Ralph Ellison

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.

Commercial rock ’n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music … an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

The truth is the light and light is the truth.

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

When I discover who I am, I'll be free.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?

Fred Hoyle

Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.

We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biological species and stretches back over many thousand millennia.

In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God.

This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.

These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past.

Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.

Life cannot have had a random beginning ... The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a trial is only one part in 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.

The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.

The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.

The creationist is a sham religious person who, curiously, has no true sense of religion. In the language of religion, it is the facts we observe in the world around us that must be seen to constitute the words of God. Documents, whether the Bible, Qur'an or those writings that held such force for Velikovsky, are only the words of men. To prefer the words of men to those of God is what one can mean by blasphemy. This, we think, is the instinctive point of view of most scientists who, curiously again, have a deeper understanding of the real nature of religion than have the many who delude themselves into a frenzied belief in the words, often the meaningless words, of men. Indeed, the lesser the meaning, the greater the frenzy, in something like inverse proportion.

Willa Cather

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while.

In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.

He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent.

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family — but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.

The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.

Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. 

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

Alexander Puskin

Upon the brink of the wild stream
He stood, and dreamt a mighty dream.

The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.

Always contented with his life,
and with his dinner, and his wife.

A man who's active and incisive
can yet keep nail-care much in mind:
why fight what's known to be decisive?
custom is despot of mankind.

The clock of doom had struck as fated;
the poet, without a sound,
let fall his pistol on the ground.

Like some magistrate grown gray in office,
Calmly he contemplates alike the just
And unjust, with indifference he notes
Evil and good, and knows not wrath nor pity.

Frank Herbert

When a wise man does not understand, he says: "I do not understand." The fool and the uncultured are ashamed of their ignorance. They remain silent when a question could bring them wisdom.

No matter how finely you subdivide time and space, each tiny division contains infinity.

The thing we must do intensely is be human together. People are more important than things.

When I was quite young... I began to suspect there must be flaws in my sense of reality.It seemed to my dim sense of confusion that things often blended one into another, and the Law of Excluded Middle merely opened up a void wherein anything was possible. But I had been produced to focus on objects (things) and not on systems (processes).

If we define Futurism as an exploration beyond accepted limits, then the nature of limiting systems becomes the first object of exploration.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

It wasn’t the kind of answer he'd expected — too subtly penetrating and leaving too much uncommitted. He reminded himself that it was difficult to control uncommitted people. Once a man had invested his energies, he could be twisted and turned at will... but if the man held back, conserved those energies. . .

Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be.

Learning a language represents training in the delusions of that language.

That is one of the Law's purposes, of course: to test the qualities of those who choose to employ it.

Does a population have informed consent when a ruling minority acts in secret to ignite a war, doing this to justify the existence of the minority's forces? […] failure to provide full information for informed consent on such an issue represents an ultimate crime.

Edmund Spenser

I learned have, not to despise,
What ever thing seemes small in common eyes.

For of the soule the bodie forme doth take;
For the soule is forme, and doth the bodie make.

For all that faire is, is by nature good;
That is a signe to know the gentle blood.

I hate the day, because it lendeth light
To see all things, but not my love to see.

I was promised on a time
To have reason for my rhyme;
From that time unto this season,
I received nor rhyme nor reason.

O happy earth,
Whereon thy innocent feet doe ever tread!

All for love, and nothing for reward.

The gentle minde by gentle deeds is knowne.
For a man by nothing is so well bewrayd,
As by his manners.

Roses red and violets blew,
And all the sweetest flowres that in the forrest grew.

The gentle minde by gentle deeds is knowne.
For a man by nothing is so well bewrayd,
As by his manners.

Robert Graves

To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good — in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.

Even nowadays an archaic sense of love-innocence recurs, however briefly, among most young men and women. Some few of these, who become poets, remain in love for the rest of their lives, watching the world with a detachment unknown to lawyers, politicians, financiers, and all other ministers of that blind and irresponsible successor to matriarchy and patriarchy — the mechanarchy.

After nine months he’s shed all fear, all faith, all hate, all hope.

As you are woman, so be lovely:
As you are lovely, so be various,
Merciful as constant, constant as various,
So be mine, as I yours for ever.

War was return of earth to ugly earth,
War was foundering of sublimities,
Extinction of each happy art and faith
By which the world had still kept head in air.

It doesn't matter what's the cause,
What wrong they say we're righting,
A curse for treaties, bonds and laws,
When we're to do the fighting!

You'll find me buried, living-dead
In these verses that you've read.

Douglas Adams

Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

It's nice to think that one could, even here and now, be whisked away just by hitchhiking.

A learning experience is one of those things that say, "You know that thing you just did? Don't do that."

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

We don't have to save the world. The world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about is whether or not the world we live in will be capable of sustaining us in it.

You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.

The kid was deliberately and maliciously watching television at him.

You made us what you would not dare to be yourselves. Yet you will not acknowledge us.

All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

My absolute favorite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; What is essential is invisible to the eye.

It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.

If it is true that wars are won by believers, it is also true that peace treaties are sometimes signed by businessmen.

Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures — in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.

Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

What makes the desert beautiful is that it hides, somewhere, a well.

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

To be a man is to be responsible: to be ashamed of miseries you did not cause; to be proud of your comrades' victories; to be aware, when setting one stone, that you are building a world.

Khalil Gibran

My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me that the lamp which I carry does not belong to me, and the song that I sing was not generated from within me.

Vain are the beliefs and teachings that make man miserable, and false is the goodness that leads him into sorrow and despair, for it is man's purpose to be happy on this earth and lead the way to felicity and preach its gospel wherever he goes.

Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.

To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but what he aspires to.

I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves, and behold the reality beneath.

You are your own forerunner, and the towers you have builded are but the foundation of your giant-self. And that self too shall be a foundation.

My face and your faces shall not be masked; our hand shall hold neither sword nor sceptre, and our subjects shall love us in peace and shall not be in fear of us.

He knew the depth of beauty, He was for ever surprised by its peace and its majesty.

The mind weighs and measures but it is the spirit that reaches the heart of life and embraces the secret; and the seed of the spirit is deathless.