Zena Hitz > Quotes

“And does not the democratic character also live out his life in this fashion, day by day indulging the appetite of the day, sometimes drinking wine heavily and listening to the flute; at other times drinking only water and dieting; sometimes exercising; at other times loafing and neglecting everything, and at another time occupying himself with what he takes to be philosophy? And frequently he goes in for politics and bounces up and says and does whatever enters his head. And if he happens to admire soldiers, he is borne in that direction, and if moneyed men, in that one, and there is no order or compulsion in his existence, but he calls this life of his pleasant, free, and blessed. —PLATO, REPUBLIC”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“By calling attention to Sullivan’s voyeuristic perspective, the film’s images of the poor and the desperate reach the viewer with greater effect. Sullivan himself is haunted by the failure of his efforts to become poor. After the second “rescue” by his handlers, he complains, “It’s funny the way everything keeps shoving me back to Hollywood … as if some force were saying ‘Get back where you belong…. You don’t belong to real life, you phony you.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“In this book I have tried to articulate what I have learned about intellectual life over the course of my own life. To properly acknowledge my debts in this experiential learning process would be tantamount to acknowledging the debts I owe for my life in general. It must suffice to say that I am grateful beyond words to all of the communities that have nurtured this activity in me, and to the teachers, students, and colleagues who made them up. But it all began with birth and childhood, and so I dedicate this book to my brothers and to our parents, with gratitude.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Einstein’s closest friend was the brilliant chemist Fritz Haber, who turned his intellect to the invention of the poisonous gases that could be deployed in battle, thus playing his part in murdering and terrifying thousands of soldiers.15 The Germany of the early twentieth century was at the pinnacle of human culture: science, literature, scholarship, music. That it turned to conquest and large-scale murder gives the lie to the claim that higher culture is humanizing in itself.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Restoring Our Humanity How vainly men themselves amaze To win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes; And their uncessant Labours see Crown’d from some single Herb or Tree, Whose short and narrow verged Shade Does prudently their toils upbraid; While all Flow’rs and all Trees do close To weave the Garlands of repose. —ANDREW MARVELL, “THE GARDEN”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“One can only travel the long way into the heart of another: the slow work of finding common ground, the careful discernment of grounds for admiration, the disciplines of kindness, encouragement, silence, and restraint.”
― Zena Hitz, A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life

“El hombre no es más que un junco, el más débil de la naturaleza, pero un junco que piensa. No es necesario que el Universo entero se arme para aplastarle. Un vapor, una gota de agua, son bastante para hacerlo perecer. Pero, aun cuando el Universo le aplastara, el hombre sería más noble que lo que le mata, porque él sabe que muere. Y la ventaja que el Universo tiene sobre él, el Universo no la conoce. No debo buscar mi dignidad sobre la base del espacio, sino de la regulación de mi pensamiento. No tendré más si poseo mundos. Por el espacio el universo me comprende y me absorbe como un punto; por el pensamiento, yo lo comprendo a él. Pascal, Pensamientos”
― Zena Hitz, Pensativos: Los placeres ocultos de la vida intelectual (Nuevo Ensayo nº 97)

