The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

by Stephen Greenblatt

Gustave Flaubert: “Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.”

“Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city.”

Monasteries, he writes to a friend, are “not congregations of the faithful or places of religious men but the workshops of criminals”;

The pattern of dreaming and deferral and compromise is an altogether familiar one: it is the epitome of a failed life.

We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment’s peace.

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fear.

while we are alive, we should be filled with the deepest pleasure, for we are a small part of a vast process of world-making that Lucretius celebrated as essentially erotic.