ART - LIFE - PHILOSOPHY - POLITICS - JOKES - POETRY
Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions.
- Emerson, Social Aims
I hate quotations. - Emerson
Nothing is so useless as a general maxim. - Macaulay
Even a proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it. - Keats
Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting it. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east & west. - Emerson
I pounce on what is mine, wherever I find it. - Marmontel
The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship.
- possibly Emerson (who cares?)
In fact, it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others, as it is to invent. Always some steep transition, some sudden alteration of temperature, or of point of view, betrays the foreign interpolation. - Emerson
We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates. - Emerson
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ART
I must create my own System or be enslaved by another man's.
- William Blake
There are only two kinds of artists - revolutionaries & plagiarists.
- Paul Gauguin
In good hours we do not find Shakespeare or Homer over-great, - only to have been translators of the happy present, - & every man & woman divine possibilities.
- Emerson, Success
ART: ...the most universal & freest form of communication.
- Dewey, Art as Experience, p270
...a realm of thought experiments that quicken, sharpen & sweeten our being in the world. - Wendy Steiner
Art is naturally communication (only a perverse ingenuity can attempt to deny this obvious truth)... - Iris Murdoch
Then all at once the peace, always sought but always escaping us on that first path of willing, comes to us of its own accord, & all is well with us. It is the painless state prized by Epicurus as the highest good & as the state of the gods; for that moment we are delivered from the miserable pressure of the will.
- Schopenhauer
the aim of art is simply to create a mood. - Wilde, The Critic as Artist, II
There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise & the taste for emotions of recognition. - Henry James, Partial Portraits, Trollope
In Art, the best is good enough. - Goethe
This democratic culture is the real meaning of the "postmodern" age. Modernism, with its priesthood of the avant-garde, was the last gasp of the aristocratic world-view. - Roger Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, p496
Though he may have been deprived of wealth, social mobility & political power, the common man quickly learned to compensate for his impotence in those arenas by channeling his energies instead into the one arena in which he did seem paramount, culture, & into the one form of culture that was truly his own, entertainment. Nothing could have been more democratic than entertainment. Everyone had access to it, the majority ruled in it, & no one's aesthetic judgement of it was deemed better than anyone else's. - Neil Gabler, Life: The Movie, p30
Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
- George Burns
For what is Truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one's last mood. - Wilde, The Critic as Artist
Every appearance of nature corresponds to some state of mind, & that state of mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.
- Emerson, Infinite Beauty
...Art's first appeal is neither to the intellect nor the emotions, but purely to the artistic temperament. - Wilde
What art does do is to communicate to us an attitude, an attitude taken up by the artist consequent upon his perceptions... It is characteristic of the greatest art that the attitude it communicates to us is felt by us to be valid, to be the reaction to a more subtle & comprehensive contact with reality than we can normally make.
- J W N Sullivan (1927)
This is no book; who touches this, touches a man. - Walt Whitman
...the expression is the completed feeling; for the feeling is not fully felt till it is expressed, & in being expressed it is still felt but in a different way. What the act of expression does is to fix & distinguish it finally; it then, & then only, becomes a determinate feeling. In the same way the consciousness which we express when we have found the 'right word' is not the same as our consciousness before we found it; so that it is not strictly correct to call the word the expression of what we meant before we found it...What is absolutely unexpressed & inexpressible is nothing. We can only describe it potentially & by anticipation. It cannot enter into any human life until it has become articulate in some way, though not necessarily in words
- R. L. Nettleship, Philosophical Remains, i. p132
...it is not language which expresses but the man who uses or understands it...the man who appreciates a picture or a mountain aesthetically is in his degree an artist. None of these things is beautiful to him unless he expresses in it his feelings or, which...is the same thing, it expresses, that is, reveals them to him. The writer of a poem expresses his passion in it. It expresses the passion to me, but only on condition that I have some such passion to express. The truth is that in reading a poem I express myself in it, I find words for what I have already been, & so first come fully to know it. ...Language only has a meaning for me when in hearing it I express myself in it. - E. F. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p182-3
...those parts of the work of art which he could not in some sort have invented for himself will pass by him unseen...one never sees anything in anybody's work but what one brings to it, & it is as true of art as of nature that
we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone doth Nature live;
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud.
- Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p68
...the highest Criticism...criticises not merely the individual work of art, but Beauty itself. - Wilde, The Critic as Artist
The question of beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of the foundations of things. Goethe said : "The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of Nature, which, but for this appearance, had been for ever concealed from us." ...I am warned by the ill fate of many philosophers not to attempt a definition of Beauty. - Emerson, Beauty
BEAUTY : ...the purgation of superfluities - Michelangelo
...the subjection of matter to spirit so as to be transformed into a symbol, in & through which the spirit reveals itself.
- Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p239
...the beauty of a line is movement, & the beauty of movement expression.
- Herder
Beautiful is what happens without interest. - Kant
...only & always that in which we can recognise the expression of our feelings is beautiful to us. - E. F. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p183
A work can express depression, of course, like the finale of Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony, without being depressing : even if this movement has led critics to wonder whether depression is an emotion that art should try to express. Depressing music is not normally depressed, & muzak in a restaurant is depressing largely because of its asinine cheeriness.
- Roger Scruton, Aesthetics of Music , p154
...to be unanalysable, &, therefore, save by the poet, indescribable, is the aim of art & the fact of beauty. - E. F. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p271
...one of Hegel's general philosophical errors...lies in the supposition that every work of art is an attempt to express the same thing...Every beautiful thing, or, in other words, every work of art, is an individual expression, an expression of something that cannot be expressed in any other way & therefore cannot be known apart from its unique expression.
- E. F. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p173
The experience of beauty is an activity, & hence in its own way good & pleasant; it has therefore been confused with morality & with pleasure. Its activity is contemplation of passion; & hence it has been identified with knowledge & with feeling simply. It contemplates passion by means of expressing it in sensible form, & has therefore been mistaken for the imitation of natural objects. - E. F. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p296
...we have a word amusement for our attitude to what is funny, but no precisely
parallel name for our attitude to what is sublime, pretty or beautiful, such terms as admiration, appreciation, love being all of wider significance. The subjective side of the relation is certainly more obvious in the ludicrous : for it is often seriously maintained that things are beautiful whether anybody is aware of it or not, whereas, though we call things funny or absurd, I have never heard it suggested that they have these qualities in themselves as they have length or roundness... we naturally speak of things as having beauty, it is rather artificial to say they have ludicrousness or funniness... There is nothing which cannot be funny. ...Beauty, moreover, by a quite natural & explicable error, has commonly been connected with moral goodness, both as a symptom of it in the artist & as productive of it in the beholder. But no such relation is ever suggested between morality & the ludicrous. Wit belongs to a spirit that denies.
- E. F. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, App. A
Delight is the chief, if not the only end of poesy. Instruction can be admitted, but in the second place.
- Dryden, Defence of an Essay on Dramatic Poetry
For a thousand years before the "Romantic Revival" of the later 18th C, aesthetic theory, when it existed, was almost invariably distorted by the assumption that the essential thing in art was its moralising purpose. The splendid, though loosely worded, protest of Dryden stands nearly isolated among the moralistic doctrines of others & of himself.
- E. F. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p43
The sun neglects to provide the appropriate limelight effect even upon a triumphant Napoleon or a dying Caesar... it is...the great occupation of the graphic arts to give us first of all order & variety in the sensuous plane, & then so to arrange the sensuous presentment of objects that the emotional elements are elicited with an order & appropriateness altogether beyond what Nature herself provides. - Roger Fry, An Essay in Aesthetics
It is only when an object exists in our lives for no other purpose than to be seen that we really look at it. - Roger Fry, An Essay in Aesthetics
The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.
- Wilde, The Decay of Lying
A picture is of something, a literary work is about something &...imitates not by being like but by being about something...
- Sparshott, Theories of Aesthetics
We don't understand music, it understands us. - Adorno
Beats do not follow one another; they bring each other into being, respond to one another, & breathe with a common life. - Roger Scruton, Aesthetics of Music
We lack in music an aesthetic that would impose laws on musicians & give them a conscience; we lack, as a consequence, a genuine conflict over "principles" - for as musicians we laugh at Herbart's velleities in this realm as much as we do Schopenhauer's. In fact, this results in a great difficulty: we no longer know on what basis to found the concepts "model", "mastery", "perfection" - we grope blindly in the realm of values with the instinct of old love & admiration; we come close to believing "what is good is what pleases us"...
- Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p441
[some parts in Mahler are meant to be not listened to but] "listened against" - Adorno
...music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself... - Schopenhauer, The World as Will & Idea, I, p257
...[the great composers] will even do things purposely ill or unsatisfactorily, in order to give greater value to their well-doing in other places. In a skilful poet's versification the so-called bad or inferior lines are...inferior...because he feels that if all were equally weighty, there would be no real sense of weight anywhere; if all were equally melodious, the melody itself would be fatiguing; & he purposely introduces the labouring or discordant verse, that the full ring may be felt in his main sentence, & the finished sweetness in his chosen rhythm. And continually in painting, inferior artists destroy their work by giving too much of all that they think is good, while the great painter gives just enough to be enjoyed, & passes to an opposite kind of enjoyment, or to an inferior state of enjoyment...
- Ruskin, Elements of Drawing, p192
It is neither the best nor the worst of a book that is untranslatable. - Nietzsche
[The Sorrows of Young Werther ] may well be the greatest success in the history of literature. Goethe here perfected the portrait of the writer as "genius". For if the great writer is someone who transforms his inner life into a matter of public interest from the very outset, & simultaneously makes the questions of the day into matters of immediate concern for his own personal thought & experience, then it is in Goethe's early works that we find the most consummate avatar of this kind of author. In Werther Goethe provided the bourgeoisie of his day with a perceptive & flattering picture of its own pathology, comparable in its way to the one supplied by Freud for the benefit of the modern bourgeoisie.
- Walter Benjamin
...if I mistake not, it is with Meister as with every work of real & abiding excellence, the first glance is the least favourable. A picture of Raphael, a Greek statue, a play of Sophocles or Shakespeare, appears insignificant to the unpractised eye; & not till after long & patient & intense examination, do we begin to descry the earnest features of that beauty, which has its foundation in the deepest nature of man, & will continue to be pleasing through all ages.
- Carlyle, translator's preface to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister
Bad writing is always full of the fumes of personality...I do not mind owning a personal style, but I do not want to be obviously present in my own work. ...Shakespeare has a recognizable style but no presence...D. H. Lawrence has a less evident style but a strong presence.
- Iris Murdoch, in Bryan Magee's Talking Philosophy
Ernest: ...what is the difference between literature & journalism?
Gilbert: Oh! journalism is unreadable, & literature is not read. That is all.
- Wilde, The Critic as Artist, p110
...an art book should be stimulating & not doctrinaire. Creative ideas can be stimulated only if there are no positive instructions to be followed.
For the past 50 years there has been a tremendous effort to make a science out of art appreciation...this means having formulas, laws, principles &, above all, standards...laws of artistic creativeness do not exist...it cannot be taught on a scholastic basis,...cannot be weighed or measured...Art rejects any regimentation. ...the scholastics concentrate on a basic element, the history of art, on the basis that history can be accepted as a kind of factual subject, a science; but the history of art cannot be conceived as a science.
- Orban, What Is Art All About?, p46
The inherently uncontrolled spontaneity of primitive peoples & children - envied by artists - is the foundation of all artistic activity. Doctrinaire education, which for centuries killed the spontaneous creativity of the inborn urge, has to be abolished entirely before we can fully realize that the term "artist" does not define a profession but a liberated state of mind in which one's inborn creativity can flourish. To reach this state of mind we must give up all preconceived ideas, all conscious ambitions, cease craving for good results, & begin floating happily towards an unknown, mysterious, wonderful world, the world of creativeness.
