Nancy Cunard

“There is a purpose in everything. In order to achieve it, one must detach oneself from an awareness of self.” The importance of this humility lay in the fact that without it one cannot perceive things as they are in themselves; egotism tries to refashion things according its own distorted perceptions. “I am no longer of this world,” wrote the young Brancusi. “I am far from myself, I am no longer a part of my own person. I am within the essence of things themselves.”