“The social use of intellectual life lies in its cultivation of broader and richer ways of being human, in shaping our aspirations and our hopes for ourselves. It is obvious and widely noticed that literature provides a broadening of our perspective: we sympathize in our imaginations with human beings different from us—people of different races, genders, religions, times, and places. But the same is true of mathematics and science. It is surely part of what it means to be a human being to think mathematically and scientifically; by studying these subjects, especially through the thinkers of the past, we see from the inside magnificent and strange human possibilities and modes of comprehension.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Natural know-it-alls like myself know the intoxication of the feeling of knowing. It is a drive for this superficial feeling that underlies many intellectual pursuits, that threatens to draw inquirers away from the depths of understanding and trap them at the surface. It is surely the feeling of knowing that attracts us to having knowledge possessed only by a few, or to the aggressive accumulation of facts, the collection of a fearsome arsenal for the verbal bludgeoning of unsuspecting ignoramuses. Augustine knew this intoxication well; it describes his life among the Manichaeans.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Augustine describes the ultimate desire of human beings as not just for truth, nor for any old pleasure, but for pleasure in the truth.36 Since God is truth, in God lies our happiness. We all desire”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there. —JOHN BAKER, THE PEREGRINE”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“To say that intellectual life has a direction without a determinate object is perhaps paradoxical. What is the “more” that we love, when we love learning for its own sake? What is the nature of this desire that disciplines and orders all others? Is it like a compulsive desire for money or for pleasure, one that seeks more and more without limit? Or does it have an end point, a final destination? George Steiner argues that all art and thought aims at transcendence, at God or at God’s absence.56”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“With the spirit of the age I am in complete disagreement, because it is filled with disdain for thinking. —ALBERT SCHWEITZER, OUT OF MY LIFE AND THOUGHT”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Education is not in reality what some people proclaim it to be in their professions. What they aver is that they can put true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting vision into blind eyes…. But the true analogy … is that of an eye that could not be converted to the light from the darkness without turning the whole body. —PLATO, REPUBLIC, TRANS. PAUL SHOREY”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“It is a disgrace to our system of higher education that person-to-person teaching belongs only to a handful of liberal arts colleges and to elite doctoral programs. Our campuses burgeon with new buildings, food courts, and climbing walls; as class sizes become larger, the distance between teacher and student becomes wider, and the quality of the education less and less serious. Somehow learning is imagined as something that could be boiled down to the mastery of a set of sentences. There are useful subjects that can be learned this way, but nothing that would justify the expense or the inconvenience of a modern university.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Political talk builds an exterior wall of words, a set of opinions built and reinforced by competitive passions: “I am this sort of person and not that.” It is a way to avoid the encounter with the difficult and humiliating social reality to which one belongs or for which one is responsible. Further on, I call this process “opinionization,” by which I mean the reduction of thinking and perception to simple slogans or prefabricated positions, a reduction motivated by fear, competition, and laziness.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“I lack an argument that the virtue of seriousness is sufficient to shape one’s thinking toward ways of serving others, but I do have an example: Dorothy Day, the American Catholic convert and cofounder with Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker movement. Day on her own account learned to love humanity and live accordingly through serious reading and the constant attempt to live what she read.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“La actividad intelectual nutre una vida interior, un núcleo humano que es tanto un refugio del sufrimiento como un recurso de reflexión por sí mismo. Hay otras formas de nutrir la vida interior: tocando música, ayudando a los débiles y vulnerables, pasando tiempo en la naturaleza u orando, pero el aprendizaje es crucial.”
― Zena Hitz, Pensativos: Los placeres ocultos de la vida intelectual (Nuevo Ensayo nº 97)

“Mauriac tells of a subtle pride and hypocrisy: “There is a kind of hypocrisy which is worse than that of the Pharisees; it is to hide behind Christ’s example in order to follow one’s own lustful desires and to seek out the company of the dissolute.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Once he left prison, Malcolm became a minister in the Nation of Islam, gathering fame as a clear and forceful voice for African American communities beaten down by the poverty and violence nurtured in racial prejudice. His profuse stream of public speeches masked a disciplined inwardness, a constant struggle to see things as they were and to commit himself accordingly. So over time he came to reject the anti-white teachings of the Nation and underwent a second conversion to the broader humanism of orthodox Islam. The culmination of the second conversion was a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he saw the stone house at the center of the Great Mosque: “It was being circulated by thousands upon thousands of praying pilgrims, both sexes, and every size, shape, color and race in the world.”25 The change of mind inspired by this vision cost him his life: he was killed by members of his former community. His murderers likely were aided by US officials who viewed the anti-white cast of his first conversion as a threat.26 Thus Malcolm staked his life on both of his major changes of mind.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“I have used, from necessity, stories about the intellectually accomplished, Einstein and Gramsci, André and Simone Weil, the Herschels and Goethe. While the heights of excellence are a crucial part of the mind at leisure, they are only one part. The fact is that anyone can take the insights of others into their own mind and make them their own, without a special capacity of discovery. Imagining, reflecting, pondering the fact of one’s own susceptibility to illness and death can be a part of the most ordinary life. We are all subject to the realm of fantasy, and thus to illusion; but we all have the capacity to see the fantasy broken up by reality, to see things as they are. Our humanity is not a profession to be left to the accomplished few.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Polish film Ida.”
― Zena Hitz, A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life

