On
Dreams
I have never seen a truly sad face in animals except in the
chimpanzee.
It is characteristic of humans to have a sad, vague and wistful
longing for an ideal. Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is
that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom with imagination. All of us have the desire to get out of an
old nut, and all of us wish to be something else, and all of use dream.
The world is quite like an restaurant where everybody thinks the
food next table has ordered so much more inviting and delicious than his own.
In the matter of desirability, “wives are better if they are
others’, while writing is always better of it is ours own.” Everybody wants to
be somebody so long that somebody is not himself.
This human trait is undoubtly due to power of imagination and our
capacity for dreaming. The greater the imagination power of man, the more
perpetually he is dissatisfied. That is why an imaginative child is always a
more difficult child; he is more often sad and morose like monkey than happy
and contended like a cow. Divorce is
most common among the idealists and the more imaginative people than among the
unimaginative. The vision of a desirable
ideal like companion has an irresistible force which the less imaginative and
less idealistic never feel.
Dreams descend from the world of idle visions and enter the world of
reality and become a real force in our life.
Dreams have a way of concealing themselves and leave us no peace until
they are translated into reality, like seeds germinating underground, sure to
sprout in their search for the sunlight.
Dreams are wry real things.
The blue bird always attracts the romanticists fancy.
On the Humour / Sense
of Humour
To me the worst comments on dictatorship is that presidents of
democracies can laugh while dictators always look so serious with protruding
jaw, a determined chin and pouched lower lip, as if they are doing something
terribly important and the world could not be saved, except by them.
The best thing I have ever read about Hitler is that he is
completely natural in private.
For who have started war for us? The ambitious, the able, the
clever, the scheming, the cautious, the sagacious, the haughty, the over
patriotic, the people inspired to
“serve” mankind, people who have a “career” to carve and an “impression” to
make on the world, who expect and hope to look down the ages from the eyes of
bronze figure sitting on a bronze horse in some square. Curiously, the able, the clever and the
ambitious and haughty are at the same time most cowardly and middle headed
believing in the courage and depth and subtlety of the humorists with their
greater sweep of mind can envisage large things.
A diplomat who does not whisper in a low voice and look properly
scared and intimidated and correct and cautious is no diplomat at all.
Our life is too complex, our scholarship too serious, our philosophy
too somber and our thought too involved.
This seriousness and this involved complexity of our thoughts and
scholarships make the present world such an unhappy one today.
Man has become the slave of his ideas, thoughts, ambitions and
social systems that are his own product.
Mankind over burdened with this load of ideas and ambitions and social
systems, seems unable to rise above them.
He who handles his ideas lightly is master of his ideas, and only he
who is master of his ideas is not enslaved by them.
Simplicity paradoxically is the outward sign and symbol of depth of
thought. It seems to me simplicity is
about the most difficult thing to achieve in scholarship and writing.
No learned scholar can present his specialized knowledge in simple
human terms until he has digested that knowledge himself and brought it into
relations with this observation of life.
Simplicity presupposes digestion and maturity. As we grow older, our thoughts become
clearer, ideas take on most definite shapes and long trains of thought
gradually shape themselves into a convenient formula which suggests itself and
we arrive at true wisdom.
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