The wisdom of the poet
must never become apparent,
as the philosopher's love
must stay below the surface.

Poets do not tell us how they feel;
they show us what our words can do.
Philosophers don't tell us what they think;
they make us see what words must be.

Do not try to get them to believe what you feel; just let them know what you think.

Many of the things you know are compatible with beliefs you eschew.

Many of the people you master are amenable to desires you despise.

"Identity" and "personality" are amoral categories, structures without texture built in spaces without time. They let us posit souls untempted by flesh, character untempered by suffering. As though we could live with each other without having to live with ourselves.

Identity

Gender is the way
we have sex,
the way we carry
our genitals.

Character is the way
we have soul,
the way we carry
our selves.

Intuitions must be mostly true or we would know nothing.
Institutions must be mostly just or there would be no masters.

Don’t attempt with mediocre emotion what has already been done with good manners.

People are as good as they get.
Things are as true as they say.

I don't know whose side I'm on.
Unfortunately, they do.

Do not admire
the poet's pain
nor the doubts
of a philosopher.
They're both trying
to be precise.

As a poet, his feelings embarrassed him;
he sought his dignity in the intensity
of the emotion that is implicit in the act
that each of us is guilty of forever.

As a philosopher, he was loth to think. The clarity of the concept itself was to be the source of his authority. He would simply describe the facts that obtain everywhere, indifferent to our suffering.

Poetry and philosophy, both, address the image. One seeks the emotion there; the other seeks the concept. But poets, of course, are never pure, ever prone to philosophical digressions. And philosophers, thankfully, are easily diverted by poetic notions. The imagination gives them what they need. The image is all they have and, in their private suffering, all that they want.

Poetry braces us with words
against political violence.

Philosophy speaks lightly
into the darkness of science.

After two and a half millennia of Western metaphysics, you'd think we'd have learned to live with a little dualism.

Ignorance is to knowledge
as impotence, to power.

Freedom is to feeling
as limits, to thought.

To know your thoughts
but ignore your feelings

is like mastering your feelings
only to be enslaved by thought.

Rain is not precise. It falls willy-nilly
here-and-there. It doesn't care whose
birthday it is, nor know when to let up.

It's not as if I know not seems,
but the surfaces the mind presents
as things to do break the heart
with all the people still to see.

Try only to understand your cowardice. Let your courage remain a mystery.

Reference is to sense
as deference to motive.

Some words are indications,
others, supplications.

There are things we understand
and people we obey.