15 quotes
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being “somebody,” to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth’s many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)
When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989)