As much as possible, and this as quickly as possible: that is what the great mental and emotional illness craves that is variously called "present" or "culture," but that is actually a symptom of consumption.
Values are related to our emotions, just as we practice physical hygiene to preserve our physical health, we need to observe emotional hygiene to preserve a healthy mind and attitudes.
The most precious research to me came from the paperwork filed on behalf of my grandparents and great-grandfather. The ship's manifest showed that they could read and write. I am still emotional when I look at those boxes checked yes.
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections. and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self, and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
I can look back . . . at two distinct periods of opinion whose foundations I have successively come to distrust - a period before 1919 or so, when the weight of classic authority unduly influenced me, and another period from 1919 to about 1925, when I placed too high a value on the elements of revolt, florid colour, and emotional extravagance or intensity.
It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.
Imagination that compares and contrasts with what is around as well as what is better and worse is the living power and prime agent of all human perception judgement and emotional reaction.
At times it does not really matter what language you are speaking, especially when you are emotional and try to reach other hearts. To transcend emotion, silence is the best language.
Simply put, you can read a story in a single sitting and hold it all in your mind. You can experience all of its rhythms, beginning to end, during that span. Consequently it has, I think, greater emotional power than a novel because of this real-time effect. Stories can stun you.
Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.