Quotes
This is my version of a “commonplace book”, a notebook of passages copied out while reading and gathered under topical headings so they could be found again. Back when books were too valuable to be written in directly, keeping a commonplace was a popular way to record info you wanted to come back to later; Erasmus taught his students how to keep one,1 John Locke published a method for indexing his,2 and Jefferson3 and Milton4 each kept their own.
Nothing here comes from a book of quotations or a list found online. I read or heard every one of these in its source and copied it down myself.
“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer: If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.”
“If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.”
“There is no happiness for the man who does not travel. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner. For Indra is the friend of the traveller. Therefore wander!”
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
“I gotta take a stand...I am not gonna sit on my ass as the events that affect me unfold to determine the course of my life. I’m gonna take a stand.”
“Never go with a hippie to a second location.”
“A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.”
“As we have seen, these words we have half digested are the distillations of great questions that must be faced if one is to live a serious life: reason-revelation, freedom-necessity, democracy-aristocracy, good-evil, body-soul, self-other, city-man, eternity-time, being-nothing.”
“If the mind itself is not included among the things that are relative to cultures, the observations of cultural relativism are trivial and have always been accepted. Yet everyone likes cultural relativism but wants to exempt what concerns him. The physicist want to save his atoms; the historian, his events; the moralist, his values. But they are all equally relative. If there is an escape for one truth from the flux, then there is in principle no reason why many truths are not beyond it; and then the flux, becoming, change, history, or what have you is not what is fundamental, but rather, being, the principle of science and philosophy.”
“Man is the particular being that can know the universal, the temporal being that is aware of eternity, the part that can survey the whole, the effect that seeks the cause.”
“Of course, as we use it [the sacred], it has no more in common with God than does value with the Ten Commandments, commitment with faith, charisma with Moses, or life-style with Jerusalem or Athens. The sacred turns out to be a need, like food or sex; and in a well-ordered community, it must get its satisfactions like the other needs. In our earlier free-thinking enthusiasm, we tended to neglect it. A bit of ritual is a good thing; sacred space along with some tradition must be provided for, as a generation ago culture was thought to be a useful supplement. The disproportion between what all these words really mean and what they mean to us is repulsive. We are made to believe that we have everything. Our old atheism had a better grasp of religion than does this new respect for the sacred. Atheists took religion seriously and recognized that it is a real force, costs something and requires difficult choices. These sociologists who talk so facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.”
“The university’s task is thus well-defined, if not easy to carry out or even keep in mind. It is, in the first place, always to maintain the permanent questions front and center. This it does primarily by preserving—by keeping alive—the works of those who best addressed these questions.”
“Nothing is more damaging to an argument than the words without hesitation, without doubt, undoubtedly, certainly, and the like. They are used only when proof is wanting.”
“You see the darkest sides of human nature when you’ve got either zero or a million bucks. The sweet spot is somewhere in between.”
“Augustine said to a group of people, ‘We are talking about God. What wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God.’”
“How you spend your days is, of course, how you spend your life. What we do with this hour, or that one, is what we are doing.”
“Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is?—our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?”
“No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and they wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.”
“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time— or even knew selflessness or courage or literature—but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.”
“We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—even of silence—by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t ‘attack’ anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”
“Since it is above all the analytical attitude which predominates in philosophy, its latest disciples have everywhere been engaged in dissolving and decomposing. In physics, they have found nothing but objections to make to the author of nature. In metaphysics, they have found nothing but doubts and subtleties. Ethics and logic have provided them with nothing but harangues against the political order, against religious ideas and against the laws of property. They have aspired to nothing less than the reconstruction of everything, by means of a revolt against everything. And without remembering that they themselves are in the world, they have torn down the pillars that support the world.”
“Carelessly we have abandoned the stabilizing values of our forebears, from the simplest traditions and values to the most complex strategies that survive over generations, since we believe we no longer need them. Enduring values that transcend the individual have been set aside, and at the center of the world we have placed the individual, around whom everything revolves and with whom everything ends. By giving the appearance of pushing back disease, famine, and war and leading longer lives in general, we believe in our own immortality during the best years of life. But that isn’t true, no matter how much we gloss over the decline of the body and banish the process of dying from our everyday lives and consciousness. The cathedrals of faith and prayer have been replaced with clinics of health and science. But clinics are not cathedrals. They can only treat physical ailments. We have replaced the spires of churches with towers of books in university libraries. But all this rational knowledge is not the same as wisdom.”
“The everyday worlds of our ancestors may have been smaller in terms of space and shorter in time, their horizons narrower than our own. Their lives could end at any moment. But these physical limits—the next hill and the edge of a great and dense forest, as well as death and dying—weren’t the same as real boundaries and the end of life. In terms of space and time their worlds reached much further than this. For they did not always have to keep their eyes on the ground or their gaze on the next mountain or the edge of the forest. They could also turn their gaze boldly (or perhaps anxiously) upward to the Sun and the Moon, the stars and the planets, the rain clouds and storms that were approaching. For present life in a peasant world, all of this was certainly of greater importance than the question of who lived on the other side of the next mountain or forest. Likewise, death and dying were accepted as a natural and understandable break, as a passage, but this in no way distracted the view of what was to come: continuation of life everlasting.”
“There were a multitude of these little worlds in the past… It should be obvious at this point that there was no typical single farm or community. In the same way that every life course was unique and colorful, different from any other at the time in ways that are not the case today, so it was with every piece of property, every farm, and every community. What was typical was the colorful mosaic-like quality of life: the richness and multiplicity of possibilities, the lack of uniformity.”
“Today we have largely done away with such customs and like to make fun of what seem to us to be pointless traditions. But the question is whether instead of the supposed freedom we have gained (in this case, the choice of wedding days), we have lost in the bargain a framework for life that these customs provided. At the very least we have created more problems for our-selves.”
“Every man has the power to choose, but no man has the power to escape the necessity of choice.”
“Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman’s Law, as follows: ‘The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold’ (or any figure the reader would care to supply).”
“His life was a pool not so easy to fish in.”
“‘Funny ting,’ he said. ‘Dey talk bout real worl’, dey never mean real worl’ where man help adder man or spend him life do good for people, de allus mean real worl’ like rat in de cellar or dung-heap cock try git on top.”
“The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming now more now than another of that ancient urge—much older than the desire for truth—to command attention, dominate one’s fellows.”
“There was a smell of wood smoke and he could hear the voices of children, happy-angry, in the distance. It was a world, and it was precious to him.”
“The feeling of satisfaction, accomplishment, and relaxation after a day on a good horse breathing fresh air in unspoiled country is a great tonic to body and soul.”
“Raids are our agriculture.”
“I have had responsibilities and work, dangers and pleasure, good friends, and a world without walls to live in. These things I still have, I remind myself—and shall have until I leave them.”
“If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.”
“It is no good telling yourself that one day you will wish you had never made that change; it is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.”
“There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rain-storm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.”
“To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told—that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.”
“Arise! Conquer thy enemies! Obtain glory and enjoy a prosperous kingdom. By Me, they are already slain; be merely the instrument, O Savyasācīn (Arjuna).”
“Among your instincts you will find the longing for strong friendships, that the modern evil tries to snuff out. And they have good reason to try this, because every great thing in the past was done through strong friendships between two men, or brotherhoods of men, and this includes all great political things, all acts of political freedom and power. The modern zoo wants you instead to be a weak and isolated ‘individual.’”
“Contrary to this exists the surfeit of flesh we see on the obese and in general the lassitude, the spiritual obesity, not only of modern life but of many historical forms of life as well, the domestic life of the village, of the village sewer, of the fetid valleys, of matriarchy and domestics, of slaves, the life of the human animal collapsed to mere life, life for the sake of life, as it devolves to the yeast form aesthetically, morally, intellectually, physically. On the other side is the life of the immortal gods who live in pure mountain air, and the sign of this life, where energy is marshaled to the production of higher order, is the aesthetic physique, the body in its glorious and divine beauty.”
“For the longest period of which we are at present aware, for hundreds of thousands of years in the Paleolithic, humans walked around, like healthy animals, in a state that we would today call religious delirium, but which is in fact the default state of all conscious and semi-conscious life. For long after the coming of civilization also, many continued in this condition, or did so during special times of the year or festivals when man could regain his free and natural state. It was civilization and in particular agricultural civilization that forbad this condition and plunged the majority of humans into a semi-permanent repressive or depressive frame. That this is consistent with, and even a prerequisite for, the impressive works and development of higher civilization and higher culture shouldn’t be surprising: the majority of mankind suffered terribly also in their bodies from the coming of agriculture, the backbreaking labor, the malnourishment that shows itself in the smaller stature and more slender build of farmer’s skeletons, of the destruction of their teeth, the atrophy of their brains and other organs. Agriculture allowed a steady food source, an increase in numbers, and above all the maintenance of an elite, free from these exactions, that lived parasitically on the many. But agriculture broke the human animal and domesticated him. Do you understand then what the ‘disenchanted’ worldview is? I have to laugh at the ‘secular worldview,’ the disenchanted worldview, which is fact the worldview or mood of the broken peasant farmer.”
“Hormones hold the key to the meaning of life in the most fundamental way, and if this sounds “reductionist” to you, if you think I demystify things too much, it’s because you think you know what you don’t, or you think scientists know, when they actually don’t. These substances, seen with fresh eyes, are pure Big Magic.”
“If a god showed himself today to you, in a dream, would you have the inner energy and power to honor him and do his bidding in the world?”
“It is madness to ask the common prefab run of man to fashion his own way, his own “religion”—the many find solace and meaning only in submission. It is good that this is so, and they shouldn’t be made to feel ashamed for it. So much of modern idiocy is based on shaming those who would find true pleasure in submission!”
“No one today except maybe in Bhutan, in dark nooks of Japanese imperial palaces, or similar fossil pocket holdouts has any right to the luxury of continuation of tradition. The reason conservatives and especially social conservatives appear to be both disingenuous and also losers—to always lose, to always play a caricature or foil of the left, ultimately to play the cuckolded husband who is being mocked by adulterous mistress and her lovers and all the audience—is because of what we call roleplaying or LARPing, but which is the pretense or even worse the belief that you are upholding traditions or institutions when these have been violated, impregnated, and transformed by interloping others into something else. And therefore you are reduced to a steward and protector of your enemy’s aims and offspring, which is after all the definition of the cuckold, in this case with the added buffoonish humiliation of having the trappings and airs of the patriarch and Head of the Household.”
“Peoples are nature’s circuitous ways to great specimens and for this reason the peoples that have arisen out of nature must be preserved in their distinct forms.”
“The modern peasant just replaces the artificial prejudices of superstitions and village old wives’ tales with the superstition of science, which he receives ready-made from authorities among the popularizers of science. He loves them because of the creature comforts they provide through technology. He is a cargo cultist—he knows nothing of what goes into the discoveries of science, nor the way the substance is transmitted among scientists, he just has a propagandized image of some of the results. This is no different from belief in Big Magic, which is how many primitives think of science—the Big Magic of the white man.”
“There is a hidden path for you also that remains…behind the marketplace, it begins in the thickets of small woods…it winds up many steep paths toward the high mountain air, to life in the ascent, uncorrupted by the miasma of the yeast man and the toilets in the river valleys…the life of Jason’s Argo can be reclaimed…and by some few in the modern world, it has been…”
“Thus everywhere we see that the very comforts and safety produced by the best men leads to the usurpation of society by those parts of the human spirit that are oriented instead toward a different kind of life, that everywhere the mode of the yeast wins out…and usually wins out very quickly. And in the West, whose special fate has been confused for History or Progress of the entire species, this development has taken place through the promotion of logos or reason and all the manifestations of this: the adulation of empty words, of legalism as a guide for social and political life, of the cult of science that is very far from real science. All of this has been a cover for the ascent of the blob human, of the lower orders of the spirit and is instead delivering not just the West, but all of mankind, to a condition of domestic brokenness and servility.”
“What Mount Aetna was to Empedocles—is there something like that to you? Is there something like that at all anymore?”
“You must learn to see the secret language of nature and what it drives at: there is one path that drives for the production of a supreme specimen. It is the path that governs higher life; survival and reproduction are only side effects of this path. Life is at most basic, struggle for ownership of space.”
“Every mythology remembers the innocence of the first state: Adam in the Garden, the peaceful Hyperboreans, the Uttar-akurus or ‘the Men of Perfect Virtue’ of the Taoists. Pessimists often interpret the story of the Golden Age as a tendency to turn our backs on the ills of the present, and sigh for the happiness of youth. But nothing in Hesiod’s text exceeds the bounds of probability.
The real or half-real tribes which hover on the fringe of ancient geographies—Atavantes, Fenni, Parrossits or the dancing Spermatophagi—have their modern equivalents in the Bushman, the Shoshonean, the Eskimo and the Aboriginal.
One characteristic of the Men of the Golden Age: they are always remembered as migratory.”
“I quit my job in the ‘art world’ and went back to the dry places: alone, travelling light. The names of the tribes I travelled among are unimportant: Rguibat, Quashgai, Taimanni, Turkomen, Bororo, Tuareg—people whose journeys, unlike my own, had neither beginning nor end. I slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara, I understood Muhammed’s dictum, ‘A journey is a fragment of Hell.’
The more I read, the more convinced I became that nomads had been the crankhandle of history, if for no other reason than that the great monotheisms had, all of them, surfaced from the pastoral milieu...”
“It is a paradox of the monotheistic faiths that, although they arose within the ambit of the desert, the desert people themselves show an indifference towards the Almighty that is decidedly cavalier. ‘We will go up to God and salute him,’ said a bedu to Palgrave in the 1860s, ‘and if he proves hospitable, we will stay with him: if otherwise, we will mount our horses and ride off.’”
“Nomos is Greek for ‘pasture’, and ‘the Nomad’ is a chief or clan elder who presides over the allocation of pastures. Nomos thus came to mean ‘law’, ‘fair distribution’, ‘that which is allotted by custom’ - and so the basis of all Western law.
The verb nemein - to ‘graze’, ‘to pasture’, ‘to range’, or ‘to spread’ - has a second sense as early as Homer: ‘to deal’, ‘to apportion’ or ‘to dispense’ - especially of land, honour, meat or drink. Nemesis is the ‘distribution of justice’ and so of ‘divine justice’. Nomisma means ‘current coin’: hence ‘numismatics’.”
“The Bushmen, who walk immense distances across the Kalahari, have no idea of the soul’s survival in another world. ‘When we die, we die, they say. The wind blows away our foot prints, and that is the end of us.’ Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians—with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds—project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.”
“The Hero Cycle, wherever found, is a story of ‘fitness’ in the Darwinian sense: a blueprint for genetic ‘success’. Beowulf leaves... Ivan leaves... Jack leaves... the young Aboriginal on Walkabout leaves... even the antique Don Quixote leaves, And these Wanderjahre, and combats with the Beast, are the story-teller’s version of the incest taboo; whereby a man must first prove ‘fitness’ and then must ‘marry far.
