Paul Goodman

• “There is a dilemma in any High Standard of Living in a profit economy. I am referring to the embarrassing truth that the best things in life are free. ... things like friendly competitive sports, friendly gambling, love-making and sex, solitary study and reading, contemplation of nature and cosmos, art-working, music, religion.”

• “We do not need to be able to say what “human nature” is in order to be able to say that some training is “against human nature.””

• “The aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to re-establish “belonging,” although this kind of speech and thought is precisely calculated to avoid contact and so makes belonging impossible.”

• “When the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality.”

• “Let me formulate the artistic disposition as follows: it is reacting with one’s ideal to the flaw in oneself and in the world, and somehow making that reaction formation solid enough in the medium so that it indeed becomes an improved bit of real world for others.”

• “Sometimes you come to literature that seems related to your own in some ways, but after you've been writing for a while. And then you feel terribly corroborated. Like Paul's [Goodman] stories, the ones I really love the most, I read them much later, but they made me feel very good about certain things I was doing.”

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.

Paul Goodman across IJR