"It's a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it goes away."
"Not deliberately to irritate him but because the irritation seems symptomatic of something deeper, something under the surface that isn't immediately apparent."
"You always suppress momentary anger at something you deeply and permanently hate."
"But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term."
"a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent."
"Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted."
"But the world as discovered by its scientific discoveries is also reality, and people in John's dimension will have to do more than just ignore it if they want to hang on to their vision of reality."
"A classic understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance."
"Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about."
"What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness. Familiarity can blind you too."
"We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world."
"Black and white. Now and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts."
"He wanted to destroy it because the ghost was what
he was and he wanted to be free from the bondage of his own identity."
"If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge."
"... needing these mountains in an almost physiological way."
"... and his thoughts were already independent to a degree few people are familiar with."
"It's so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it."
"What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of
a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses."
"The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them has to forego closeness with the people around him."
"No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt."
"If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed."
"'You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something."
"You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself."
"Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster."
"He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then
it will be 'here'."
"Definitions are the
foundation of reason."
"When you are trained to despise 'just what you like' then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others - a
good slave. When you learn not to do 'just what you like' then the System loves you."
"The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality."
"The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is."
"We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives."
"You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style."
"We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the results is not just bad, it is ghastly."
"The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there."
"A person filled with gumption doesn't sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He's at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what's up the track and meeting it when it comes. That's gumption."
"If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. Your ego isolates you from the Quality of reality."
"You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That's the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence."
"'Quality is the continuous stimulus which causes us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.'"
"The media has convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely."
"... the tendency
to do what is 'reasonable' even when it isn't any good."
"A good student seeks knowledge fairly and impartially."
"'What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism,' Kitto comments, 'is not a sense of duty as we understand it - duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself. He strives after that which we translate "virtue" but is in Greek arete, "excellence".'"
"We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves."
"If it was all bricks and concrete, pure form of substance, clearly and openly, he might survive. It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality that kill. The plaster false fireplace in the apartment, shaped and waiting to contain a flame that can never exist. Or the hedge in front of the apartment building with a few feet of grass behind it. A few feet of grass, after Montana. If they just left out the hedge and grass it would be alright. Now it serves only to draw attention to what has been lost."