- Orban, What Is Art All About?, p50
Such is always the mode in which the highest imaginative faculty seizes its materials. It never stops at crust or ashes, or outward images of any kind; it ploughs them all aside, & plunges into the very central fiery heart; nothing else will content its spirituality; whatever semblances & various outward shows & phases its subject may possess go for nothing; it gets within all fences, cuts down to the root, & drinks the very vital sap of that it deals with : once therein, it is at liberty to throw up what new shoots it will, so always that the true juice & sap be in them, & to prune & twist them at its pleasure, & bring them to fairer fruit than grew on the old tree; but all this pruning & twisting is work that it likes not, & often does ill; its function & gift are the getting at the root, its nature & dignity depend on its holding things always by the heart. Take its hand from off the beating of that, & it will prophesy no longer; it looks not in the eyes, it judges not by the voice, it describes not by outward features; all that it affirms, judges, or describes, it affirms from within. - Ruskin (1846)
I have no love for reasonable painting...If I am not quivering & excited like a serpent in the hands of a soothsayer, I am uninspired. I must recognize this & accept it. Everything good that I have done has come to me in this way.
- Delacroix
When such a fortunate age of pure production has passed, reflection enters, & with it an element of estrangement. What was earlier living spirit is now transmitted theory. - Schelling, Philosophy of Art, p10
...art is, & remains for us, on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past. Herein it has further lost for us its genuine truth & life, & rather is transferred into our ideas than asserts its former necessity, or assumes its former place, in reality.
- Hegel, Introductory Lectures in Aesthetics, p13
The modernness of all good books seems to give me an existence as wide as man. What is well done, I feel as if I did; what is ill done, I reck not of. - Emerson, Nominalist & Realist
I find the most pleasure in reading a book in a manner least flattering to the author. I read Proclus, & sometimes Plato, as I might read a dictionary, for a mechanical help to the fancy & the imagination. I read for the lustres, as if one should use a fine picture in a chromatic experiment, for its fine colours. 'Tis not Proclus, but a piece of nature & fate that I explore. It is a greater joy to see the author's author, than to see himself.
- Emerson, Nominalist & Realist
Every good book, or piece of book, is full of admiration & awe; it may contain firm assertion or stern satire, but it never sneers coldly, nor asserts haughtily, & it always leads you to love or reverence something with your whole heart. - Ruskin, Elements of Drawing, p227
...all drawing depends, primarily, on your power of representing Roundness... The world itself is round, & so is all that is in it, more or less, except human work, which is often very flat indeed.
- Ruskin, Elements of Drawing
...the clouds, not being much liable to man's interference, are always beautifully arranged...You cannot be sure of this in any other features of landscape...though we can hide them with smoke, & mix them with poison, cannot be quarried nor built over, & they are therefore always gloriously arranged... - Ruskin, Elements of Drawing
A great writer creates a world of his own & his readers are proud to live in it. - Cyril Connolly
Instead of living the substitute life of art, why not just live? ...artists have sometimes been treated like people who pander to a human frailty, the addictive need to inhabit an unreal & sometimes illusory world of aesthetic possibilities rather than living fruitfully in nature itself. ...They are usually hooked themselves on this common preference for virtual but inauthentic reality. ...Plato argued that art should be banned from the ideal state because it is only an image of an image & thus greatly removed from ultimate reality. Can one not, in a similar vein, suggest that men & women fortify their minds not by imagining what is nonexistent but instead by cultivating aptitudes that help them to enjoy the beauties that do exist, at every moment, in the world of actuality? ...Although [the imaginary & art] can be misused, like every other source of goodness, these do not deprive us of our capacity to enjoy reality. On the contrary, they arouse & also cultivate perceptual & cognitive powers of the mind needed for any consummatory appreciation of nature. ...[Art] is nature re-creating itself, not as a denial of whatever beauty or goodness has already emerged but as an augmentation of it. ...it allows us to find & create new consummations while escaping the price that nature often exacts for those, in love or sexuality, for instance, that it also yields but sometimes withholds.
- Irving Singer, The Harmony of Nature & Spirit, p122-3.
The attraction of imperfection.- Here I see a poet who, like many a human being, is more attractive by virtue of his imperfections than he is by all the things that grew to completion & perfection under his hands. Indeed, he owes his advantages & fame much more to his ultimate incapacity than to his ample strength. His works never wholly express what he would like to express & what he would like to have seen: it seems as if he had had the foretaste of a vision & never the vision itself; but a tremendous lust for this vision remains in his soul, & it is from this that he derives his equally tremendous eloquence of desire & craving. By virtue of his lust he lifts his listeners above his work & all mere "works" & lends them wings to soar as high as listeners had never soared. Then, having themselves been transformed into poets & seers, they lavish admiration upon the creator of their happiness, as if he had led them immediately to the vision of what was for him the holiest & ultimate - as if he had attained his goal & had really seen & communicated his vision. His fame benefits from the fact that he never reached his goal. - Nietzsche, The Gay Science, II, 79
Surprise me. - Diaghilev to Cocteau
I look forward in the future to new & even longer pieces by Mr Cage!
- Stravinsky on 4'33"
From Fauvism & Cubism, down through Surrealism & Abstract Expressionism, & finally to Minimalism & Conceptual Art: the process of shedding the representational baggage of art leads eventually to a point where nothing remains that can be shed. The process resembles a from of anorexia nervosa:- no matter how much has been eliminated, the modern artist looks in the mirror & sees yet more representational fat that needs to be cut; nothing will satisfy but the wasted, skeletal image from which others are forced to look away in horror, but which to him seems "so right"...or will just at the point of death. ...We need to face the fact that philosophical notions...are capable of doing us the greatest possible harm: they can rob us of our art. To begin to undo the damage that has been done it is necessary for us to completely re-examine the two imperatives that brought us here: the need to progress & the need to de-represent. ...We should listen once again for those arts that have found their way home, to some sense of the sublime.
In doing this we might save ourselves as much as our culture. - Adrian Heathcote, The Death of Art
...the Persian artist had none of the egotism or conceit which has lead the European artist since the Renaissance to create a medium of expression independent of the common needs of men. - Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art, p83
If I couldn't find ways of dealing with nature without mutilating it, I felt I had to find other ways to deal with human values. - Mark Rothko
...the hermetic work of art belongs to the bourgeois, the mechanical work belongs to fascism, & the fragmentary work, in its state of complete negativity, belongs to utopia.
- Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, p126
The ultimate purpose of music & philosophy is purely the articulating of this basic mystery, this first & last question of all things...It is that which does not yet exist, which is lost & dimly sensed, our encounters with the self & the 'we' concealed in the dark & in the latency of every lived instant, our utopia calling to itself through charity, music & metaphyics, but not to be realised on Earth. - Ernst Bloch, Essays on the Philosophy of Music, p133
The lasting effect is, like the first effect of speech on the development of the mind, to make things conceivable rather than to store up propositions. Not communication but insight is the gift of music; in very naive phrase, a knowledge of "how feelings go."
- Susanne Langer, Philosophy In A New Key, p244
Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute & brutalize; words depersonalize; words make the uncommon common.
- Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 810
A chord is by no means an agglomeration of intervals. It is a new unit which, although dependent on the formative power of the single interval, is felt as being self-existent & as giving to the constituent intervals meanings & functions which they otherwise would not have.
- Hindemith
Man shall only play with Beauty, & he shall play only with Beauty. Man plays he only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, & he is only wholly Man when he is playing. ...[Though man is] serious with the agreeable, the good, the perfect, with Beauty he plays.
- Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods.
- Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist, p145
I venture to believe that any theory of art is inevitably implicated in some philosophy of life, & that the only question is whether the artist is conscious or unconscious of the theory he is acting upon.
- Walter Lippmann, A Preface To Morals, p107
433. Seeing with new eyes. - Supposing that beauty in art is always to be understood as the imitation of happiness - & this I hold to be the truth - in accordance with how an age, a people, a great, self-regulating individual imagines happiness : what does the so-called realism of contemporary artists give us to understand as to the happiness of our own age? Its kind of beauty is undoubtedly the kind of beauty we can most easily grasp & enjoy. Is one not then obliged to believe that our happiness lies in realism, in possessing the sharpest possible senses & in the faithful interpretation of actuality - thus not in reality but in knowledge of reality? The influence of science has already acquired such depth & breadth that the artists of our century have, without intending to do so, already become glorifiers of the 'delights' of science! - Nietzsche, Daybreak
...here & now music is able to do nothing but portray within its own structure the social antinomies which are also responsible for its own isolation...[Music] fulfils its social function more precisely when it presents social problems through its own material & according to its own formal laws - problems which music contains in the innermost cells of its technique. ...the task of music as art thus enters into a parallel relationship to the task of social theory. - Adorno, On the Social Situation of Music
[Artworks] must either narrow down & volatise whatever has to be given form to the point where they can encompass it, or else they must show polemically the impossibility of achieving their necessary object & the inner nullity of their own means. And in this case they carry the fragmentary nature of the world's structure into the world of forms.
- Lukacs, Theory of the Novel, p38
Our aesthetics hitherto has been a woman's aesthetics to the extent that only the receivers of art have formulated their experience of "what is beautiful?" In all philosophy hitherto the artist is lacking... This...is a necessary mistake; for the artist who began to understand himself would misunderstand himself: he ought not to look back, he ought not to look at all, he ought to give... It is to the honour of an artist if he is unable to be a critic - otherwise he is half & half, he is "modern". - Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p430
What moves men of genius, or rather, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough. - Eugene Delacroix, Journal, 15 May 1824
The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes. - Delacroix
A painting is good not because it looks like something, but because it feels like something. - Phil Dike
One is an artist at the cost of regarding that which all non-artists call "form" as content, as "the matter itself". - Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 818
An error that what Wagner created was a form : - it was formlessness.
- Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p440
If the substance means ideas, images & the life taken alone, & the form means the measured language taken by itself, this is a possible distinction, but it is a distinction of things not in the poem, & the value lies in neither of them.
- A. C. Bradley, Poetry for Poetry's Sake
...two extreme parties, the expressionists, who are all for soul, & the formalists, who are all for patterns, have not infrequently joined hands against the centre, as one of philistine indifference, which is all for realism. But in truth the alliance was a natural one. A common enemy brought out their essential community of interest, "for the soul is form & doth the body make."
- E. F. Carritt, Theory of Beauty, p264
Every good picture leaves the painter eager to start again, unsatisfied, inspired by the rich mine in which he is working, hoping for more energy, more vitality, more time -- condemned to painting for life. - John Sloan, Gist of Art (1939)
The states in which we infuse a transfiguration & fullness into things & poetize about them until they reflect back our fullness & joy in life: sexuality; intoxication; feasting; spring; victory over an enemy; mockery; bravado; cruelty; the ecstasy of religious feeling. Three elements principally: sexuality, intoxication, cruelty - all belonging to the oldest festal joys of mankind, all also preponderate in the the early "artist".
Conversely, when we encounter things that display this transfiguration & fullness, the animal responds with an excitation of those spheres in which all those pleasurable states are situated - & a blending of these very delicate nuances of animal well-being & desires constitutes the aesthetic state.
- Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p422
To experience a thing as beautiful means: to experience it necessarily wrongly. - Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p424
That making perfect, seeing as perfect, which characterises the cerebral system bursting with sexual energy...The demand for art & beauty is an indirect demand for the ecstasies of sexuality communicated to the brain.
- Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p424
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry. - John Ruskin
No perfect talent without a great suffering. [He should learn] patience in the presence of great vexations. If the vexations increase, you must multiply your patience, "just as you put on more clothes when the cold becomes more intense. Then vexations will no longer hurt you." - Jaspers, quoting Leonardo
First you find the logical way, & when you find it, avoid it, & let your inner self break through & guide you. Don't try to be anybody else but yourself. - Will Marion Cook, remark to Duke Ellington
What is best in literature is the affirming, prophesying, spermatic words of men-making poets. Only that is poetry which cleanses & mans me. - Emerson, Inspiration
Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs. - Edgard Varese
Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort. - George Bernard Shaw
Unless an author has an establishment of his own, or is entered on that of some other person, he will hardly be allowed to write English or spell his own name. To be well spoken of, he must enlist under some standard; he must belong to some coterie. He must get the esprit de corps on his side: he must have literary bail in readiness. Thus they prop one another's rickety heads in Murray's shop, & a spurious reputation, like false argument, runs in a circle. ...You must commence toad-eater to have your observations attended to; if you are independent, unconnected, you will be regarded as a poor creature.
- Hazlitt, On the Aristocracy of Letters
Sycophants & flatterers are undesignedly treacherous & fickle. They are prone to admire inordinately at first, & not finding a constant supply of food for this kind of sickly appetite, take a distaste to the object of their idolatry. To be even with themselves for their credulity, they sharpen their wits to spy out faults, & are delighted to find that this answers better than their first employment. It is a course of study, "lively, audible, & full of vent". They have the organ of wonder & the organ of fear to a prominent degree. - Hazlitt, On Patronage & Puffing
The majority of notions which artists & critics use to define themselves or to define their adversaries are indeed weapons & stakes in the battle, & many of the categories which art historians deploy in order to treat their subject are nothing more than skilfully masked or transfigured indigenous categories, initially conceived for the most part as insults or condemnations. (Our term "categories" stems from the Greek kaqegoresqai meaning to accuse publicly.)
- Pierre Bourdieu, Historical Genesis of A Pure Aesthetic
Let us not forget that names of peoples are usually abusive names...Tartars are literally "the dogs"..."Germans"...meant "heathen"...
- Nietzsche, The Gay Science, III, 146
"Essentialist thought" is at work in every social universe & especially in the field of cultural production - the religious, scientific & legal fields, &c... it is quite evident that "essences" are norms.
- Pierre Bourdieu, Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic
The first condition of criticism is that the critic should be able to recognise that the sphere of Art & the sphere of Ethics are absolutely distinct & separate. When they are confused, chaos is come again.
- Wilde, The Critic as Artist, II, p191
Aesthetics...are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilisation what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely & wonderful, fill it with new forms, & give it progress, & variety & change. - Wilde, The Critic as Artist
Virtue is not exactly a positive weakness of the will; it is, rather, an intentional restraint imposed upon its violence through a knowledge of its inmost being as manifested in the world. This knowledge of the world, the inmost being of which is communicable only in ideas, is common both to the genius & the saint. ...the genius reveals his knowledge by rendering it in some form of his own choice, & the product is Art. For this the saint...possesses no direct faculty; he makes an immediate application of his knowledge to his own will, which is thus led into a denial of the world. With the saint knowledge is only a means to an end, whereas the genius remains at the stage of knowledge, & has his pleasure in it, & reveals it by rendering what he knows in his art. - Schopenhauer, Genius & Virtue
Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste. - Lichtenberg
"To elevate & surprise" is the great art of quackery & puffing; to raise a lively & exaggerated image in the mind, & take it by surprise before it can recover breath, as it were; so that by having been caught in the trap, it is unwilling to retract entirely - has a secret desire to find itself entirely in the right, & a determination to see whether it is or not. - Hazlitt, On Patronage & Puffing
What is called tradition is usually an excuse for laziness.
- mahler
...morality is nothing other...than obedience to customs... customs, however, are the traditional way of behaving & evaluating... What is tradition? A higher authority which one obeys, not because it commands what is useful to us, but because it commands. - Nietzsche, Daybreak, 9
We should relativise arthood to an artworld. Relative to one artworld, Duchamp's Fountain is an artwork. Relative to another, it is not. - James O. Young, Art & Knowledge
Beauty is as relative as light & dark. Thus, there exists no beautiful woman, none at all, because you are never certain that a still far more beautiful woman will not appear & completely shame the supposed beauty of the first. - Paul Klee, diary, 1910
Collective mind. A good writer possesses not only his own mind but also the mind of his friends. - Nietzsche
If art merely performs the acts that are required to make a possible object actual, adequately to our cognition of that object, then it is mechanical art; but if what it intends directly is the feeling of pleasure, then it is called aesthetic art. The latter is either agreeable or fine art. It is agreeable art if its purpose is that the pleasure should accompany presentations that are mere sensations; it is fine art if its purpose is that the pleasure should accompany presentations that are ways of cognizing. ...Fine art...is a way of presenting that is purposive on its own & that furthers, even though without a purpose, the culture of our mental powers to [facilitate] social communication.
- Kant, Critique of Judgement, 44
Take particularly actors, singers, orators & poets; the more unskilled one of them is, the more insolent he will be in his self-satisfaction, the more he will blow himself up, & spread himself. And...the more absurd a thing is, the more admirers it collects. Thus the worst art pleases the most people, for the simple reason that the larger part of mankind...is subject to folly. If, therefore, the less skilled man is more pleasing both in his own eyes & in the wondering gaze of the many, what reason is there that he should prefer sound discipline & true skill? In the first place, these will cost him a great outlay; in the second place, they will make him more affected & meticulous; & finally, they will please far fewer of his audience. -Erasmus, The Praise of Folly
One of the most common developments in the history of art is that the popular art of one era, which is denounced & solidly excluded from proper social & intellectual life, becomes the fine art of the next. So when the novel first appeared...it was taken to be an absolutely horrible genre. Coleridge attacked it : compared to Shakespeare, he said, reading novels is not "pass-time but kill-time". But in Elizabethan times, there was Henry Prynne, saying that Shakespeare attracts & creates only "ruffians & adulterers." Now Shakespeare is as close to the divine as any human being could ever be. The same thing happened with cinema, jazz, photography, rock-&-roll. What is popular, & therefore pronounced harmful in one period is transformed into a standard of beauty a short while later.
- Alexander Nehemas, interview
It is a familiar expedient of brilliant writers, & not less of witty talkers, the device of ascribing their own sentence to an imaginary person, in order to give it weight, as Cicero, Cowley, Swift, Landor, & Carlyle have done. And Cardinal de Retz, at a critical moment in the Parliament of Paris, described himself in an extemporary Latin sentence, which he pretended to quote from a classic author, & which told admirably well. - Emerson
The audience does not listen to the music, but through it, to the performers... The relation between the musicians & their fans is tribal; & any criticism of the music is received by the fan as an assault upon himself & his identity.
- Roger Scruton on "Nirvana", Aesthetics of Music , p500
Acting like singing are intentional - they are done 'on purpose' - but not for the sake of producing consequences. The essential relation involved is not that of earlier to later time. It is that of part to whole. - Mary Midgley, Science & Salvation, p10
...it is not how but what you do that counts. - Drawing & Painting with Ink, p75
...dogmatic symbolism, always a bad element in art... - Herbert Read, Meaning of Art, p80
a composition is of value in proportion to the number of orderly connexions which it displays. - Denman Ross, Theory of Pure Design
in the household that was T. S. Eliot, a stately archdeacon lived together with a querulous old peasant woman...as well as a mischievous boy - W. H. Auden
...because you, unluckily, have an eye or nose too keen, why need you spoil the comfort which the rest of us find in them? - Emerson, Conduct of Life, p194
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LIFE
We must give ourselves an impossible goal. - Valery, to Gide
...nothing is worth doing except what the world says is impossible. - Wilde
Our judgements concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us. ...We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions & duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties & the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too much involved in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity & injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgements, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons' conditions or ideals. ...
The spectator's judgement is sure to miss the root of the matter, & to possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion & difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer is the side that feels the more, & not the side that feels the less. ...
Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; & there is 'importance' in the only real & positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.
- William James, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings
It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid. It may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, & is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not done to the versatility & the unplumbed childishness of man's imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud: there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted...
There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life, - the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, & found himself at his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years... It is not only the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him & chuckles, & his days are moments. ...All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands, - seeking for that bird & hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, & the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud & of old iron, cheap desires & cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember & that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news. ...
For...the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory... it may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology... It has so little bond with externals...that it may even touch them not, & the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the fields of fancy... In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer...is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above & abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds & nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, & catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always & everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, & give it a voice far beyond singing.
For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret...the scene...is meaningless. And hence the haunting & truly spectral unreality of realistic books. ...In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked & seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colours of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth among salts & acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows & the storied wall.
- R. L. Stevenson, The Lantern-bearers
As Wordsworth walked, filled with this strange inner joy, responsive thus to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbours, tightly & narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops & lambs & fences, must have thought him a very insignificant & foolish personage. It surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what was going on inside of him or what it might be worth. And yet that inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the souls of others, & fills them to this day with inner joy. - William James, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings
...believe me, the secret of the greatest fruitfulness & the greatest enjoyment of existence is : to live dangerously! - Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 283
...the first lesson of history is the good of evil. - Emerson, Considerations By The Way
Life cannot be reduced to a system... Actual historic institutions, fortunately, have been modified by anomalies, discrepancies, contradictions, compromises : the older they are, the richer the organic compost. ...their weakness is their saving strength... - Lewis Mumford, Conduct of Life, p176
A man must thank his defects, & stand in some terror of his talents. A transcendental talent draws so largely on his forces, as to lame him; a defect pays him revenues on the other side. - Emerson, Conduct of Life, p27
...sickness liberated me slowly... gave me a right to a complete reversal of my habits; it permitted, it commanded forgetting; it bestowed on me the compulsion to lie still, to be idle, to wait & be patient...But to do that means to think!... I was redeemed from the 'book', for years at a time I read nothing - the greatest favour I have ever done myself! - That deepest self, as it were buried & grown silent under a constant compulsion to listen to other selves, ...awoke slowly, timidly, doubtfully - but at length it spoke again. I have never been so happy with myself as in the sickest & most painful periods of my life...
- Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, HAH 4
...everything decisive comes about 'in spite of'... - Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Z 1
...man, unconquered to this day, still unrealised, so agitated by his own teeming energy that his future digs like spurs into the flesh of every present moment... - Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, p257
Nietzsche...lacked the initial power of self-discipline to overcome these emotions aroused by human stupidity. So, of course, did Van Gogh & T. E. Lawrence & Nijinsky, & the heroes of Sartre & Barbusse & Camus... It all comes back...to the "appetite for fruitful activity & a high quality of life"... For the Outsider, the world into which he has been born is always a world without values. Compared to his own appetite for a purpose & a direction, the way most men live is not living at all; it is drifting. This is the Outsider's wretchedness, for all men have a herd instinct that leads them to believe that what the majority does must be right. Unless he can evolve a set of values that will correspond to his own higher intensity of purpose, he may as well throw himself under a bus, for he will always be an outcast & a misfit.
- Colin Wilson, The Outsider, p142
...Outsiders who awake to the fact that they were not what they had always supposed themselves to be when they felt something that opened up new possibilities...the recovery of the insight depends on finding a way back to the place where it was seen... thought...has been bound hand-&-foot by habit, laziness, ways of "seeing oneself" &c. Action is necessary...A man can change his mental habits by changing his way of life...His purpose is clear - to find his way back into a daylight where he can know a single undivided will, Nietzsche's "pure will without the troubles of intellect". His first step is to repudiate the false daylight of the once-born bourgeois. His next problem is to find an act, a definite act that will give him power over his doubts & self-questionings. - Colin Wilson, The Outsider, p155
An educator never says what he thinks, but always only what he thinks of a thing in relation to the requirements of those he educates. He must not be detected in his dissimulation; it is part of his mastery that one believes in his honesty. He must be capable of employing every means of discipline: some he can drive towards the heights only with the whips of scorn; others, who are sluggish, irresolute, cowardly, vain, perhaps only with exaggerated praise. Such an educator is beyond good & evil; but no one must know it.
- Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 980
(Harry Gallagher, swim coach: Never lie to your kids. This other trainer used to tell his kids fast times. I'd never do that...I'd tell them slow times to motivate them.
Interviewer: Isn't that lying?
Harry: I didn't lie - I manipulated time. - The Religion Report, Radio National, 2002)
The moment we define stress as coming from anywhere other than from within ourselves, we set ourselves up to experience it - & are too late to prevent it.
- Richard Carlson, You Can Be Happy No Matter What
The most suffering animal on earth invented for itself - laughter.
- Nietzsche
Life is so full of danger that some flee into a garden of repose where there is no risk of failure nor need for effort. The manifestations of this are the quests for God or Utopia or determinism. - Paul Kurtz, Exuberance
We cannot suffer negative emotions unless we can justify to ourselves that we're entitled to them & unless we identify with them personally. We experience negative emotions when we blame someone or something else for a situation we find unsatisfactory. The instant we stop blaming, our negative emotions stop. We stop blaming by saying "I AM RESPONSIBLE" every single time something happens that causes us to feel angry or upset. - Brian Tracy
Getting good at struggling with problems just makes you more skillful at struggling with problems. To enjoy your life more, & especially to have more love, it's better to become skillful at what inspires your enthusiasm & generates vitality & good feelings. - Stella Resnick, The Pleasure Zone, p11
The fact that our society today is more interested in peak performance than peak experience says something very significant about our popular values... - Stella Resnick, The Pleasure Zone, p18
...since early childhood it's been drummed into us that...the pursuit of happiness...is...a selfish & petty enterprise. We learn that it's morally superior to deny yourself & to suffer. We learn to perform rather than experience... We learn that pleasure is...a reward for hard work - a time-limited vacation from real life. - Stella Resnick, The Pleasure Zone, p20
...He spoke with assurance & his tone implied I was arguing with him. Hundreds of miles of desolate, monotonous, burnt steppe are less demoralizing than one man sitting & talking if you have no idea when he is going to leave you in peace. - Chekhov, The Artist's Story
There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, - now repeated & hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, & its details addressed. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the mornings meadows. - Emerson, Behaviour
...for the most part, his manners marry him, &, for the most part, he marries manners.
- Emerson, Conduct of Life, p108
One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference towards ones hearers. - Oscar Wilde
The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil. And why, then, should you not pluck at my laurels?...
You are my believers : but of what importance are all believers?
You had not sought yourselves when you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all belief is of so little account.
Now I bid you lose me & find yourselves...
- Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
So often doing good involves a kind of grimness. To assault evil, even small evil, with mischief, cleverness, merriment, & laughter - that takes genius few of us have but which, when it is found, graces the human scene & makes progress both possible & palatable.
If we could just figure out how to have more fun at it, maybe more of us would join the ranks of those who seek after justice & mercy.
- Robert Fulghum, It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It
...it became our priority to find that which in the work sustains us - to find, in the act of service, in the act of work, a joy that not only prevents burnout but feels like a glorious celebration. - Patch Adams
There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear & trembling, so to vote & to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see. - William James, Will to Believe, 158
I saw that the whole thing was made up & that the game of success was just that, a game. I realized I could invent another game.
I settled on a game called I am a contribution. Unlike success & failure, contribution has no other side... "How will I be a contribution today?"
- Ben Zander, The Art of Possibility
Just look carefully at the cover of the box, & if the rules do not light up your life, put it away, take out another one you like better, & play the game wholeheartedly. Remember, it's all invented.
- Ben Zander, The Art of Possibility
If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character. This is true, & that other is true. But our geometry cannot span these extreme points, & reconcile them. What to do? By obeying each thought frankly, by harping, or, if you will, pounding on each string, we learn at last its power. - Emerson, Fate
...my instinct went into the opposite direction from Schopenhauer's : toward a justification of life, even at its most terrible, ambiguous & mendacious; for this I had the formula "Dionysian"... Schopenhauer was not strong enough for a new Yes. ...
Dionysus versus the "Crucified" : there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom - it is a difference in the meaning of it...the problem is that of the meaning of suffering : whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering : he is sufficiently strong, rich & capable of deifying to do so. The Christian denies even the happiest lot on earth : he is sufficiently weak to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life : it will be eternally reborn & return again from destruction.
- Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Never anticipate evils; or, because you cannot have things exactly as you wish, make them out worse than they are, through mere spite or wilfulness.
- Hazlitt, On The Conduct Of Life
Q : Of what accomplishment are you most proud?
Justice Thurgood Marshal : That I did the best I could with what I had.
Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding. Hope never spreads her wings but on unfathomable seas.
- Emerson, Progress of Culture
...life is good only when it is magical & musical, a perfect timing & consent, & when we do not anatomize it. You must treat the days respectfully, you must be a day yourself, & not interrogate it like a college professor. The world is enigmatical, - everything said, & everything known or done, & must not be taken literally, but genially...
...what has been best done in the world, - the works of genius, - cost nothing. There is no painful effort, but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. Shakespeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves his nest. Poems have been written between sleep & waking, irresponsibly... Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; & those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking. - Emerson, Works & Days
Eyes...wait for no introduction; they are no Englishmen; the glance is natural magic. The mysterious communication established across a house between two entire strangers, moves all the springs of wonder. - Emerson, Conduct of Life
That is the great happiness of life, - to add to our high acquaintances. - Emerson, Success
Build...your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. - Emerson, Nature [near the end]
Ordinary people think merely how they shall spend their time; a man of any talent tries to use it. - Schopenhauer, Wisdom of Life, p28
A reasoned life without a definite outlook is not a life, but a burden & a horror. - Chekhov
Slow, slow to learn the lesson that there is but one depth, but one interior, & that is, - his purpose. - Emerson, Considerations By The Way
...one thing is needful: that a human being attain his satisfaction with himself - whether it be by this or by that poetry & art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to revenge himself therefor; we others will be his victims, if only by always having to stand his ugly sight. - Nietzsche, Gay Science
...to fill the hour - that is happiness. - Emerson, Works & Days, p416, & Experience, p153
One doesn't live in the world - you wait for the world to live in you.
- Roger Rosenblatt
...you shall not tell me that you have learned to know men; you shall make me feel that; your saying so unsays it. - Emerson, Greatness
...there are other people in the world besides yourself... The more airs of childish self-importance you give yourself, you will only expose yourself to be the more thwarted & laughed at. - Hazlitt, On the Conduct of Life
Men are the children of the Universe, with foolish enterprises & irrational hopes. - Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p42
No one can question his or her own vision of life, because thought is the originator of our experience. - Richard Carlson, You Can Be Happy No Matter What, p117
...the world of reality has its bounds, the world of the imagination is boundless; as we cannot enlarge the one, let us restrict the other... We should, therefore, desire mediocrity in all things, even in beauty.
- Rousseau, Emile
Our ancestors spent most of their lives dealing with physical problems: they fought, they loved, & they worked... Modern man finds himself in an immensely confusing world that offers no opportunity for the heroic virtues...lack of challenge induces boredom, ineptitude & a general draining of self-confidence. - Colin Wilson
We live in cities & suburbs & watch TV & drink beer, all the while being pushed & pulled by feelings designed to propagate our genes in a small hunter-gatherer population. It's no wonder that people often seem not be pursuing any particular goal - happiness, inclusive fitness, whatever - very successfully.
- Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
One habit that natural selection never "meant" to encourage was drug addiction itself. This miracle of technology is an unanticipated biochemical intervention, a subversion of the reward system. We were meant to get our thrills the old-fashioned way, from a hard day's work: eating, copulating, undermining rivals & so on.
- Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, p368
...as early as 1620 we find the philosophy that today prefers kidney machines to symphony orchestras, & would turn ancient churches into 'community centres', selling their works of art to provide creches & set up mother-&-toddler groups. We find already in Bacon the obsessive harping on happiness in a material sense, which makes our life today so mediocre in so many ways, which forgets that what is really worthwhile can be achieved only through struggle & suffering, that there are aims in life higher than the elimination of pain & the cultivation of pleasure.
- Anthony O'Hear, After Progress, p9
...once it is accepted that pleasure & pain are the only determinants of human activity...there is no good or evil, no sense that one pleasure is better than another, or some vicious or unsupportable.
- Anthony O'Hear, After Progress, p23
[No reader of the journal Science is] likely to be content with the statement that the searching out of the ideas that govern the universe has no other value than that it helps human animals to swarm & feed...the only thing that makes the human race worth perpetuation is that thereby rational ideas may be developed, & that rationalization of things furthered. - C. S. Peirce
Is life tolerable if all we are here to do is to swarm & feed?
- Anthony O'Hear, After Progress, p152
...when feeling any kind of pain or uneasiness we seem liable to underrate pain of a very dissimilar kind : thus in danger we value repose, overlooking its ennui, while the tedium of security makes us imagine the mingled excitement of past danger as almost purely pleasurable. ...And again when we are absorbed in any particular pleasant activity, the pleasures attending dissimilar activities are apt to be contemned : they appear coarse or thin, as the case may be : & this constitutes a fundamental objection to noting the exact degree of a pleasure at the time of experiencing it.
- Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, p145
...as a genuine preference for virtuous or refined pleasure is a mark of genuine virtue or refined taste, men who do not really feel such preference are unconsciously or consciously influenced by a desire to gain credit for it, & their express estimate of pleasures is thus modified & coloured.
- Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, p153
Men show a really startling readiness to admit that the estimates of happiness which guide them in their ordinary habits & pursuits are erroneous & illusory; & that from time to time the veil is, as it were, lifted & the error & the illusion made manifest. - Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, p154
...if a man accepts any end as ultimate & paramount, he accepts implicitly as his "method of ethics" whatever process of reasoning enables him to determine the actions most conducive to this end. - Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, p8
...in ease of body & peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, & the beggar who suns himself by the side of the highway possesses that security which kings are fighting for. - Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, iv, i
The prig is a very interesting psychological study, & though of all poses a moral pose is the most offensive, still to have a pose at all is something. - Wilde
We do what we must, & call it by the best names.
- Emerson, Considerations By The Way
Sensuality in its disguises :
(1) as idealism ("Plato"), peculiar to youth, creating the same kind of concave image that the beloved in particular assumes, imposing an encrustation, magnification, transfiguration, infinity upon everything --;
(2) in the religion of love : "a handsome young man, a beautiful woman", somehow divine, a bridegroom, a bride of the soul --;
(3) in art, as the "embellishing" power : as man sees woman &, as it were, makes her a present of everything excellent, so the sensuality of the artist puts into one object everything else that he honours & esteems - in this way he perfects an object ("idealizes" it). - Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Woman, conscious of man's feeling concerning women, assists his efforts at idealization by adorning herself, walking beautifully, dancing, expressing delicate thoughts : in the same way, she practises modesty, reserve, distance - realizing instinctively that in this way the idealizing capacity of the man will grow. ( - Given the tremendous subtlety of woman's instinct, modesty remains by no means conscious hypocrisy : she divines that it is precisely an actual naive modesty that most seduces a man & impels him to overestimate her. Therefore woman is naive - from the subtlety of her instinct, which advises her of the utility of innocence. A deliberate closing of one's eyes to oneself - Wherever dissembling produces a stronger effect when it is unconscious, it becomes unconscious.)
- Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p425
A beautiful woman is the hell of the soul, the purgatory of the purse, & the paradise of the eyes. - Fontenelle
Sexual pleasure has never done anybody any good. - Epicurus
At the same time, we must laugh, philosophize, manage our households, take care of our other private affairs, & never cease proclaiming the sayings born of true philosophy. - Epicurus
...the constantly proper end of action on the part of any individual at the moment of action is his real greatest happiness from that moment to the end of his life. - Bentham, Memoirs, p560
I do not want to talk about what you understand about this world. I want to know what you will do about it. I do not want to know what you hope. I want to know what you will work for. I do not want your sympathy for the needs of humanity. I want your muscle. - Robert Fulghum
...just as a horse ignorant of grammar is not miserable, a man who is a fool is not unhappy. - Erasmus
The school & sect of Chrysippus deem every man mad, whom vicious folly or the ignorance of truth drives blindly forward. This definition takes in whole nations... - Horace, Satires, II, iii
There is one species of folly that dreads things not in the least formidable; insomuch that it will complain of fires, & rocks, & rivers opposing it in the open plain; there is another different from this, but not a whit more approaching to wisdom, that runs headlong through the midst of flames & floods. - Horace, Satires, II, iii
We're all on earth to help others. What on earth the others are here for, we don't know. - W. H. Auden
See them in thought such as they ought to be when you must act upon them; but see them as they are when you are tempted to act for them.
- Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter 9
Believe all the good you can of everyone. Do not measure others by yourself. If they have advantages which you have not, let your liberality keep pace with their good fortune. Envy no one, & you need envy no one. - Hazlitt, On the Conduct of Life
Everything fertile & unpredictable is dangerous. - Mary Midgley p148
Ernest: Are you going to tell me now that all thought is, in its essence, dangerous?
Gilbert: Yes, in the practical sphere it is so. The security of society lies in custom & unconscious instinct, & the basis of the stability of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of intelligence amongst its members. The great majority of people being fully aware of this, rank themselves naturally on the side of that splendid system that elevates them to the dignity of machines, & rage so wildly against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any questions that concern life, that one is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
- Wilde, The Critic as Artist, II, p 182
Enlightenment rationality promised to free mankind from irrational & ignoble domination by corrupt & ignorant authorities, particularly...religious... But those chosen means of liberation...revealed human nature itself to be determined through & through by non-rational forces. The ennobling of man through reason, then, turns out in practice to destroy the basis of his self-respect. ...science...has brought us & our pretensions down. - Anthony O'Hear, After Progress, p25
...it is not the sleep of reason that brings forth monsters. It is reason itself, which shows us to be nothing but monsters.
- Anthony O'Hear, After Progress, p26
...in the passing moment, the quadruped interest is very prone to prevail: & this beast-force, whilst it makes the discipline of the world, the school of heroes, the glory of martyrs, has provoked in every age the satire of wits, & the tears of good men.
- Emerson, The Conduct of Life, VII
Society rapes the individual. - Tennessee Williams
Let it be allowed that though virtue or moral rectitude does indeed consist in affection to & pursuit of what is right & good, as such : yet that, when we sit down in a cool hour, we can neither justify to ourselves this or any other pursuit, till we are convinced that it will be for our own happiness, or at least not contrary to it. - Bishop Butler
Man is a rope, tied between beast & superman - a rope over an abyss...What is great in man is that he is a bridge & not an end : what can be loved in man is that he is an overture & a going under. - Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, I:4
The faults of others too often arise out of our own ill-temper; or though they should be real, we shall not mend them by exasperating ourselves against them. Treat your playmates as Hamlet advises Polonius to treat the players, "according to your own dignity rather than their deserts." If you fly out at everything in them that you disapprove or think done on purpose to annoy you, you lie constantly at the mercy of their caprice, rudeness or ill-nature. You should be more your own master.
Do not begin to quarrel with the world too soon: for, bad as it may be, it is the best we have to live in...Consider (as a matter of vanity) that if there were not so many knaves & fools as we find, the wise & honest would not be those rare & shining characters that they are allowed to be; & (as a matter of philosophy) that if the world be really incorrigible in this respect, it is a reflection to make one sad, not angry.
- Hazlitt, On the Conduct of Life
What others know about us. - What we know about ourselves & remember is not so decisive for the happiness of our life as people suppose. One day that which others know about us (or think they know) assaults us - & then we realize that this is more powerful. It is easier to cope with a bad conscience than...a bad reputation. - Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 52
Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would... not grow this twig again. - Stephen J. Gould
...the measure of the success of a web of memes - a myth, a hypothesis, a dogma, is not its truth but how well it serves as a social glue.
- Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle, p108
If you can convince enough people of your worldview, no matter how wrong you are, you're right! - Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle
It is convenient to believe, if one can, that all of one category is good, all of the other evil. - Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice
There is nothing that makes us feel so good as the idea that someone else is an evildoer. - Pratkanis/Aronson, Age of Propaganda
labeling inevitably functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- David Burns, Feeling Good, p157
Advertisers know all too well that we believe what we believe & buy what we buy in the service of our self-image. They imbue their products with a 'personality'. - Pratkanis/Aronson, Age of Propaganda
A man who merely rides in other people's automobiles may not rise to finer discrimination than between a Ford, a taxicab, & an automobile. But let the same man own a car & drive it, let him, as the psychoanalysts would say, project his libido upon automobiles, & he will describe a difference in carburettors by looking at the rear end of a car a city block away.
- Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
A communicator can be an immoral person & still be effective, as long as it seems that the communicator is not acting in his or her self-interest by attempting to persuade us. - Pratkanis/Aronson, Age of Propaganda
The mighty proposition with which civilisation begins : any custom is better than no custom. - Nietzsche, Daybreak, 16
...those gruesome hybrids of sickness & will to power called founders of religions. - Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Foreword 4.
...deep in the unconscious herd instinct of the British governing class there was a test of fitness for membership of this most gigantic of all social clubs, but a test which was seldom recognized by those to whom it was applied, the possession of some form of power over other people. ...
The conventional requirements with regard to personal morality, sexual or financial, were graded with almost meticulous exactitude to the degree of social, political or industrial power exercised by the person concerned. A duchess, especially if she came from a princely family, might exchange her insignificant duke for a powerful marquis as a habitual companion without causing the slightest dent in her social acceptability. But if Mrs Smith indulged in similar domestic waywardness the penalty was complete social ostracism. - Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship, p72-3
The unfortunate people condemned as atheists were often those whose enthusiasm for denouncing this hypothetical crime was just insufficiently enthusiastic. - Malcolm Bull, The Ecstasy of Philistinism
So many people are discontented unless they can be discontented. - Chesterton
If anyone is vain or proud, it is from folly or ignorance. - Hazlitt, On the Conduct of Life
In a test of beer drinkers: Drinking from a 6-pack without labels, beer lovers decided the quality of the beer was not very good & shared no particular preference for one bottle over another - even though their favorite brand was included as one of the unlabeled bottles. Later, given the same 6-packs, this time with the proper brand labels, the taste rating improved immeasurably & drinkers showed a definite preference for their own brand.
- Jeffrey Schrank, Snap, Crackle & Popular Taste (1977)
This century...is an age of organised masses & disappearing individuality. The unique, autonomous person, whose great literary record is the European novel, is ceasing to exist, or is, at any rate, under heavy pressure. There are some...who welcome this. In 'The Gutenberg Galaxy' McLuhan joyfully predicts man's reversion to the anonymity of tribal life.
- Anthony Quinton, Thoughts & Thinkers, p32
...those who do not bore themselves usually bore others, while those that bore themselves usually entertain others.
- Kierkegaard
Don't let us discuss anything solemnly. I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, & I live in terror of not being misunderstood. - Wilde, The Critic as Artist, p111
One of the most entertaining delusions of men is the belief that they always know everything which it is unquestionably necessary for them to know. Listen to them talking politics, that complex science, or discussing marriage & society.
- Stendhal, Love, p197
Don't degrade me into the position of giving you useful information. Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught. - Wilde, The Critic as Artist, p111
Even if my life had no other significance, I am satisfied with having discovered the absolutely demoralizing existence of the daily press. - Kierkegaard
We lived, indeed, in a perpetual state of ferment, receiving & questioning all contemporary hypotheses as to the duty & destiny of man in this world & the next. Into this all-questioning state of mind were thrust the two most characteristic of all current assumptions : first, that physical science could solve all problems, & secondly, that everyone, aided by a few elementary textbooks, could be his own philosopher & scientist - just as a previous generation had imagined that if only the law were codified into a clearly printed little handbook, every man could be his own lawyer.
- Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship, p78
...you can't use the expanding areas to sustain the others. This is not only because, being on the move, they are known to be unstable. Successful knowledge gets specialised. It's articulated in a specialised idiom, no longer the idiom in which we normally speak about human affairs. This makes it unavailable as a premise for one's vision of the world, or for one's social life.
- Ernest Gellner, in Bryan Magee's Talking Philosophy
The only real living interest of the majority both of men & women, especially after early youth, is eating - How to eat, what to eat, where to eat & when to eat. - Tolstoy, The First Step
Live? Our servants can do that for us. - Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Axel
No-one in Sydney ever wastes time debating the meaning of life - it's getting yourself a water frontage... in Melbourne all views are equally depressing - there's no point.
- Williamson, Emerald City p2
The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing - the marriage...of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, & endurance; with some man or woman's pain. - William James, Talks to Teachers, 166
`Know thyself!' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world `Be thyself' shall be written.
- Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time than someone else. - Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Here we have at once the principle of limitation, the only saving principle in the world. The more you limit yourself, the more fertile you become in invention. A prisoner in solitary confinement for life becomes very inventive, and a spider may furnish him with much entertainment.
- Kierkegaard (Either/Or, VOL. I, THE ROTATION METHOD)
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.
- Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
'HUMANITY.' - We do not regard the animals as moral beings. But do you suppose the animals regard us as moral beings? An animal which could speak said : "Humanity is a prejudice of which we animals at least are free."
- Nietzsche, Daybreak, 334
Everything in the world exudes crime - Baudelaire
If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; & if our soul has trembled with happiness & sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event - & in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, & affirmed.
- Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1032
One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of the cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, & preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! - Emerson, Nature, p3
Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace. - Elbert Hubbard
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. What is a day? What is a year? What is summer? What is a woman? What is a child? What is sleep?...To the wise,...a fact is true poetry, & the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to our door. - Emerson, Nature, p53
434. Making intercession. Unprepossessing landscapes exist for the great landscape painters, remarkable & rare ones for the petty. For the great things of nature & mankind have to intercede for all the petty, mediocre & ambitious among their admirers - but the great man intercedes for the simple things.
- Nietzsche, Daybreak
Nothing is truer than the Wordsworthian creed, on which Carlyle lays such stress, that we need only look on the miracle of every day, to sate ourselves with thought and admiration every day. But how are our faculties sharpened to do it? Precisely by apprehending the infinite results of every day.
Who sees the meaning of the flower uprooted in the ploughed field? The ploughman who does not look beyond its boundaries and does not raise his eyes from the ground? No—but the poet who sees that field in its relations with the universe, and looks oftener to the sky than on the ground. Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though, in truth, his dreaming must not be out of proportion to his waking!
The mind; roused powerfully by this existence, stretches of itself into what the French sage calls the "aromal state." From the hope thus gleaned it forms the hypothesis, under whose banner it collects its facts. - Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, p127 (1843)
The mystery & the possibilities are not in the roots of the grass, nor is the depth of things in the sea; they are in existence, in my soul. The marvel of existence, almost the terror of it, was flung on me with crushing force by the sea, the sun shining, the distant hills.
- Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart
I was utterly alone with the sun & the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, & the distant sea, far beyond sight...With all the intensity of feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the sun & sky, the starts hidden by the light, with the ocean, - in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written, - with these I prayed as if they were the keys of an instrument... The great sun, burning with light, the strong earth, - dear earth, - the warm sky, the pure air, the thought of ocean, the inexpressible beauty of all filled me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus, too, I prayed...The prayer, this soul-emotion, was in itself, not for an object: it was a passion. I hid my face in the grass. I was wholly prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt & carried away... Had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf, he would only have thought I was resting a few minutes. I made no outward show. Who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was going on in me as I reclined there!
- Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart, p5-6 (1883)
Surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured by the usual standards of commercial value. Yet in what other kind of value can the preciousness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if it consist not in feelings of excited significance like these, engendered in some one, by what the hour contains?
Yet so blind & dead does the clamor of our own practical interests make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as such, to have any perception of life's meaning on the large objective scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, & laying low in a minute the distinction which it takes a hard-working conventional man a lifetime to set up. You may be a prophet, at this rate; but you cannot be a worldly success.
- William James, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings
New York, Oct. 9, 1868
Dear Pete, - It is splendid here this forenoon - bright & cool. I was out early taking a short walk by the river only two squares from where I live...Shall I tell you about [my life] just to fill up? I generally spend the forenoon in my room writing, &c, then take a bath fix up & go out about twelve & loafe somewhere or go call on someone down town or on business, or perhaps if it is very pleasant & I feel like it ride a trip with some driver friend on Broadway from 23rd Street to Bowling Green, three miles each way. (Every day I find I have plenty to do, every hour is occupied with something.) You know it is a never ending amusement & study & recreation for me to ride a couple of hours on a pleasant afternoon on a Broadway stage in this way. You see everything as you pass, a sort of living, endless panorama - shops & splendid buildings & great windows: on the broad sidewalks crowds of women richly dressed continually passing, altogether different, superior in style & looks from any to be seen anywhere else - in fact a perfect stream of people - men too dressed in high style, & plenty of foreigners - & then in the streets the thick crowd of carriages, stages, carts, hotel & private coaches, & in fact all sorts of vehicles & many first class teams, mile after mile, & the splendour of such a great street & so many tall, ornamental, noble buildings many of them of white marble, & the gayety & motion on every side: you will not wonder how much attraction all this is on a fine day, to a great loafer like me, who enjoys so much seeing the busy world move by him, & exhibiting itself for his amusement, while he takes it easy & just looks on & observes. - Walt Whitman
Truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may say, & not altogether creditable to a grown-up man. And yet, from the deepest point of view, who knows the more of truth, & who knows the less, - Whitman on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle inspires him, or you, full of the disdain which the futility of his occupation excites? ...But to the jaded & unquickened eye it is all dead & common, pure vulgarism, flatness, & disgust. "Hech! it is a sad sight" says Carlyle, walking at night with some one who appeals to him to note the splendor of the stars. And that very repetition of the scene to new generations of men...that eternal recurrence of the common order, which so fills a Whitman with mystic satisfaction, is to a Schopenhauer, with the emotional anaesthesia, the feeling of 'awful inner emptiness' from out of which he views it all, the chief ingredient of the tedium it instils. What is life on the largest scale, he asks, but the same recurrent inanities, the same dog barking, the same fly buzzing, forevermore? Yet of the kind of fibre of which such inanities consist is the material woven of all the excitements, joys, & meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in this world.
To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whitman, to the mere spectacle of the world's presence, is one way, & the most fundamental way, of confessing one's sense of its unfathomable significance & importance. But how can one attain to the feeling of the vital significance of an experience, if one have it not to begin with? There is no receipt which one can follow. Being a secret & a mystery, it often comes in mysteriously unexpected ways. It blossoms sometimes from out of the very grave wherein we imagined that our happiness was buried.
- William James, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings
Here only, & for the first time, he appreciated, because he was deprived of it, the happiness of eating when he was hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy, & of talking when he felt the desire to exchange some words... He learnt that man is meant for happiness, & that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of existence, & that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need, but of our abundance... - Tolstoy, War & Peace
Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. - Emerson
...we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, & to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, & glib with verbalities & verbosities; & in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, & we grow stone-blind & insensible to life's more elementary & general goods & joys.
The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound & primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist.
- William James, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings
I wish to be at all times hereafter only a Yea-sayer
- Nietzsche, The Gay Science, IV
For truly, the heart at the center of the universe with every throb hurls the flood of happiness into every artery, vein & veinlet, so that the whole system is inundated with the tides of joy. - Emerson, Success
All my experience as a psychologist leads me to the conclusion that a sense of reverence is necessary for psychological health. If a person has no sense of reverence, no feeling that there is anyone or anything that inspires awe, it cuts the conscious personality off completely from the nourishing springs of the unconscious. It is ironic, then, that so much of our modern culture is aimed at eradicating all reverence, all respect for the high truths & qualities that inspire a feeling of awe & worship in the human soul. - Robert Johnson
When [Maslow's] students began thinking & talking about peak experiences every day, they began having peak experiences all the time.
- Colin Wilson, The Outsider
...the chief aim & bent of the following system is to obtain, first, a perfectly patient, &, to the utmost of the pupil's power, a delicate method of work, such as may ensure his seeing truly. For I am nearly convinced that, when once we see keenly enough, there is very little difficulty in drawing what we see; but, even, supposing that this difficulty be still great, I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; & I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love Nature, than teach the looking at Nature that they may learn to draw. It is surely also a more important thing, for young people & unprofessional students, to know how to appreciate the art of others, than to gain much power in art themselves. - Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, preface
Do not keep the alabaster boxes of your love & tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness. Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them & while their hearts can be thrilled by them. - Henry Ward Beecher
Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. - Anais Nin
There are two types of people--those who come into a room and say, "Well, here I am!" and those who come in and say, "Ah, there you are."
- Frederick L Collins
Your worst humiliation is only someone else's momentary entertainment.
- Karen Crockett
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself. - Erich Fromm
...it is not what we get but what we become by our endeavours that makes them worthwhile. - Ruskin
You will learn more by agreeing in the main with others & entering into their trains of thinking, than by contradicting & urging them to extremities... Sound conclusions come with practical knowledge, rather than with speculative refinements: in what we really understand, we reason but little... be neither too tenacious of your own claims, nor inclined to press too hard on their weaknesses.
...I would rather be asked out to sing than to talk. Every one does not pretend to a fine voice, but everyone fancies he has as much understanding as another.
- Hazlitt, On the Conduct of Life
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
- J. M. Keynes, accused of inconsistency
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time-a tremendous whack. - Winston Churchill
Nobody really cares if you're miserable, so you might as well be happy.
- Cythia Nelms
Every suffering sheep says to himself, "I suffer; it must be somebody's fault." But his shepherd, the ascetic priest, says to him, "You are quite right, my sheep, somebody must be at fault here, but that somebody is yourself." This is not only very bold but also abundantly false. But one thing, at least, has been accomplished : resentment has found a new target.
- Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, XV, 265
...lament is passively internalized, as in the commonplace bumper sticker that reads SHIT HAPPENS... - as opposed to the non-stoical & less preconditioned SHIT IS CAUSED, which...to my knowledge does not exist. - Richard Leppert, Adorno on Music, p49
I was born modest, but it didn't last. - Mark Twain
Everything almost depends on first impression, & these depend (besides person, which it not in our power) upon two things, dress & address, which everyone may command with proper attention. These are the small coin in the intercourse of life which are continually in request; & perhaps you will find at the year's end...that the daily insults, coldness, or contempt, to which you have been exposed by a neglect of such superficial recommendations, are hardly atoned for by the few proofs of esteem or admiration which your integrity or talents have been able to extort in the course of it. When we habitually disregard those things which we know will ensure the favourable opinion of others, it shews we set that opinion at defiance, or consider ourselves above it, which no one ever did with impunity. - Hazlitt, On the Conduct of Life
There are two aims which the teacher may have in view when addressing to his students a question or a suggestion... First, to help the student to solve the problem at hand. Second, to develop the student's ability so that he may solve future problems by himself. - Polya, How To Solve It
...it may fairly be doubted whether men in general do value domestic life very highly, apart from the gratification of sexual passion. Certainly whenever any part of civilised society is in such a state that men can freely indulge this passion & at the same time avoid the burden of a family, without any serious fear of social disapprobation, celibacy tends to become common : it has even become so common as to excite the grave anxiety of legislators. - Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, p156
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PHILOSOPHY
...the struggle to set philosophy's question agenda is in effect a dispute for territorial dominance... To articulate a philosophical position is to engage in an imperialism of sorts. For half the battle...lies in managing to set the agenda, to be in a position to determine the rules of conflict...
- Nicholas Rescher, Philosophical Reasoning, p42
...that "philosophy", a confused mixture of scientific abstractions & historical facts, which is professionally expounded by people called philosophers.
- R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p314
PHILOSOPHY: the art of self-expression - Hans Cornelius
...a tool which is useful only against philosophers & against the philosopher in us. - Wittgenstein
...reclassification of substantives with adjectives
- Morris Lazerowitz
PHILOSOPHERS: professors of what another man has suffered
- Kierkegaard
Wherever you are puzzled you have made an assumption & it is your duty to discover what that assumption is. - Bradley
...the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise. - Russell, History of Western Philosophy, end of Hegel chapter, p715
The only thing that is certain is that whatever you may say of this procedure, someone will accuse you of misunderstanding it.
- William James on Hegel's dialectics
The harmonious feeling or attitude, which the metaphysician tries to express in a monistic system, is more clearly expressed in the music of Mozart. And when a metaphysician gives verbal expression to his dualistic-heroic attitude towards life in a dualistic system, is it not perhaps because he lacks the ability of a Beethoven to express this attitude in an adequate medium? Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability. - Carnap
...anyone who suffers from a pronounced feeling of inadequacy & self-estrangement will not be satisfied merely with expressing it... He will also search for a resolution of his difficulty...a spurious subject, an empty, syntactical x which the unconscious can use for its own ends.
- Morris Lazerowitz, Studies in Metaphilosophy, p249
[Michael Balint in "Thrills & Regressions"] ...has described the acquisition of certain skills as falling under the formula "progression for the sake of regression", & it is difficult to resist the thought that philosophy is a linguistic skill which falls under this formula.
- Morris Lazerowitz, Studies in Metaphilosophy, p70
A philosopher who holds a view like "Time is unreal" & resists its translation into "There are no temporal facts" is not failing to see an obvious implication. ...his words...do not have that translation because he has, in the way usual in philosophy, changed language.
- Morris Lazerowitz, Moore & Philosophical Analysis, p212
A philosopher who holds a bizarre anti-common sense view has, like Hume, performed a conversion analysis & has not governed himself by Moore's prohibition against using analysis to justify radical alterations of ordinary speech. With Moore philosophy gains sobriety & the appearance ["Moore's empirical-seeming refutations are actually counter-moves with language"] of rigour but loses most of its dramatic appeal; & it is taste & nothing else which dictates which we choose in philosophy, the extravagance of metaphysics or the sobriety of Common Sense with its semblance of science. We may say with Hume: "'Tis not solely in poetry & music we must follow our taste & sentiment, but likewise in philosophy." (Treatise I, iii, 8)
- Morris Lazerowitz, Moore & Philosophical Analysis, p213
Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been : namely, the personal confession of its author & a kind of involuntary & unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown. - Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, 6
If you can't say it you can't say it & you can't whistle it either. - Frank Ramsey
Do not place thought as a barrier between you & love: do not abstract yourself into the regions of truth, far from the smile of earthly beauty. Let not the cloud sit upon your brow: let not the canker sink into your heart. Look up, laugh loud, talk big, keep the colour in your cheek & the fire in your eye, adorn your person, maintain your health, your beauty, & your animal spirits, & you will pass for a fine man. But should you let your blood stagnate in some deep metaphysical question, or refine too much in your ideas of the sex, forgetting yourself in a dream of exalted perfection, you will want an eye to cheer you, a hand to guide you, a bosom to lean on, & will stagger into your grave, old before your time, unloved & unlovely. If you feel that you have not the necessary advantages of person, confidence & manner, & that it is uphill work with you to gain the ear of beauty, quit the pursuit at once, & seek for other satisfactions & consolations.
