On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence.
Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound. The man who does not shrink from self-crucifixion can never fail to accomplish the object upon which his heart is set. This is true of earthly as of heavenly things. Even the man whose object is to acquire wealth must be prepared to make great personal sacrifices before he can accomplish his object; and how much more so he who would realize a strong and well-poised life.
The object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose.
Along with the lazy man... the dying man is the immoral man: the former, a subject that does not work; the latter, an object that no longer even makes itself available to be worked on by others.
Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love. That is no metaphor, but the actual truth. Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its " content," its object; but love is between I and Thou. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love; even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses.
God does not give grace freely in the sense that He will demand no satisfaction, but He gave Christ to be the satisfaction for us.
Nothing radically changes when instead of human satisfaction, we think of the satisfaction of some heavenly being! God's person displaces the problem and does not abolish it.
The question so often asked of modern painting, "What is it?", contains more than the dull skepticism of the man who is not going to have the wool pulled over his eyes. It speaks of a fundamental placement in relation to the work, that of a voyager in the world coming upon a strange object. The reader reconstitutes the work by his active participation, by approaching the object, tapping it, shaking it, holding it to his ear to hear the roaring within. It is characteristic of the object that it does not declare itself all at once, in a rush of pleasant naïveté.
I made my choice to be in Ferrari. It is not easy because it is important for a man to have satisfaction. And for me to get the satisfaction I want means getting results.
When the Higher Man does something worthy of admiration, it is an evidence of his Mastership, not the object of it.
The idea of, say, the compressed space between the floor and the object hanging over it and then the long space between the object and the ceiling was a kind of interesting idea for me - the idea of compressing and expanding. That was an idea that I worked with, which you could only do sculpturally. You can't really do with a painting on the wall.
A man who experiences no genuine satisfaction in life does not want peace. Men court war to escape meaninglessness and boredom, to be relieved of fear and frustration.
Man works for an object. Remove that object and you reduce him into inaction.
As soon as man applies his intelligence to any object at all, he unfailingly destroys the object.
The less a man is willing to give up a sex object, the more he'll be trapped into becoming a success object.
There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near.