The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
Anais NinRead
We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing aggression in human beings. And when one sees in psychoanalysis hostility disappearing as people conquer their fears, one wonders if the cure is not there.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the contradiction between celebrating peace and ignoring the roots of aggression in humanity.
Anais Nin highlights the paradox of society's focus on celebrating peace while neglecting to address the underlying causes of aggression within individuals. She suggests that understanding and overcoming personal fears through psychoanalysis can lead to a reduction in hostility, proposing that internal healing is key to external harmony.
In practice
This quote would be ideal for a psychology seminar discussing the importance of mental health in achieving social peace.
The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
Anxiety is love's greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning.
The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.
We have been poisoned by fairy tales.
But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted.
I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.
I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that ... you really must make the self. It is absolutely useless to look for it, you won't find it, but it's possible in some sense to make it. I don't mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and choose the self you want.
The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
Startling as the Gospel of Judas sounds, it amplifies hints we have long read in the Gospels of Mark and John that Jesus knew and even instigated the events of his passion, seeing them as part of a divine plan.
We cannot expect that all nations will adopt like systems, for conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
Our government's got a war on drugs. That's certainly better than no drugs at all.
Holding back is so close to stealing.
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