- Hazlitt, On the Conduct of Life
Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity; one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, voluntarily, one slowly inters oneself. - Bertrand Russell
You can't think decently if you don't want to hurt yourself.
You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are.
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself...he will remain superficial in his writing.
Working in philosophy...is really more a working on oneself.
That man will be revolutionary who can revolutionize himself.
- Wittgenstein
But let us talk in our mother tongue, & not believe that we must pull ourselves out of the swamp by our own hair; that was - thank God - only a dream. We are only supposed to remove misunderstandings, after all. - Wittgenstein
When I come into new living quarters under new circumstances I undertake as soon as possible to devise a technique to endure the various discomforts & to avoid friction: I accommodate myself to the given circumstances. And thus I accommodate myself gradually also with thinking, only this cannot be done simply through a certain degree of self-mastery & intellect. Instead this must form & arrange itself on its own. Just as one finally does fall asleep in this strained position. And being able to work is in so many ways similar to being able to fall asleep...both cases concern a shift in the troops of interest. (In the one case it is merely a withdrawal, in the other a withdrawal & concentration at some location.) - Wittgenstein's diaries
Thinking is sometimes easy, often difficult but at same time thrilling...But when it's most important it's just disagreeable, that is when it threatens to rob one of one's pet notions & to leave one all bewildered & with a feeling of worthlessness. In these cases I & others shrink from thinking or can only get ourselves to think after a long sort of struggle...
...I know that it's difficult to think well about 'certainty', 'probability', 'perception', &c. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people's lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's most important. - Wittgenstein
...every man who is devoted to the purely objective contemplation (& it is this that is meant by the knowledge of ideas) completely loses sight of his will, & its objects, & pays no further regard to the interests of his own person, but becomes a pure intelligence free from any admixture of will. - Schopenhauer
...the average man is wholly relegated to the sphere of being ; the genius, on the other hand, lives & moves chiefly in the sphere of knowledge. ...a man can be one thing only but he may know countless things.
- Schopenhauer, Parerga & Paralipomena, VII p96
...science is aesthetic intellect, or intellect exhibiting the capriciousness of art & framing to itself imaginary objects: history is religious intellect, or intellect submitting itself with self-forgetful devotion to the claims of absolute fact: philosophy is intellectual intellect. - R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p56
...in what matter soever there is place for addition & subtraction, there also is place for reason; & where these have no place, reason has nothing at all to do. - Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 5
...the same degree of precision is not to be sought for in all subjects...it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the subject admits. - Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
In every question the nature & manner of the proof it is capable of should be first be considered to make our enquiry such as it should be.
- Locke,Conduct of the Understanding, p69
When a doubt is propounded, you must learn to distinguish, & show wherein a thing holds, & wherein it doesn't hold. Ay, or no, never answered any Question. The not distinguishing where things should be distinguished, & the not confounding where things should be confounded, is the cause of all the mistakes in the World.
- John Selden, Table-Talk
We find few disputes that are not founded on some ambiguity in the expression...
- Hume, Essays, Of The Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature
Knowledge then seems to me nothing but the perception of the connexion & agreement, or disagreement & repugnancy, of any of our ideas. In this alone it consists. - Locke, Essays , IV, i, 2
Truth is all simple, all pure, will bear no mixture of anything else with it.
- Locke, Conduct of the Understanding, p66
To be indifferent which of two opinions is true is the right tempo of the mind that preserves it from being impressed on & disposes it to examine with that indifferency till it has done its best to find the truth; & this is the only direct & safe way to it. But to be indifferent whether we embrace falsehood for truth or no is the great road to error.
- Locke, Conduct of the Understanding, p63
He that has a mind to believe has half assented already.
- Locke, Conduct of the Understanding, p103
Truths are not the better or worse for their obviousness or difficulty, but their value is to be measured by their usefulness & tendency.
- Locke, Conduct of the Understanding, p87
...by reading & understanding...I mean, not barely comprehending what is affirmed or denied in each proposition, but to see & follow the train of his reasonings, observe the strength & clearness of their connection & examine upon what they bottom. - Locke
What counts as a fact depends on the concepts you use, on the questions you ask. - Mary Midgley, Beast and Man, p7
...facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations.
- Nietszche, Will to Power, 481
...if what philosophers are currently saying is true, there is no need to listen to them. Only if what they say is false do they continue to be the guardians of a significant & important enquiry. - Brenda Almond in The Impulse to Philosophize, p217
Only what is fruitful is true. - Goethe
I believe that nothing can be true which it is not good to believe, & that the truest is the best. - G. T. Fechner, Zend-Avesta (1851)
PRAGMATISM : "the greatest American contribution to life" - Dewey
...We all fear truth... - Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Why I Am So Clever, 4
Truth that is worth pursuing needs to contribute to understanding.
- Mary Midgley p62
The meaning of a proposition is its method of verification. - Shlick
...to benefit from...technology we need not know or understand the science of which it is the product. Whereas to benefit from philosophy one has to think for oneself, to do philosophy. Philosophy does not have any products which the public can use or from which it can benefit. In that sense philosophy is useless & should not try to defend itself to those who can see no value in anything except utility. The enrichment which it brings to intellectual life cannot be understood in terms of its utility.
- Dilman in The Impulse to Philosophize, p115
Philosophical thinking is not something that a normal human being can submit to all the time, nor at any time he or she may choose. Philosophical questions...are not questions that are alive for one at just any time...they drift between the boring and the urgent.
- Stanley Cavell
One of the miseries of intellectual pretensions is, that nine-tenths of those you come in contact with do not know whether you are an impostor or not.
- Hazlitt, On the Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority
The use of philosophy is to maintain an active novelty of fundamental ideas illuminating the social system. It reverses the slow descent of accepted thought towards the inactive commonplace...philosophy is mystical. For mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet unspoken. But the purpose of philosophy is to rationalise mysticism: not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterisations, rationally coordinated.
Philosophy is akin to poetry, & both of them seek to express that ultimate good sense which we term civilization. In each case there is reference to form beyond the direct meanings of words. Poetry allies itself to metre, philosophy to mathematic pattern.
- Whitehead, [end of] Modes of Thought
...study, psychologists, the philosophy of the 'rule' in its struggle with the exception... - Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, 218
Auschwitz was a rational place, but it was not a reasonable one. - George Friedman
the work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders ["given" in the world] for a particular purpose. - Wittgenstein, PI 227
Philosophy does not have a purpose - it is philosophers that have purposes. - Nicholas Fearn
External criticism is valueless; the true critic is one who can place himself at the point of view criticized, & in his own person live out its consequences to the bitter end. He must vivisect himself in illustration of his own lecture. ...such a criticism is not merely destructive. It is a vindication... - R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, p45
...self-love is liable to engross the mind to a degree incompatible with a healthy & vigorous outflow of those 'disinterested' impulses towards particular objects...the principle of Egoistic Hedonism, when applied with a due knowledge of the laws of human nature, is practically self-limiting; i.e. that a rational of attaining the end at which it aims requires that we should to some extent put it out of sight & not directly aim at it...it is an experience only too common among men...that they let the original object & goal of their efforts pass out of view, & come to regard the means to this end as ends in themselves: so that they at last even sacrifice the original end to the attainment of what is only secondarily & derivatively desirable. And if it be thus easy & common to forget the end in the means overmuch, there seems no reason why it should be difficult to do it to the extent that Rational Egoism prescribes: &, in fact, it seems continually to be done by ordinary persons in the case of amusements & pastimes of all kinds. - Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, p136-7
When the second volume of the Decline [of the West ] appeared, in 1922, its reception did not even remotely approach that of the first, even though the thesis of the decline is not concretely developed until the second volume. The laymen who had read Spengler as they had read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer before him had in the meantime become estranged from philosophy; the professional philosophers were soon to flock to Heidegger, whose work was to give their irritation more dignified and refined expression. He exalted death and promised to transform the thought of it into a professional secret for academics; Spengler had simply decreed it without respect to persons. Spengler was left behind....
- Adorno, Prisms, "Spengler After the Decline", p53
Recent ideology critique already appears in respectable garb, & in Marxism & especially psychoanalysis it has even put on suit & tie so as to completely assume an air of bourgeois respectability. It has given up its life as satire, in order to win its position in books as 'theory'. - Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p16
I find the coincidence of the extremes of eastern & western speculation in the daring statement of Schelling, "there is in every man a certain feeling, that he has been what he is from all eternity, & by no means became such in time." - Emerson
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POLITICS
Politics is the art of making people indifferent to what should concern them. - Paul Valery
...the meaning of life is just the little matter on which our official ideology of scientific enlightenment & liberal politics studiously refuses to pronounce; in place of anything like that, what we are offered are material prosperity, formal equality & political participation, & when these are not enough, drugs or therapy or yet more unrealizable political promises.
- Anthony O'Hear, After Progress, p237
One is always wrong, but with two, truth begins. - One cannot prove his case, but two are irrefutable. - Nietzsche, The Gay Science, III, 260
History written by Power taught us that we had lost.... We did not believe what Power taught us. We skipped class when they taught conformity and idiocy. We failed modernity. We are united by the imagination, by creativity, by tomorrow. In the past we not only met defeat but also found a desire for justice and the dream of being better. We left skepticism hanging from the hook of big capital and discovered that we could believe, that it was worth believing, that we should believe -- in ourselves. Health to you, and don't forget that flowers, like hope, are harvested. - Subcommandante Marcos
Democracy is a kind of religion, & we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths & utopias are the noblest exercises of human reason, & no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture. - William James
...we cannot have a nation-state without imagining what it is - & once it is imagined, that is what it becomes, as a basis for thought & action.
- Donald Horne, The Public Culture, p108
MYTH ...a belief held in common by a large group of people that gives events & actions a particular meaning. - Donald Horne, The Public Culture
For [USA & USSR] their revolutions are projected as events of unique world significance, but the 'myths' of their revolutions are reinterpretable : their revolutions are...a 'mythic' resource that can be drawn on to give any meaning that modern circumstance may demand. - Donald Horne, The Public Culture, p111
In the ideal images of its enthusiasts, the industrial society can be seen as itself a factory... The factory-nation is seen as an 'economy' that can be 'managed'. The tests of 'economic management' are...found in...growth... If the figures do not show 'growth'... the society is stagnating - Donald Horne, The Public Culture, p80
...the only proper avenue to human dignity & welfare is seen as through income-producing labour. ...one of the most magically glowing cults of industrialism. ...the very success of industrialism depends on most people doing what they are told to do. - Donald Horne, The Public Culture
In the public culture...life was offered its greatest secular meaning in the absorption of selfhood into loyalty to Crown & Empire. The greatest honour available to mankind was to lay down one's life for God & Emperor. It was only in the France of the Third Republic & in the US that honour could be achieved by laying down one's life for 'the people'. - Donald Horne, The Public Culture, p151
In modern industrial societies traditional folk culture has been attenuated into a few last souvenirs. The culture that dominates the public scene is not a ruling-class culture of triumphal display, but a fabricated 'public culture' that purports to be the culture not just of the rulers but of all the people.
- Donald Horne, The Public Culture, p184
...in Britain techniques of self-criticism abound which allow the criticism of everything except what most matters. - Donald Horne, The Public Culture, p114
The notion of 'warranted assertability' already has an air of Watergate about it. - Alex Carey, Taking The Risk Out of Democracy, p78
the mass media may not tell you what to think, but they do tell you what to think about & how to do it.
- Pratkanis/Aronson, Age of Propaganda, p26
The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process.
- Edward Bernays, The Engineering of Consent, 1947
This is the secret of propaganda : Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing they are immersed in it. - Joseph Goebbels
Proctor & Gamble does not sell Crest toothpaste by taking out one newspaper or running one television commercial. They sell & resell it every day by keeping the product fresh in the consumer's mind. The institutes sell ideas in much the same manner. - Edwin Feulner 1985
[the dominance of public debate by free-market think tanks is effective] in keeping...debate within its proper perspective.
