We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
e. e. cummingsI will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air Alive with closed eyes to dash against darkness
e. e. cummingsThe intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works. Jacques Barzun, 1959 all ignorance toboggans into know and trudges up to ignorance again.
e. e. cummingsI was too tired to think. I merely felt the town as a unique unreality. What was it? I knew -- the moon's picture of a town. These streets with their houses did not exist, they were but a ludicrous projection of the moon's sumptuous personality. This was a city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonnight. -- Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of color. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I must not, or lose all.
e. e. cummings