We are always getting ready to live, but never living... The wave moves onward but the particles of which it is composed do not... It cannot be but that at intervals throughout society there are real men intermixed . . . as the carpenter puts one iron bar in his bannister for every five or six wooden ones.
The real people who hold our civilization together are the maintenance people. If it weren't for them - pumping water out of subways, painting bridges to keep from rusting, fixing a steam pipe that is 70 years old - we'd be sunk. If we got rid of all the politicians and the policymakers in the world, the world would keep going. If you get rid of maintenance people, the whole thing breaks down.
I always felt like if you get to a point where you've got enough money to invest in something real, you gotta invest in anything that's related to a natural resource because that's gonna be here forever - so you might as well invest in something that's gonna be here, rather than invest in something that's gonna wear out.
In strict science, all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining forthe metaphysical foundation of this elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are.
I think there are a lot of people who are involved in the Tea Party who have very real and sincere concerns about spending that's out of control or generally philosophically believe that the government should be less involved in certain aspects of American life rather than more involved. And they have every right and obligation as citizens to be involved and engaged in this process.
Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure - more, doubtless, by life than by words - to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved.
That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.
You can begin to see an amalgamation of cultures, the real beginning of one world. Ten years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine a Cockney singing group with a Southern Negro style and Indian and electronic music. I wonder if people have even noticed what a tremendous cultural signal the Beatles are.
Up till now I always thought bickering was just something children did and they outgrew it. Of course, there's sometimes a reason to have a 'real' quarrel, but the verbal exchanges that take place here are just plain bickering. I should be used to the fact that these squabbles are daily occurrences, but I'm not and never will be as long as I'm the subject of nearly every discussion. (They refer to these as 'discussions instead of 'quarrels', but Germans don't know the difference!)
If only-if only, Hastings, you would part your hair in the middle instead of at the side! What a difference it would make to the symmetry of your appearance. And your moustache. If you must have a moustache, let it be a real moustache-a thing of beauty such as mine.
Even though I grew up in an area of England that was more conservative than my personal politics and my family's personal politics, I grew up with a lot of guy friends. There was no real difference between us. When I moved to London, it really became apparent that gender was going to make a mark. I started experiencing sexual intimidation and aggression. People coming up to women on the streets and telling them how hot they are and what they wanted to do to them. For me, that was shocking coming from a village. I thought intersexuality was a great way of exploring that shock.
Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life. Distinctions are no longer made, or deemed necessary, between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter, as an improved version with defects corrected - accessible and user-friendly.
The Jivanmukta ('the living free' or one who knows) alone is able to give real love, real charity, real truth, and it is truth alone that makes us free.