In practice, it scarcely matters whether myths are the coded messages of instinct, whose structures will reside in the central nervous system, or tales of instruction handed down from the Year Dot. One point cannot be emphasised too strongly. Seldom, if ever, in myth, is it desirable, morally, for a man to kill a man in cold blood.”
“Although modern man rarely questions the value of exploration, the explorer pursues a course of activity that seems, logically, at variance with man’s basic strivings for the good life, the best obtainable in food, shelter, and all those other physical, mental and spiritual comforts that characterize civilized life. The explorer deliberately turns his back on civilization and its pleasures simply to go and see unknown lands. Yet the explorer is always a civilized man; exploration itself is an advanced intellectual concept. The primitive or half-civilized man may move into new lands for food, protection or trade, but he is always driven there by necessity or greed and rarely troubles to record what he has seen. The true explorer goes only to see and to tell others what he has seen. It seems incredible, considering the hardships and dangers, that men would willingly do this. I speak of men rather than women because the spirit of adventure that leads to exploration is primarily a masculine trait; women, being more sensible and their curiosity being confined to more personal and realistic matters nearer home, are less afflicted by the desire to see what lies beyond the seas and mountain ranges. But this spirit lurks in all men, I would guess, to a greater or lesser degree. In some it is weak and easily satisfied by novels or television; in others it is a ruling passion that thrusts them to the remote corners of the globe.”
“For when you get down to it, is not the popular idea of Christianity simply this: that Jesus Christ was a great moral teacher and that if only we took his advice we might be able to establish a better social order and avoid another war? Now, mind you, that is quite true. But it tells you much less than the whole truth about Christianity and it has no practical importance at all.
It is quite true that if we took Christ’s advice we should soon be living in a happier world. You need not even go as far as Christ. If we did all that Plato or Aristotle or Confucius told us, we should get on a great deal better than we do. And so what? We never have followed the advice of the great teachers. Why are we likely to begin now? Why are we more likely to follow Christ than any of the others? Because he is the best moral teacher? But that makes it even less likely that we shall follow him. If we cannot take the elementary lessons, is it likely we are going to take the most advanced one? If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference.”
“Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.”
“...if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself...I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’.
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”
“Man is the only amateur animal; all the others are professionals. They have no leisure and do not desire it. When God made the beasts dumb He saved the world from infinite boredom, for if they could speak they would all of them, all day, talk nothing but shop.”
“Now, Theology is like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God—experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In fact, that is just why a vague religion—all about feeling God in nature, and so on—is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.”
“The human spirit has two remarkable powers: invention and assimilation. Turning the old into the new and then turning the new into the old. The most abrasive intrusion into the body and the most violent disruption of habit are quickly absorbed and domesticated. Almost immediately we lose our connection to old ways, our former agonies. The clanking of machines drowns out years of suffering. New technical programs revise our memories and beliefs in their own image, and the present stands ready to be erased by the future.”
“Although it may appeal to a man’s selfish instincts to sit in sweatpants and type on a computer in a locked room while gnawing on a turkey leg, he’s spiritually, civically and morally improved by embodied interactions, by spending time in public space.
The relaxed fashion and behavior in the home may seem preferable to the formalities of the office, but the current resentment toward a public standard of appearance indicates widespread maladaptation and stunted maturity, a pathological obliviousness to others and a decline of outwardly directed behavior in professional and collective settings. We dress like refugees and mental patients because of mass-produced sleepwear and because we’re not expected to cultivate self-respect or restraint. We don’t value bodily comfort obesity and chronic illness ravage the body, bad choices trouble the soul.
People wear comfortable clothes in public because they’re uncomfortable, because their bodies are panicked and inflamed from decades of nutritional and emotional chaos.
Modern hedonism violently contradicts the sagely approach to moderating passions and limiting pleasures. Unrestrained eating, drinking, drug intake and consumption of media implies hatred of the body, not love of the senses.”
“Division of labor multiplies inconvenience, obnoxious intermediaries, liaisons and representatives. Zeno’s paradox of infinite middlemen between middlemen. People make their living by making my living harder to make. Division of labor is subtraction of organic bonds. Almost everyone I know I met through an economic or electronic exchange. No human contact without an application, contract, a bill or an app. Professional and romantic relationships dissolved with a message, a phone call. Cutting someone out takes less than a gesture. Whole networks pulverized and reformed every six months.”
“Even with appliances and devices, the technical outsourcing of family to machines, a single man is also his own wife and maid, his own father and grandfather and son. A laborer and a housekeeper and cook, activities manager and social director. He’s responsible for seeking out his own wisdom and recreation. The atomized self tends toward androgyny, in that it must carry out the work of both sexes.”
“Everyone wants everything to be free and available and easy, but then they want everything to be protected and safe and guaranteed as well, and then they also want everything to be valuable and esteemed and recognized as worthy. If you are a genuine outcast, then you will be cast out. You cannot be a normal weirdo, a mainstream deviant. It is one or the other. The life of a mutant criminal freak who has to outrun and outwit power, or a normal conforming person with everyday habits and interests.”
“Human life is miserable in this exact way: you fall short of your ideals but you exceed your low expectations. You are too good to enjoy what’s base but not good enough to fulfill your higher calling. A little more than nothing and a little less than something. No peace in the void, no plenitude of being.”
“I believe in the public good until I’m out in public.”
“More filters on faces, no filters on mouths. On the internet you have no idea what others look like, how they move, sound or smell, even with video access. You know far too much about what they think, or at least what they think they want you to think. Sensory deprivation and noetic overload.”
“Much right-wing internet discourse boils down to a complaint that society won’t let men be men. These dissidents tend to project a fantasy image of the masculine man as an independent figure, bold, risk-taking, creative and authoritative. But if masculinity is predicated on independence and strength, how can it be stifled by women and effeminate men? Pretend patriarchs are more comfortable in their subordinate roles than they’d like to think.”
“No animals harmed in the making of our products except for the animals who eat them.”
“Nothing seemed to happen except what always happened, at its regular time and in its regular way. The traffic got heavy and then it got lighter. The day was hot and now it was cooler. The shadows hid underground and now they oozed up and spread everywhere like spilled oil. It was summer but soon it would be fall. The sun would set and the horizon would glow red and orange like embers. Even Clemons’s crimes and wanderings fit into the fixed order. One broken life did nothing to disturb the workings of the world.
Everything the same even in its changes. Every scrap of matter, every last acorn or spot of sunlight changing just as it should, blending into its opposite or morphing into a being wholly unlike it. In all movement and bustle and chaos and noise there was a profound stillness and silence, something abiding yet unknowable.”
“People talk about the militarization of the police; what about the militarization of the public? Every person armed with machine guns and pistols and surveillance equipment and knives and pepper spray and lead pipes, enrolled in street fighting martial arts classes; townhouses and sedans outfitted with state-of-the-art security systems.”
“Pretend you are an atheist in the Middle Ages. How would you have managed? You could have kept quiet and pretended to go along with the dominant beliefs, you could have expressed your disagreements and doubts in code or obliquely through art, or you could have spoken up and challenged the consensus and demanded recognition of your minority views.
Those are still your options. Most likely you will not be strung up by your testicles or impaled or crucified or burned at the stake or have molten lead poured down your throat or have your fingertips smashed. You probably will not be buried up to your neck in the hot desert sand with your eyelids cut off so the sun cooks your eyeballs and you probably will not have your head slathered in honey so ants and flies eat your face.”
“Reality used to impose itself on you, while fantasy was your own doing. Now illusions flush your brain and reality is something you laboriously construct, rip from the earth and beat out of people.”
“The leftist concept of emotional labor used to describe how service jobs require a performance of happiness and camaraderie. Now the idea is cited in a petulant demand to be paid for listening to your friends and family. Economic thinking has seeped into every domain, corrupted all relationships. We feel pressured to treat coworkers like friends and feel entitled to treat friends and family like clients. A warm smiling face for bloodless transactions and a self-interested logic applied to the most intimate bonds.”
“The system punishes you for trying to provide for yourself until you reach total destitution and madness. Then you’re eligible for assistance.”
“Aggression and eroticism are deeply intertwined. Hunt, pursuit, and capture are biologically programmed into male sexuality. Generation after generation, men must be educated, refined, and ethically persuaded away from their tendency toward anarchy and brutishness.”
“Alas, we have not too little intimacy, but too much. Once there was the world of men and the world of women. Now the sexes, freely mingling, know each other too well, and both have lost their allure.”
“Freedom begins for an individual the moment he or she chooses to do the right thing without calculating the consequences.”
“Here are my conclusions after a lifetime of observation and reflection. Maleness at its hormonal extreme is an angry, ruthless density of self, motivated by a principle of ‘attack’ (cf. ‘roid rage’ produced in male bodybuilders by anabolic steroids). Femaleness at its hormonal extreme is first an acute sensitivity of response, literally thin-skinned (a hormonal effect in women) and secondly a stability, composure, and self-containment, a slowness approaching the sultry. Biologically, the male is impelled towards restless movement; his moral danger is brutishness. Biologically, the female is impelled toward waiting, expectancy; her moral danger is in stasis. Androgen agitates; estrogen tranquilizes—hence the drowsiness and ‘glow’ of pregnancy. Most of us inhabit not polar extremes but a constantly shifting great middle. However, a preponderance of gray does not disprove the existence of black and white. Sexual geography, our body image, alters our perception of the world. Man is contoured for invasion, while woman remains the hidden, a cave of archaic darkness. No legislation or grievance committee can change these eternal facts.”
“I see two principal kinds of male homosexuality. The first and most ancient is rooted in identification with the mother, perceived as a goddess. The castrated, transvestite priests of Cybele, honored in disco-like rites of orgiastic dance, survive in today’s glamorous, flamboyant drag queens. The second kind of homosexuality represents a turning away from the mother and a heroic rebellion against her omnipotence. Such homosexuality disdains femaleness and esteems perfected masculinity, which it symbolizes in the ‘hunk,’ the taughtly muscled, arrogantly architectural male form first fully imagined by the Greeks. Greek athletics were a religious spectacle of the beauty of masculinity, formalized in the kouros sculptures that began the Western high-art tradition.”
“My approach to art is multipartite, a psychomedical workup. First, palpation: I record the work’s emotional and sensory character, photographing it by faithful description. Second, genealogy: the work’s psychohistory, its relation to the artist and era. Third, X-ray: its skeleton or ritual deep structure. Fourth, analogy: its resemblance to other things, past and future, high and low.”
“Nothing so astounds me as the delusion of rationalists that human life is free of biophysical influences. It is irreligious and hubristical to imagine that we are divorced from the continuum of living things, alone among plants and animals in our imperviousness to lunar and seasonal rhythms. Science has barely begun to chart the complexities of our multiple hormone systems, which intricately interact and alter us physically and psychologically hour by hour. Hormones are our link to pagan nature. Thought itself is a net of racing electric impulses, the energy that unifies the cosmos, a music of atom’s dance.”
“Secularization is a welcome process if it allows us to analyze literature and art without moral preconception and sermonizing; but secularization is pernicious when it strips the spiritual dimension from experience.”
“Trying to remake the future, feminism cut itself off from sexual history. It discarded and suppressed the sexual myths of literature, art, and religion. Those myths show us the turbulence, the mysteries and passions of sex. In mythology we see men’s sexual anxiety, their fear of woman’s dominance. Much sexual violence is rooted in men’s sense of psychological weakness towards women.”
“As I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am conpelled to beleive differently.”
“Our moral values, our emotions, our loves are no less real for being part of nature, for being shared with the animal world, or for being determined by the evolution that our species has undergone over millions of years. Rather, they are more valuable as a result of this: they are real. They are the complex reality of which we are made. Our reality is tears and laughter, gratitude and altruism, loyalty and betrayal, the past that haunts us and serenity. Our reality is made up of our societies, of the emotion inspired by music, of the rich intertwined networks of the common knowledge that we have constructed together. All of this is part of the self-same ‘nature’ that we are describing. We are an integral part of nature; we are nature, in one of its innumerable and infinitely variable expressions. This is what we have learned from our ever-increasing knowledge of the things of this world.”
“When we talk about the Big Bang or the fabric of space, what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories that humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years. It is the continuation of something else: of the gaze of those same men in the first light of day looking at tracks left by antelope in the dust of the savannah—scrutinizing and deducing from the details of reality in order to pursue something that we can’t see directly but can follow the traces of. In our awareness that we can always be wrong, and therefore ready at any moment to change direction if a new track appears; but knowing also that if we are good enough we will get it right and will find what we are seeking. This is the nature of science.”
“Assume you will achieve your goal, even if it requires multiple attempts. Take it on faith that the world is more pliable than feels true. Refuse to accept your brain’s first-order response that you probably can’t achieve goal X because of restrictions Y and Z. Instead, approach restrictions Y and Z with a puzzle-solving mindset, relishing the challenge of discovering how to work around them.”
“Every time you skirt around small frictions, you accumulate debt in the form of resentment. The debt grows, and for a while it might seem manageable, but then one day you just don’t like the person anymore.”
“I think our memories are benevolent with respect to other people’s failures because they just aren’t very emotionally salient for us. Perhaps we feel compassionate, or we might feel judgmental. More often, we just don’t think of them. In any event, failure is not as significant from the outside. To the outside eye, the course of a life consists of the bright peaks achieved, with the long gray plateau of ordinary days edited away.”
“If you would like to become the author of your own life, regardless of the plot, more agency is the key.
Agency entails a radically different way of relating to the world.
Rather than avoiding failure and rejection, agentic people see these as the inevitable costs of personal progress, and opportunities for learning. Rather than assuming that everything worthwhile has been done already, they assume that many great ventures are postponed out of inertia and fear. Rather than taking it for granted that the experts have it under control, they expect that something more can be done, and that they can be the ones to do it. They choose to believe that everything is learnable, even traits and skills often believed to be innate, like charisma or curiosity.
And, fundamentally, they take responsibility. They act on the world, rather than the world acting on them.”
“It’s important to realize that you are allowed to have some shortcomings that you don’t address. In fact, I think accomplishing anything of real value in life requires accepting the finitude of time and the practicality of being mediocre in areas you don’t care about.”
“...the continuous need for willpower may be the sign of a badly-engineered life.”
“The exertion of willpower makes you feel like you’re trying. But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re actually trying.”
“The high-agency mindset about rejection takes things even further. It says that you should seek out rejection, or at least welcome it.
Congratulate yourself on hearing no. Remind yourself that if you don’t routinely encounter rejection, you are not asking for enough-you’re only making requests that are extremely likely to receive a yes. By making bolder requests, you will sometimes achieve big leaps, and you’ll know you’re not leaving opportunities on the table.”
