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Quote by Jack Kerouac

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Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

The volume includes letters that span several decades, offering insights into the creative process and personal lives of these influential American writers. The correspondence reveals their friendship, literary collaborations, and the cultural and social context of their time. more

Author

Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac, born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, was an influential American novelist. Known for his autobiographical novels and beat literature, his most famous work is 'On the Road'. Kerouac's writings had a profound impact on American culture in the 1960s. more

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“My wife and I are that other kind of rich: the misers among you, in our quaint three-bedroom house in the suburbs, unrenovated since the 1990s, one modest hatchback car between us, our big-box store generic clothes, our outdated phones and computers. Lucky in our birthright privileges, in our inheritance, in our jobs, in the stock market, hoarding cash for reasons that stopped being clear to us long ago, that make less and less sense the older we get. We have no children. Our parents are dead. We keep working, we clean our own toilets, rake our own yard. We use our vacations to go camping in-state. We’ll give it all away upon our deaths, and there will be one of those shocked news stories about people like us and our secret millions, the sudden windfall upon our pet causes and distant nieces and nephews. Why don’t we help anyone while we’re alive? Our once-reasonable anxieties grown distorted, outsized, habitual. There will never be enough money to make us feel safe.”

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“All The World's An Asylum (Sonnet 1235) All the world's an asylum, All the people are lunatics. Some are but loonies of love, Some loonies run by prejudice. Some die running in love of currency, Some die sharing the currency of love. Beyond the grasp of dollar and euro, Love is the only nonvolatile currency in the world. It's good to be a loonie, If the reason is justly humane. When human welfare is at stake, It's only logical to be insane. Sane, insane - be as the need arises, To hell with the judgment of nitwits! In an organic world no sanity is absolute, Boldly walk the spectrum as the purpose fits.”

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“This continuity between Cynicism and Socratic thought can be expressed in an another way. Socrates made a sharp differentiation between the self and external objects as moral ends. External objects are morally neutral and hence cannot serve as ultimate ends; material wealth is neither good nor evil in itself, but wise use makes it so.50 Aristotle adopts this view in a more complex way, opening up at least the quasi-Cynic possibility that wisdom is self-sufficient and in no need of externals. For Aristotle, the highest life we can imagine is the life of God-pure thought and actuality, selfsufficient, unmoved, wholly non-material. Such a God has no need for wealth, for Hesiod's plough, ox, and slave-girl. In certain intense moments, one may begin to "immortalize" oneself and become like this God; through contemplation, the philosopher becomes at least psychologically more selfsufficient, less dependent on community.51 Only a god or animal may live without community,52 and, unlike the Cynic, the Aristotelian philosopher is more god than "dog." Yet, like the Cynics, Aristotle stresses the ontological difference between this highest state and materiality. God's well-being is not caused by externals, and analogously the thinker's most powerful experiences have nothing to do with material possessions. Wealth is not constitutive of perfect virtue and well-being as such; instead, it is a merely accidental feature of human life as ordinarily experienced. Therefore, Aristotle speaks of wealth as the material through which virtues like magnanimity express themselves; generosity is not caused by wealth, but has its origin elsewhere and so is in itself autonomous of wealth.”

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