The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
We begin life with the world presenting itself to us as it is. Someone - our parents, teachers, analysts - hypnotizes us to see the world and construe it in the right way. These others label the world, attach names and give voices to the beings and events in it, so that thereafter, we cannot read the world in any other language or hear it saying other things to us. The task is to break the hypnotic spell, so that we become undeaf, unblind and multilingual, thereby letting the world speak to us in new voices and write all its possible meanings in the new book of our existence. Be careful in your choice of hypnotists.
Sidney Jourard
But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying.
Virginia Woolf
The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive - a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society - a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.... The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.
Samuel Butler, Notebooks, 1912
My uncle ordered popoversfrom the restaurant's bill of fare.And, when they were served,he regarded them with a penetrating stare.Then he spoke great words of wisdomas he sat there on that chair:To eat these things, said my uncle,You must exercise great care.You may swallow down what's solid,but you must spit out the air!And as you partake of the world's bill of fare,that's darned good advice to follow.Do a lot of spitting out the hot air.And be careful what you swallow.
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel)
What makes you think that human beings are sentient and aware? There's no evidence for it. Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their beliefs. The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is a self-congratulatory delusion.
Michael Crichton, The Lost World
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was.
Margaret Mitchell
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
James Baldwin
Nobody knows what you want except you. And nobody will be as sorry as you if you don't get it. Wanting some other way to live is proof enough of deserving it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell.
Lillian Hellman
You cannot collaborate with another person toward some common end unless you know him. How can you know him, and he you, unless you have engaged in enough mutual disclosure of self to be able anticipate how he will react and what part he will play?
Sidney Jourard, Transparent Self
I am here because there is no refuge,Finally, from myself,Until I confront myself in the eyesAnd hearts of others, I am running.Until I suffer them to share my secrets,I have no safety from them.Afraid to be known, I can know neither myselfNor any others; I will be alone.Where else but on this common ground,Can I find such a mirror?Here, together, I can at last appearClearly to myself,Not as the giant of my dreams,Not the dwarf of my fears,But as a person, part of a whole,With my share in its purpose.In this ground, I can take root and grow.Not alone anymore, as in death,But alive, to my self and to others.
Richard Beauvais, Pledge, writte
To believe in yourself and to follow your dreams, to have goals in life and a drive to succeed, and to surround yourself with the things and the people that make you happy - this is success!
Sasha Azevedo
Let the dream go. Are there not other dreamsIn vastness of clouds hid from thy sightThat yet shall gild with beautiful gold gleams,And shoot the shadows through and through with light?What matters one lost vision of the night?Let the dream go! ...
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Let Them Go
The greatest achievements were at first and for a time dreams. The oak sleeps in the acorn.
James Allen
The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more and more about less and less...
Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Rep
Essentialists hope that when students leave school, they will possess not only basic skills and an extensive body of knowledge, but also disciplined, practical minds, capable of applying schoolhouse lessons in the real world.
William C. Bagley
A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again.
Enid Bagnold
When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy. So there ought to be one fairy for every boy or girl.
James Barrie, Peter Pan
Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father!
Lydia Maria Child, Philothea: A
When God was creating fathers, He started with a tall frame. An angel nearby said, What kind of father is that? If you
Erma Bombeck, attributed
Father...knows exactly what those boys at the mall have in their depraved little minds because he once owned such a depraved little mind himself. In fact, if he thinks enough about the plans that he used to have for young girls, the father not only will support his wife in keeping their daughter home but he might even run over to the mall and have a few of those boys arrested.
Bill Cosby
If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance of being right.
Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life.
Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Va
The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name.
Enid Bagnold, Autobiography, ch.
For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.
Sarah Bernhardt, Memories of My
The truth, the absolute truth, is that the chief beauty for the theatre consists in fine bodily proportions.
Sarah Bernhardt, The Art of the
There was a time when all these things would have passed me by, like the flitting figures of a theatre, sufficient for the amusement of an hour. But now, I have lost the power of looking merely on the surface.
Lydia Maria Child, Letter; publi
I had learned to have a perfect nausea for the theatre: the continual repetition of the same words and the same gestures, night after night, and the caprices, the way of looking at life, and the entire rigmarole disgusted me.
Isadora Duncan, My Life, ch. 5,
The world's a theatre, the earth a stage,Which God and nature do with actors fill
John Heywood
Free speech means the right to shout 'theatre' in a crowded fire.
Abbie Hoffman
A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.
Kenneth Tynan, Tynan Right and L
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
Thornton Wilder
The theatre is supremely fitted to say: Behold! These things are. Yet most dramatists employ it to say: This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.
Reviewers...must normally function as huff-and-puff artists blowing laggard theatergoers stageward.
Walter Kerr, Statement quoted in
Nature, in her most dazzling aspects or stupendous parts, is but the background and theater of the tragedy of man.
John Morley
No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.
Kenneth Tynan, Recalled on his d
I would just like to mention Robert Houdin who in the eighteenth century invented the vanishing birdcage trick and the theater matinee - may he rot and perish. Good afternoon.
Orson Welles
The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.
Many plays, certainly mine, are like blank cheques. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
We live in what is, but we find 1,000 ways not to face it. Great theatre strengthens our faculty to face it.
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