“There is always a way to trade time for ever-increasing sums of money, and once you start making that trade, it becomes harder and harder to draw a line, easier and easier to convince yourself that your obligations to someone else—spouse, kids, aging parents—demand that you stay where you are.”
“When you’re strong in a particular way, it’s easy to settle into achieving adequate results by being narrowly exceptional and broadly mediocre.”
“At the beginning, then, globalization was a Communist idea. Today, it finally seems to be coming to fruition by means of liberalism. Put another way, history’s real irony is that globalization is being realized by the opponents of those who initially proposed it.”
“Death, however, is the fundamental question of existence, primarily since existence is only meaningful because of its precariousness. If we take away the certitude of its ending, it loses its essential structure. Even our greatest joys, which we recognize as being moments of eternity, draw their grandeur from their comparison with the precariousness of everything. There is another reason that death is the fundamental question of existence: it is that man’s existence is always more limited than his thoughts, which very naturally strain against their limits, as they forever look beyond for an invisible horizon.”
“Every positive law is rooted in a culture. Therefore, in order to have a world law there must be a world culture. And there is no such thing.”
“Every truly moral development requires such a passing through experiences, regrets, and sorrows. Only after a long voyage can the conscience recognize evil as such.”
“Human existence remains an enigma. The thinking species is destined to tragedy, in the sense that the questions it eternally poses never find a definitive answer. What is the answer to questions like: Why death? Why evil and conflict? What is justice? The deepest meaning of culture is to propose partial, provisional, or temporary answers to these queries. Man is the animal that interrogates his existence. The diversity of cultures characterizes humanity because humanity poses to itself questions that in their nature are finally unanswerable. Human existence, in other words, is an enigma, not a simple aporia, a ‘pathless’ condition. Human existence is not an impasse; rather, it opens up multiple ways to respond to these eternal questions. This is what creates those fissures, so hard to accept, between humans who are simultaneously alike in their common ‘tragic’ condition and different in the paths they tread as a consequence of such questioning. Only someone who had definitively resolved the enigma of human existence would have the right to unify and homogenize cultures. But this uncontested superman does not exist, even if during the past two centuries several have tried to personify him.”
“Individually, moral life consists in developing human relations between different personalities who are respected in their differences. Collectively, the search for unity passes not through the abolition of cultural differences but by their constant maintenance or sustenance. To become civilized is nothing other than to learn to genuinely recognize the other.”
“Opinions on the right of intervention naturally evolve with the times, espousing the dominant values of the period. Speaking generally, the opposite of what each period finds most important will not be tolerated. When religion dominated, it justified wars, as Montesquieu observed: ‘Religion gives to those who profess it a right to enslave those who do not, in order to more easily propagate it.’ Today, one can say the same thing of the morality of human rights, while religion is compelled to be tolerant because it has assumed a lesser importance.”
“Our contemporaries no longer seek a ‘socially homogeneous universal state,’ as Alexandre Kojève put it at the time of communism, but rather a morally homogenous universal state. It is natural that rather vague ambient idea of a world government should be put at the service of the dominant values of our times.”
“Some will respond: Do we therefore have to relativize everything, since we cannot draw a line between the absolute and the relative? Do we have to become accomplices to crimes because we do not want to become inquisitors? No. There is a way out of this impasse. Because an absolute norm cannot be precisely defined, one should refrain from institutionalizing it. Not to tolerate certain crimes ought to be a decision, not a matter of obedience to positive law. If in matters of such gravity the borders are indistinct, it belongs to conscience and not the law to mark them out. This, at least, is the position I want to defend.”
“The absolute certitude with which we assign good and evil indicates just how much a true pluralism of judgements and attitudes, a sense of nuance, a civilized hesitation before the difficult judgements of moral practice, are deserting us.”
“The conservatives who fear developments that they believe will ignore indelible aspects of the human condition would gain by attending to history and geography before they claim to know what mankind is, for the forms that the human enterprise has taken are sometimes more varied than they might think. But the followers of progress would do well to learn their own history and geography before legitimizing and legalizing any social development, for the forms of human existence are more coherent than they think, and they risk reestablishing archetypes that contradict their own points of reference.”
“The dream of a messianic reign lingers on in our thoughts and partially shapes them. The end of messianism will come only when we have abandoned our impatience: salvation remains always incomplete. Impatience for the reign of the Good can be seen in the machinations of the Inquisition, in both the red and brown totalitarianisms, but also in the invention of the International Criminal Court, that global righter of wrongs which has taken upon itself to purge the earth of its monsters. We will rebuild a common world only by avoiding this kind of impatience. We can struggle against evil, but we cannot pose as supreme righters of wrongs, searching out evil wherever it may be found and then eradicating it.”
“The lesson of the twentieth century is the following: we have limits that we do not choose, and which it would be in our interest to accept rather than suppress, given the damage attempts at suppression have caused.”
“The soul is the part of us that recognizes the enigmas of existence, without actually knowing them. It recognizes that these enigmas convey meaning, but does not know what that meaning is. It is the part of us that accepts the awkward presence of unanswerable questions. In other words, it represents the conscious limit of the mind, the eye that remains open to the void.”
“The subject is he who opens his eyes to human weakness and organizes society in a way that responds to this reality. Instead of unconsciously assimilating his heritage like man in olden societies, and instead of rejecting his heritage like the contemporary individual, he recognizes that he is an heir. Instead of remaining submerged in his world like man in olden societies, and instead of rejecting his world like the contemporary individual, he engages himself in this world. Engagement and the recognition of one’s heritage are expressions of accepted finiteness even within the quest for freedom.”
“To pursue a life-work is to create order amidst the overall disorder of the world. It is a flower in the tumult, meaning in the midst of meaninglessness. Even if the work does not express anything great, it mysteriously bears witness to what man is. It is a sign of the depth of humanity and as such establishes a sure link with symbolic immortality. Through it, man defines himself as a being who can escape the chaos of contingency to dominate the passing of time, a being who resists the absurd by trying to shape scattered bits and pieces into a meaningful whole. In other words, he is a being who challenges the necessity of death, both hopelessly and with confidence. Since one day he must shuffle off the stage, he hopes to leave behind a sign of his presence, a minute yet significant trace: an existence with a name. The life-work is a reflection of its author and remains after him, as if the image lingered in the mirror after the person himself had left.”
“Today, we are to believe that the love of humanity is normal (in both senses of the term), while the love of the particular is ignoble. But both are human. Love of the particular is natural, and the natural cannot be denigrated: it exists, and it belongs to life.”
“We can recognize an objectively bad or objectively good event in extreme situations. But the positive universal that defines the Good inevitably remains insufficient. We cannot grasp anything in its totality. We can grasp only flashes, echoes, remnants of a total Good, which always remains an object of promise and faith. Our certitude, even if we clearly perceive the path it takes, remains incomplete, mixed with the finiteness that constitutes our being. We are the ones who determine its contours, we who have a history, mores, and desires steeped in the uniqueness of time and place. This is why to impose our certitude on others is unscrupulous.”
“What characterizes man is not any unity which is finally, perfectly, achieved, but the activity and effort undertaken in view of unity, the action by which he progresses toward communion without ever completely realizing it.”
“When the Everlasting asked King Solomon what he wished to receive as a reward for his good behavior, Solomon replied, discernment. In granting Solomon discernment, God did not actually give him anything, for Solomon’s very request demonstrated that he possessed it already. Solomon thereby revealed that he has perceived the core of human weakness: we must judge here on earth, yet only God can judge, and God is not on earth—a terrible paradox.”
“History is littered with examples of men who, when pressing their case in the public square, have thought solely about the interests of their land, tribe, religion, or self; but it is sprinkled only lightly with men who, in making their arguments, have taken care to respect the enduring principles that have served to break the cycle of strife, faction, and war.”
“The American project—a phrase you will see again in the chapters to come—consists of the continuing effort, begun with the founding, to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals and families to live their lives as they see fit, coming together voluntarily to solve their joint problems. The polity based on that idea led to a civic culture that was seen as exceptional by all the world. That culture was so widely shared among Americans, that it amounted to a civil religion. To be an American wants to be different from other nationalities, in ways that Americans treasured. That culture is unraveling.”
“If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he have not done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.”
“In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
“Los que no pueden recordar la sangre de la guerra son siempre las más calientes para la lucha.
Those who cannot remember the blood of war are always hottest for the fight.”
“No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they?
No.
It’s never like what you expected.
Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them? People speak about what is in store. But there is nothing in store. The day is made of what has come before. The world itself must be surprised the shape of that which appears. Perhaps even God.”
“Si el mundo es ilusión la pérdida del mundo es ilusión también.
If the world is an illusion, then the loss of the world is an illusion too.”
“The reverence attached to the artifacts of history is a thing men feel. One could even say that what endows any thing with significance is solely the history in which it has participated. Yet wherein does that history lie?”
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
“Yet even so there is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these also are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hidden from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hidden from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And whether in Caborca or in Huisiachepic or in whatever other place by whatever other name or by no name at all I say again all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.”
“Life is a verb.”
“The prescription I’ve come to seems to be this. Know the heaven and earth that were, but experience the world that is.”
“Depending on what happens to human societies, we will spend the next few generations coming to terms with what we have lost...We won’t know most of what we have lost because it will have never been named. Some of the species we will have lost will have had important medicinal values. Some of them will have pollinated our crops. Some of them will have been strange creatures deserving explanation. Some will have been beautiful. Some will have had values that we are not yet capable of understanding.
We live in a vast living museum that is being flooded and burned and ravaged. We know that we must save some of the art, but we don’t know anything about the art. So we grab the showiest things and hope they are important.”
“What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.”
“Language is the product of synergism between values of the society, communication theory, biology, physiology, physics (of the inherit limitations of our brains as well as our phonetics), and human thought. I believe this is also true of the engine of language, grammar.
Both modern linguistics and the bulk of the philosophy of language have chosen to separate language from culture in their quests to understand human communication. By this move they fail to come to grips with language as a “natural phenomenon,” to use the words the philosopher John Searle. Many linguists and philosophers since the 1950s have characterized language almost exclusively in terms of mathematical logic. It is almost as if the fact that language has meaning and is spoke by human beings is irrelevant to the enterprise of understanding it.”
“I’m addicted to the entire planet. I don’t want to leave it. I want to get down into it. I want to say hello. On the beach, I could have stopped all day long and looked at those damned shells, looked for all the messages that come not in bottles but in shells.”
“It is good conservation practice, if you are going to develop, to concentrate people and leave wild land around them. People need earning territory—territory they have to earn by walking, limping, crawling, or whatever they can do.”
“The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgement appear the only result of our must accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a-quarreling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.”
“We live in a world that depends for its economic survival on the constant adoption and consumption of new things. Archaeology, history, genealogy, and prayer are the overflowing drawers into which we throw our thoughts of earlier generations.”
“When you look in the mirror you see not just your face but a museum. Although your face, in one sense, is your own, it is composed of a collage of features you have inherited from your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. The lips and eyes that either bother or please you are not yours alone but are also features of your ancestors, long dead perhaps as individuals but still very much alive as fragments in you. Even complex qualities such as your sense of balance, musical abilities, shyness in crowds, or susceptibility to sickness have been lived before. We carry the past around with us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives also in our customs, including the way we speak. The past is a set of invisible lenses we wear constantly, and through these we perceive the world and the world perceives us. We stand always on the shoulders of our ancestors, whether or not we look down to acknowledge them.”
“In nature I remember: I’m a tiny mote in God’s creation. No more significant than an insect. But no less perfect.”
“There is no God, but we still have the mountains and the hummingbirds. Or a good drink and a good fuck. Even a good shit and a good jerk. Try as you might, you cannot escape small pleasures. The flowers please you in spite of yourself, as you walk down the street muttering. Despairing over no text message from some girl you’d get tired of if she texted you back. Worrying about work. The clouds look painterly at sunset every god damn day and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it. Even if you shut the blinds the magic hour light leaks through. A baby smiles at you in the checkout line. Sees something in your eyes. It was not lost.”
Γνῶθι σεαυτόν.
“Know thyself.”
“People tell you who they are, but we ignore it, because we want them to be who we want them to be.”
“No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.”
“We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the idea of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law upon our pert loquacity.”
“If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred?”
“If you desire to know, feel and live the desert, as opposed to only looking at it as tourists and art critics do, you’ve got to arise from your bottom end and walk upright like a human being, alone or with a friend, into the ancient blood-thrilling primeval freedom of those vast and democratic vistas. You will never understand the secret essence of the word freedom until you do.”
“Names, names, the naming of the names. What’s this? What’s that? they ask me, pointing to this bush, that bush. I give my standard reply: What it is, ma’am, no one knows; but men call it—creosote bush.”
“One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am: a reluctant enthusiast, a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.”
“What does the desert mean? It means what it is. It is there, it will be there when we are gone. But for a while we living things—men, women, birds, that coyote howling far off on yonder stony ridge—we were a part of it all. That should be enough.”
“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.”
“History is a predicament for man who must live in it. In order to act in history, he must seek to rise above it. He needs perspectives in terms of which to understand his situation, and timeless truths and values in terms of which to act in it. Yet the perspectives which he finds often merely reflect his age; and what he accepts as timelessly true and value is apt to be merely the opinion that is in fashion. Thus while man must always try to rise above his historical situation he succeeds at best only precariously.”
“ALWAYS LIFT HEAVY—THAT’S WHAT MAKES LIFE WORTH LIVING!”
“Existence has the structure of the In-Between, of the Platonic metaxy, and if anything is constant in the history of mankind it is the language of tension between life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and imperfection, time and timelessness; between order and disorder, truth and untruth, sense and senselessness of existence; between amor Dei and amor sui, l’âme ouverte and l’âme close; between the virtues of openness toward the ground of being such as faith, love, and hope, and the vices of infolding closure such as hybris and revolt; between the moods of joy and despair; and between alienation in its double meaning of alienation from the world and alienation from God. If we split these pairs of symbols, and hypostatize the poles of the tension as independent entities, we destroy the reality of existence as it has been experienced by the creators of the tensional symbolisms; we lose consciousness and intellect; we deform our humanity and reduce ourselves to a state of quiet despair or activist conformity to the age, of drug addiction or television watching, of hedonistic stupor or murderous possession of truth, of suffering from the absurdity of existence or indulgence in any divertissement (in Pascal’s sense) that promises to substitute as a value for reality lost. In the languages of Heraclitus and Plato: Dream life usurps the place of wake life”.”
“It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her.”
“Fortunately I have never learned to take the good advice I give myself nor the counsel of my fears.”
“We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.”
“A man cannot change his feelings again during the last rush with a veil of blood before his eyes. He does not want to take prisoners but to kill. He has no scruples left; only the spell of primeval instinct remains. It is not till the blood has flowed that the mist gives way in his soul. He looks around him as if waking from the bondage of a dream. It is only then that he becomes once more a soldier of to-day and capable of addressing himself to the next problem of tactics.”
