Quotes about Roles

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts.

Who am I? is the only question worth asking and the only one never answered. It is your destiny to play an infinity of roles, but these roles are not yourself. The spirit is non-local, but it leaves behind a fingerprint, which we call a body. A wizard does not believe himself to be a local event dreaming of a larger world. A wizard is a world dreaming of local events.

I watched them tearing a building down
A gang of men in a busy town.
With a Ho-Heave-Ho, a lusty yell
They swung a beam - and a side wall fell.
I asked the foreman, "Are these men skilled
And the men you'd hire if you had to build?"
"For the most part," he said, "No indeed.
Just common labor is all I need.
I can easily wreck in a day or two
What builders have taken a year to do."
And I thought to myself, as I went away,
Which of these roles have I tried to play?
Am I a builder, who works with care,
Measuring life by the rule and square?
Am I shaping my deeds to a well made plan?
Patiently doing the things I can?
Or, am I a wrecker, who walks the town
Content with the labor of tearing down?

First of all, I choose the great roles, and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.

I have often pondered over the roles of knowledge or experience, on the one hand, and imagination or intuition, on the other, in the process of discovery. I believe that there is a certain fundamental conflict between the two, and knowledge, by advocating caution, tends to inhibit the flight of imagination. Therefore, a certain naivete, unburdened by conventional wisdom, can sometimes be a positive asset.

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion, or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family.

There are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle . . . those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. . . . No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter - the enslavement of man's body, in spirit - the destruction of his mind . . . make no mistake about the character of the mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages - and power, the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust. . . . But it cannot be done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you deserve it.