Hermann Hesse's Long Summer [Part 1 of 4]

Interview with Dan Dennett on the Mind

never really end

Travel is like love, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end. -Pico Iyer

silence

Speech is great, silence is greater. Thomas Carlyle

what we feel

What we feel arises out of what I feel for what you feel for what I feel about your feelings about me - Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary

Dr. Iain McGilchrist on The Divided Brain

who can lay hold of the heart

"Who can lay hold of the heart and give it fixity, so that for some little moment it may be stable, and for a fraction of time may grasp the splendor of a constant eternity." - St Augustine

final wisdom

There are no simple congruities in life or history. The cult of happiness erroneously assumes them. It is possible to soften the incongruities of life endlessly by the scientific conquest of nature's caprices, and the social and political triumph over historic injustice. But all such strategies cannot finally overcome the fragmentary character of human existence. The final wisdom of life requires, not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it. Reinhold Niebuhr

Kafka a clean keyhole

Life is infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one's personal existence. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean. Kafka