“And, so strange as it may sound, I learned from this very four year’s schooling in force and in all the fantastic extravagance of material warfare, that life has no depth of meaning except when it is pledged for an ideal, and that there are ideals in comparison with which the life of an individual and even of a people has no weight. And though the aim for which I fought as an individual, as an atom in the whole body of the army, was not to be achieved, though material force cast us, apparently, to the Earth, yet we learned once and for all to stand for a cause and if necessary to fall as befitted men.”
“However cleverly people may talk and write, there is nothing to set against self-sacrifice that is not pale, insipid, and miserable.”
“The great moment had come. The fire lifted over the first trenches. We advanced…
The turmoil of our feelings was called forth by rage, alcohol, and the thirst for blood as we stepped out, heavily yet irresistibly, for the enemy’s lines. And therewith beat the pulse of heroism—the godlike and the bestial inextricably mingled. I was far in front of the company, followed by my batman, and a man of one year’s service called Haake. In my right hand I gripped my revolver, in my left a bamboo riding-cane. I was boiling with a fury now utterly inconceivable to me. The overpowering desire to kill winged my feet. Rage squeezed bitter tears from my eyes.”
“Your Honor, I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never so clearly comprehended as now the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of industrial freedom and social justice.
I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own.
When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places, and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.”
“For it is common experience that, as in matters of passion small differences can be most irritating, so in matters of thought the study of differences based on common intentions is most stimulating.”
“If we are longing for ontological grandeur and uncompromising plumbing of that one and only thought, Being, then Parmenides will seem the primordial deep thinker in his blazing induction into ‘the steadfast heart of persuasive truth’ (Diels, Parmenides, 1, 1. 29). But if we are gripped by the strife-locked unity of the physical cosmos and aroused by Heraclitus’s unflinching heedfulness to that one Speaker, the Logos, then he will appear as the aboriginal penetrating observer in his solitary burrowing into the designs of the Wise Thing.”
“In fact, it is the easiest thing in the world to utter a verbal contradiction, though much harder to entertain a mental one. This is indeed an arresting fact of speech—that what logicians claim you cannot say, you can so easily utter.”
“It [the cosmos] is a realm constituted of oppositions, now stably locked together in a wrestler’s hold, now suddenly parted in a catastrophic transformation, as when fighters break apart and gain the distance to strike home. That is its genesis and its rule:
‘War is Father of all things, of all things King.’ (53)
Antagonisms are, once more, ultimate. Heraclitus can both see a world constituted of antitheses and enunciate it as orderly because the Logos not only drives everything apart into confronting terms that face each other in fixed measures, but it also, and even primarily, collects everything into a unity:
‘Out of everything one and out of one everything.’ (10)”
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…and one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
“The most revolutionary act is to actually make something.”
“You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.”
“In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
“Whenever I am thinking of a character, in public life it may be, or in literature, I always ask ‘What was happening in the world when he was twenty?’ If I am thinking of a year, the question is ‘Who were in their forties then?’ To the twenties I go for the shaping of ideas not fully disclosed: to the forties for the handling of things already established.”
“Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.
The owl of Minerva first begins her flight with the onset of dusk.”
“Reason is Thought determining itself in absolute freedom.”
“When we contemplate this display of passions and the consequences of their violence, the unreason which is associated not only with them, but even—rather we might say especially— with good designs and righteous aims; when we see arising therefrom the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created, we can hardly avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption...But in contemplating history as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, a question necessarily arises: To what principle, to what final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered?”
“The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.”
“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?”
“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
“It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good and beautiful, for home or children or civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.”
“Loyalty is something you need for things you don’t love enough.”
“Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it.”
“There were depths, but the soundings were few.”
“Trump’s historical function imo is that he exposes any system he’s in. As a real estate investor, he exposed the greed of the banks that lent money to him by playing them for fools. As a TV show host he exposed the cynical clawing ambition of people who work for him by showing how they would step on anyone for a job. As president he has exposed...what America wants to let itself be, what cruelty we will allow as a country. He has also exposed the hypocrisy of Europe and Israel. Trump doesn’t do this intentionally nor does he care about justice. He participates in the evil and by participating, he shows how ugly these systems are.”
“High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been worn away a single day of eternity will have passed.”
“I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places...I should not like to think some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.”
“Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεί.”
Mάχεσθαι χρὴ τὸν δῆμον ὑπὲρ τοῦ νόμου ὅκωσπερ τείχεος.
“Defend the laws as you would the city wall.”
“If every man had exactly what he wanted, he would be no better than he is now.”
“It must be seen clearly that war is the natural state of man. Justice is contention. Through contention all things come to be.”
Hθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων.
“Man’s character is his fate.”
Πολυμαθίη νόον οὐ διδάσκει.
“The learning of many things teaches not understanding.”
“The most beautiful order of the world is still a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves.”
“To God all is beautiful, good, and as it should be. Man must see things as either good or bad.”
Dὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης.
“You cannot step twice into the same river.”
“Very strange bridges are used to make the passage from one state of things to another; we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research. History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.”
“Far out of the front I’d charge and spear my man, I’d cut down any enemy soldier backing off. Such was I in battle, true, but had no love for working the land, the chores of households either, the labor that raises crops of shining children. No, it was always oarswept ships that thrilled my heart, and wars, and long polished spears and arrows, dreadful gear that makes the next man cringe. I loved them all—God planted that love inside me.”
“Listen closely. Of all that breathes and crawls across the earth, our mother earth breeds nothing feebler than a man. So long as the gods grant him power, spring in his knees, he thinks he will never suffer affliction down the years. But then, when the happy gods bring on the long hard times, bear them he must, against his will, and steel his heart. Our lives, our mood and mind as we pass across the earth, turn as the days turn…as the father of men and gods makes each day dawn.”
“What greater glory attends a man, when he’s alive, than what he wins with his racing feet and striving hands?”
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should in live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
“In the absence of strong convictions about what you want from life, you will always default to wanting more money.”
“The irony of modern life is that those of us with the means to really, truly live, who can afford to take risks and strike out on our own and blaze our own paths, are the least likely to do it, because we are seduced by the comforts of the apathetic life, and we don’t have to go above and beyond to make ends meet. So we continue existing, not living, and the clock keeps ticking.”
“I think that most people in my generation have been brought up to think that we don’t and can’t have public goods in this country, and at first I found it deliriously exciting to see ranchers running cattle on federal ground, a crashing together of collectivism and the most iconic image of free Americana—because who on earth is a more ardent socialist than an American cowboy, pushing horns across 640 million acres of shared public land? It made me very happy to think—to have proof—that these things could coexist.”
“The past and present live alongside each other in our working lives, overlapping and intertwining, until it is sometimes hard to know where one ends and the other starts. Each annual task is also a memory of the many times we have done it before and the people we did it with. As long as the work goes on, the men and women that once did it live on as well, part of what we are doing, part of our stories and memories, part of how and why we do those things.”
“I am like a man who sees the works of a watch for the first time; he is never weary of admiring the mechanism, though he does not know the use of the instrument and has never seen its face. I do not know what this is for, says he, but I see that each part of it is fitted to the rest, I admire the workman in the details of his work, and I am quite certain that all these wheels only work together in this fashion for some common end which I cannot perceive.”
“I cannot understand how any one can be a sceptic sincerely and on principle. Either such philosophers do not exist or they are the most miserable of men. Doubt with regard to what we ought to know is a condition too violent for the human mind, it cannot be long endured; in spite of itself the mind decides one way or another, and it prefers to be deceived rather than to believe nothing.”
“I suppose this prodigious diversity of opinions is caused, in the first place, by the weakness of the human intellect; and, in the second, by pride. We have no means of measuring this vast machine, we are unable to calculate its workings; we know neither its guiding principles nor its final purpose; we do not know ourselves, we know neither our nature nor the spirit that moves us; we scarcely know whether man is one or many; we are surrounded by impenetrable mysteries. These mysteries are beyond the region of sense, we think we can penetrate them by the light of reason, yet we fall back our imagination. Through this imagined world each forces a way for himself which he holds to be right; none can tell whether his path will lead him to the goal. Yet we long to know and understand it all. The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable. We prefer to trust to chance and to believe what is not true, rather than to own that not one of us can see what really is. A fragment of some vast whole whose bounds are beyond our gaze, abandoned by its Creator to our foolish quarrels, we are vain enough to want to determine the nature of that whole and our own relations with regards to it.”
“If matter in motion points me to a will, matter in motion according to fixed laws points me to an intelligence; that is the second article of my creed. To act, to compare, to choose are the operations of an active, thinking being, so this being exists. Where do you find him existing, you will say not merely in the revolving heavens nor in the sun which gives us light, not in myself alone, but in the sheep that grazes, the bird that flies, the stone that falls, and the leaf blown by the wind.”
“Show me any other creature on Earth who can make a fire and who can behold with admiration the sun. What! Can I observe and know all creatures and their relations; can I feel what is meant by order, beauty, and virtue; can I consider the universe and raise myself towards the hand that guides it; can I love good and perform it; and should I then liken myself to the beasts? Wretched soul, it is your gloomy philosophy which makes you like the beasts, or rather in vain do you seek to degrade yourself; your genius belies your principles, your kindly heart belies your doctrines, and even the abuse of your powers proves their excellence in your own despite.”
“To raise myself so far as may be even now to this state of happiness, strength, and freedom, I perceive myself in lofty contemplation. I consider the order of the universe, not to explain it by any futile system, but to revere it without ceasing, to adore the wise Author who reveals himself in it. I hold intercourse with him, I immerse all my powers in his divine essence; I am overwhelmed by his kindness, I bless him and his gifts, but I do not pray to him. What should I ask of him—to change the order of nature, to work miracles on my behalf? Should I, who am bound to love all things the order of which he has established in his wisdom and maintained by his providence, should I desire the disturbance of that order on my own account? No, that rash prayer would deserve to be punished rather than to be granted. Neither do I ask of him the power to do right; why should I ask what he has given me already! Has he not given me conscience that I may love the right, reason that I may perceive it, and freedom that I may choose it? If I do evil I have no excuse, I do it of my own free will, to ask him to change my will is to ask him to do what he asks of me; it is to want him to do the work while I get the wages; to be dissatisfied with my lot is to wish to be no longer a man, to wish to be other than what I am, to wish for disorder and evil. Thou source of justice and truth, merciful and gracious God, in thee do I trust, and the desire of my hear is—Thy will be done. When I unite my will with thine, I do what thou doest, I have a share in they goodness, I believe that I enjoy beforehand the supreme happiness which is the reward of goodness.”
“As I have said elsewhere, a theory or a politics that cannot cope with contradiction, that denies the irrational, that tries to sanitize the erotic, fantastic components of human life cannot visualize an authentic end to domination, but only vacate the field.”
“Every binary split creates a temptation to merely reverse its terms, to elevate what has been devalued and denigrate what has been overvalued.”
“‘I have led a toothless life’, he thought. ‘A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on—and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.’” – Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason, 1945.
I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”
“Any bird or creature may be hunted down, any nest discovered, if you lay siege to it; but to find what you are not looking for, to catch the shy winks and gestures on every side, to see all the byplay going on around you, missing no significant note or movement, penetrating every screen with your eye-beams—that is to be an observer, that is to have “an eye practiced like a blind man’s touch,”—a touch that can distinguish a white horse from a black—a detective eye that reads the faintest signs.”
“Just as we would be inestimably poor to be denied the opportunity to see giraffes, roses, bombardier beetles, tulips, and little black house cats with white spots on their chests that sit on our laps as we write, we lose one of the true wonders of the world every time one of these glorious variations on a theme set by the first language slips away unrecorded for posterity. We will never encounter a stegosaur, but we can be thankful that fossils allow us to know what it was like. In the same way, if we cannot enjoy all 6000 of the worlds languages alive for much longer, let us at least make sure to afford them high quality preservation…The world’s riffs on basic materials that emerged in East Africa around 148,000 B.C. represent 6000 ways of being human.”
“I will follow my instincts, be myself for good or ill, and see what will be the upshot. As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”
“Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel/
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land./
Well, they dug for their coal ’til the land was forsaken/
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.”
“But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
“A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of lifespan. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility, with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy, and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby.”
“Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it?”
“Even while I protest the assembly-line, production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance.”
“For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, and even some affection, but with Montana it is love, and it’s difficult to analyze love when you’re in it…It seems to me that Montana is a great splash of grandeur. The scale is huge but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda. Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans…I wanted to stay. But I see that, as usual, love is inarticulate. Montana has a spell on me. It is grandeur and warmth. If Montana had a sea coast, or if I could live away from the sea, I would instantly move there and petition for admission. Of all the states it is my favorite and my love.”
“Most areas in the world may be placed in latitude and longitude, described chemically in their earth, sky and water, rooted and fuzzed over with identified flora and people with known fauna, and there’s an end to it. Then there are others where fable, myth, pre-conception, love, longing, or prejudice step in and so distort a cool, clear appraisal that a kind of high-colored magical confusion takes permanent hold. Greece is such an area, and those parts of England where King Arthur walked. One quality of such places as I am trying to define is that a very large part of them is personal and subjective. And surely Texas is such a place.”
“Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”
“Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.”
“The great concepts of oneness and of majestic order seem always to be born in the desert. The quiet counting of the stars, the observation of their movements, came first from desert places. I have known desert men who chose their places with quiet and slow passion, rejecting the nervousness of a watered world. These men have not changed with the exploding times, except to die and be replaced by others like them.”
“Writers facing the problem of Texas find themselves floundering in generalities, and I am no exception. Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word…It is a mystique closely approximating a religion. And this is true to the extent that people either passionately love Texas or passionately hate it and, as in other religions, few people dare to inspect it for fear of losing their bearings in mystery and paradox…But I think there will be little quarrel with my feeling that Texas is one thing. For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings, Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America. Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.”
“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they know only their side of the question.”
“In the absence of conviction, I’ve come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life. An abundance of mystery is simply part of the bargain—which doesn’t strike me as something to lament. Accepting the essential inscrutability of existence, in any case, is surely preferable to its opposite: capitulating to the tyranny of intransigent belief.”
“The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end-wealth, fame, eternal salvation—but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself. This is no less true for the religious fanatic than for the fanatical pianist or fanatical mountain climber. As a result of his (or her) infatuation, existence overflows with purpose. Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic’s worldview; a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are soiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture.”
“No estoy seguro de que yo exista, en realidad. Soy todos los autores que he leído, toda la gente que he conocido, todas las mujeres que he amado. Todas las ciudades que he visitado, todos mis antepasados.
I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved. All the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.”
“What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it.”
“Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of the police and of its opinion.”
“Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?”
“The yearning for certainty which grails the scientist, the aching beauty which harasses the artist, the sweet thorn of justice which fierces the rebel from the eases of life, or the thrill of exultation with which we hear of true acts of that now difficult virtue of courage, of cheerful endurance of hopeless suffering are these really derivable from matter? Or even continuous with the idiot hierarchies of speechless apes?”
“Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the busy give-and-take of talk have worn away with use.”
“How often in our frustrations with trying to solve the mysteries of mind do we comfort our questions with anatomy, real or fancied, and think of a thought as a particular neuron or a mood as a particular neurotransmitter! It is a temptation born of exasperation with the untestableness and vagueness of all the above solutions. Away with these verbal subtleties!”
“O, What a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all—what is it?”
“...there are several stages of creative thought: first, a stage of preparation in which the problem is consciously worked over; then a period of incubation without any conscious concentration upon the problem; and then the illumination which is later justified by logic. The parallel between these important and complex problems and the simple problems of judging weights or the circle-triangle series is obvious. The period of preparation is essentially the setting up of a complex struction together with conscious attention to the materials on which the struction is to work. But then the actual process of reasoning, the dark leap into huge discovery, just as in the simple trivial judgment of weights, has no representation in consciousness. Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.”
“If there is any fixed star in our Constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what will be orthodox, in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith in it.”
“You have to understand. The longer you wait to build skills, the harder life pushes you to settle for something beneath your potential capabilities. Education is a race against premature convergence.”
“Beauty has been stolen from the people and sold back to them under the concept of luxury.”
“To ask earnestly the question of the ultimate meaning of history takes ones breath away; it transports us to a vacuum which only hope and faith can fill.”
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
“The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save —the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.”
“President Trump appointed some excellent judges to the federal bench, and I expect that will have some desirable effect on abortion jurisprudence — but a culture in which the normal thing to do is to pay off the porn star with whom you were having an affair in order to avoid a confrontation with your third wife and grease the skids for your presidential campaign is a culture that is going to have abortion, whether there is one Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court or nine.”
“As the last of the night cupped the river in its hands, Petschek knew in his heart that it was simply impossible to come away from an extended encounter with the greatest canyon on earth without acknowledging that human life, despite its frailty and insignificance, represents a bestowal of grace for which one has done nothing whatsoever to deserve—and that for this reason, the river world vibrated with a harrowing beauty whose principal dividends were gratitude and joy.”
“A man can’t just sit around.”
“I have been raised in the country all my life. I love dearly to feel the wind on my face, to see the sunrise, to see the moon in the night. I have no intention of spending any of my days in a concrete box.”
“Attempts to peel children away into their own special-interest group represents a false anthropology. Those making this argument imagine that adults have no continuity of identity with the children they once were. Adults who say they “hate children” or don’t want to be around them aren’t expressing an aesthetic taste, but a certain degree of self-hatred. A world that isn’t welcoming to children cannot be a humane world, since childhood is part of what it means to be human.”
“Far from legitimizing the historicist inference, history seems rather to prove that all human thought, and certainly all philosophic thought, is concerned with the same fundamental themes or the same fundamental problems, and therefore that there exists an unchanging framework which persists in all changes of human knowledge of both facts and principles. This inference is obviously compatible with the fact that clarity about these problems, the approach to them, and the suggested solutions differ more or less from thinker to thinker or from age to age.”
“For the recognition of universal principles forces man to judge the established order, or what is actual here and now, in the light of the natural or rational order; and what is actual here and now is more likely than not to fall short of the universal and unchangeable norm. The recognition of universal principles thus tends to prevent men from wholeheartedly identifying themselves with, or accepting, the social order that fate has allotted to them. It tends to alienate them from their place on the earth. It tends to make them strangers, and even strangers on the earth.”
“Napoleon’s contradictory interventions showed that rights need not be seen as forming a single package. He introduced religious toleration and equal civil and political rights for religious minorities wherever he ruled. Yet at home in France, he severely limited everyone’s freedom of speech and basically eliminated freedom of the press. The French emperor believed that ‘Men are not born to be free...Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men. Consequently, it may be repressed with impunity. Equality, on the other hand, pleases the masses.’ The French did not desire true liberty, in his view; they simply aspired to rise to the top of society. They would sacrifice their political rights in order to ensure their legal equality.”
“Ironically, then, the very notion of human rights inadvertently opened the door to more virulent forms of sexism, racism, and anti-Semitism. In effect, the sweeping claims about the natural equality of all mankind called forth equally global assertions about natural difference, producing a new kind of opponent to human rights, more powerful and sinister even than the traditionalist ones. The new forms of racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism offered biological explanations for the naturalness of human difference. In the new racism, Jews were not just Christ-killers, their inherent racial inferiority threatened to stain the purity of whites through intermarriage. Blacks were no longer inferior because they were slaves; even as the abolition of slavery progressed around the globe, racism became more, not less, poisonous. Women were not simply less reasonable than men because they were less educated; their biology destined them to the private, domestic life and made them entirely unsuitable for politics, business, or the professions. In these new biological doctrines, education or changes in environment could never change the inherent hierarchical structures in human nature.”
“Factory work’s easier on the back, and I don’t mind it, understand, but a man becomes what he does. Got to watch that. That’s why I keep at farmin’, although the crops haven’t ever throve. It’s the doin’ that’s important.”
Μὴ σικχαίνειν μηδὲ ἀπαυδᾶν μηδὲ ἀποδυσπετεῖν, εἰ μὴ καταπυκνοῦταί σοι τὸ ἀπὸ δογμάτων ὀρθῶν ἕκαστα πράσσειν· ἀλλὰ ἐκκρουσθέντα πάλιν ἐπανιέναι καὶ ἀσμενίζειν, εἰ τὰ πλείω ἀνθρωπικώτερα, καὶ φιλεῖν τοῦτο, ἐφ᾿ ὃ ἐπανέρχῃ.
“Do not be disgusted nor discouraged nor dissatisfied, if you do not succeed in doing everything according to right principles; but when you have failed return back again, and be content if the greater part of what you do is consistent with man’s nature, and love this to which you return.”
Μηκέθ᾿ ὅλως περὶ τοῦ, οἷόν τινα εἶναι τὸν ἀγαθὸν ἄνδρα δεῖ, διαλέγεσθαι, ἀλλὰ εἶναι τοιοῦτον.
“Put an end once and for all to this discussion of what a good man should be, and be one.”
“On the steps of the Forum at Timgad, one board sums it all up with ‘Hunting, bathing, gaming, laughing: that’s living.’ (VENARI LAVARE LUDERE RIDERE OCCEST VIVERE).”
“...feminist viewpoints emerge in tandem with technological advancement and social atomisation, and direct their efforts at mitigating the sex-specific impacts of a high-tech market society on women. But if the causal relationship between feminism and atomisation is complex, what’s indisputable is its deep implication in what it seeks to remedy. And thus many of the solutions proposed by feminism in response to women’s specific challenges under market society serve in practice to worsen women’s alienation and subordination to that market.”
“For women, this ideal of personhood took definitive legal form in the legalisation of abortion, and broader form in the rejection of ‘care’ as in any sense a female domain or obligation. But the net impact of women rejecting a sexist obligation to shoulder the burden of care hasn’t yet been men taking on an equal part of that burden. Rather, it’s been an awkward mixture of poorer people—usually women—being deputised as paid substitute carers, and those most in need of care often going without.”
“Mothers are only visible within this market society to the extent that we detach ourselves from caregiving, which is largely seen as an obstacle to that participation, and therefore to self-realization.”
“The industrial era raised new questions about how the economics of life in common could and should mesh with sexuality and the asymmetric material realities of child-rearing. Over the first two centuries of industrial-era life, men and women re-negotiated those parameters, co-constructing twin spheres of emotional sensibility and market competition: spheres that articulated via the axis of romance. But with the advent of the sexual revolution those spheres began to dissolve into one another. And as we’ll see, the romantic vision of marriage has shed the crucial role it played in balancing relations between the sexes, becoming instead an active impediment to those relations.
Underwritten by economic and technological changes that freed wives from financial dependence, and sexual intercourse from pregnancy risk, feminist advocates for that dissolution envisaged a utopia of joy and pleasure. Liberated from the burden of social constraint heaped for millennia on women, as a means of discouraging unplanned pregnancy, women could at last explore their sexuality untrammelled. They succeeded.
Accelerated by the pervasive metaphor of the virtual ‘marketplace’, in which individual men and women are packaged as products to browse, select and enjoy, casual sexual encounters are normalised today. Now, in a world where romance has lost its function as the connective tissue between desire and material reality, and the Hayekian marketplace serves as governing metaphor even for our most intimate encounters, the prospect of making, or trusting another to make a binding promise of mutual commitment seems ever more remote. Instead, the ‘human’ dream of radically malleable sexual and reproductive identities envisioned variously by Kollontai, de Beauvoir and Firestone has set the stage for a new, nominally feminist vision, foundationally premised on the power of reproductive technologies to eliminate or at least de-nature every embodied limit experienced by men and women.
Under the sign of this bio-libertarianism, governed by the ‘spontaneous order’ of digital markets, relationships are formed and dissolved in an unbounded space marked by what one millennial man of my acquaintance describes as a ‘general film of impermanence. And the radical pursuit of unattached individual freedom this both presumes and legitimises comes at considerable, if asymmetrical, cost to both men and women.
For the price of transition first into an industrial-era marriage marketplace, and now from that into a cyborg-era sexual marketplace, has been the steady dwindling of any space for solidarity - not just between men and women, but between individuals of any kind. As I’ll show, it has instead set off an all-out war on relationships.”
“What travels under the term ‘progress’ is revolutionary destruction of previously immutable-seeming limits. This is usually framed as moral advancement, but in practice follows a two-step ratchet. This first is a shining picture of the utopia that will follow when all the old norms are dissolved and new, improved ones are free to form in the space this cleared. Then, whatever has been smashed in pursuit of progress ends up reordered to the atomised laws of the market.”
“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
“Were I to describe the blessings I desire in life, I would be happy in a few but faithful friends. Might I choose my talent, it should rather be good than laming. I would consult in the choice of my house, convenience rather than state; and, for my circumstances, desire a moderate but independent fortune. Business enough to secure me from indolence, and leisure enough always to have an hour to spare. I would have no master, and I desire few servants. 1 would not be led away by ambition, nor perplexed with disputes. I would enjoy the blessings of health but rather be beholden for it to a regular life and an easy mind, than to the school of Hippocrates. As to my passions, since we cannot be wholly divested of them, I would hate only those whose manners rendered them odious, and love only where I knew I ought. Thus would I pass cheerfully through that portion of my life which cannot last always, & with resignation wait for that which will last forever.”
“But a strong desire over took me to go away, to take a plane out that morning, to go to Mexico, as Arthur had once done, and live irresponsibly in a little pink hotel; or to Italy, to sleep through blinding afternoons in a half fallen villa; or to vanish into the railroad wastes of North America. My only commerce would be with prostitutes and bartenders. I would send postcards without a return address.”
“I don’t know what happened to the Future. It’s as if we lost our ability, or our will, to envision anything beyond the next hundred years or so, as if we lacked the fundamental faith that there will in fact be any future at all beyond that not-too-distant date. Or maybe we stopped talking about the Future around the time that, with its microchips and its twenty-four-hour news cycles, it arrived. Some days when you pick up the newspaper it seems to have been co-written by J. G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. Human sexual reproduction without male genetic material, digital viruses, identity theft, robot firefighters and minesweepers, weather control, pharmaceutical mood engineering, rapid species extinction, US Presidents controlled by little boxes mounted between their shoulder blades, air-conditioned empires in the Arabian desert, transnational corporatocracy, reality television—some days it feels as if the imagined future of the mid-twentieth century was a kind of checklist, one from which we have been too busy ticking off items to bother with extending it. Meanwhile, the dwindling number of items remaining on that list—interplanetary colonization, sentient computers, quasi-immortality of consciousness through brain-download or transplant, a global government (fascist or enlightened)—have been represented and re-represented so many hundreds of times in films, novels and on television that they have come to seem, paradoxically, already attained, already known, lived with, and left behind. Past, in other words.”
“A culture comprises unfinished intellectual and emotional journeyings, expeditions now abandoned but known to us in the tattered maps left behind by the explorers; it is composed of lighthearted adventures, of relationships invented and explored in exploit or in drama, of myths and stories and poems expressing fragments of human self-understanding, of gods worshipped, of responses to the mutability of the world and of encounters with death. And it reaches us, as it reached generations before ours, not as an accumulation of human achievements we are called upon to accept, but as a manifold of invitations to look, to listen, and to reflect.”
“A human life is composed of performances, and each performance is a disclosure of a man’s beliefs about himself and the world and an exploit in self-enactment. He is what he becomes; he has a history but no ‘nature’. This history is not an evolutionary process or a teleological engagement; there is no ‘ultimate man’ hidden in the womb of time or prefigured in the characters who now walk the world.”
“A university will have ceased to exist when its learning has degenerated into what is now called research, when its teaching has become mere instruction and occupies the whole of an undergraduate’s time, and when those who came to be taught come, not in search of their intellectual fortune but with a vitality so unroused or so exhausted that they wish only to be provided with a serviceable moral and intellectual outfit; when they come with no understanding of the manners of conversation but desire only a qualification for earning a living or a certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world.”
“Every human being is born an heir to an inheritance to which he can succeed only in a process of learning.”
“For the sceptic [sic], there is a barbarism of order no less to be avoided than the barbarism of disorder; and the barbarism of order appears when order is pursued for its own sake and when the preservation of order involves the destruction of that without which order is only the orderliness of the ant-heap or the graveyard.”
“In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither starting place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to stay afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behavior to make a friend of every hostile situation.”
“Politics is the activity of attending to the general arrangements of a collection of people who, in respect of their common recognition of a manner of attending to its arrangements, compose a single community.”
“The pursuit of perfection as the crow flies is an activity both impious and unavoidable in human life. It involves the penalties of impiety (the anger of the gods and social isolation), and its reward is not that of achievement but that of having made the attempt. It is an activity, therefore, suitable for individuals, but not for societies. For an individual who is impelled to engage in it, the reward may exceed both the penalty and the inevitable defeat. The penitent may hope, or even expect, to fall back, a wounded hero, into the arms of an understanding and forgiving society. And even the impenitent can be reconciled with himself in the powerful necessity of his impulse, though, like Prometheus, he must suffer for it. For a society, on the other hand, the penalty is a chaos of conflicting ideals, the disruption of a common life, and the reward is the renown which attaches to monumental folly.”
“There are many who have no other idea of social progress than the extrapolation of the character of a society in time of war—the artificial unity, the narrow overmastering purpose, the devotion to a single cause and the subordination of everything to it—all this seems to them inspiring: but the direction of their admiration reveals the emptiness of their souls.”
“To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one’s own fortune, to live at the level of one’s means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one’s circumstances. With some people this is itself a choice; in others it is a disposition which appears, frequently or less frequently, in their preferences and aversions, and is not itself chosen or specifically cultivated.”
