I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.
My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions.
Safety lies in tending towards our highest and not in resting content with an inferior potentiality..... To rest in or follow after an inferior potentiality may seem safe, rational, comfortable, easy, but it ends badly, in some futility or in a mere circling down the abyss or in a stagnant morass. Our right and natural road is towards the summits.
Freedom lies outside the pattern of society; but to be free of that pattern you have to understand the whole content of it, which is to understand your own mind.
For those actors and directors who produce films which are always about the old kingdom or about heroes, you know about the fantasies related to the classics, but there is no real discussion about today's life and no discussion of the real conditions - which is really sickening. They've become part of a conspiracy, collaborators of the crime, which is lying to the general public and trying to hide the kind of criminal acts happening in many cases.
The chief difference between horror fans and science fiction fans lies in why they won't walk backwards. A horror fan won't walk backwards because he knows he'll be knifed by a madman. A science fiction fan won't walk backwards because he knows he'll step on the cat.
Evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill. The ball is made of flakes-circumstances. They contribute to the mass without knowing it. They adhere without intention, and without foreseeing what is to result. When they see the result they marvel at the monster ball and wonder how the contriving of it came to be originally thought out and planned. Whereas there was no such planning, there was only a law: the ball once started, all the circumstances that happened to lie in its path would help to build it, in spite of themselves.
The god we now behold with opened eyes,
A herd of spotted panthers round him lies
In glaring forms; the grapy clusters spread
On his fair brows, and dangle on his head.
Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial. The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found.
Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
The difference between a baby and adult is that a baby believes in everything while the adult doubts everything. Babies also only tell the truth until they learn what a lie is.