Those who think to win the world by doing something to it, I see them come to grief. For the world is a sacred object. Nothing is to be done to it. To do anything to it is to damage it. To seize it is to lose it.

Ursula K Le Guin, Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]

Hermetic quote Le Guin Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching win world doing something come to grief world sacred nothing to be done do damage seize lose

Consider also:

  1. “Now you’re freaking me out,” Gary said. “I’m freaking myself out,” Jim said.
  2. “So when the Convergence talk about their Inter Cerebral Divinity and how it tried to take physical form during the war, I’m not going to say they’re completely wrong. “
  3. “Later, when I was transferring my apparatus to my house in Scotland, I employed two workmen to remove the mirrors. As they were working they were suddenly overcome, knocked out by unseen assailants. It took several hours to revive them. People passing the doorway suddenly fell down in fits. That flat remained without a tenant for years after I had left it. All this was because I had not enough experience to control the forces.”
  4. “Nostalgia can be contained and marketed—but actual difference would threaten the hegemony of the one worldview. The ‘Gift Economy’ of some nearly-extinguished ‘primitive tribe’ makes excellent TV; our mourning for its disappearance can only boost the sales of whatever commodity might soothe our sense of loss. Mourning itself can become fetishized, as in the victorian era of onyx and jet and black-plumed graveyard horses. Death is good for Capital, because money is the sexuality of the dead. Corpses have already appeared in advertising—’real’ corpses.”
  5. “I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know”