The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.
Ralph EllisonRelated topics
catastrophe chronicle experience finger form grain jag lyricism squeezing bluesRelated quotes
It is through an "intimate cessation of all intellectual operations” that the mind is laid bare. If nor, discourse maintains it in its little complacency. ... The difference between inner experience and philosophy resides principally in this: that in experience, ... what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind.
Georges Bataille
I was a mere tourist with no part whatever in this great conflict; but it was my rare privilege, through an unusual train of circumstances, to witness the moving scenes that I have resolved to describe. In these pages I give only my personal impressions; so my readers should not look here for specific details, nor for information on strategic matters; these things have their place in other writings.
Henry Dunant
It may indeed be doubted, whether butcher's meat is any where a necessary of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese, and butter, or oil, where butter is not to be had, it is known from experience, can, without any butcher's meat, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet.
Adam Smith
Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology it covers both the natural and the spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.
Albert Einstein
Independent of biological need fulfillment and the reproductive needs of the species, cultures] satisfy not bodily needs, but values. Values define cultural man's need for rationality, meaningfulness in emotional experience, richness of imagination, and depth of faith. All cultures respond to such supra-biological values. But in what form they do so depends on the specific kind of values people happen to have.
Ervin László