I find that because of modern technological evolution and our global economy, and as a result of the great increase in population, our world has greatly changed: it has become much smaller. However, our perceptions have not evolved at the same pace; we continue to cling to old national demarcations and the old feelings of 'us' and 'them'.
How does one stay mindful? Where feelings are known as they arise, known as they persist, known as they pass away. Thoughts are known as they arise, known as they persist, known as they pass away. Perceptions are known they arise, known as they persist, known as they pass away. This is how a monk stays awake.
The so called unconscious inferences can be traced back to the all-preserving memory, which presents us with parallel experiences and hence already knows the consequences of an action. It is not anticipation of the effects; rather, it is the feeling: identical causes, identical effects . . .
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind,
the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.
That's why I always question this sense. The feeling of home really requires a lot of trust. It requires you to identify with it, which I always find myself very contradictory to.
I think that each of us is so much alike, and yet at the same time we are so different, and I have a feeling that if you encountered difficulty, and I with my age encountered the same difficulty, I would respond one way, and you would respond another. Neither would be right or wrong. It's just that each of us is courageous, and that's what I encourage, courage, and the courage to see, and the courage to say to oneself what one has seen. Don't be in denial.
There is no better feeling than when you write something you know is a piece of you and that, at some point, is going to communicate with someone else.
Let no one presume to give the feelings of a young woman on receiving the assurance of that affection of which she has scarcely allowed herself to entertain a hope.
It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.