philosophy
Richard Rorty
I think the most one can do by way of linking up pragmatism with America is to say that both the country and [Dewey] suggest that we can, in politics, substitute hope for the sort of knowledge which philosophers have usually tried to attain. America has always been a future-orieted country, a country which delights in the fact that it invented itself in the relatively recent past.
Letter to Li Tzu-jan
Old Jan! Have you written any poems recently? If we don't write poems, how can we make it through these boring days?
All in all, nothing in this world is
that hard to do--just charge ahead and do it! A day will inevitably come when "the ditch will be dug and the waters flow through." I only fear that you will be overly cautious, that you may be unwilling to take the risk and plunge ahead. Well, force yourself a little! It would be a good idea not to prove yourself undeserving of a friend's encouragement.
Charles Olson
Idealisms of any sort, like logic and like classification, intervene at just the moment they become more than the means they are, are allowed to become ways as end instead of ways to end, END, which is never more than this instant, than you on this instant, then you, figuring it out, and acting so. Find ways to stay in the human universe, and not to be led to partition reality at any point, in any way.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
A genuine poem...allows us toe experience nearness in such a way that this nearness is held in and through the linguistic form of the poem. Whenever we have to hold something, it is because it is transient and threatens to escape our grasp. In fact, our fundamental experience as being subject to time is that all things escape us.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
This being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows on to dream in peace.
Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”
It is language that tells us about the nature of a thing, provided that we respect language's own nature. In the meantime, to be sure, there rages round the earth an unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and broadcasting of spoken words. Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man. Perhaps it is before all else man's subversion of this relation of dominance that drives his nature into alienation. That we retain a concern for care in speaking is all to the good, but it is of no help to us as long as language still serves us even then only as a means of expression. Among all the appeals that we human beings, on our part, can help to be voiced, language is the highest and everywhere the first.