Quotes: 25 April 2025
What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.
For the good of society, should cosmetic facelifts be prohibited? Are they a crime against humanity? What you do to your visible image has societal implications. Your face is the Other for everyone else. If it no longer bares its essential vulnerability, then the grounds for caring, the demand for honesty, the call to respond on which societal cohesion rests have lost their originating source.
Our enormous waste-disposal and cleanup problems have become autonomous powers like destructive zombies exacting tribute for the heaps of ghouls and corpses left around on the victorious battlefields of productivity or dumped in pits and tossed in rivers to be carried away. But there is no “away.”
A Secret History of Consciousness
The key to higher consciousness, Ouspensky understood, lay in a changed perception of time, in an ability to escape the limitations of the present moment and see deeper into the past and future.
[Max] Scheler, however, saw phenomenology as more of an ‘attitude’ or ‘way of seeing’, than a method. It was a way of ‘being with things’ that would allow for them to show themselves as they are. It was a Geisteshaltung, a ‘disposition of spirit’, or ‘spiritual stance’, that one took toward the world, as one waited for it to show itself. In this sense, Scheler’s philosophical approach shares much with Iain McGilchrist’s suggestion that the kind of attention we bring to the world determines the kind of world we will attend to.
Collingwood's The Idea of History
The past, then, does not come to us as light from a distant star. Without the historian’s critical engagement the past could not come alive at all, but critical engagement with what?
My answer: the evidence, critical engagement with the evidence.
The levelling down of the masses through suppression of the aristocratic or hierarchical structure natural to a community is bound, sooner or later, to lead to disaster. For, when everything outstanding is levelled down, the signposts are lost, and the longing to be led becomes an urgent necessity.
Is this a fundamental problem? Is this what’s wrong with our society? An intriguing possibility.
[W]hat is crucial is that on which the contending parties agree, namely that there are only two alternative modes of social life open to us, one in which the free and arbitrary choices of individuals are sovereign and one in which the bureaucracy is sovereign, precisely so that it may limit the free and arbitrary choices of individuals. Given this deep cultural agreement, it is unsurprising that the politics of modern societies oscillate between a freedom which is nothing but a lack of regulation of individual behavior and forms of collectivist control designed only to limit the anarchy of self-interest.
This suggests only a binary choice: freedom or control. But as with most social and political decisions, aren’t we experiencing a set of analog choices, where we can dial the mix up or down? Our political choices aren’t as simple or precise as yes-no, stop or go, but more like working a radio dial to find the tune that best suits us.
Poetic age is popularly known as the “difficult” age. It is self-centered; it yearns to express itself; it rather specializes in being misunderstood; it is restless and tries to achieve independence; and, with good luck and good guidance, it should show the beginnings of creativeness; a reaching out towards a synthesis of what it already knows, and a deliberate eagerness to know and do some one thing in preference to all others.
Every kind of language is in this way a specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all languages.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.
Buddhism in a short paragraph.
You know the old joke: Emerson goes to see Thoreau in jail and says “Henry, what are you doing in here?” His friend replies: “Ralph, what are you doing out there?”