- Edwin Feulner, president, Heritage Foundation, 1978
...a standard pre-persuasion tactic used by just about every politician worth his or her salt - define the issue in a such a way that you can't help but win. - Pratkanis/Aronson, Age of Propaganda, p53
...In any debate, especially one fought in the arena of public opinion, the battle is won not by knockdown arguments but by the party that succeeds in placing its own spin on the terms presiding over the discussion. - Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle, p312
The subtlest & most persuasive of all influences are those which create & maintain the repertory of stereotypes. - Walter Lippmann
IGNORANCE SPIRAL : a cynical populace bombarded with more & more thoughtless propaganda that they have less & less skill & inclination to process & ability to understand. Hitler's belief that the masses are ignorant thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
- Pratkanis/Aronson, Age of Propaganda, p356
WHAT THE PUBLIC IS INTERESTED IN : ...not fixed, a given, eternal, immutable, fact of nature. The appetite is rather, & largely, constructed by the very media that feed it, in a glorious circle of supply creating demand & demand creating supply. - A. Belsey, Journalism & Ethics
...there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, & what are not. - Wilde, The Critic as Artist, p192
Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands & influence, & need not to be flattered, but schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, & break them up, & draw individuals out of them. - Emerson, Considerations By The Way
Democratic culture presses us to accept every taste that does no obvious damage. A teacher who criticizes the music of his pupils, or who tries to cultivate, in the place of it, a love for the classics, will be attacked as 'judgemental'. In matters of aesthetic taste, no adverse judgement is permitted except judgement of the adverse judge. This attitude has helped America to survive & flourish in a world of change. An aristocratic culture has an instinctive aversion to what is vulgar, sentimental or commonplace; not so a democratic culture, which sacrifices good taste to popularity, & places no obstacles whatsoever before the ordinary citizen in his quest for a taste of his own. This is the culture whose 'political theology' has been so carefully constructed by Rawls in his Theory of Justice - the culture in which 'conceptions of the good' belong to the private sphere, & the public sphere has no other business than to guarantee fair treatment for everyone, without regard for private tastes.
- Roger Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, 497-9
One of the legacies of the Vietnam War is the now infamous quote from an American military press officer, "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." Rings some bells these days. In the name of "fighting terror," countries with secret weapons programs are poised to pulverize Iraq because of its secret weapons programs. And Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) are being used against civilians in order to prevent WMD from being used against civilians. - Heather Wokusch
Way back in 1988, on the 3rd of July, the U.S.S. Vincennes, a missile cruiser stationed in the Persian Gulf, accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner and killed 290 civilian passengers. George Bush the First, who was at the time on his presidential campaign, was asked to comment on the incident. He said quite subtly, "I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are." - Arundhati Roy
People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.… All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked and denounce the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. - Goering
...the men of God, when they came to power, learned to play the game of power. The only difference between them & others is that, since they had a certitude of having a pipeline to God, they did not have to reckon at all with the uneasy factor of their conscience. The most destructive imperialisms of the world have been those of men who have elevated their preferences to the pinnacle of moral imperatives & who have then confidently proceeded to impose those imperatives on others.
- Max Lerner, Introduction, Machiavelli's Prince & Discourses, pxlv
It's possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way. - Marx to Engels, 1857
The tendency for American policymakers to view freedom as encompassing not just political liberties but also commercial "economic freedom" limits the ability of other nations to protect their domestic industries and natural resources from control by powerful foreign corporations. - Stephen Zunes
In some countries the better part of the meaning of the magically glowing word "freedom" is that it is a nice way of saying "capitalism" without actually saying it. - Donald Horne, The Public Culture, p172
When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.
- Mark Twain
PATRIOTISM: the religion of the state - Mortimer Adler
Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception. - Mark Twain
Trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood —that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy, he plunged into war.
- Lincoln on James Polk & Mexican War, 1848
Thomas Merton feared that an Auschwitz or a whole terrorist apparatus of genocide could be "set up tomorrow anywhere and made to work ... because there is no dearth of people who .... will instinctively welcome and submit to an ideology ... which turns them loose against their fellow man to destroy him cruelly and without compunction, as long as he belongs to another race, or believes in a different set of semi-meaningless political slogans."
"It is enough", Merton added, "to affirm one basic principle: anyone belonging to class x or nation y or race z is to be regarded as subhuman and worthless, and consequently has no right to exist. All the rest will follow without difficulty."
There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals ... others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public. - Edward Herman
...most of us fill out large parts of our lives by telling each other simple little narratives to such an extent that one can approach a society simply by asking : what are its characteristic anecdotes? In this sense, most of 'the news' is highly 'conversational'. It consists mainly of the presentation of anecdotes in the form of 'events', even if in the Communist countries there is a greater attempt to place these 'events' as part of processes...
...'the news' must also respond to the unexpected & the uncontrived. This makes it different from all traditional legend-telling. 'The news' repeats the old verities every day, but it does so by telling constant new stories...
...In liberal-democratic societies there is a certain defined area of political struggle - between the accepted political parties - but this struggle also helps explain & justify order by displaying that the society is liberal-democratic; any political struggle beyond this is likely either not to be reported, or reported as deviant or threatening.
...a prime function...is not to 'inform' but to act as a ritual...
- Donald Horne, The Public Culture, p17-22
...it is part of the 'myth' of liberal democracy that it is not only democratic but useful (efficient) that there should be informed debate in a free marketplace of ideas about what is supposed to be happening. What is happening...is that in the interests of preserving a modern, industrial state governments permanently concern themselves with the forms of the accumulation of capital & labour & with the 'management' of the economy... - Donald Horne, The Public Culture, p128
The commonest trick is this: of people's individual spending mention only the goods they get, but of their collective spending mention only the prices they pay. When they buy a private car & a public road to drive it on, present the car as a benefit & the road as a tax or cost. Tell how the private sector is the productive sector which gives us food, clothing, houses, cars, holidays & all good things, while the public sector gives us nothing but red tape & tax demands. - Hugh Stretton
I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers - and it was not there . . . in her fertile fields and boundless forests and it was not there . . . in her rich mines and her vast world commerce - and it was not there . . . in her democratic Congress and her matchless Constitution - and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great. - de Tocqueville
'Democracy,' in the United States rhetoric refers to a system of governance in which elite elements based in the business community control the state by virtue of their dominance of the private society, while the population observes quietly. So understood, democracy is a system of elite decision and public ratification, as in the United States itself. Correspondingly, popular involvement in the formation of public policy is considered a serious threat. It is not a step towards democracy; rather it constitutes a 'crisis of democracy' that must be overcome.
- Noam Chomsky, On Power and Ideology (1987)
Prayer for supernatural intervention in earthly affairs has never worked, yet belief in prayer as the way of getting things done has provided 'legitimations' so complex that they have provided much of the bases of most past cultures, just as in modern secular societies belief in politics & economics as ways of getting things done have produced 'legitimations' so complex that they have provided much of the bases of most modern cultures. - Donald Horne, The Public Culture, p23
PLURALISTIC IGNORANCE : in which each person decided that since nobody is concerned, nothing is wrong...where a single individual, uninfluenced by the seeming calm of others, would react.
- Robert Cialdini, Influence
Thus corporations finally claimed the full rights enjoyed by individual citizens while being exempted from many of the responsibilities and liabilities of citizenship. Furthermore, in being guaranteed the same right to free speech as individual citizens, they achieved, in the words of Paul Hawken, 'precisely what the Bill of Rights was intended to prevent: domination of public thought and discourse.' The subsequent claim by corporations that they have the same right as any individual to influence the government in their own interest pits the individual citizen against the vast financial and communications resources of the corporation and mocks the constitutional intent that all citizens have an equal voice in the political debates surrounding important issues.
- David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World
All conservatives are such from personal defects. - Emerson, Conduct of Life, p15
At least one erstwhile national leader now promotes a sort of New Age spiritualism. In 1992, the former president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel—who was raised by governesses and chauffeurs in a fervently anti-communist, wealthy family and who has reclaimed for his private ownership a publicly owned building and other holdings that once belonged to his family—called for a new breed of political leader, who would rely less on "rational, cognitive thinking," and show "humility in the face of the mysterious order of Being" and "trust in his own subjectivity as his principal link with the subjectivity of the world." We should have a "sense of transcendental responsibility, archetypal wisdom," and the ability "to get to the heart of reality through personal experience." Havel lists the ecological dangers facing the world but denounces the idea of rational, collective social efforts to solve them. He denounces democracy's "traditional mechanisms" for being linked to "the cult of objectivity and statistical average." He thinks he is being visionary when in fact he is putting forth an elitist subjectivism and antidemocratic obscurantism.
-Michael Parenti, The New Age Mythology
...everything that tends to favor religion (even though it were believed false) should be received & availed of to strengthen it; & this should be done the more, the wiser the rulers are, & the better they understand the natural course of things.
- Machiavelli, Discourses, ch12
My country is the world. My countrymen are mankind. - Tom Paine
...there is only one truly social orientation, namely the one of solidarity with mankind. Social cohesion within the group, combined with antagonism to the outsider, is not social feeling but extended egotism. - Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, p318
The Principle of Equality...is that we should not be distracted or detained in any way from trying to make well-off in a certain sense all those who are badly off. That is the solution to the problem of justice.
- Ted Honderich, philosopher : a kind of life, p20
...size is not always an advantage: the trick is to use your rival's bigger size & consequently inflexibility against him. - Dixit/Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically
In the affairs of rulers, the general public, or important people, if something lofty & noble is possible & appropriate, decision is made in favor of that. If something that does not require expenditure of energy & is easy to accomplish is possible & appropriate, decision is made in favor of that. If something that requires effort & intense exertion but cannot be avoided is possible & appropriate, decision is made in favor of that. Decision is made in favor of that which eliminates trouble, if possible & appropriate; decision is made in favor of that which leads to good fortune, if possible & appropriate. - The Master of Demon Valley
When respect is extreme, then there is no familiarity; when familiarity is extreme, then there is no respect. - Master of the Hidden Storehouse
==================================================
JOKES
- I'm Neddy Seagoon - I'm famous.
- How famous?
- You heard of the Eiffel Tower?
- Yes.
- Well, let that be a lesson to you.
- Wait a minute - how could the Eiffel Tower make you famous?
- I fell off it.
- But no man has fallen from the Eiffel Tower & lived!
- Call this living?
- Only in the mating season. - The Goons
===========================================================
POETRY
LIKE THIS
If anyone asks you
how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting
will look, lift your face
and say,
Like this.
When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the night sky, climb up upon the roof
and dance and say,
Like this?
If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is,
or what "God's fragrance" means,
lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close.
Like this.
When someone quotes the old poetic image
about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,
slowly loosen knot by knot the strings
of your robe.
Like this?
If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don't try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.
Like this. Like this.
When someone asks what it means
to "die for love", point
here.
If someone asks how tall I am, frown
and measure with your fingers the space
between the creases on your forehead.
This tall.
The soul sometimes leaves the body, then returns.
When someone doesn't believe that,
walk back into my house.
Like this.
When lovers moan,
they're telling our story.
Like this.
I am a sky where spirits live.
Stare into this deepening blue,
while the breeze says a secret.
Like this.
When someone asks what there is to do,
light the candle in his hand.
Like this.
How did Joseph's scent come to Jacob?
Huuuuu.
How did Jacob's sight return?
Huuuu.
A little wind cleans the eyes.
Like this.
When Shams comes back from Tabriz,
he'll put his head around the edge
of the door to surprise us.
Like this.
- Rumi
Great Quotes on Life and Art
Saturday, April 12, 2008
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