Where/Key quotes
Quick thoughts:
Quotations to ponder
Here's a thought. Consider it. If you find parts that make no sense, try to make sense of them. Look things up. Understand the passage. Then tell yourself and others what you think in response. If that's, "meh...," that's fine, pass over it — the world holds many thoughts. If you have a response, great! and if you have a little time, others may be interested if you explain it in the comment box.
What do you think?
This beauty? ― one thought then ― its all very well, but is it mine? And is the truth that I am getting to know my truth? The goals, the voices, the reality, the seduction of it all, luring and leading one on, all that one follows and plunges into ― is it the actual actuality or does one still get no more than a hint of the actual, a breath hovering intangibly on the surface of the actuality one is offered? What one so perceptibly mistrusts is the cut-and-dried way that life is divided up and the ready-made forms it assumes, the ever-recurring sameness of it, the prefabrications passed down by generation after generation, the stock language, not only the words it mouths, but also in its perceptions and emotions.Robert Musil, The man without qualities, v1,ch34.[1]
More than anything else I would like my role in the world to be to educate others to feel more and more for themselves and less and less according to the dynamic law of the collectivity. To educate others in that spiritual asceticism, which would preclude the contagion of vulgarity, seems to be the highest destiny of the teacher of the inner life that I would like to be. Fernando Pessoa, The book of disquiet, p. 103[2]
...that which is best and most pleasant for each creature is that which is proper to the nature of each; accordingly the life of the intellect is the best and the pleasantest life for man, inasmuch as the intellect more than anything else is man; therefore this life will be the happiest."Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X, vii, 9.[3]
This desire to know more than is sufficient is a sort of intemperance. Why? Because this unseemly pursuit of the liberal arts makes men troublesome, wordy, tactless, self-satisfied bores, who fail to learn the essentials just because they have learned the non-essentials. Seneca, Epistles. LXXXVIII[4]
- ↑ Translation based on Robert Musil, The man without qualities (Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser, trans., London: Picador, 1975) Vol 1, 149.
- ↑ Fernando Pessoa, The book of disquiet (Margaret Jull Costa, trans., New York: New Directions, 2017) p. 103.
- ↑ Aristotle, The nicomachean ethics (H. Rackham, trans., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962) p.619.
- ↑ Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales (Richard M. Gummere, trans., Cambriddge: Harvard University Press, 1962) vol. 2, pp. 371 & 373.