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Quote by Shellen Lubin

“We artists know how to address transformation-- how to grow empathy, passion, and collectivity-- Spirituality knows how to address transformation-- but not with formal systems-- Systems breed safety-- follow this and you will be this, do this and you will do that, get here and you will get there. But empathy, passion, and collectivity grow from the recognition that we are not safe, that no one is safe, that our only hope is to care for ourselves and each other, and that we must each figure out our own way to do that.”

Quote by Shellen Lubin

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Shellen Lubin

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“For all my days, I have been making up to the world for how challenging I am, how questioning I am, how strong and smart and passionate I am, how unwilling I am to accept systems and processes and values just because that's the way it's been done and been seen, considered especially challenging as a female, especially in a somewhat younger time (a/k/a less open to challenges)-- when I, too, was younger (a/k/a what does she know?). There I was, challenging, questioning, but also trying to make up to the world for it, always to be--show--prove that I'm not didactic, intransigent, inflexible, that my passion is not dogma, but a malleable creative force informed by sensory, intellectual, and emotional input... For all my days, I have been making up to the world for how challenging I am. But that has been as good for me as it has thwarted me, it has grown me, shaped me, honed me”

“Let us, in our character of knowers, not be ungrateful towards such determined reversals of the ordinary perspectives and values, with which the mind had for too long raged against itself with an apparently futile sacrilege! In the same way the very seeing of another vista, the very wishing to see another vista, is no little training and preparation of the intellect for its eternal "Objectivity" — objectivity being understood not as "contemplation without interest" (for that is inconceivable and nonsensical), but as the ability to have the pros and cons in one's power and to switch them on and off, so as to get to know how to utilise, for the advancement of knowledge, the difference in the perspective and in the emotional interpretations. But let us, forsooth, my philosophic colleagues, henceforward guard ourselves more carefully against this mythology of dangerous ancient ideas, which has set up a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge"; let us guard ourselves from the tentacles of such contradictory ideas as "pure reason," "absolute spirituality," "knowledge-in-itself": — in these theories an eye that cannot be thought of is required to think, an eye which ex hypothesi has no direction at all, an eye in which the active and interpreting functions are cramped, are absent; those functions, I say, by means of which "abstract" seeing first became seeing something; in these theories consequently the absurd and the nonsensical is always demanded of the eye. There is only a seeing from a perspective, only a "knowing" from a perspective, and the more emotions we express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we train on the same thing, the more complete will be our "idea" of that thing, our "objectivity." But the elimination of the will altogether, the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, granted that we could do so, what! would not that be called intellectual castration?”

“Keller and the woman exchanged a polite smile and proceeded to look in different directions. The whole ride, they danced with gestures. Bradford would study the reflection of her face from the window in front of her and once pleased, he would look away as if to pass the baton and say, your turn. And she took it. The woman enjoyed his build and arms and eyelashes. She would turn to break her glance casually away and run her fingers through her hair, remembering the American man as if he were already a memory. Bradford’s cues were endless. He rolled up his sleeves. He let out a cough to share another peek. If there was the slightest noise in her direction, he would make an excuse to face curiously there. She was slightly limited by her seated position, but managed to follow after him, with her body attuned to her thoughts. She crossed her legs to prompt his curiosity of sudden movement. She spoke politely to an old lady for him to see. She saw how he wore green, too—a different pale, forest green sweater—but nonetheless green like hers!—and she loaded that stupid comment of matching clothes in her throat, should there ever be a window to fire. The climax was when the two seemingly searching, thinking, would look just around the other person, daring as close as an inch, but never directly. They soaked each other up in their peripheral views.”

“The actor blinked, hurt. He felt that chilly world of duplicity— having been given her benevolence and now her indifference. Few things burned men as much as the cold side of a woman that was once warm. They’d had her once, right in their hands, but now that woman had insensibly disappeared. Will I ever know her again? What have I done? God, how she flipped her warmth altogether like a switch! I hate not knowing her anymore, he thought. The actor tried to meet her eyes, but accepted from her composure she would not be kindled.”