Jews From The United States

"Happiness is closer to the experience of acceptance and contentment than it is to pleasure. True happiness exists as the spacious and compassionate heart's willingness to feel whatever is present."

"Everything is impermanent. Every physical and mental experience arises and passes. Everything in existence is endlessly arising out of causes and conditions. We all create suffering for ourselves through our resistance, through our desire to have things different than the way they are - that is, our clinging or aversion."

"The body breathes by itself. The mind thinks by itself. Awareness simply observes the process without getting lost in the content."

"The inner revolution will not be televised or sold on the Internet. It must take place within one's own mind and heart."

"The truth is, going against the internal stream of ignorance is way more rebellious than trying to start some sort of cultural revolution."

"It's easy to hate and point out everything that is wrong with the world; it is the hardest and most important work in one's life to free oneself from the bonds of fear and attachment."

"I sought a different path than that of my parents. I totally rejected meditation and all the spiritual shit they built their lives on. Looking at the once idealistic hippie generation who had long since cut their hair, left the commune, and bought into the system, we saw that peace and love had failed to make any real changes in the world. In response, we felt love and despair and hopelessness, out of which came the punk rock movement. Seeking to rebel against our parents' pacifism and society's fascist system of oppression and capitalist-driven propaganda, we responded in our own way, different from those before us, creating a new revolution for a new generation. Painfully aware of corruption in the government and inconsistencies in the power dynamics in our homes, we rebelled against our families and society in one loud and fast roar of teen angst. Unwilling to accept the dictates of the system, we did whatever we could to rebel. We wanted freedom and were willing to fight for it."

"While we are in recovery we need to be able to strike a balance between not allowing our ego to do all the talking and not letting our low self-esteem to only present what is wrong with us."

"Summertime and the livin' is easy, Fish are jumpin', and the cotton is high. Oh yo' daddy's rich, and yo' ma is good lookin', So hush, little baby, don' yo' cry."

"You've made my life so glamorous, You can't blame me for feeling amorous. 'S wonderful, 's marvellous That you should care for me."

"I think the circle is very abstract. I could make up stories of what the circle means to men, but I don't know if it is that conscious. I think it was a form, a vehicle. I don't think I had a sexual anthropomorphic, or geometric meaning. It wasn't a breast and it wasn't a circle representing life and eternity....I remember always working with contradiction and contradictory forms which is my idea also in life. The whole absurdity of life, everything for me has always been opposite. Nothing has ever been in the middle. When I gave you my autobiography, my life never had anything normal or in the center. It was always extremes."

"Art and work and art and life are very connected and my whole life has been absurd. There isn't a thing in my life that has happened that hasn't been extreme - personal health, family, economic situations...absurdity is the key word..."

"I got rhythm, I got music, I got my man Who could ask for anything more?"

"In time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble, They're only made of clay, But our love is here to stay."

"The way you wear your hat, The way you sip your tea, The mem'ry of all that – No, no! They can't take that away from me!"

"They all laughed at Christopher Columbus When he said the world was round; They all laughed when Edison recorded sound."

"You like potato and I like po-tah-to, You like tomato and I like to-mah-to; Potato, po-tah-to, tomato, to-mah-to – Let's call the whole thing off!"

"Poor Jenny, bright as a penny! Her equal would be hard to find. She lost one dad and mother, A sister and a brother-- But she would make up her mind."

"Nice work if you can get it, And you can get it if you try."

"It ain't necessarily so, It ain't necessarily so. De t'ings dat yo' li'ble To read in de Bible, It ain't necessarily so."

"America fears the unshaven legs, the unshaven men's cheeks, the aroma of perspiration, and the limp prick. Above all it fears the limp prick."

"I did not wish to protest against war. My object was to remember. I wanted people to find in my poems the truth of what it had been like to be an American infantry soldier. Now I see I was writing a memorial of those years, for the me I had known, who were silent."

"For people may not know what they think about politics in the Balkans, or the vexed question of men and women, but everyone has a definite opinion about the flavour of shredded coconut."

"It's complicated, being an American, Having the money and the bad conscience, both at the same time. Perhaps, after all, this is not the right subject for a poem."

"All that grave weight of America Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome. The future in ruins! JH Honesty seems to me to be the best legacy I can leave the world."

"Where is the Mississippi panorama And the girl who played the piano? Where are you, Walt? The Open Road goes to the used-car lot."

"When I was in hospital I found I could hardly read or writ. In these circumstances I began to write poems. I found that poetry was the only kind of writing in which I could express my thoughts. One night I dreamed I was lying on the bank of a canal, under machine gun fire. The next morning I wrote it out , Carentan O Caretan, and as I wrote I realized it was not a dream, but the memory of my first time under fire"

"Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect."

"Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth."

"Rousseau ... is aesthetically revolted by the trashiness of what, some twenty years ago, David Riesman called the 'other-directed' personality, which he saw becoming ever-more salient in our society. This is the personality whose whole being is attuned to catch the signals sent out by the consensus of his fellows and by the institutional agencies of the culture, to the extent that he is scarcely a self at all, but, rather, a reiterated impersonation."

"The spectator, we might put it, contracts by infection the characteristic disease of the actor, the attenuation of selfhood that results from impersonation."

"The prototypical act of the modern intellectual is his abstracting himself from the life of the family. It is an act that has something about it of ritual thaumaturgy—at the beginning of our intellectual careers we are like nothing so much as those young members of Indian tribes who have had a vision or a dream which gives them power on condition that they withdraw from the ordinary life of the tribe. By intellectuality we are freed from the thralldom to the familial commonplace, from the materiality and concreteness by which it exists, the hardness of the cash and hardness of getting it, the inelegance and intractability of family things. It gives us power over intangibles and imponderables such as Beauty and Justice, and it permits us to escape the cosmic ridicule which in our youth we suppose is inevitably directed at those who take seriously the small concerns of the quotidian world, which we know to be inadequate and doomed by the very fact that it is so absurdly conditioned—by things, habits, local and temporary customs, and the foolish errors and solemn absurdities of the men of the past."

"If we ask what it is he [George Orwell] stands for, … the answer is: the virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple, direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have. … He communicates to us the sense that what he has done any one of us could do. Or could do if we but made up our mind to do it, if we but surrendered a little of the cant that comforts us, if for a few weeks we paid no attention to the little group with which we habitually exchange opinions, if we took our chance of being wrong or inadequate, if we looked at things simply and directly, having in mind only our intention of finding out what they really are, not the prestige of our great intellectual act of looking at them. He liberates us. He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us; he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our own lights—he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us."

"The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them. He does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie. The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all."

"There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination."

"Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion."

"The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy."

"We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health."

"We properly judge a critic's virtue not by his freedom from error but by the nature of the mistakes he does make, for he makes them, if he is worth reading, because he has in mind something besides his perceptions about art in itself — he has in mind the demands that he makes upon life."

"Even the nonreligious may exercise aesthetic judgment in matters of religion, and indeed our age has given the unbelieving a sophisticated taste in religious literature."

"Disgust is expressed by violence, and it is to be noted of our intellectual temper that violence is a quality which is felt to have a peculiarly intellectual sanction. Our preference, even as articulated by those who are most mild in their persons, is increasingly for the absolute and extreme, of which we feel violence to be the true sign. The gentlest of us will know that the tigers of wrath are to be preferred to the horses of instruction and will consider it intellectual cowardice to take into account what happens to those who ride tigers."

"We have all in some degree become anarchistic."

"Arnold must have for us the something of the character of what we nowadays have taken to calling a "culture hero": that is, a man who gives himself in full submission and sacrifice to his historical moment in order to comprehend and control the elements which that moment brings."

"The aspects of society that humanism most exalts are justice and continuity. That is why humanism is always being presented with a contradiction. For when it speaks of justice it holds that the human condition is absolute; yet when it speaks of continuity it implies that society is not absolute but pragmatic and even anomalous. Its intelligence dictates the removal of all that is anomalous; yet its ideal of social continuity is validated by by its perception that the effort to destroy anomaly out of hand will probably bring new and even worse anomalies, the nature of man being what it is. "Let justice be done though the heavens fall" is balanced by awareness that after the heavens fall justice will not ever be done again."

"The definitions of humanism are many, but let us here take it to be the attitude of those men who think it an advantage to live in society, and, at that, in a complex and highly developed society, and who believe that man fulfills his nature and reaches his proper stature in this circumstance. The personal virtues which humanism cherishes are intelligence, amenity, and tolerance; the particular courage it asks for is that which is exercised in the support of these virtues. The qualities of intelligence which it chiefly prizes are modulation and flexibility."

"After all, no one is ever taken in by the happy ending, but we are often divinely fuddled by the tragic curtain."

"It is one thing, then, to say, "The Bible contains the religion revealed by God," and quite another to say, "Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God." If the latter be accepted, metaphor and allegory become literal statements and the errors and absurdities of bibliolatry follow."

"The doctrines of Calvinism involved a reversal of values with which Arnold became increasingly concerned. Work had always been a curse and a means, but it had now turned into a blessing and an end. The production of goods had become an end in itself and the consumption of goods only the means to further production. The factory was not made for man but man for the factory."

"Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity, for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him — in fact, he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's."

"Freud … showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty."