Human Accomplishment Quotes

“A story is told about the medieval stone masons who carved the gargoyles that adorn the great Gothic cathedrals. Sometimes their creations were positioned high upon the cathedral, hidden behind cornices or otherwise blocked from view, invisible from any vantage point on the ground. They sculpted these gargoyles as carefully as any of the others, even knowing that once the cathedral was completed and the scaffolding was taken down, their work would remain forever unseen by any human eye. It was said that they carved for the eye of God. That, written in a thousand variations, is the story of human accomplishment.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“Suppose that this reading of history is correct. Today’s creative elites are not just overwhelmingly secular but often hostile to the idea that transcendental goods have any meaning. Such is the reason to fear that well-made entertainments are as much as we can hope for. Great art requires a source of inspiration that the people who produce those entertainments are not tapping.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“It is not at all clear to me how a culture gets from here to there, however, because I come to the end of this book convinced that religion is indispensable in igniting great accomplishment in the arts. I use religion at once loosely and stringently. Going to church every Sunday is not the definition I have in mind, nor even a theology in its traditional sense. Confucianism and classical Greek thought were both essentially secular, and look at the cultures they produced. But both schools of thought were tantamount to religion in that they articulated a human place in the cosmos, laid out a clear understanding of the end—the good—toward which humans aim, and set exalted standards of human behavior. And that brings me to the sense in which I use religion stringently. Confucianism and Aristotelianism, along with the great religions of the world, are for grownups, requiring mature contemplation of truth, beauty, and the good. Cultures in which the creative elites are not engaged in that kind of mature contemplation don’t produce great art.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“But my point applies to a broader audience. Indulge me in one more thought experiment, a familiar one: You will be stranded on a desert island, and you can take just 10 books and 10 music CDs. What do you choose? My prediction is that even people who don’t listen to classical music regularly will take Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Even people who haven’t picked up Shakespeare in years will take the collected works of Shakespeare. When we want something we can go back to again and again, we choose the same giants that the experts choose. My proposition about the literature, music, and visual arts of the last half century is that hardly any of it has enough substance to satisfy, over time. The post-1950 West has unquestionably produced some wonderful entertainments, and I do not mean wonderful slightingly. The Simpsons is wickedly smart, Saving Private Ryan is gripping, Groundhog Day is a brilliant moral fable. The West’s popular culture is for my money the only contemporary culture worth patronizing, with its best stories more compelling and revealing than the ones written by authors who purport to write serious novels, and its best popular music with more energy and charm than anything the academic composers turn out. It is a mixed bag, with the irredeemably vulgar side by side, sometimes intermingled, with the wittiest and most thoughtful work. But the quality is often first-rate—as well it might be. The people producing the best work include some who in another age could have been a Caravaggio or Brahms or Racine, and perhaps dozens of others good enough to have made their way onto the roster of significant figures. Why not be satisfied with wonderful entertainments?”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“Some specific propositions about the roles of the shapers of accomplishment: In the arts, the richness of the structure has most of its effect on the amount of work that is produced within a field; access to transcendental goods has most of its effect on the enduring quality of that work. Where artists do not have coherent ideals of beauty, the work tends to be sterile. Where they do not have coherent ideals of the good, the work tends to be vulgar. Lacking access to either beauty or the good, the work tends to be shallow. In the sciences (and humanities and the social sciences): Where scholars do not have allegiance to ideals of truth, the work tends to be false. Accomplishment in the arts and sciences that is sterile, vulgar, shallow, or false does not endure.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“The book’s secondary message, more implicit than explicit, is this: It is also time to render unto equality that which is appropriate to equality, and unto excellence that which is appropriate to excellence. Equality is a fine ideal, and should have an honored place. To have understood that each person is unique, that each person must be treated as an end and not a means, that each person should be free to live his life as he sees fit, so long as he accords others the same freedom, that each person should be equal before the law and is equal in God’s sight, and to incorporate these principles into the governance of nations—these are among the greatest of all human accomplishments. But equality has nothing to do with the abilities, persistence, zeal, and vision that produce excellence. Equality and excellence inhabit different domains, and allegiance to one need not compete with allegiance to the other. Excellence is not simply a matter of opinion, though judgment enters into its identification. Excellence has attributes that can be identified, evaluated, and compared across works. The judgments reached by those who are most expert in their fields, and who work from standards of excellence that they are willing to specify and subject to the inspection of logic, are highly consistent—so consistent that eminence in the various domains of accomplishment can be gradated with higher reliability than is achieved by almost any other measure in the social and behavioral sciences. When the rating of eminence is scrutinized against the reasons for that eminence, it also becomes apparent that those who rank highest are those who have achieved at the highest levels of their field.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“One key characteristic of structure is its richness. To illustrate, recall the comparison that John Rawls drew between checkers and chess when he was describing the Aristotelian principle (see page 386). Both games are played on a board with 64 squares, but they have different structures. Checkers has one kind of piece, while chess has six different kinds of pieces. The movement of any checker piece is restricted to a single square per turn unless it is capturing, while movement in chess is different for each piece. In checkers, the goal is to capture all the opponents’ pieces. In chess, the goal is to trap one particular piece. The structure of chess is objectively richer than the structure of checkers. It is no coincidence that chess has thousands of books written about tactics and strategy for every aspect of the game while checkers has a fraction of that number. The nature of accomplishment in checkers and chess is also objectively different, as reflected in their relative places in Western culture.[1] I measure the richness of a structure by three aspects: principles, craft, and tools. The scientific method offers convenient examples. Conceptually, a scientific experiment proceeds according to principles such as replicability, falsifiability, and the role of the hypothesis that apply across different scientific disciplines. The actual conduct of a classic scientific experiment involves craft—the generation of a hypothesis to be tested or a topic to be explored, the creation of the methods for doing so, and meticulous observance of protocols and procedures during the actual work. The details of craft differ not only across disciplines but within disciplines. They also have a family resemblance, in the sense that a meticulous scientist behaves in ways that are recognizable to scientists in every field—“meticulous” being one of the defining characteristics of craft practiced at a high level. Tools play a double role. Sometimes they are created in direct response to needs generated by principles and craft—accurate thermometers are an example—but at least as often, a tool turns out to have unanticipated uses that alter both principles and craft, independently expanding the realm of things a discipline can achieve. An example is the invention of the diffraction grating to study spectra of light, which 40 years later turned out to enable astronomers to study the composition of the stars.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“Historian Robert Merton, in his study of the growth of science in 17C England, says yes, arguing for a direct link between Protestant characteristics of methodical, persistent action, empirical utilitarianism, and anti-traditionalism and the development of the scientific method in England.30 An indirect link is also possible. As a matter of theology, Aquinas’s Catholicism is more enthusiastic about the human exercise of autonomy and intellect than Lutheranism or Calvinism. As a matter of psychology, however, Protestantism pervasively affected the day-to-day practice of Christianity in ways that cut its adherents loose from a powerful institution and its attendant rituals. While good Catholics confessed to the priest, did penance under the priest’s instruction, and turned to the Church to tell them what the Bible meant, good Protestants read the Bible for themselves, confessed directly to God, received absolution directly from God, and didn’t do penance at all. In this practical sense, Protestants were more on their own than Catholics were, and it is plausible to see this as an extension of individualism and of a sense of autonomy.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“The crucial difference was that Roman Catholicism developed a philosophical and artistic humanism typified, and to a great degree engendered, by Thomas Aquinas (1226–1274). Aquinas made the case, eventually adopted by the Church, that human intelligence is a gift from God, and that to apply human intelligence to understanding the world is not an affront to God but is pleasing to him. Aquinas taught that human autonomy is also a gift from God, and that the only way in which humans can realize the relationship with God that God intends is by exercising that autonomy. Aquinas taught that faith and reason are not in opposition, but complementary.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“Mine is far from an original conclusion, but in recent decades it has not been fashionable, so I should state the argument explicitly: The Greeks laid the foundation, but it was the transmutation of that foundation by Christianity that gave modern Europe its impetus and differentiated European accomplishment from that of all other cultures around the world.[24]”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“Highly familistic, consensual cultures have been the norm throughout history and the world. Modern Europe has been the oddball.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“Put in terms of autonomy, Islam bore similarities to medieval Christianity, seeing life on this earth as important primarily as a preparation for eternal life, and harboring deep suspicions about the piety of inquiring too closely into the nature of God’s creation. But Islam, more than Christianity at any point in its history, also saw God as sustaining the universe on a continuing basis, and as a deity who is not bound by immutable laws. To proclaim scientific truths that applied throughout the universe and throughout time could easily become blasphemy, implying limits to what God could and could not do.20 Islamic piety consisted in obedience to God’s rules and submission to his will, not presuming to analyze his works or glorify him with flights of one’s personal fancies and curiosities. Indeed, expressing one’s fancies through representational art or most fictional literature ran directly against Islamic teaching. Islam was (and is) not a religion that encourages autonomy. Seen in the framework I have been using, it is no surprise that the burst of accomplishment in the golden age was aberrational, not characteristic, of Islamic culture.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“Why did the burst of activity fade so rapidly? The specific explanations diverge in their particulars, but they agree on the central point that, as H. Floris Cohen, put it, “the root cause of its decline is to be found in the Faith, and in the ability of its orthodox upholders to stifle once-flowering science.”16 To Islamic scholar G. E. von Grunebaum, Islam was never able to accept that scientific research is a means of glorifying God.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“A major stream of human accomplishment is fostered by a culture that encourages the belief that individuals can act efficaciously as individuals, and enables them to do so.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“People who see a purpose in their lives have a better chance of creating enduring work than people who don’t, because the kind of project they work on does make a difference to them. The general statement here is that to believe life has a purpose carries with it a predisposition to put one’s talents in the service of whatever is the best—not the most lucrative, not the most glamorous, but that which represents the highest expression of the object of one’s vocation. The link is to some degree a tautology. We use the phrase life has a purpose only when that purpose has a transcendental element, something more important than the here and now. Thus when someone says something like “Sure, my life has a purpose: to make as much money as I can,” we recognize that as mocking the word purpose. To have a purpose in life is to be compelled to try to live up to that transcendental element. The composition and role of the potential transcendental elements are discussed in Chapter 20. For now, this simple proposition: Purpose in life shapes a life’s work, and for the better.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“PURPOSE A major stream of human accomplishment is fostered by a culture in which the most talented people believe that life has a purpose and that the function of life is to fulfill that purpose.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“When you are faced with a challenge that is far beyond your skills, the result is anxiety. When your skills are high but the challenges are low, you are bored. If you have low skills and the challenge is also low, you are able to do the job but are unlikely to become absorbed in it—apathy is the characteristic response. But when the skills are high and in balance with a stiff challenge, flow occurs. It is the Aristotelian principle on a two-dimensional plot.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“Philosopher John Rawls distilled the sense of Aristotle’s discussion into what he labeled the Aristotelian principle, which Rawls stated as follows: Other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“In recognizing how thoroughly non-European science and technology have been explored, let’s also give credit where credit is due: By and large, it has not been Asian or Arabic scholars, fighting for recognition against European indifference, who are responsible for piecing together the record of accomplishment by non-European cultures, but Europeans themselves. Imperialists they may have been, but one of the by-products of that imperialism was a large cadre of Continental, British, and later American scholars, fascinated by the exotic civilizations of Arabia and East Asia, who set about uncovering evidence of their accomplishments that inheritors of those civilizations had themselves neglected. Joseph Needham’s seven-volume history of Chinese science and technology is a case in point.[10] Another is George Sarton’s Introduction to the History of Science, in five large volumes published from 1927–1948, all of which is devoted to science before the end of 14C, with the bulk of it devoted to the period when preeminence in science was to be found in the Arab world, India, and China.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“But until about –5C, we have nothing that puts the question of right behavior in the following fashion: Here we are, human beings, living a relatively short span of years in the company of other human beings. What is the underlying nature of a human life? How should this underlying nature lead us to comport ourselves, both for our own private happiness and to create harmonious and happy communities? It was the first attempt to answer such questions independently of religion that I call the invention of ethics.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“In this simple observation about the nature of human consciousness lies a challenge that was taken up sometime in the course of Hinduism’s long development: focus the mind so that the tumble of extraneous thoughts is slowed, then stilled altogether. The practice that developed, which we know as meditation, is of unknown antiquity. It was certainly already in use when the Upanishads were put into writing circa –6C. An archaic form may be inferred from the Rig Veda, which takes the practice back at least to –1200. If recent arguments that the Rig Veda dates to the Indus-Sarasvati civilization hold up, then we must think in terms of an additional millennium or two during which some form of meditation was practiced. I have dated the culmination of the development of meditation to –2C because that is the most popular dating for the life of Patanjali, the Hindu sage who is seen as the progenitor of classical Yoga, an advanced system of meditation. Since its initial development in India, forms of meditation have become part of most religions and of a wide range of secular schools as well. In the West, despite the importance of forms of meditation in Catholicism and some Protestant Christian churches, the word meditation has become identified with some of the flamboyant sects that attracted publicity in the 1960s and 1970s. In some circles, meditation is seen as part of Asian mysticism, not a cognitive tool. This is one instance in which Eurocentrism is a genuine problem. The nature of meditation is coordinate with ways of perceiving the world that are distinctively Asian. But to say that the cognitive tool called meditation is peculiarly useful to Asians is like saying that logic—my next meta-invention—is useful only to Europeans. Meditation and logic found homes in different parts of the world, but meditation, like logic, is a flexible, powerful extension of human cognitive capacity.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“The Invention of Meditation. India, culminating circa –200. Shortly after Homo sapiens developed consciousness, he must also have become aware of one of the curious aspects of consciousness, its chaotic substrate. However lucid the conversation we may be holding, or however intently we think we are concentrating on the task before us, a little self-examination quickly shows that, flowing along just below the surface of the coherent line of thought, is a string of flighty, unpredictable, apparently uncontrollable other thoughts, irrelevant to what we’re supposed to be thinking about. Try to walk for a hundred yards, for example, while thinking about nothing but the act of walking. Untrained people can seldom get beyond the first few steps without finding that their attention has already wandered.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“The last quarter of –6C saw the opening of a two-century burst of philosophic work across the Eurasian land mass, dating roughly from –520 to –320, in which human beings thought through some large proportion of all the great philosophic issues—not in primitive forms that were later discarded, but as profound philosophic systems. Both of India’s dominating traditions were founded at the outset of this two-century seminal period—Hinduism with the assembly of the Upanishads sometime in –6C, and Buddhism with Buddha a century later. In some of the same decades when Buddha was teaching his disciples, so was Confucius in China. In Greece, the earliest thinkers to take up philosophic topics, Thales and Anaximander, were at work in the early part of –6C, followed by Pythagoras at its close.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“But it was not until Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740 and, a decade later, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, that the novel reached the form as we know it today, and opened an outpouring of work in 19C that would transform literature throughout the West.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“If one person is to be singled out as the one who took that step, it should be Édouard Manet (1832–1883). The painting is not a window on the world, Manet announced. It consists of patches of color on a two-dimensional surface. You don’t look through a painting but at it. Manet proclaimed further that “realism” does not consist of a Kalf-like fidelity to the way things look when they are minutely inspected. When people observe a scene in real life, they perceive it as a whole, focusing on some objects and not on others; seeing motion, with all its blurriness, rather than movement frozen in time; seeing light and shapes rather than specific clouds and shadows.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“With that understanding of how I am defining the term, let me propose 14 meta-inventions that occurred after –800. Six are in the arts, three in philosophy, three in mathematics, and two in the sciences: Artistic realism Linear perspective Artistic abstraction Polyphony Drama The novel Meditation Logic Ethics Arabic numerals The mathematical proof The calibration of uncertainty The secular observation of nature The scientific method Are these the meta-inventions since –800, exactly 14 in number? That claim is too ambitious. The borders of a meta-invention are fuzzy, and drawing boxes around a single meta-invention is sometimes arbitrary—the single meta-invention called scientific method in my list could easily be broken into half a dozen separate ones. I will describe the thinking behind my choices as I go along, noting some borderline cases that barely missed the cut. The note discusses some others.[4]”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“Diffuse cultural attributes are not meta-inventions. As examples, consider Western individualism and Chinese Daoism. The importance of the complex of beliefs that we call Western individualism is surely on a par with any other cultural development in history. Individualism is often argued to have been a decisive factor in the ascendancy of Western civilization, a position with which I agree and expound upon in Chapter 19. But individualism is a phenomenon with roots that sprawl across the Greek, Judaic, and Christian traditions. It manifested itself in different ways across different parts of the West in the same era and within any given country of the West across time. Similarly, Daoism, while technically denoting a specific literature identified with Laozi and Zhuangzi, labels a Chinese world view that permitted traditions of art, poetry, governance, and medicine that could not conceivably have occurred in the West—but, like Western individualism, it is grounded in such diffuse sources that to call it an invention stretches the meaning of that word too far. In searching for meta-inventions I am looking for more isolated, discrete cognitive tools.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“Then we come to the works that appear in eight out of the nine art histories. They were Velazquez’s Las Meninas, one or another of the pages of the Limbourg brothers’ illuminations for Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise on the north baptistery door of the Florence cathedral, Edvard Munch’s Scream, and Theodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa. All are important works, and at least two, Las Meninas and Gates of Paradise, attract extravagant praise in many art histories. The others are among the finest representatives of a movement or genre—but that’s why they are shown so often, not because anyone thought they belonged at the very apex of artistic greatness. Thus the first and obvious difference between a list of art works and the index of artists: Whatever quibbles one might have with the precise ordering of a list of great artists in the Western art inventory, all the people who are near the top belong somewhere near the top. The same cannot be said of all the works of art that are near the top. The ordering of Western artists has high face validity, whereas the ordering of works of Western art does not.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“Nor does one have the option of saying that differences exist but that one will not judge them. To notice a difference is to have an opinion about it—unless one refuses to think. And that is my ultimate objection to the nonjudgmental frame of mind. We can refuse to voice our opinions, our judgments, but we cannot keep from having them unless we refuse to think about what is before our eyes.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950

“My first objection to this stance is that being nonjudgmental is internally contradictory and an impossibility. Return to the extreme cases: If you refuse to accept that there are any objective differences, expressible as continua from negative to positive, between the nude painted on black velvet and Titian’s Venus of Urbino, between a Harlequin romance and Pride and Prejudice, between How Much Is That Doggy in the Window and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, you are not standing above the fray, refusing to be judgmental. It is a judgment on the grandest of all scales to say that How Much Is That Doggy in the Window is, in terms of its quality as a musical composition, indiscriminable from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. And if you really believe it, you have also made a sweeping judgment about the capacity of the human mind to assess information. The impossibility of being nonjudgmental does not go away as the differences in quality become smaller. The nature of the judgments merely changes. When we are comparing Venus of Urbino with a Rembrandt self-portrait, we immediately understand that no objective dimension enables us to say that one work is better than the other. But there remain dimensions on which the two paintings differ, and those dimensions lend themselves to comparisons in which one work may be found superior to the other. One may choose to examine those differences or not, but one does not have the option of saying that no differences exist.”
― Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950