“To have command over the languages of our civilization is, not to know the rules of their grammar, but to have the opportunity of a syntax and a vocabulary, rich in fine distinctions, in which to think for oneself.”
“We may listen to what a man has to say, but unless we overhear in it a mind at work and can detect the idiom of thought, we have understood nothing.”
“What every man is born an heir to is an inheritance of human achievement; an inheritance of feelings, emotions, images, visions, thoughts, beliefs, ideas, understandings, intellectual and practical enterprises, languages, relationships, organizations, canons and maxims of conduct, procedures, rituals, skills, works of art, books, musical compositions, tools, artifacts and utensils—in short, what Dilthey called geistige Welt.”
“What is furthest from our needs is that kings should be philosophers.”
“For living is one thing and knowing is another; and, as we shall see, perhaps there is such an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life.”
“A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”
“Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.”
“Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female world.”
“The fantasy of the Grand March that Franz was so intoxicated by is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies. The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.
The dictatorship of the proletariat or democracy? Rejection of the consumer society or demands for increased productivity? The guillotine or an end to the death penalty? It is all beside the point. What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.”
“The longing for Paradise is man’s longing not to be man.”
“Individuals can search for truth. Groups search for consensus.”
“The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.”
“History is the world of experience abridged by the category of the past. Science is experience conceptualized quantitatively. Practice is experience abstracted in terms of will.”
“The philosopher takes the everyday concepts of life and uses them as apertures for the observation of experience.”
“A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it.”
“When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember no vexation, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass indeed into their world.”
“We are mistaken when we think of nomads as rootless—for isn’t it by walking around a place, rolling in its dust, branching out and returning, that you grow to know it, to love it? Hence tariqa, a way or path, is the Sufi tariqa, ‘The Way’ to communicate with God, the beloved.”
“To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge.”
“You know, the older you get, the more you begin to depend upon irony as the last human element you can rely on. Whatever exists will, sooner or later, be turned inside out.”
“The capitalists proclaim that the only good is wealth, the socialists answer back that the only evil is poverty.”
“All great discoveries and inventions spring from the delight of strong men in victory. They are expressions of personality and not of the utilitarian thinking of the masses, who are merely spectators of the event, but must take its consequences whatever they may be.”
“Distinctions between bodily structure and way of life are only anatomists’ distinctions; if we start from the inner form of the life instead of that of the body, tactics of living and the organisation of the body appear as one and the same, both being expressions of one organic actuality.”
“Every machine serves some one process and owes its existence to thought about this process. All our means of transport have developed out of the ideas of driving and rowing, sailing and flying, and not out of any concept such as that of a wagon or of a boat. Methods themselves are weapons. And consequently technics is in no wise a ‘part’ of economics, any more than economics (or, for that matter, war or politics) can claim to be a self-contained ‘part’ of life. They are all just sides of one active, fighting, and charged life.”
“Every struggle to overcome a problem has its own logical technique. There is a technique of the painter’s brush-strokes, of horsemanship, of navigating an airship. Always it is a matter of purposive activity, never of things. And it is just this that is so often overlooked in the study of prehistory, in which far too much attention is paid to things in museums and far too little to the innumerable processes that must have been in existence, even though they may have vanished without leaving a trace.”
“Man is no simpleton, ‘naturally good’ and stupid, and not a semi-ape with technical tendencies, as Haeckel describes him and Gabriel Max portrays him. Over these caricatures there still falls the plebeian shadow of Rousseau.
No, the tactics of his living are those of a splendid beast of prey, brave, crafty, and cruel. He lives by attacking and killing and destroying. He wills, and has willed ever since he existed, to be master.”
“The animal of prey is the highest form of mobile life. It implies a maximum of freedom from others and for oneself, of self-responsibility, of independence, and an extreme of necessity where that self can hold its own only by fighting and winning and destroying. It imparts a high dignity to Man, as a type, that he is a beast of prey.”
“There are no ‘men-in-themselves’ such as the philosophers prattle about, but only men of a time, of a locality, of a race, of a personality type, who contend in battle with the given world and through or fail, while the universe moves slowly on with a godlike unconcern. This battle is life, and life in the true Nietzschean sense of a cruel, pitiless, relentless battle deriving from the Will to Power.”
“Without an economic wealth that is concentrated in a few hands, there can be no ‘wealth’ of art, of thought, or of elegance, not to speak of the luxury of possessing a worldview and of thinking theoretically instead of practically. Economic impoverishment at once brings spiritual and artistic impoverishment in its train.”
“A core feature of liberal philosophy and politics is recognition of the arbitrariness of almost every border. This runs as a golden thread in considerations not only of the political understanding of borders—primarily national borders—but of any existing differentiation, distinction, boundary, and delineation, all of which come under suspicion as arbitrarily limiting individual freedom of choice. All such ‘borders’ are interrogated for their arbitrariness, and few can ultimately withstand the pressure of such interrogation—even those that are not arbitrary but are nevertheless limiting. Borders and boundaries based in geography, history, and nature must increasingly be erased under the logic of liberalism…Liberalism’s logic seeks to eliminate not only borders as we normally consider them—through political and economic globalization—but also the ‘boundaries’ that exist in nature. Today’s emphasis upon issues of identity—especially arising from the sexual revolution—arise equally from the liberal abhorrence of ‘forms’. The human form above all that requires elimination is sexual difference, a goal advanced by increasingly aggressive efforts to secure state-funded birth control, abortion, and artificial forms of fertilization and gestation of children. The people most committed to protecting and preserving the environment and the technological manipulation of nature are often the most fervent in support of eliminating every evidence of natural differentiation between men and women, through chemical and technological manipulation.”
“At the heart of liberal theory and practice is the preeminent role of the state as agent of individualism.”
“Building on liberalism’s successes means recognizing both the legitimacy of its initial appeal and the deeper reasons for its failure. It means offering actual human liberty in the form of both civic and individual self-rule, not the ersatz version that combines systemic powerlessness with the illusion of autonomy in the form of consumerist and sexual license.”
“Liberalism is thus not merely, as is often portrayed, a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridicial defense of rights. Rather, it seeks to transform all of human life and the world. It’s two revolutions—its anthropological individualism and the voluntarist conception of choice, and its insistence on the human separation from and opposition to nature—created its distinctive and new understanding of liberty as the most extensive possible expansion of the human sphere of autonomous activity.”
“One of the key differences between ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’ today is over whether liberalism can and should see its primary locus as the nation or the world. Both sides share the view that liberalism is a universalist philosophy, but they differ over how best to advance that universalism. Mainstream conservatives have sought to advance liberal universalism through the vehicle of the nation, primarily through globalized economic policy and aggressively interventionist and even imperialist militarism. Liberals believe the nation state must eventually be superseded by global governance, best represented today by the European union. Both sides of this project—the two faces of liberalism—have failed.”
“Our main political choices come down to which depersonalized mechanism will purportedly advance our freedom and security—the space of the market, which collects our billions upon billions of choices to provide for our wants and needs without demanding from us any specific thought or intention about the wants and needs of others; or the liberal state, which establishes depersonalized procedures and mechanisms for the wants and needs of others that remain insufficiently addressed by the market.
Thus the insistent demand that we choose between protection of individual liberty and expansion of state activity masks the true relation between the state and the market: that they grow constantly and necessarily together. Statism enables individualism, individualism demands statism.”
“Thus the two sides of the liberal project wage a ceaseless and absorbing contest over means, the ideal avenue for liberating the individual from constitutive relationships, from unchosen traditions, from restraining custom. Behind the lines, however, both have consistently sought the expansion of the sphere of liberation in which the individual can best pursue his or her preferred lifestyle, leading to mutual support of the expansion of the state as the requisite setting in which the autonomous individual could come into being. While ‘conservative’ liberals express undying hostility to state expansion, they consistently turn to its capacity to secure national and international markets as a way of overcoming any local forms of governance or traditional norms that might limit the market’s role in the life of a community. And while ‘progressive’ liberals declaim the expansive state as the ultimate protector of individual liberty, they insist that it must be limited when it comes to enforcement of ‘manners and morals,’ preferring the open market place of individual ‘buyers and sellers,’ especially in matters of sexual practice and infinitely fluid sexual identity, the definition of family, and individual choices over ending one’s own life. The modern liberal state consistently expands to enlarge our self-definition as ‘consumers’—a word more often used today to describe denizens of the liberal nation-state than ‘citizens’—while entertaining us with a cataclysmic battle between two sides that many begin to rightly suspect aren’t that different after all.”
“What is supposed to allow us to transform our world is instead transforming us, making us into creatures to which many, if not most of us, have not given our ‘consent’. It is making us ever more into the creatures that liberalism supposed was our nature in that ‘state of nature’ that existed before the coming of civilization, law, and government. Ironically, but perhaps not coincidentally, the political project of liberalism is shaping us into the creatures of its prehistorical fantasy, which in fact required the combined massive apparatus of the modern state, economy, education system, and science and technology to make us into: increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves, replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.”
“If he would express the sight in colour the artist would use soft pastels for the plains to the west and south, harsh black-purple for the cliffs to the north and east. To express it in music the conductor would bring out the soul of the strings for the west and south, and force the brass to explode and the percussion to thunder for the north and east. To put it in words the poet would create a sigh for the west and south and a hostile fatalism for the north and east. To report on it technically the geologist would describe rolling, grass-covered savannas to the west and south, ending abruptly in two gigantic rock table-moun-tains to the north and east.”
“A morality is not something above our daily existence that we bring to bear on our actions through an act of reflective effort; rather, it is a medium for conduct without which no action or utterance could take place. A morality does not somehow supervene on the primary or natural activity of desiring or instinctual gratification; it is a language within which the pursuit of any satisfaction takes place, a knowledge we are never without.”
“Science confines itself to the measurable or quantitative aspect of things and excludes what is not measurable, individual, or unique. History deals with the individual and the unique, but it is abstract because it postulates an objective series of facts and events wholly independent of the historian and it never arrives at a complete explanation of anything. And practical thinking is condemned to an endless ‘ought to be’ that never finds rest in a stable ‘is’.
The primary conclusion that follows from all this is that scientific, historical, and practical thinking have nothing to contribute to political philosophy, nor can they criticize its conclusions.”
“It’s easy to hate the rich. But do you have the courage to hate the poor?”
“The inflation of specialized vocabularies, far from giving us the means for a more refined and rigorous understanding, multiplies the crutches with which we try in vain to make up for the loss of confidence in our capacity to understand and to speak.”
“Today the human ambition is to be a creator. There are great creators, middling creators, and small creators, but everyone has the desire to be a creator. And it seems to me, once again, that to understand what is, is not something that stirs the ambitions of our contemporaries. They are more interested, one might say, in what is not. Rousseau, the great master of the modern in this matter, said, “Only what is not is beautiful.” For me, fundamentally, the opposite is true: only what is interests me. And this is perhaps the reason why, at least since I became an adult, I have not been able to be on the left, because the left prefers to imagine a society that is not, and I have always found the society that is more interesting than the society that might be.”
“Þá nam ek frævask
ok fróðr vera
ok vaxa ok vel hafask
orð mér af orði
orðs leitaði
verk mér af verki
verks leitaði.
Then began I to thrive,
and wisdom to get,
I grew and well I was;
Each word led me on to another word,
Each deed to another deed.”
“There is no reason for competition of any kind between reason and faith...In their respective worlds, God and the human being are set within a unique relationship. In God there lies the origin of all things, in him is found the fullness of the mystery, and in this His glory consists; to men and women there falls the task of exploring truth with their reason, and in this their nobility consists.”
“Guided by the Spirit, the People of God come to recognize in cultural and social transformations both the signs of the presence of Christ, who comes and guides history toward its fulfilment, and those aberrations that obscure his face. In this way, the essential core of revealed Truth is not altered, but made explicit and adopted as a living standard for guiding concrete choices,
inspiring paths of personal and communal conversion, promoting structural reforms and supporting new forms of evangelical witness in public life. History is thus understood as one of the places in which the Church allows herself to be taught by the Spirit about the humanizing power of the Gospel; and she learns to develop her own teaching at the service of the dignity of every person and the good of all peoples.”
“True progress always stems from a heart open to others, an intelligence willing to listen, and a will that seeks what unites rather than what separates.”
“Understanding that the truth is a gift to be shared, not a possession to be monopolized, frees the Church from the temptation of seeking forms of presence based on power...What matters most is not occupying positions of power or defending cultural strongholds, but initiating good processes and enabling them to mature. In this way, the truth of the Gospel is not imposed from above, but grows over time within the concrete interweaving of lives, communities and cultures. This is not a truth that fears diversity, but instead welcomes and guides it. It does not eliminate conflicts, but transforms them, reuniting that which history tends to scatter. This concept can also be illustrated by the image of a multifaceted polyhedron, in which the one truth of the Gospel is reflected from different angles.”
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic, as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
“Finish every day and be done with it. For manners and for wise living it is a vice to remember. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. To-morrow is a new day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.”
“As for ourselves, on the one hand, contemporary science, or rather the ideological use made of it by the mainstream media, leads us to believe that we are hardly more than lucky monkeys, produced by the chance encounter of irrational forces. On the other hand, we harp upon the “dignity” of man, endowed with “human rights” that are supposed to provide us with the unshakable ground for our moral choices and legal rulings. Little wonder that some people propose to enlarge the notions of rights to animals, since human beings themselves are conceived of as animals that happen to be endowed, nobody knows why, with sacred and unalienable rights.”
“Culture is the set of answers to the basic questions of mankind, be they humdrum or lofty: Whom shall I marry? What shall I eat and how shall I cook my meals? How shall I behave with my social and natural surrounding? Whom shall I worship? In each case, a culture distinguished a right and wrong behavior, hence what we call ‘values.’ What we call a culture or a civilization is a definite set of answers that distinguish a right way and a wrong one: thou shalt marry a suitable person belonging to this group, and not have incestuous commerce; thou shalt eat this food and not that disgusting filth; thou shalt worship this god of ours and not that foreign idol, and so on.”
“The basic Christian experience is that we don’t do what we want and don’t want what we do.”
“We meet here a paradox that was already pointed out on another level: natural science represents a fantastic triumph of reason, but at the same time it claims to show that reason is merely a product—and an unintentional product, an epiphenomenon—of evolution, that is, of a movement that was led by blind and irrational forces.”
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
“Art is high-Quality endeavor. That is all that really needs to be said. Or, if something more high-sounding is demanded: Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man.”
“We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.”
“Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.”
“A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to adapt what is best in the past to the changing circumstances of the present.”
“Human beings make a radical distinction, of course, between the past and future, and they know in their hearts that the future can be changed, whereas the past cannot be. But they also know in their hearts that the future is unknowable but the past is knowable, and there’s a conflict, a natural division among human beings between those who are interested in changing things and those who are interested in knowing things. Among the latter, of course, are conservatives—those who want to know about their condition and know it by looking at the past and seeing what in the past is useful and valuable and what is not. That backward-looking attitude is fundamental to us. But of course, it isn’t about changing things, it’s about understanding them; whereas the left has this emphasis on the future, always, because the future can be changed. The only problem with it is that we don’t know how to do it and the evidence of history is that when we think we know how to do it, we will always make it worse.”
