Robert Pogue Harrison

16 quotes

Essayist · Born Jan 1, 1954 · United States Of America · Male

All Age (5)Youth (3)Gardens (2)We Are History (2)Nature (1)Understanding Time (1)Preparing A Readiness (1)Power of Thoughts (1)Understanding Hipsters (1)Growth (1)The Nightmare of History (1)Hipsters (1)Time (1)How We Measure Life (1)Language (1)

From “Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition”

“Gardening is an opening of worlds-of worlds within worlds-beginning beginning with the world at one's feet. To become conscious of what one is treading on requires that one delve into the ground's organic underworld, so as to appreciate, in an engaged way, the soil's potential for fostering life.”

Tagged: Gardens, Gardening, Nature, Soil

“We have a seemingly infinite capacity for misery. Yet if the human race is cursed, it is not so much because we have been thrown into suffering and mortality, nor because we have a deeper capacity for suffering than other creatures, but rather because we take suffering and mortality to be…”

Tagged: Amor fati, Misery, Pain, Yeasayer

“The gardens that have graced this mortal Eden of ours are the best evidence of humanity's reason for being on Earth. Where history unleashes its destructive and annihilating forces, we must, if we are to preserve our sanity, to say nothing of our humanity, work against and in spite of them. We must…”

Tagged: Gardens, Growth

From “Gardens”

“Gardening is an opening of worlds-of worlds within worlds-beginning beginning with the world at one's feet.”

From “Forests: The Shadow of Civilization”

“It is not the poet's task, nor is it within his power, to give birth to a new religion. At most he may keep open the space or possibility for some new revelation. How this might come about—why, when, where, above all whether—remains imponderable, but there is little doubt that, in the present age,…”

Tagged: Poetizing, Preparing A Readiness, Reconfigures

From “Robert Pogue Harrison: Juvenescence : A Cultural History of Our Age (Hardcover); 2014 Edition”

“The greatest blessing a society can confer on its young is to turn them into the heirs, rather than the orphans, of history. It is also the greatest blessing a society can confer on itself, for heirs rejuvenate the heritage by creatively renewing its legacies. Orphans, by contrast, relate to the…”

Tagged: Historical Continuum, Orphans, Legacy, Movements of History, Orphanage of Postmodernity

“It may appear as if the world now belongs mostly to the younger generations, with their idiosyncratic mindsets and technological gadgetry, yet in truth, the age as a whole, whether wittingly or not, deprives the young of what youth needs most if it hopes to flourish. It deprives them of idleness,…”

Tagged: Old vs. Young, Youth, Snapchat, Internal Lives

From “Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age”

“No society on earth comes close to matching America’s youthful imagination, its liberation of youthful energies, colors, forms, products, and narratives, all of which appeal directly to what is most neotenic or childlike in our nature. That America is comprehensible from the perspectives of all…”

Tagged: Youth, America, Americanism, Age

“We have never before been so young, nor so old.”

Tagged: We Are History, Youth, Age

“Lolita represents a different cultural type than her ancestors. She is not just an adolescent girl on her way to womanhood but a new specimen of humanity whose progeny will embody a historically unparalleled strain of youthfulness, even in their old age. In that sense we all share Lolita’s age.”

Tagged: Lolita, Quotes about the work of Vladimir Nabokov, The New Age, Back to an Adolescent Civilization, Hipsters

“Language does not arise from a need to escape but from a desire to enter, not from frowns of impotence but from a surplus of vitality and wonder.”

Tagged: Language, expression, Power of Thoughts

“A young boy and his grandfather in an old-growth forest of the Pacific Northwest may cast their eyes on the same giant redwood, yet they do not see the same phenomenon. Because of their age difference, it appears one way to the boy, another to his elder. The sky I see today is more or less the same…”

Tagged: Age as Interpretation, Seeing Seeing, Age, Death Is Coming

“Only age gives time a measure of reality.”

Tagged: Age, Time, What Makes Time Real, Understanding Time

“Nothing in the universe— be it the newborn infant or the universe itself— is without age.”

Tagged: Age, Age Is The Ultimate Systemizer, How We Measure Life

“The past does not cease to exist simply because we lose our memory of it.”

Tagged: The Nightmare of History, The Joy of History, We Are History, History

From “Interview with Robert Pogue Harrison”

“Traditionally, young people imitated their elders for a simple reason: old people held the power. But they no longer have it.”

Tagged: Power of Youth

Robert Pogue Harrison

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