On
Having Strong Muscles
In the animal kingdom, the lion is always right.
The quickest way to shut up a man who believes he is right and who
shows the propensity to argue, is to hang him.
Men resort to talking only when they haven’t the power to enforce their
convictions upon others. On the other
hand, men who act and love the power to act seldom talk. They despise
arguments.
Mankind is endowed with a chattering instinct as well as fighting
instinct. The tongue is, historically
speaking, as old as the fist or the strong arm.
The ability to talk distinguishes man from animals, and the mixture of
verbiage and barrage seems to be peculiarly human trait.
Angels settle arguments all by chatter, brutes settle arguments all
by muscles and claws, and human beings alone settle them by a strange confusion
of muscles and chatter. Angels believe
sheerly in right, brutes believe sheerly in might, and human beings alone
believe that might is right.
On Having Mind
Saints without sins don’t interest me.
A plan that is sure to be carried out down to its last detail already
loses interest for me. A General who
goes to battle and is completely sure of his victory beforehand and can even
predict the exact number of casualties, will lose interest in battle. No one would play chess if he knew his
opponent mind, good, bad or indifferent – was infallible. All novels would be
unreadable did we know exactly how the mind of each character was going to work
and were we able to consequently to predict the exact outcome.
Our mind is gradually evolved upon four underlying layers; the
animal mind, the savage mind, the childish mind and the traditional civilized
mind.
I am merely in love with life and being in love with life, I
distrust the intellect profoundly.
Imagine a world in which there are no stories of murders in newspaper,
everyone is so omniscient that no house ever catches fire, no aeroplane ever
has an accident, no husband deserts his wife, no poets elopes with a “choir
girl”, no king abdicates his throne for love, no man changes his mind and
everyone proceeds to carryout with logical precision, a career that the mapped
out for himself. All the excitement and
uncertainty of life would be gone. There
would be no literature because there would be no sin, no misbehavior, no human
weakness, no upsetting passion, no prejudices, no irregularities and worst of
all no disperses. It would be like a
horse race in which every one of the forty or fifty thousand spectators knew
the winner. Human fallibility is the
very essence of the colour of life, as the upsets are the very colour and
interest of a steeplechase.
If we were all completely rational beings, we should then, instead
of growing into perfect wisdom, degenerate into automation, the human mind
serving merely to register certain impulses as unfailingly as a gas meter. That would be inhuman, and anything inhuman
is bad.
Ants are perfect rational creatures.
No doubt ants are prefect socialist state living for last million
years. Ants are hard working, sane, saving
and thrifty lot. They are the socially
regimented and individually disciplined beings that we are not. They don’t mind working fourteen hours a day
for the state or the community. They
have a sense of duty and almost no sense of rights, they have persistence,
order, courtesy and courage and above all, self discipline.
Passion rather than reason rules the world.
English think with their healthy skin and Indians think with their
profound intestines.
Education of our senses and our emotions rather more important than
the education of our ideas.
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