“Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”
— Lewis Hyde
“A gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift. The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation.”
“True citizens are not the audience of their government, nor its consumers; they are its makers.”
“The gift finds the man attractive who stands with an empty bowl he does not own.”
“Unlike the sale of a commodity, the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved. When gifts circulate within a group, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges.”
“The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible.”
“We forgive when we give up attachment to our wounds.”
“When we are moved by art we are grateful that the artist lived, grateful that he labored in the service of his gifts.”
“An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation.”
“I think of a myth as a story that helps you explain all the different pieces of your life. In that broad sense, there is no way to live without mythology.”
“Art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power. Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective.”
“Science may not be as intimate as the medical profession; nonetheless, it certainly is a community in which ideas are often shared as contributions, not as proprietary things.”
“We are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved.”
“Better to operate with detachment, then; better to have a way but infuse it with a little humor; best, to have no way at all but to have instead the wit constantly to make one’s way anew from the materials at hand.”
“But neither money nor machines can create. They shuttle tokens of energy, but they do not transform. A civilization based on them puts people out of touch with their creative powers.”
“Once the web has lost its charm, its terms lose theirs; suddenly they seem contingent and open to revision. For those epi-predators who work with the signifiers themselves rather than the things they supposedly signify, language is not a medium that helps us see the true, the real, the natural. Language is a tool assembled by creatures with “no way” trying to make a world that will satisfy their needs; it is a tool those same creatures can disassemble if it fails them.”
“In a free market the people are free, the ideas are locked up.”
“In one sense the reemergence of ancient usury bespeaks a decline in faith. Gift exchange is connected to faith because both are disinterested. Faith does not look out. No one by himself controls the cycle of gifts he participates in; each, instead, surrenders to the spirit of the gift in order for it to move. Therefore, the person who gives is a person willing to abandon control. If.”
“The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society. The.”
“It is hard to travel in this fallen world if you lose the power of speech every time evil meets you on the path.”
“An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.”
“We may not have the power to profess our gifts as the artist does, and yet we come to recognize, and in a sense to receive, the endowments of our being through the agency of his creation.”
“There is the family of our birth and then there is a more noble world to which we really belong; the richness of this ideal world is often proportional to the poverty of the real, as personal grandiosity is proportional to shame.”
“A man may wonder what will come in return for his gift, but he is not supposed to bring it up. Gift exchange is not a form of barter. ‘The.”
“Out of bad faith comes a longing for control, for the law and the police. Bad faith suspects that the gift will not come back, that things won’t work out, that there is a scarcity so great in the world that it will devour whatever gifts appear. In bad faith the circle is broken.”
“An anaesthetic is a poet-killer.”
“Circular giving differs from reciprocal giving in several ways. First, when the gift moves in a circle no one ever receives it from the same person he gives it to. I.”
“It must be that sometimes our assertions about higher order and hidden design are fables we’ve made up to help us ignore our own contingency. Accidents tear.”
“The first story I have to tell is not exactly true, but it isn’t exactly false, either.”
“Scarcity appears when wealth cannot flow. Elsewhere.”
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