Any fact can be stated. Any act can be commanded. That is, they are tractable.

It is nonsense to speak of a fact but refuse to say what is thus to be seen. Likewise, it is nonsense to speak of an act but refuse to say who is to do it.

Of course, our statement may be misunderstood; our command may be disobeyed. But what has been misundertood, and who has disobeyed? It must be possible to say.

(It should perhaps be clarified that acts are never in past. Acts, once done, are now facts, to be seen. Likewise, there are no future facts, they are always behind us, in the past, where they may abide up to the present. "Who did that?" always refers to the fact that remains of some past deed.)

Experience is the coordination of your ethics with your physics.

The danger of scientific knowledge and political power is that they lead us believe things and desire people without first imagining them. It may sound strange to think of politics as the business of getting us to "desire people". It is less strange, I suppose, to think of science as getting us to believe things. But even the latter must be qualified by method; and to "desire people" is merely to give them a mandate. That is, science and politics are just systems of representation, objective and subjective, respectively. The danger, like I say, is that we represent (and allow others to represent) things and people without the intercession of imagination. There are things that are easier to believe if you don't try to imagine them, as there people who can likewise be easier to desire. The imagination intervenes (when it does) on behalf our own flesh and bones. It always represents the body.

The practical function of language is to let us describe facts and prescribe acts, to make statements and issue commands. The use of language for these purposes, inevitably affects our empirical and normative experience, our sense of what is real and ideal, what is and what should be. Language shapes our imaginations.

The "language arts," philosophy and poetry perhaps most clearly, work upon our imaginations deliberately. Their aim is to improve the accuracy of imagination, our sense of what is possible. They also try to move us to recognize certain necessities.

I say "the arts" here, and I impute a will to them, an intention, because I do not think the immediate aim of artists is always this. It's just that when they succeed, when they produce "a work of art," it is because what they have done, for whatever petty goals they may themselves have pursued, is to help us better imagine the facts and acts before us.

We become better able to see what must be, and do what we can.

The weight that can be weighed is not the full weight.

The burden you can carry does not break you.