“In the long run, it must be good to be open to the truth that different societies maintain equilibrium, order, and peace in different ways. The conservative is the one who understands his own society from within and loves and defends it.”
“Poetry, drama, portraiture and music show us that mortality is inextricably woven into the human scheme of things: that our virtues and our loves are the virtues and loves of dying creatures; that everything that leads us to cherish one another, to sacrifice ourselves, to make sublime and heroic gestures, is predicated on the assumption that we are vulnerable and transient, with only a fleeting claim on the things of this world.”
“The contradictory nature of the Socialist utopias is one explanation for the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible.”
“The dispute between the unscrupulous optimists and the dystopians will not disappear, but will be endlessly renewed as new futures occur to the one, and a renewed past detains the other. In emergencies, and all changes that abolish old routines, the optimists hope to turn things to their benefit. They are as likely to consult the past as a battalion fighting for its life in a city is likely to protect the monuments. They strive to be on the winning side, and to find the path into the future on which the light of ‘I’ stays shining.
The ‘we’ attitude, by contrast, is circumspect. It sees human decisions as situated, constrained by place, time and community; by custom, faith and law. It urges us not to throw ourselves always into the swim of things, but to stand aside and reflect. It emphasizes constraints and boundaries, and reminds us of human imperfection and of the fragility of real communities. Its decisions take account of other people and other times. In its deliberations the dead and the unborn have an equal voice with the living. And its attitude to those who say ‘press on’ and ‘ever onward’ is ‘sufficient unto the day the evil thereof’. It does not endorse a comprehensive pessimism, but only the occasional dose of pessimism, with which to temper hopes that otherwise might ruin us. It the voice of wisdom in world of noise. And for that very reason, no one hears it.”
“Audentes Fortuna juvat.
Fortune favours the bold.”
“Our minds, our souls, our bodies work most efficiently, most profoundly, most happily, when moving and, in particular, walking. Modern civilization imprisons us in offices, and treats tramps, Gypsies, mystics, and nomads as misfits. But in fact these wanderers are in tune with an ancient and more natural form of human life. It is homes and cities and sedentary jobs that are unnatural. To find yourself, you must travel.”
“It is old custom that enables people to live together peaceably; the destroyers of custom demolish more than they know or desire. It is through convention—a word much abused in our time—that we contrive to avoid perpetual disputes about rights and duties: law at base is a body of conventions. Continuity is the means of linking generation to generation; it matters as much for society as it does for the individual; without it, life is meaningless. When successful revolutionaries have effaced old customs, derided old conventions, and broken the continuity of social institutions—why, presently they discover the necessity of establishing fresh customs, conventions, and continuity; but that process is painful and slow; and the new social order that eventually emerges may be much inferior to the old order that radicals overthrew in their zeal for the Earthly Paradise.”
“Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.”
“‘It is true,’ said Sandy, ‘many have left this life. But I will never leave it. To leave this life is to scorn the life of my parents, to say there is something superior to that life. Of course, we can do things to improve. We should educate our children, so they can understand better how to treat the animals, how to work with people in the city. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon this life. To be a Tuareg is to be a herder.
We are free and independent. We walk differently from the people in the town. Our life is a good one, as long as there is pasture, water and security. It is the best life I know.’”
“People in ancient societies thought their societies were obviously great. The imperial Chinese thought nothing could beat imperial China, the medieval Spaniards thought medieval Spain was a singularly impressive example of perfection, and Communist Soviets were pretty big on Soviet Communism. Meanwhile, we think 21st-century Western civilization, with its democracy, secularism, and ethnic tolerance is pretty neat. Since the first three examples now seem laughably wrong, we should be suspicious of the hypothesis that we finally live in the one era whose claim to have gotten political philosophy right is totally justified. Speak out against the Chinese Empire and you lose your head. Speak out against the King of Spain and you face the Inquisition. Speak out against Comrade Stalin and you get sent to Siberia. The great thing about western liberal democracy is that it has a free marketplace of ideas. Everybody criticizes some aspect of our society. Noam Chomsky made a career of criticizing our society and became rich and famous and got a cushy professorship. So our advantage is that we admit our society’s imperfections, reward those who point them out, and so keep inching closer and closer to this ideal of perfect government. Okay, back up. Suppose you went back to Stalinist Russia and you said ‘You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!’ Congratulations. You have found a way to criticize the government in Stalinist Russia and totally get away with it. Who knows, you might even get that cushy professorship. If you ‘criticize’ society by telling it to keep doing exactly what it’s doing only much much more so, society recognizes you as an ally and rewards you for being a ‘bold iconoclast’ or ‘having brave and revolutionary new ideas’ or whatever. It’s only when you tell them something they actually don’t want to hear that you get in trouble.”
“As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren’t just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.”
“The life you want is built in the margins of the life you have.”
“Of the gladest moments in human life, methinks is the departure upon a distant journey to unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the Slavery of Home, man feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood....afresh dawns the morn of life…”
“Conservatism is a philosophy of inheritance and stewardship; it does not squander resources but strives to enhance them and pass them on.”
Aἰσχρὸν δὲ καὶ τὸ διὰ τὴν ἀμέλειαν γηρᾶναι, πρὶν ἰδεῖν ἑαυτὸν ποῖος ἂν κάλλιστος καὶ κράτιστος τῷ σώματι γένοιτο.
“It is a shame indeed for a man to grow old indifferently, without seeing the beauty and strength that his body can attain.”
...o δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ...
“…the unexamined life is not the life of a human being...”
“When my boots hit the boards, I’m a brand new man/
With my back to the horizon I’ll make my stand.”
“A barbarian awareness of true danger can be an asset to any society, as well as a barbarian willingness to believe that straight action, not interminable moral confusion, is sometimes required.”
“As a construct, history is too often revised to match contemporary views. It has been said that each generation must rewrite history in order to understand it. The opposite is true. Moderns revise history to make it palatable, not to understand it. Those who edit ‘history’ to popular taste each decade will never understand the past—neither the horrors nor glories of which the human race is equally capable—and for that reason, they will fail to understand themselves.”
“Bowie, born somewhere in the South in the 1790’s, was raised in a family that became wealthy in Louisiana early in the century. He roamed, running slaves with Jean Lafitte in contravention to what every Southerner felt was a stupid law, exploring Texas, fighting Indians. Bowie was remarkable in two respects. He fitted in easily with the best society of the Creole towns and vast plantations, and he had the enormous respect of the wildest and toughest men on the harshest of all American frontiers. He was a killer: he killed the son of Jean Lafitte, who crossed him, crippled ‘Bloody’ Sturdivant, gutted Major Norris Wright and a verified number of others, in the most desperate ‘medleys’ or duels. He made the great knife his brother Rezin forged for him a glittering legend; soon Bowie knives were manufactured in England for sale on the American frontier. Yet Bowie was simply not a killer in the modern, civilized sense. He lived in a violent society, and men of keen judgement and good breeding considered him quite sound. The respect tendered him far exceeded that of any duelist.”
“Codes tend to live on in debased form, often long after the necessity that called them forth is dead.”
“Every age has a people or a culture that believes the shortest distance between dreams and goals is a bomb, a bullet, a gas oven, or a keen Toledo sword and burning stake.”
“Historically, the better organized and more powerful always became dominant, whatever their philosophy.”
“In all times and in all places there were only three ways by which greatly differentiated peoples had lived together: as slave or serf and master; by miscegenation; or by some system of caste. The first and the last solutions, historically, were commonest; they had been employed from the New World to India. The Spanish, in America, had imposed a combination of the two, with considerable miscegenation on the side.”
“It is a valid question, whether the long frontier shaped Anglo-America, or whether attitudes, prejudices, and ethics brought from Europe shaped the American frontier.”
“Texas was never a refuge for the lowly, or oppressed, or a beacon proclaiming human rights. It was a primordial land with a Pleistocene climate, inhabited by species inherently hostile to the Anglo-Celtic breed. Some North Americans chose to conquer it, and in the process unquestionably came to look upon themselves as a sort of chosen race.
This sense of being a chosen people, which was tribal and biblical, was an enormous Texan strength rather than a weakness. It gave Anglo-Texans immediate moral superiority, in action, over their enemies. It led to high nobility and at times a valor almost beyond belief. It also produced brutal prejudice, and ethnic self-satisfaction that amounted to chauvinism. The whole feeling was guileless, and therefore guiltless. Hypocrisy toward warfare was never part of the Texan ethos. The generations that moved across the Sabine were already bred to certain hatreds and war.”
“And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.”
“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
Oὐ γὰρ ἔδωκεν ἡμῖν ὁ θεὸς πνεῦμα δειλίας, ἀλλὰ δυνάμεως καὶ ἀγάπης καὶ σωφρονισμοῦ.
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and self-discipline.”
“For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
Βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι᾽ ἐσ όπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι, τότε δὲ πρόσωπονπρὸς πρόσωπον: ἄρτι γινώσκω ἐκ μέρους, τότε δὲ ἐπιγνώσομαι καθὼσκαὶ ἐπεγνώσθην.
“For now we see through a glass, darkly, then face-to-face; Now I know partly; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
“I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.”
“I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
“Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.”
“The Bible contains the mind of God, the state of man, the way of salvation, the doom of sinners, and the happiness of believers. Its doctrines are holy, its precepts are binding, its histories are true, and its decisions are immutable. Read it to be wise, believe it to be safe, and practice it to be holy. It contains light to direct you, food to support you, and comfort to cheer you. It is the traveler’s map, the pilgrim’s staff, the pilot’s compass, the soldier’s sword, and the Christian’s charter. Here Paradise is restored, Heaven opened, and the gates of Hell disclosed. Christ is its grand subject, our good the design, the glory of God its end. It should fill the memory, rule the heart, and guide the feet. Read it slowly, frequently, and prayerfully. It is a mine of wealth, a paradise of glory, and a river of pleasure. It is given you in life, will be opened at the judgement, and be remembered forever. It involves the highest responsibility, will reward the greatest labor, and will condemn all who trifle with its sacred contents.”
“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
“The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
“Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”
“Understanding is a wellspring of life to him that hath it.”
“Videmus nunc per speculum et in aenigmate...
And now we see through a glass as in a riddle...”
“When you get to where you’re going, is it too late to know you’re wrong?”
“Bodily vigor is good, and vigor of intellect is even better, but far above both is character. It is true, of course, that a genius may, on certain lines, do more than a brave and manly fellow who is not a genius; and so, in sports, vast physical strength may overcome weakness, even though the puny body may have in it the heart of a lion. But, in the long run, in the great battle of life, no brilliancy of intellect, no perfection of bodily development, will count when weighed in the balance against that assemblage of virtues, active and passive, of moral qualities, which we group together under the name of character; and if between any two contestants, even in college sport or in college work, the difference in character on the right side is as great as the difference of intellect or strength the other way, it is the character side that will win. Of course this does not mean that either intellect or bodily vigor can safely be neglected. On the contrary, it means that both should be developed, and that not the least of the benefits of developing both comes from the indirect effect which this development itself has upon the character.”
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”
“We need the rough, strong qualities that make a man fit to play his part well among men. Yet we need to remember even more that no ability, no strength and fore, no power of intellect or power of wealth, shall avail us, if we have not the root of living in us, if we do not pay more than a mere lip-loyalty to the old, old commonplace virtues, which stand at the foundations of all social and political well being.”
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
“As they say in South America, everyone knows that they are going to die; yet nobody believes it. Human lapses of this kind, enable us to fish, fornicate, overeat, and bet on the horses.”
“Constant discovery is the eternal joy of the ahistorical.”
“It is not given to every soul pining for the natural world to be a naturalist. Most of us require a game to play, whether hunting, birdwatching, angling, or sailing, and each creates superb opportunities to observe the weather, the land under changing light, the movement of water.”
“The Bible tells us to watch and to listen. Something like this suggests what fishing ought to be about: using the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves.”
“There are always a few anglers, blessed with genius and inspiration: towering casters, leadfooted, deep river waders, anglers with astounding vision, and so on. But the angler who accepts both his gifts and limitations, who recognizes the importance of keeping his fly in the water, who abjures tackle tinkering once he reaches the river, and who strives to fish coherently throughout the day will usually, finally, succeed.”
Ρᾷον δ᾽ οἱ πολλοὶ κακοῦργοι ὄντεςδεξιοὶ κέκληνται ἢ ἀμαθεῖς ἀγαθοί, καὶ τῷ μὲν αἰσχύνονται, ἐπὶ δὲ τῷἀγάλλονται.
“Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are as ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first.”
‘Χρώμεθα γὰρ πολιτείᾳ οὐ ζηλούσῃ τοὺς τῶν πέλας νόμους, παράδειγμαδὲ μᾶλλον αὐτοὶ ὄντες τισὶν ἢ μιμούμενοι ἑτέρους. Καὶ ὄνομα μὲν διὰ τὸμὴ ἐς ὀλίγους ἀλλ᾽ ἐς πλείονας οἰκεῖν δημοκρατία κέκληται: μέτεστι δὲκατὰ μὲν τοὺς νόμους πρὸς τὰ ἴδια διάφορα πᾶσι τὸ ἴσον, κατὰ δὲ τὴνἀξίωσιν, ὡς ἕκαστος ἔν τῳ εὐδοκιμεῖ, οὐκ ἀπὸ μέρους τὸ πλέον ἐς τὰ κοινὰἢ ἀπ᾽ ἀρετῆς προτιμᾶται, οὐδ᾽ αὖ κατὰ πενίαν, ἔχων γέ τι ἀγαθὸν δρᾶσαιτὴν πόλιν, ἀξιώματος ἀφανείᾳ κεκώλυται. Ἐλευθέρως δὲ τά τε πρὸς τὸκοινὸν πολιτεύομεν καὶ ἐς τὴν πρὸς ἀλλήλους τῶν καθ᾽ ἡμέρανἐπιτηδευμάτων ὑποψίαν, οὐ δι᾽ ὀργῆς τὸν πέλας, εἰ καθ᾽ ἡδονήν τι δρᾷ, ἔχοντες, οὐδὲ ἀζημίους μέν, λυπηρὰς δὲ τῇ ὄψει ἀχθηδόναςπροστιθέμενοι. Ἀνεπαχθῶς δὲ τὰ ἴδια προσομιλοῦντες τὰ δημόσια διὰδέος μάλιστα οὐ παρανομοῦμεν, τῶν τε αἰεὶ ἐν ἀρχῇ ὄντων ἀκροάσει καὶτῶν νόμων, καὶ μάλιστα αὐτῶν ὅσοι τε ἐπ᾽ ὠφελίᾳ τῶν ἀδικουμένωνκεῖνται καὶ ὅσοι ἄγραφοι ὄντες αἰσχύνην ὁμολογουμένην φέρουσιν.’Καὶ μὴν καὶ τῶν πόνων πλείστας ἀναπαύλας τῇ γνώμῃ ἐπορισάμεθα, ἀγῶσι μέν γε καὶ θυσίαις διετησίοις νομίζοντες, ἰδίαις δὲ κατασκευαῖς εὐπρεπέσιν, ὧν καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἡ τέρψις τὸ λυπηρὸν ἐκπλήσσει. Ἐπεσέρχεται δὲ διὰ μέγεθος τῆς πόλεως ἐκ πάσης γῆς τὰ πάντα, καὶ ξυμβαίνει ἡμῖν μηδὲν οἰκειοτέρᾳ τῇ ἀπολαύσει τὰ αὐτοῦ ἀγαθὰγιγνόμενα καρποῦσθαι ἢ καὶ τὰ τῶν ἄλλων ἀνθρώπων.
“Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbors’, but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and all are alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not direct sour looks at him, which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular regard to those which are ordained for the protection of the injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment. And we have not forgotten to provide for our weary spirits many relaxations from toil; we have regular games and sacrifices throughout the year; our homes are beautiful and elegant; and the delight which we daily feel in all these things helps to banish sorrow. Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as our own.”
Καὶ ἐπέπεσε πολλὰ καὶ χαλεπὰκατὰ στάσιν ταῖς πόλεσι, γιγνόμενα μὲν καὶ αἰεὶ ἐσόμενα, ἕως ἂν ἡ αὐτὴφύσις ἀνθρώπων ᾖ, μᾶλλον δὲ καὶ ἡσυχαίτερα καὶ τοῖς εἴδεσι διηλλαγμένα, ὡς ἂν ἕκασται αἱ μεταβολαὶ τῶν ξυντυχιῶν ἐφιστῶνται. Ἑνμὲν γὰρ εἰρήνῃ καὶ ἀγαθοῖς πράγμασιν αἵ τε πόλεις καὶ οἱ ἰδιῶταιἀμείνους τὰς γνώμας ἔχουσι διὰ τὸ μὴ ἐς ἀκουσίους ἀνάγκας πίπτειν: ὁ δὲπόλεμος ὑφελὼν τὴν εὐπορίαν τοῦ καθ᾽ ἡμέραν βίαιος διδάσκαλος καὶπρὸς τὰ παρόντα τὰς ὀργὰς τῶν πολλῶν ὁμοιοῖ. Εστασίαζέ τε οὖν τὰτῶν πόλεων, καὶ τὰ ἐφυστερίζοντά που πύστει τῶν προγενομένων πολὺἐπέφερε τὴν ὑπερβολὴν τοῦ καινοῦσθαι τὰς διανοίας τῶν τ᾽ ἐπιχειρήσεωνπεριτεχνήσει καὶ τῶν τιμωριῶν ἀτοπίᾳ. Καὶ τὴν εἰωθυῖαν ἀξίωσιν τῶνὀνομάτων ἐς τὰ ἔργα ἀντήλλαξαν τῇ δικαιώσει. τόλμα μὲν γὰρ ἀλόγιστοςἀνδρεία φιλέταιρος ἐνομίσθη, μέλλησις δὲ προμηθὴς δειλία εὐπρεπής, τὸδὲ σῶφρον τοῦ ἀνάνδρου πρόσχημα, καὶ τὸ πρὸς ἅπαν ξυνετὸν ἐπὶ πᾶνἀργόν: τὸ δ᾽ ἐμπλήκτως ὀξὺ ἀνδρὸς μοίρᾳ προσετέθη, ἀσφαλείᾳ δὲ τὸἐπιβουλεύσασθαι ἀποτροπῆς πρόφασις εὔλογος. Καὶ ὁ μὲνχαλεπαίνων πιστὸς αἰεί, ὁ δ᾽ ἀντιλέγων αὐτῷ ὕποπτος. ἐπιβουλεύσας δέτις τυχὼν ξυνετὸς καὶ ὑπονοήσας ἔτι δεινότερος: προβουλεύσας δὲ ὅπωςμηδὲν αὐτῶν δεήσει, τῆς τε ἑταιρίας διαλυτὴς καὶ τοὺς ἐναντίουςἐκπεπληγμένος. ἁπλῶς δὲ ὁ φθάσας τὸν μέλλοντα κακόν τι δρᾶνἐπῃνεῖτο, καὶ ὁ ἐπικελεύσας τὸν μὴ διανοούμενον. Καὶ μὴν καὶ τὸξυγγενὲς τοῦ ἑταιρικοῦ ἀλλοτριώτερον ἐγένετο διὰ τὸ ἑτοιμότερον εἶναιἀπροφασίστως τολμᾶν: οὐ γὰρ μετὰ τῶν κειμένων νόμων ὠφελίας αἱτοιαῦται ξύνοδοι, ἀλλὰ παρὰ τοὺς καθεστῶτας πλεονεξίᾳ. καὶ τὰς ἐςσφᾶς αὐτοὺς πίστεις οὐ τῷ θείῳ νόμῳ μᾶλλον ἐκρατύνοντο ἢ τῷ κοινῇ τιπαρανομῆσαι. Τά τε ἀπὸ τῶν ἐναντίων καλῶς λεγόμενα ἐνεδέχοντοἔργων φυλακῇ, εἰ προύχοιεν, καὶ οὐ γενναιότητι. ἀντιτιμωρήσασθαί τέτινα περὶ πλείονος ἦν ἢ αὐτὸν μὴ προπαθεῖν. καὶ ὅρκοι εἴ που ἄραγένοιντο ξυναλλαγῆς, ἐν τῷ αὐτίκα πρὸς τὸ ἄπορον ἑκατέρῳ διδόμενοιἴσχυον οὐκ ἐχόντων ἄλλοθεν δύναμιν: ἐν δὲ τῷ παρατυχόντι ὁ φθάσαςθαρσῆσαι, εἰ ἴδοι ἄφαρκτον, ἥδιον διὰ τὴν πίστιν ἐτιμωρεῖτο ἢ ἀπὸ τοῦπροφανοῦς, καὶ τό τε ἀσφαλὲς ἐλογίζετο καὶ ὅτι ἀπάτῃ περιγενόμενοςξυνέσεως ἀγώνισμα προσελάμβανεν.
“The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in a severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases. In peace and prosperity states and individuals have better sentiments, because they do not find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes. Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, from having heard what had been done before carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions, as manifested in the cunning of their enterprises and the atrocity of their reprisals. Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries. In fine, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was wanting, was equally commended, until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations had not in view the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition for their overthrow; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime. The fair proposals of an adversary were met with jealous precautions by the stronger of the two, and not with a generous confidence. Revenge also was held of more account than self-preservation. Oaths of reconciliation, being only proffered on either side to meet an immediate difficulty, only held good so long as no other weapon was at hand; but when opportunity offered, he who first ventured to seize it and to take his enemy off his guard, thought this perfidious vengeance sweeter than an open one, since, considerations of safety apart, success by treachery won him the palm of superior intelligence.”
“Change, of course, is inevitable. We need not be committed to change as good in itself to have the experience of change. We are mortal, temporal beings and change is ineluctable. Fixity is not our earthly fate, even if we long for it. Yet to subscribe to the idea of change as intrinsically good (and not to think of it as simply a necessity), and to couple that idea with efforts to engineer change in the hope that someday we will be content, is a recipe for oscillation between utopian expectations and disillusionment.”
“Human beings are what they learn to become within an already ongoing world of ideas which they discover in their unsought entrance to it. From the outset, each of us encounters a world presented to us by others as something already understood, compelling us to seek to understand what others seem already to understand.”
“Like Hobbes, Oakeshott couples a constant remembrance of the reasons for mankind to be humble, rather than proud, with a striking belief in the capacity of men so instructed to create a world for themselves in which there is much to delight in: we need political authority; we do not need symposiarchs or cultural arbiters, nor, finally, prophets.”
“Oakeshott believed that we might consider becoming less preoccupied with the world of getting and spending, less prone to measure our well-being in quantitative terms, allowing ourselves to find delight in the poetic interstices of the daily world. This means looking for the possibilities available to us in the present, not always thinking that we must commit ourselves to what may come in the future. Abstracting ourselves from present circumstances, a liberation that is at best partial, for the sake of an idyllic future, moves us toward constant dissatisfaction and anxiety, thinking that all present accomplishments are of little value compared with a hypothetical perfection that we have taught ourselves to seek.”
“Real conversation is an undirected engagement in which one distinctive voice is not reduced to another (there is, Oakeshott said, no ‘symposiarch’ or ‘arbiter’,’ no mode of all the modes), and by means of which human being discovers and distinguishes itself from all other being. The conversational prospect is where a glorious realization of the inherent freedom of the human spirit can appear.”
“Agent Hoffman: ‘OK, well, listen, I understand attorney-client privilege. I understand all the legal gamesmanship, and I understand that’s how you make your living, but I’m talking to you about something else, the security of your country. I’m sorry if the way I put it offends you, but we need to know what Abel is telling you. You understand me, Donovan? Don’t go Boy Scout on me. We don’t have a rule book here.’
James Donovan: ‘You’re Agent Hoffman, yeah?’
Agent Hoffman: ‘Yeah.’
James Donovan: ‘German extraction.’
Agent Hoffman: ‘Yeah, so?’
James Donovan: ‘My name’s Donovan. Irish, both sides. Mother and father. I’m Irish and you’re German. But what makes us both Americans? Just one thing. One. Only one. The rule book. We call it the Constitution, and we agree to the rules, and that’s what makes us Americans. That’s all that makes us Americans. So don’t tell me there’s no rule book, and don’t nod at me like that you son of a bitch.’”
“But it don’t pay to think too much, on things you leave behind.”
“Time was like water but I was the sea: I wouldn’t have noticed it passing.”
“Where you been is good and gone, all you keep’s the gettin’ there.”
“Roi ne suis, ne prince ne duc ne comte aussi; Je suis le sire de Coucy.”
“Never hand emotional control to people who don’t love you.”
“And we wouldn’t be able to study Japanese art, it seems to me, without becoming much happier and more cheerful, and it makes us return to nature, despite our education and our work in a world of convention.”
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can begin it, boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”
“At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.”
“The world reveals itself to people who travel by foot.”
“Since wealth is an order and procedure of production and exchange rather than an accumulation of (mostly perishable) goods, and is a trust (the ‘credit system’) in men and institutions rather than in the intrinsic value of paper money or checks, violent revolutions do not so much redistribute wealth as destroy it. There may be a redivision of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as in the old. The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.”
“To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man’s follies and crimes, but also any encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing. The historian will not mourn because he can see no meaning in human existence except that which man puts into it; let it be our pride that we ourselves may put meaning into our lives, and sometimes a significance that transcends death. If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. And to his final breath he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing that it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life.”
“I know that life is in its basis a mystery; a river flowing from an unseen source and in its development an infinite subtlety; a ‘dome of many-colored glass,’ too complex for thought, much less for utterance.
And yet the thirst for unity draws me eternally on. To chart the wilderness of experience and history, to bring into focus the future, the unsteady light of the past, to bring into significance and purpose the chaos of sensation and desire, to discover the direction of life’s majestic stream and thereby in some measure, perhaps, to control its flow: this insatiable metaphysical lust is one of the noble aspects of our questioning race. Our grasp is greater than our reach; but therefore our reach is made greater than our grasp.”
“Knowledge grows, but wisdom, though it can improve with years, does not progress with centuries. I cannot instruct Solomon.”
“Other studies may tell us how we might behave, or how we should behave; history tells us how we have behaved for six thousand years. One who knows that record is in large measure protected in advance against the delusions and disillusionments of his times. He has learned the limitations of human nature, and bears with equanimity the faults of his neighbors and the imperfections of states. He shares hopefully in the reforming enterprises of his age and people; but his heart does not break, nor his faith in life fade out, when he perceives how modest are the results, and how persistently man remains what he has been for sixty centuries, perhaps for a thousand generations.”
“I go everywhere. I admire all kinds of country...But when I strike the open plains, something happens. I’m home. I breathe differently. That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea—it’s the grand passion of my life. I tried for years to get over it. I’ve stopped trying. It’s incurable.”
“Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone-poet’ and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire’s work would run counter to the saint’s; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation.”
“Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life. But to the diseases which reflection breeds, still further reflection can oppose effective remedies...”
“A human being is not a waxen rubbing, a lifeless imprint taken from some great stony face. Rather he is a Minuteman or a dog soldier at liberty to use the inclinations of the past as he sees fit. He is free to perceive the matrix, and, within his limits, change from it. By seeing both the futility in trying to relive the old life and the danger in trying to obliterate it, man can gain the capacity to make anew. His very form depends not on repetition but upon variation from old patterns. In response to stress, biological survival requires genetic change; it necessitates a turning away from doomed replication. And what of history? Was it different?”
“I never worried about making a living,” he said, “but I’ve done thinking about making a life. It’s hard to know the difference sometimes, and it must be getting harder, judging by all them that don’t know the difference now.”
“If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a chance at something new; to him, wandering and wondering are part of the same process, and he is most mistaken, most in error, whenever he quits exploring.”
“Sometimes a man’s experience is like the sweep second hand on a clock, touching each point in its circuit, but always the arcs of movement repeating.”
“To the rider of back roads, nothing shows the tone, the voice of a small town more quickly than the breakfast grill or the five-thirty tavern.”
“With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin, and where time and men and deeds connected.”
“All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: Freedom; Justice; Honour; Duty; Mercy; Hope.”
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.”
“Any idea of education that is not connected to an idea of formation—of habitation in virtue, inculcation in tradition, veneration of the high and noble—is unavoidably impoverished.”
“That’s what conservatism really means, fundamentally, is to understand society not as just individuals and government, but to think of it in terms of everything that happens in between. That huge space between the individual and the state is where society actually is. And that’s where families are, it’s where communities are, it’s where the market economy is.”
“This is often exactly the task of the conservative—to restate old truths and reassert their relevance by helping a new generation understand them in its own terms. It is vital not only because conservatives believe that old truths remain true but also because we think that human nature does not change, and therefore that every generation—because it starts from scratch—must be helped to see what our civilization has learned through countless rounds of painful trial and error.”
“To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.”
“I do not and will not fear tomorrow because I feel as though today has been enough.”
Notes
- Erasmus, De Copia (1512), the standard schoolroom textbook for gathering and sorting passages under headings. ↩
- John Locke, A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books (French 1685; English 1706). Scan at the Internet Archive. ↩
- Douglas L. Wilson, ed., Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book (Princeton University Press, 1989). ↩
- A Common-Place Book of John Milton (Camden Society, 1876), from the manuscript now British Library Add MS 36354. ↩