Lia > Lia's Quotes

“Cowardice can be defended bravely without self-­refutation, because the opposite of cowardice is not courage but bravado.”
― Jeffrey M. Perl

“We want to get behind the beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that reflects to us our own desire for good. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a sorrowfully irritating mystery. We want to feed on it, but it is only an object we can look on; it appears to us from a certain distance. The great sorrow of human life is knowing that to look and to eat are two different operations. Only on the other side of heaven, where God lives, are they one and the same operation. Children already experience this sorrow when they look at a cake for a long time and nearly regret eating it, but are powerless to help themselves. Maybe the vices, depravities and crimes are nearly always or even always in their essence attempts to eat beauty, to eat what one can only look at. Eve initiated this. If she lost our humanity by eating a fruit, the reverse attitude— looking at a fruit without eating it— must be what saves.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“Starting on the side of particulars, Tolstoy approaches the problems of history and the will through literature. Starting on the side of universals, Schopenhauer approaches the problems of history and the will through philosophy. In this way, they can be said to say the same thing, approaching it from different sides.

The most striking difference between the two, however, lies neither with their epistemological starting points nor with the genres in which they write, but with the quietism that each is attempting to impart. Each wants us to accept the world and renounce the will, and consequently each rejects the notion that history is progressing and is governed by the actions of “great men.” But Schopenhauer’s aim in writing The World as Will and Representation is to cure our hearts “of the passion for enjoying and indeed for living,” while Tolstoy, in writing War and Peace, takes as his task “to make people love life in all its countless manifestations.”
― Caleb Thompson

“Other feelings too can be philosophical—pain, grief, tedium, delight, exultation—if they are experienced on behalf of humankind. “I looked around me, and my soul became wounded by the suffering of mankind” is the opening of Alexander Radishchev’s “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” (1790), which laid the foundation of all subsequent Russian philosophy. It is a philosophy shaped by feelings of suffering and compassion, by the Karamazovian question of how to justify a child’s tears. The range of philosophical feelings is wide.”
― Mikhail Epstein

“Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” whatever else it might be, seems to be an investigation into the possibility of durational being, which Bergson had described as “the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.” The succession that Bergson opposes to vitality is the realm in which the morbid Prufrock tries to imagine speaking Andrew Marvell’s line, “Now let us sport us while we may,” but then falls back on his indecision, his failure to pose his overwhelming question, and his inability to sing his love. Prufrock’s problems are shown to be symptoms of the form of time in which desire for youth runs defiantly against the remorselessness of aging, snapping the present in two. The “silent seas” that might bring relief from currents and countercurrents of time turn out to be like the troubling one that figures in Hamlet’s overwhelming question: “To be or not to be: that is the question: / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them.” Prufrock understands but is unable to admit the ontological force of the question: the “whips and scorns of time” that threaten to reverse all his “decisions and revisions” make him wish to be merely “a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” That synecdochic figure is as much an anachronous peripeteia for Prufrock as it is for Polonius when Hamlet taunts him: “you yourself, sir, should be as old as I am if, like a crab, you could go backwards.”
― Charles M. Tung

“My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.”
― Michel Foucault

“If economics is the dismal science, then quantum gravity is the dismal physics”
― Seth Lloyd, John Brockman

“The cultural and political conflicts in the contemporary world have much to do with the clash of the senses of dignity in different cultures. When the Jihad suicides attacked the western civilians, they might have acted out of the belief that this was the way to vindicate their own dignity, while their attacks obviously devastated the dignity and basic rights of the victims.

It seems paramount that, in order to guarantee the world peace, justice, and prosperity, the governance of a harmonious “global village” requires a global constitutional order based on the moral discourse of human dignity. Such discourse may not produce a universally agreed understanding of human dignity, but it will help to improve consensus and reduce tensions among nations of different cultures.”
― Qianfan Zhang, Human Dignity in Classical Chinese Philosophy: Confucianism, Mohism, and Daoism

“A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not."
(on Ezra Pound)”
― Gertrude Stein

“As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”
― T.S. Eliot

“It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries--we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?
...
Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.”
― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

“The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word ARREST. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“[Dostoyevsky] eloquently proves that heartless ideas are often a source of immorality: they bring with them destructiveness, hatred, cynicism, and misanthropy. The novelist also carefully examines moral indifference and corruption which leads him to the questions: “What if reason takes the side of evil?” “What if evil is done for the sake of Good?”
― George L. Kline

“Unlike ordinary feelings, the feeling of reason and the feeling of respect do not have a sensible cause; their cause is reason itself.”
― Alix Cohen, Kant on Emotion and Value

