Contents:
YIN/YANG
[see also: ALPHA/OMEGA]
Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and
energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.
William Blake (1757-1827)
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
1790-1793, Plate 3
Body and soul are not two different things, but only two different ways
of perceiving the same thing. Similarly, physics and psychology are only
different attempts to link our experiences together by way of systematic
thought.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Albert Einstein, The Human Side, 1979
Edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman
Unity is plural and, at minimum, is two.
R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)
Synergetics, 1975
"Moral of the Work"
Section 224.12
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the
mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the
communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as
contradictions.
Andre Breton (1896-1966)
"Second Manifesto of Surrealism", 1930
To place one in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to
being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that
is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable
unless God willed them.
Georges Bataille (1897-1962)
"Bataille, Feydeau and God"
Interview with Marguerite Duras
France-Observateur, 1957
"You see, Micky...I can always see two sides of a question."
And his reply, blindingly swift, was: "Only two, Fran? What a frightfully
narrow-minded person you must be!
James Hilton (1900-1956)
The Meadows of the Moon, 1927
Chapter 1, "Michael", 16
Among men, it seems, historically at any rate, that processes of co-ordination
and disintegration follow each other with great regularity, and the index of
the co-ordination is the measure of the disintegration which follows. There
is no mob like a group of well-drilled soldiers when they have thrown off
their discipline. And there is no lostness like that which comes to a man
when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him. There is no
hater like one who has greatly loved.
John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
and Edward Flanders Ricketts (1897-1948)
The Log from the Sea of Cortez, 1951
Chapter 28 "April 11"
To reject the shadow side of life and pass it by with averted eyes, refusing
our share of common sorrow while expecting our share of common joy, would
cause the unlived, closed-off shadows in us to deepen into fear, including
the fear of death.
Huston Smith (b.1919)
Cleansing the Doors of Perception, 2000
Chapter 5 "The Sacred Unconscious"
...I think that whenever you run up against either/or formulations, you should
try to replace it with both/and.
Andrew T. Weil (b.1942)
The Psychedelic Vision at the Turn of the Millenium
Preconference to the 1997 Association for Transpersonal Conference
Monterey, California, 31 July-01 August 1997
YOUTH
[see also: AGING, CHILDREN, MATURITY]
Ah! what would the world be to us
If the children were no more?
We should dread the desert behind us
Worse than the dark before.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
"Children"
The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems, 1859
Our children are not individuals whose rights and tastes are casually
respected from infancy, as they are in some primitive societies.... They
are fundamentally extensions of our own egos and give a special opportunity
for the display of authority.
Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887-1948)
Patterns of Culture, 1934
Chapter 7 "The Nature of Society"
Young people are more hopeful at a certain age than adults, but I suspect
that's glandular. As for children, I keep as far from them as possible. I
don't like the sight of them. The scale is all wrong. The heads tend to be
too big for the bodies, and the hands and feet are a disaster. They keep
falling into things. The nakedness of their bad character! We adults have
learned how to disguise our terrible character, but children, well, they are
like grotesque drawings of us. They should be neither seen nor heard, and no
one must make another one.
Gore Vidal (b.1925)
Conversations With Gore Vidal, 1981
With the open eyes of their dead fathers
Toward other worlds they gaze ahead --
Children who, wide-eyed, become
Periscopes of the buried dead.
Andrei Voznesensky (1933-2010)
"War"
Nostalgia for the Present, 1978
Translated by William Jay Smith and Vera Dunham
I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy.
It's probably because they have forgotten their own.
Margaret Atwood (b.1939)
"Hair Jewelry"
Ms., New York, 1976
When I was baby, I kept a diary. Recently, I was rereading it. It said,
"Day One: Still tired from the move." "Day Two: Everybody talks to me like
I'm an idiot."
Steven Wright (b.1955)
Saturday Night Live, NBC-TV
06 April 1985
I think an embryo/fetus/baby becomes a "person" when it is smarter than a
non-primate like a dog. By those standards, chimpanzees and gorillas are
persons (although somewhat cognitively impaired -- kind of like Fundamentalist
Christians), but human newborns are not.
David S. Touretzsky
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