal, it was himself and not the appearances; it was the poet and not the banker; it was his own thought, not the thing that moved it. He did not lack the wish to be transcendental.

From Paris in the Fifties, Stanley Karnow

Later, over drinks with him, I asked Beckett, “If you were marooned on a desert island and could only have one book, which one would it be?” He replied without hesitation, “Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.”

Hannah Arendt on Adolf Eichmann

He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is “banal”and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace. It surely cannot be so common that a man facing death, and, moreover, standing beneath the gallows, should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard at funerals all his life, and that these “lofty words” should completely becloud the reality of his own death. That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.

From The Diaries of Dawn Powell 1931-1965

If anyone likes truth—and it seems to me the most beautiful form of art in the world—they not only like to get at real motives and the real character of other people but there is a release in finding out something about themselves, or even finding old cliché’s true. After a while a number of things unfold—the reason for the banalities of best sellers, the popularity of platitudinous books on living. Platitude is the stuff of life, the core of living, the cure for heartbreak, the ultimate answer to “Why?” Underneath the woes of the world run the firm roots of platitude, the song cues, the calendar slogans. “Darkness comes before daylight,” “Tomorrow is another day,” “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” “Jesus loves you.”

There is nothing permanent, nothing for the mind to fall on but this old bed of clichés after it has stormed through life trying to find its own answers, its own solutions, and finally its own heartbreak, its own stone wall. What comfort then in “Into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary?” Little—but all there is.

Rosie Plummer (as recorded in the book Shamanic Visions, Joan Halifax)

Some shamans get their power from the water-babies. They are the only people who can talk to them. They tell the rest of the people not to make fun of water-babies. These shamans can take the water-babies out of the lake.

The water-babies came to life by their own power. They formed themselves. Some water-babies live in water-holes, and these holes never dry up. People call these water-babies the “breath of the water-holes.” There is a cool breeze all the time in the mountains where they live. They have the power to cause wind to blow, even a very strong wind. The wind is their breath.

There are also women in the lakes where the water-babies live. These women are like the water-babies. They have the same power. Big serpents live in the lake, too. Like the water-babies, those serpents have strong power. They give power to some shamans.

From "Creative Self-Criticism in Science and in Art", Karl Popper

We can distinguish two kinds of criticism, one that has aesthetic and literary interests and one that has rational interests. The first leads from myth to poetry, the second leads from myth to science; or to be more precise, to natural science. The former evaluates the beauty of the language, the energy of the rhythm, the radiance and vividness of the images, the dramatic tension and its persuasive power. This kind of critical judgment leads to poetry, especially to epic and dramatic poetry; to petic song, and with it to classical music.

Rational criticism, by contrast, asks whether the mythical report is true; whether the world really evolved in the manner asserted: whether it could have been created as Hesiod tells us or, perhaps, in according with Genesis. Under the pressure of such questions myth becomes cosmology, the science of our world, of our environment; it turns into natural science.

My third thesis is that there are still many traces left over from the common origin of poetry and music on the one hand and cosmology and science on the other. I am not asserting that all poetry is mythical in character, or that all science is cosmology. But I wish to say is that in poetry—one only has to think of Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann—and in science, the creation of myths still plays an unexpectedly large role. Myths are our attempts, naïve and inspired by our imagination, to explain ourselves and our world to ourselves. A large part not only of poetry but also of science can still be described as a naïve attempt, inspired by imagination, at explaining our world to ourselves.

Poetry and science—and therefore also music—are blood relations. They stem from the attempt to understand our origin and our fate, and the origin and the fate of our world.

(trans. Laura J. Bennett)

From The Journal of John Woolman

Look, my dear friends, to Divine Providence, and follow in simplicity that exercise of body, that plainness and frugality, which true wisdom leads to; so may you be preserved from those dangers which attend such as are aiming at outward ease and greatness.

Treasures, though small, attained on a true principle of virtue, are sweet; and while we walk in the light of the Lord there is a true comfort and satisfaction in the possession; neither the murmurs of an oppressed people, nor a throbbing uneasy conscience, nor anxious thoughts about the events of things, hinder the enjoyment of them.

From the Confessions, Saint Augustine

Is this the rhythm of our world? Is this what you prescribed when from the heights of heaven to the depths of earth, from the first beginnings to the end of time, from the angel to the worm, from the fist movement to the last, you allotted a proper place and proper time to good things of every kind and to all your just works? How can I hope to understand the height and the depth of you, from the greatest to the most lowly of your works? You never depart from us, yet it is hard for us to return to you.

(translation R.S. Pine-Coffin)