To Be Beautiful Is to Be True

This is not particularly a pretty world. We have uglified what is most beautiful in it. We have come very close to losing that sense of beauty and harmony and proportion, and in the absence of that sense we won’t even be aware of what we are doing to ourselves by making our house a fitful and horrific spectacle of a place. We more or less have given up on the idea that government has a central part to play in the cultivation of the civic dimension of life. We’ve given up very much the idea that there is something so universally expressed in human nature that there are certain cultural forms capable of nurturing this nature. In our multicultural tolerance we are losing out on something that gives substance to a shared humanity. We’ve come to think of beauty as an option and the Greeks knew better; it’s a necessity. And it should finally be the source of all we prize and all the might we might will in the world. To be beautiful is to be true and to be those things is to be good. That was the ancient ideal and to lose that is to live in a mechanical and meaningless and empty life.

Prof. Daniel Robinson

The Mysterious

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, i am a devoutly religious man.

What separates me from most so called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.

Science can be created only by those who are imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. this source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. the situation might be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as causally bound as the stars in their motions. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying, ‘a man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills,’ has been a real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance.

Albert Einstein

Listening to the Reed Flute

There’s a blind man on the road saying,
Allah, Allah. Sheikh Nuri runs to him,
‘What do you know of Allah? And if you know,
why do you stay alive?’ The sheikh keeps on,
beside himself with ecstatic questions.
Then he runs into a low place, where
a reedbed has recently been cut down.

He falls and gets up, falls again,
floundering on the sharp reed-ends.
People come and find him dead, the ground
wet with blood and written on every reed-tip,
the word Allah. This is the way one must
listen to the reed flute. Be killed
in it and lie down in the blood.

Attar, Persian Poet

trans. coleman barks

The Vocation of the Intellectual

I understand the vocation of the intellectual as trying to turn easy answers into critical questions and putting those critical questions to people with power. The quest for truth, the quest for the good, the quest for the beautiful all require us to let suffering speak, let victims be visible and social misery be put on the agenda of those with power. So to me, pursuing the life of the mind is inextricably linked with the struggle of those who have been dehumanized on the margins of society.

Dr. Cornel West

He Never Confused…

Like socrates Dr. martin luther king Jr. never confused success with greatness, he never confused financial prosperity with moral magnanimity, he never confused economic security with personal integrity, he never confused professional consciousness with deep moral commitment. what an example!

Dr. Cornel West

the sentence of grace

I believe in God, mozart and beethoven…I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, individual Art…I believe that through this Art all men are saved, and therefore each may die of hunger for Her…I believe…that true disciples of high Art will be transfigured in a heavenly veil of sun-drenched fragrance and sweet sound, and united for eternity with the divine fount of all Harmony. may mine be the sentence of grace! Amen!

Richard Wagner

I Am In Front of This Feminine Land

Like a child in front of the fire
Smiling vaguely with tears in my eyes
In front of this land where all moves in me
Where mirrors mist where mirrors clear
Reflecting two nude bodies season on season

I’ve so many reasons to lose myself
On this road-less earth under horizon-less skies
Good reasons I ignored yesterday
And I’ll never ever forget
Good keys of gazes keys their own daughters
in front of this land where nature is mine

In front of the fire the first fire
Good mistress reason
Identified star
On earth under sky in and out of my heart
Second bud first green leaf
That the sea covers with sails
And the sun finally coming to us

I am in front of this feminine land
Like a branch in the fire.

Paul Éluard