Top 15 R. W. K. Paterson Quotes

Success necessarily emasculates the spirit of rebellion. From the point of view of the true rebel the noblest cause is a lost cause.

The true rebel … may incidentally lend his support to this or that finitely realizable cause, but his unique vocation is to keep the rebellious consciousness alive. In his eyes the crucial feature of any cause is the degree to which it fosters the spirit of private defiance.

Rebellion is a way of being alive. A consciousness of evil, needful to be combated … is one of our most vivid forms of consciousness. If evil did not exist we should have to invent it, as indeed we do in works of the imagination. … A man who had never rebelled would be a man who did not know what it was to be alive.

It is nether fortune, status, nor power, nor even intellect, which marks out the Patrician, but intensity of consciousness and the resolve to pursue only what is truly worth pursuing.

Artist, philosopher, lover, mystic—these words name levels of consciousness which are accessible to all of us. It is not a question of training, education, or degree of sophistication. It is rather a question of openness, of courage and endeavour, of willingness to dwell elsewhere than in the midst of demeaning preoccupations with material fortune, status, and power.

There are individuals who are haunted by self-doubt, whose attitude to life is negative and distrustful, or who exist in a state of confusion about what they are and what they can become. … Unlike physical deprivation or obvious social injustice, evils like these strike at the very roots of human life. When men can no longer picture themselves as worthy of existing, it scarcely matters whether they have the means of existing.

There are individuals … who propagate lessons inviting self-abasement, bitterness, self-waste, and cynicism; there are those who high pride, like that of Lucifer, is to dethrone everything they perceive as superior and summoning men to what lies above them.

We cannot find out what a home is by looking at actual instances of homes, since we cannot even begin to pick these out as putatively instances of ‘homes’ unless we have somewhere in our minds an idea of what a ‘home’ is truly supposed to be. We can only recognize the false if we can compare it mentally with the true. Thus the average home cannot possibly be taken as a standard measure of what a home should be.

The patrician … has the courage to listen to and retain whatever may be glorious in the ambiguous revelations that are being offered to him; he is resolved to miss nothing, to plumb every depth and scale every height, in the pilgrimage of his consciousness.

There are hells into which we can fall, as well as heavens to which we can climb, when we take with absolute seriousness the invitations and avowals which are wafted to us across the paraconscious. And so the plebeian of soul, fearing what may befall him if he hearkens too closely, stops his ears to these siren enchanters calling through the mist. He might hear heavenly music, but he might be summoned to his death. Neither does Ulysses desire destruction, and he takes steps to guard against the entire bewitchment of his intelligence by the magic voices which are singing their song to him. We must preserve our critical faculties when we listen to the call of our dreams.

There are two kinds of danger awaiting the individual who stakes his life on the conviction that the symbols of romance and grandeur which summon him express ultimate realities wherein he can truly find himself. It may be that our dreams are no more than the pathetic illusions of creatures who are driven by various biological, psychological, and social causes to deceive themselves about their actual status in the scheme of things, and therefore that the patrician’s commitments to ideals of glory and majesty are no better than empty posturings. He may be relinquishing this world’s goals for pathways which lead nowhere. Yet even if this were so, he could still give the reply made by Pascal in recommending his Wager: ‘if you lose, you lose nothing’; for the patrician has already judged that worldly pleasure and profit, if devoid of all higher significance, are not worth having.

Self-distrustful and suspicious of life, the plebeian is nevertheless not wholly deaf to the fancies which rap and knock at his soul, though he forbids them entry. Focusing on what he regards as hard practical matters—his income, work, health, social position, housing, and the extent and security of his physical possessions—he nevertheless dimly feels that he has been cheated of something he cannot precisely define because it springs from values—sacrifice, endurance, commitment, responsibility, faith, a cleaving unto what is truly good and beautiful—which disturb him by the very magnitude of the horizons they unroll, and in which, fearfully, he cannot bring himself to believe. They demand from him a reversal in the whole course on which he has set his life, and it is safer and easier for him to thrust these ambiguous and uncertain promises and challenges into the far off limbo of his paraconscious, into the studiously forgotten regions of his self where they will not perpetually remind him of how little he has in fact gained and how much he may have lost. Yet here they are, and too often emerge as unwelcome visitants, for example when he reads of or perhaps actually meets some other human being who has surrendered material security for a life spent in the pursuit of knowledge, artistic creation, or adventure.

The situations we encounter in life can be subjected to the scrutiny of what we might call our administrative consciousness, which deals with those aspects of our existence which are overt, palpable, manageable by the well-tried techniques of our practical intelligence, and nearly always trivial when judged as elements in our ultimate well-being. Or they can be subjected to the more searching scrutiny of our fuller and more intense consciousness, which recognizes that … the data of sense for the most part function as cues soliciting our creative contribution as agents who schematize, conceptualize, and evaluate everything that lies before us; that we build our freshly given materials into a definite meaningful panorama by enfolding them within other, richer materials drawn from the many reservoirs of memory and structured by our ceaselessly effectual imagination; and that this whole creative activity can terminate either in a turning towards those experiences and images which symbolize possibilities of truer fulfilment at the cost of greater challenge, effort, and risk, or a turning away from these to seek refuge in the narrower but safer confines of standardized external meaning from which every reminder of existential depth and personal trial has been carefully pruned.

The consciousness of the patrician remains open to the symbolisms which surround him. He believes that they may be rungs on a ladder of being which he can ascend. … He has the courage to dwell in their midst and thus to form his life by reference to dimensions of significance which transcend his narrow mundane interests as a physical organism.

Talk of the sublime, the exalted, the eternal, the passionate, of glory, challenge, or majesty fills some of us with bewilderment, discomfort, and embarrassment; others with sour resentment or scornful disbelief. To reinstate such values seems to us like trying to reinstate Ptolemaic astronomy—equally misguided, incomprehensible, and inimical to our perceived interests.