“will’ is ‘character’, but it is character ‘completely freed from everything which may be only empirical and thus belong to anthropology’.”
― Manfred Kuehn

“A good character may not make us happy, but it does make us worthy of happiness (XXV 1174). He also maintains that people of character have an inner worth, while people of talent have a market value (XXV 1174), and emphasizes that this worth is created by the person himself. Most importantly, however, he claims that character ‘consists in the basic characteristic [GrundAnlage] of the will’ (XXV 1174).”
― Manfred Kuehn

“Kant’s conception of dignity is indebted to Cicero and the Roman conception of dignitas, according to which dignity is an elevated position or rank. The Roman dignitas is a complicated notion that has further connotations, e.g. worthiness, duties and privileges. Many of these are reflected in present-day usage, as when one speaks of a ‘dignitary’ or behaving with dignity. However, the additional connotations are not essential to dignitas.”
― Oliver Sensen

“the passage on dignity is an addendum to the formula of autonomy: ‘act only so that the will could regard itself as at the same time giving universal law through its maxim’ (G IV 434). Kant raises the question of why a morally good being abides by this formula. His answer (in brief) is because morality has an elevated worth (i.e. only moral dictates are categorical).”
― Oliver Sensen

“In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant makes it quite clear that sympathetic feelings are often welcome, amiable, desirable, beautiful. They can under certain conditions be good objectively, all things considered.
But they are not morally good (V 82.18–25). A happy, well-rounded character is an ideal that lies beyond the sphere of Kant’s conception of morality.”
― Jens Timmermann

“In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone he goes so far as to claim that conscientious moral judgement cannot err. The voice of conscience, which is our internal moral judge, can serve as a ‘guiding thread’ (Leitfaden) in matters of doubt.”
― Jens Timmermann, Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary

“Kant does not seem to envisage that we are torn between two courses of action for moral reasons. He makes no provisions for genuine moral dilemmas, where no option is unambiguously right or all options are equally problematic.”
― Jens Timmermann, Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; A Commentary

“There is something splendid about innocence; but what is bad about it, in turn, is that it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced. Because of this, even wisdom - which otherwise consists more in conduct than in knowledge - still needs science, not in order to learn from it but in order to provide access and durability for its precepts.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

“Kant also identified idle desires with wishing and active desire with willing, and he seemed to think that one of the problems of his contemporaries was the confusion between the two.
People read novels and allow themselves to become subject to passionate yearnings and be preoccupied by ‘true ideals’ that get in the way of active desires.”
― Manfred Kuehn

“Against Hume, Kant has found a more proper ground for humility: “True humility follows unavoidably from our sincere and exact comparison of ourselves with the moral law” . The proper way to come to terms with our limits is not to compare ourselves with others but to hold ourselves accountable to those rational moral standards we know to be most properly our own.”
― Jeanine Grenberg

“The social organization of Heart of Darkness – captured in the corporate culture of the ‘Company’ – is a metonym for modernity. It is powerfully linked to the psychic through the symbolic order. In the novel’s primal scene, young Marlow pores over maps, lingering over the ‘blank spaces’. ‘The biggest – the most blank, so to speak’ is the heart of Africa. From the Western perspective, these blank spaces are but undiscovered dominions, lacking proper social organization, civilization and especially enlightenment. It is somewhat perplexing, then, to find that the exploration and mapping that take place between the time of Marlow’s youth and maturity appear not as illumination but darkening:


[B]y this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness.”
― Stephen Ross

“Even after human beings have reached adulthood and developmental maturity, there remain hindrances in human nature that make it difficult for them to act from moral principle. One of most fundamental challenges is the fact that the developmentally mature human mind is still a finite intelligence rather than an infinite intelligence. The adult human mind is equipped only with ‘a discursive, image-dependent understanding’ (CU V 408): in order to think abstractly, we need images. The finitude of the human condition thus poses a permanent challenge to the task of grasping ideas of pure reason such as a priori moral norms or the concept of a morally perfect will.

Kant’s basic response to this challenge of human finitude is to articulate various strategies for representing moral concepts analogically and symbolically through images. As he remarks in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, ‘for the human being the invisible needs to be represented through something visible (sensible)’ (Religion VI 192).”
― Robert B. Louden

“[I]t is important to underscore Kant’s basic point that the finitude of the human condition implies a life-long need for concrete moral examples and personal exemplars. With his second argument in defence of examples, we are no longer talking about a strategy of moral education that is to be applied only to children and that can be dispensed with once they reach adulthood. Adult human beings do have stronger powers of reflection and abstraction than do children. But even adults remain saddled with ‘a discursive image-dependent understanding’, and thus they will always need examples in order to make the law visible to themselves.”
― Robert B. Louden