Rather than discovering emotions, Western culture has been busy inventing them. Insulated from normal evolutionary constraints by our recent — and probably temporary — economic success, we have had the freedom to develop feelings and attitudes that make less and less social sense. Our belief in human irrationality has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy... We are no longer content to be cogs in a social machine. We now want our presence felt no matter what the cost to society as a whole...
Understanding that emotions are roles we play would remove the nagging feeling that we are emotionally inadequate because our passions do not sweep us away in quite the way we think they should. A strong bodily reaction is a part of feeling a higher emotion. Sensations of arousal, pleasure, and pain help give a feeling its psychological punch. But the mistake commonly made is to expect the physiological jolt to come first. In many situations, the bodily reaction is triggered by thinking of particular thoughts and ideas characteristic of the emotion, rather than the other way around.
John McCrone, The Myth of Irrationality
Has anyone...any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration? ... There is an ecstasy such that the immese strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, along with which one's steps either rush or involuntarily lag, alternately. There is the feeling that one is completely out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and quiverings to the very toes... Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, cited in Richard Restak, The Modular Brain
One hears — one does not seek; one takes — one does not ask who gives.
Friedrich Nietzsche, cited in Brewster Ghiselin, ed., The Creative Process, recited in John McCrone, The Myth of Irrationality
The poets are nothing but interpreters of the gods, each one possessed by the divinity to whom he is in bondage.
Plato, "Ion", cited in John McCrone, The Myth of Irrationality
The deity on purpose [sings] the liveliest of all lyrics through the most miserable poet.
Plato, cited in John McCrone, The Myth of Irrationality
The beginnings of all poetry is to suspend the course and the laws of rationally thinking reason and to transport us again into lovely vagaries of fancy and the primitive chaos of human nature.
August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Karl Wilhelm von Schlegel, cited in Max Nordeau, Degeneration, recited in John McCrone, The Myth of Irrationality
Poetry has no other end but itself: it cannot have any other... If a poet has followed a moral end he has diminished his poetic force and the result is most likely to be bad.
Baudelaire, quoted in William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure, recited in John McCrone, The Myth of Irrationality
We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthmas, epilepsies, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest.
Marcel Proust, cited in Richard Restak, The Modular Brain
Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.
Simone de Beauvoir, La Force de L'Age, quoted in Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life
Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.
Sherlock Holmes, in A. Conan Doyle, The Greek Interpreter
Creativity is a problem-solving response by intelligent, very active, highly emotional and extremely introverted persons... Subjected to a vast array of disorganized perceptual data and strongly feeling the inconsistencies, the active and intelligent individual forms new perceptual relationships to develop feelings of consistency and harmony.
Dr. L. M. Bachtold, quoted in Richard Restak, The Modular Brain
It is reckoned that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become reasonably skilled in just about any activity, whether it is chess, playing the piano or kicking a soccer ball. The biographies of most successful people show that they were already hard at work in their field of interest before they were even into their teens.
If the moment of discovery seems to come swiftly and effortlessly to the trained mind, it should never be forgotten how many years were spent flexing the muscles of thought and stocking the memory banks to make such discoveries possible.
John McCrone, The Myth of Irrationality
Genius should not be thought of as something that is solitary, spontaneous, and irrational. The human mind is born naked and then clothed with socially forged patterns of thought. The genius is the person who learns these habits of thinking better than anyone else and then finds a socially valued application for them.
John McCrone, The Myth of Irrationality
Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.
Lord Dunsany, notes to "A Shop in Go-By Street," in At the Edge of the World
"My shadow's gone. He took it. And he can't give it back now, because he's dead."
. . . "But what's so important about a shadow? Who cares? What good is it to you up there, anyway, jumping around in trees where you can't even see it most of the time?"