“So the account of learning given by the cotton spinner Charles Campbell (b. 1793): The lover of learning, however straitened his circumstances, or rugged his condition, has yet a source of enjoyment within himself that the world never dreams of…. Perhaps he is solving a problem of Euclid, or soaring with Newton amidst the planetary world, and endeavouring to discover the nature and properties of that invisible attraction by which the Almighty mind has subjected inanimate matter to laws that resemble the operations of intelligence; or descending from the harmony of the spheres, he contemplates the principle of animal life, and explores the intricate labyrinths of physiological phenomena…. Pursuing the footsteps of Locke and Reid, he traces the origins of his own ideas, feeling, and passions: or … he unbends the wing of his imagination, and solaces his weary mind in the delightful gardens of the classic muse of poetry and music.25”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The thundering inscription over the oracle at Delphi—“Know thyself!”—does not seem to mean “Know what you personally enjoy most at breakfast.” It seems rather to mean “Be aware that you are a limited human being and that you lack godlike powers.” So, too, Plato’s Socrates seeks to know how a human being could be both a fleshy animal, subject to sleepiness, sickness, and death, and yet also the locus of insight into eternal realities. To seek after self-knowledge is to seek to understand the kind of thing one is—that is, the kind of thing a human being is. Augustine does not deny us a view of the shape of his intimate individuality: his compulsive attachment to sex, his fierce competitive egoism, his haunted inner thirst for understanding. But he is careful to embed these elements in philosophical discussions of general interest and to lead us through them into yet more universal considerations. He suggests that these discussions and considerations have shaped him as an individual, and he describes his life in order to display its general human elements.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The Dignity of Learning And they’ll ask: what helped us live, without letters or news—just walls and coldness in the cell, stupidity of official lies, nauseating promises for betrayal. And I’ll tell about the first beauty which I saw in this captivity: window in the frost! No spy holes, nor walls, nor grating—no long suffering— only bluish light in the smallest glass. —IRINA RATUSHINSKAYA, “I’ll live through this … ,” TRANS. F. P. BRENT AND C. J. EVANS”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The civil exchange of opinions can create a veneer of tolerance, but it requires no serious thinking. Opinions rarely change. Nor, when they do, is their change necessarily the sign of any intellectual engagement. Opinions are fixed in place by a network of socially directed impulses of fear and ambition. We change our minds when we change our clique, our social circle. At the level of opinion, our reasoning powers operate backward to justify predetermined choices. Our social world is our intellectual comfort zone. To break its bonds, so as to actually learn something, requires a sort of intellectual violence: the pain inflicted by a torturously realistic book, by an unanswerable question, or by the presence of an intelligent human being who is oriented differently than we are.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“I understand the virtue of seriousness to be a desire to seek out what is most important, to get to the bottom of things, to stay focused on what matters. Whereas the lover of spectacle skims over the surfaces of things and is satisfied with mere images and feelings, the serious person looks for depth, reaches for more, longs for reality. To be serious is to ponder one’s dissatisfactions, to discern better from worse, the possible from the impossible. A serious person wants what is best and most true for himself or herself.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“have argued that intellectual life properly understood cultivates a space of retreat within a human being, a place where real reflection takes place. We step back from concerns of practical benefit, personal or public. We withdraw into small rooms, literal or internal. In the space of retreat we consider fundamental questions: what human happiness consists in, the origins and nature of the universe, whether human beings are part of nature, and whether and how a truly just community is possible. From the space of retreat emerges poetry, mathematics, and distilled wisdom articulated in words or manifested silently in action. The space of retreat is a place of escape: the prisoner, the working person, the beleaguered mother all find in the work of the intellect a dignity otherwise impinged on by their surroundings.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Solitude and hunger and weariness of spirit—these sharpened my perceptions so that I suffered not only my own sorrow but the sorrows of those about me. I was no longer myself. I was man. I was no longer a young girl, part of a radical movement seeking justice for those oppressed, I was the oppressed. I was that drug addict, screaming and tossing in her cell, beating her head against the wall. I was that shoplifter who for rebellion was sentenced to solitary. I was that woman who had killed her children, who had murdered her lover.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The diminishment of intellectual life caused by the opinionization of everything also demeans our students. If we cultivate our college campuses either as echo chambers or as chocolate-box assortments of viewpoints, we think of young people first and foremost as receptacles of opinions, as consumers of content, and as subjects whose experiences must be carefully managed. The difference is only whether the selection of opinions is curated by concerned officials or left to the open market, where gimmicky appeals or social pressures might draw in fresh consumers. Either way, we deny the rational agency and inbuilt love of learning of our students. We seek to control the reactions of beings viewed as inferior to us rather than to undertake an open-ended inquiry with fellow free adults.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life