Human Beings - They Go On Being

An Ugliness Unfurled In The Moonlight And Soft Shadow And Suffused The Whole World. If I Were An Amoeba, He Thought, With An Infinitesimal Body, I Could Defeat Ugliness. A Man Isn’t Tiny Or Giant Enough To Defeat Anything.

…the Samurai Ethic Is A Political Science Of The Heart, Designed To Control Such Discouragement And Fatigue In Order To Avoid Showing Them To Others. It Was Thought More Important To Look Healthy Than To Be Healthy, And More Important To Seem Bold And Daring Than To Be So. This View Of Morality, Since It Is Physiologically Based On The Special Vanity Peculiar To Men, Is Perhaps The Supreme Male View Of Morality.

There Is No Virtue In Curiosity. In Fact, It Might Be The Most Immoral Desire A Man Can Possess.

Better To Be Caught In Sudden, Complete Catastrophe Than To Be Gnawed By The Cancer Of Imagination.

However, As Words Become Particularized, And As Men Begin - In However Small A Way - To Use Them In Personal, Arbitrary Ways, So Their Transformation Into Art Begins. It Was Words Of This Kind That, Descending On Me Like A Swarm Of Winged Insects, Seized On My Individuality And Sought To Shut Me Up Within It. Nevertheless, Despite The Enemy's Depredations Upon My Person, I Turned Their Universality - At Once A Weapon And A Weakness - Back On Them, And To Some Extent Succeeded In Using Words To Universalize To My Own Individuality.