"There's more to it than that," he explained. "It's attached to other things that go away with it. I can't feel things the way I used to. I used to just know things—where the best nuts were, what the weather was going to be like, where the ladies were when the time came, how the seasons were changing. Now I can think about it, and I can figure all these things out and can make plans to take advantage of them—something I could never have done before. But I've lost all those little feelings that came with the kind of knowing that comes without thinking. And I've—thought—about it a lot. I miss them. I'd rather go back to them than think and soar the way I do."
Greymalk the squirrel, in "October 25" chapter of A Night in the Lonesome October, by Roger Zelazny
Even if all possible scientific questions are answered, our problem is still not touched at all.
Ludwig Wittgentstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, quoted in The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of their Thought, by Ben-Ami Scharfstein
Longing for creativity precedes the urge to create itself, and this is the first spark that sets in motion the mechanism for making images.
M. C. Escher, quoted on a tag for a Smart Art T-Shirt from Andazia International
Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence — whether much that is glorious — whether all that is profound — does not spring from disease of thought — from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret.
Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora
The creativity and pathology of the human mind are, after all, two sides of the same medal coined in the evolutionary mint. The first is responsible for the splendour of our cathedrals, the second for the gargoyles that decorate them to remind us that the world is full of monsters, devils, and succubi.
Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine, cited in John McCrone, The Myth of Irrationality
Do you know, Bram, —I sometimes think madness is an extreme kind of sanity.
Inspector Alleyn, TV adaptation of The Nursing Home Murder by Ngaio Marsh
According to esoteric tradition, the "organ of perception," which can be tutored in the same fashion as is language, is what we term intuition. Although the phrase is often maligned, conventionally used to indicate random guesswork or a mysterious combination of elements, it should be properly understood as knowledge without recourse to inference.
Robert E. Ornstein, The Mind Field, Chapter 3
Reason, then, primarily involves an analysis of discrete elements, inferentially (sequentially) linked; intuition involves a simultaneous perception of the whole. The word "rational" is derived from "ration," to break into segments. The common element in actions normally considered "intuitive" —a great insight, a superb dance movement, an immediate reaction in sports, an overall picture of a finished object or building design—is a simultaneity of perception.
Robert E. Ornstein, The Mind Field, Chapter 3
Simply speaking, there has never been, nor will there ever be, enough time to be truly rational.
Robert E. Ornstein, The Evolution of Consciousness, Chapter 1
Stillness in the heart of motion is the secret of all power.
A Chinese monk, quoted by John Blofeld in The Secret and Sublime
The significant problems that we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them.
Albert Einstein
Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bermerkungen, quoted in The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of their Thought, by Ben-Ami Scharfstein
To truly know a thing, one must live it completely. Through the body. When the body has learned, so has the heart, the inner parts of your being . . .Your thoughts are just that. Your thoughts. They know nothing for themselves. They are just movements and patterns. They are tools of greater, more elusive parts of ourselves. And without training and discipline they are very poor tools. They trick us and tell us that they are the master and the center. And then we spend our lives trapped in their movements and patterns. Hooked like a big fish.
Kay Cordell Whitaker, The Reluctant Shaman, p. 24
When we met I asked about the linear qualities within the mind and if they were, indeed, something that could be used simultaneously with the gifts.
Domano sat on the wall and motioned for us to join him and said, "Oh, you have tried this. You know it is tricky. But it can be done. You need to pull yourself, with gifts in use, toward the south. To use the linear mind with big results means you think in sentences. But the sentences of your choice. Not mindless chatter. You control the direction and content of the thoughts. Not the old ideas and fears leading you by the nose.
"When you do this, the linear part of your mind becomes your tool, not your dictator. In the greater part of your mind, where perceiving is in whole pictures, you can learn to act out your experiments. Experience wondrous new things. Then it is the job of the linear to translate it as best it can into sentences."
Ibid, pp. 229-230
For what is intuition? Brutally stated, it is simply a conclusion reached without premises.
R. Austin Freeman, The Uttermost Farthing, Ch. VII
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