Lost in Thought Quotes

“I have described a life of utter futility. If I work for the sake of money, spend money on basic necessities for life, and organize my life around working, then my life is a pointless spiral of work for the sake of work. It is like buying ice cream, immediately selling it for cash, and then spending the proceeds on ice cream (which one once again sells, … and so on). It is no less tragic than working for money and getting crushed by a falling anvil on the way to cash the paycheck. Activities are not worthwhile unless they culminate in something satisfying. For that reason, Aristotle argued that there must be something beyond work—the use of leisure, for the sake of which we work and without which our work is in vain. Leisure is not merely recreation, which we might undertake for the sake of work—to relax or rest before beginning to labor anew. Rather, leisure is an inward space whose use could count as the culmination of all our endeavors. For Aristotle, only contemplation—the activity of seeing and understanding and savoring the world as it is—could be the ultimately satisfying use of leisure.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Smith echoes the famous appeal of W.E.B. Du Bois to the human bond in books that ignores the veil of racial prejudice: I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.64 Committed to a goal (Truth) beyond what mere social life might offer, Du Bois finds in books a human community open to him in a way that his local human communities are not, riven as they are by segregation and hatred. Instead, on the basis of common humanity and common concern for truth, the dead authors welcome Du Bois into their company.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“read and inquire as a free adult is to take on the awesome responsibility of allowing oneself to be changed.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“What good is intellectual life? It is a refuge from distress; a reminder of one’s dignity; a source of insight and understanding; a garden in which human aspiration is cultivated; a hollow of a wall to which one can temporarily withdraw from the current controversies to gain a broader perspective, to remind oneself of one’s universal human heritage. All this makes clear at the least that it is an essential good for human beings, even if one good among others.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Our desires for truth, for understanding, for insight are in constant conflict with other desires: our desires for social acceptance or an easy life, a particular personal goal or a desirable political outcome. Hence the retreat that intellectual work requires does not function only as an escape. It is also a place of salutary distance, a place to set aside our agendas to consider things as they really are. When we think and reflect, we struggle to allow our desire for truth to prevail over the desires that conflict with truth. We push aside the soft barriers and chip away at hard accretions of wishful thinking. It is for this reason that intellectual life is a discipline: the product of hard work and practice in a certain sort of self-denial. Everyone with even a passing interest in the life of the mind has felt the collision of illusion with reality. The”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Many of my thoughts will be only half-baked. Their batter may not be even quite mixed. Finish baking them your own way—or cook up something else.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The freedom of a leisurely activity is the freedom from results or outcomes beyond it, not the freedom of rest or recreation.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The idea that real and serous learning is something practiced only by a small elite is stubborn and hard to displace.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“I do not know, I cannot imagine, any group which does not include among its current ideas an enormous dose of lies. That being the case, the alternative is inevitable: either one must like falsehood, or one must dislike the familiar setting of daily life.”44 Simon sees that if lies prevail in social life and if truth is necessary for one’s full humanity, daily life with others is virtually unbearable.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The “masters” of our current servant class have no leisure either. The slave is a slave of a slave, and these days at the top of heap of the slaves there is not even an exploitative gentleman farmer—writing essays, dissecting animals, and speculating on the nature of the political—but another slave at a higher social rank. The wealthier in the chain impose such burdens on themselves, just as many of us in positions of privilege willingly put ourselves under electronic surveillance as constant as the Amazon warehouse, posting to social media even our time at the gym or our obsessions with our pets.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“If human beings flourish from their inner core rather than in the realm of impact and results, then the inner work of learning is fundamental to human happiness, as far from pointless wheel spinning as are the forms of tenderness we owe our children or grandchildren. Intellectual work is a form of loving service at least as important as cooking, cleaning, or raising children; as essential as the provision of shelter, safety, or health care; as valuable as the delivery of necessary goods and services; as crucial as the administration of justice. All of these other forms of work make possible, but only possible, the fruits of human flourishing in peace and leisure: study and reflection, art and music, prayer and celebration, family and friendship, and the contemplation of the natural world.”
― 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

“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

“My coreligionists, Catholics specifically and Christians more broadly, have also fallen into the trap of educating by opinions: riven by anxiety about the broader, hostile culture or by conflicts within their ranks, they each retreat to their own faction and turn to the rigid promotion of factional teachings. In this way they reduce serious inquiry and intellectual development to catechesis and evangelization by bullet points. The educational agenda is set more by broad political goals—to each faction its own—rather than by the fundamentals of spiritual life. We teach self-justifying arguments rather than the common human bonds that ground persuasion. We need to remind ourselves that Christianity has a few basics and holds out the prospect of free, vast, and indefinite growth in understanding and in sanctity. Christian teaching is less a containable artificial lake than it is an inexhaustible spring.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“happiness, and we all know that we desire it; but we do not all at bottom pursue joy in the truth, so we do not all pursue God. We seek joy in honor or in power, in pleasure or in superstition, instead of in the things that will enable us to flourish.”
― 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

“I learned more, and more pleasantly, from weekly lunches with Jim than from many visits to the library.”
― 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

“One of the diseases of our spectacle-riddled culture is that we forget that the invisible life has all the human splendor of the visible one, and often more. I have had in mind all along, and have appealed to where possible, the humble bookworm, the amateur naturalist, the contemplative taxi driver. If you, like me, are naturally drawn to achievement, collect examples of ordinary thinkers—human beings whose splendor is known only to a few, their family, their neighbors, their coworkers. Settle back in awe from time to time, as I do, in thinking about the vast treasury of thought and experience that will never be available to us.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“In the face of these examples, to justify intellectual activity in terms of its economic and political benefits, as do contemporary defenders of the humanities and liberal education, might seem banal or beside the point. But such defenses are worse than that: they are false and destructively so. For intellectual life to deliver the human benefit it provides, it must be in fact withdrawn from considerations of economic benefit or of social and political efficacy. This is the case in part because, as the little human things testify, a human being is more than an instrument of personal or public benefit. Intellectual life is a source of human dignity exactly because it is something beyond politics and social life. But withdrawal from the world is also necessary because intellectual life is, as I have said, an ascetic practice. If intellectual life is not an elite property but a piece of the human heritage, it belongs first and fundamentally to ordinary human beings.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“In the face of these examples, to justify intellectual activity in terms of its economic and political benefits, as do contemporary defenders of the humanities and liberal education, might seem banal or beside the point. But such defenses are worse than that: they are false and destructively so. For intellectual life to deliver the human benefit it provides, it must be in fact withdrawn from considerations of economic benefit or of social and political efficacy. This is the case in part because, as the little human things testify, a human being is more than an instrument of personal or public benefit. Intellectual life is a source of human dignity exactly because it is something beyond politics and social life. But withdrawal from the world is also necessary because intellectual life is, as I have said, an ascetic practice.”
― 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

“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

“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

“When I say that intellectual life cultivates our aspirations, I do not mean that it expands career choices, although of course it may do that. We may discover a desire to be a firefighter or a forest ranger through exercising the love of learning. We may decide to leave everything to live in a poor hut outside the village, growing vegetables, praying, and offering spiritual advice when asked. But human aspiration is deeper in range and broader in scope than our outward life. We aspire to ways of being: to be wise, or kind; to be vast in understanding, steadfast in truth, humble in success, witty in adversity. Albert Schweitzer, who left a brilliant career in divinity and music to provide medical care to the poor in Africa, pointed out that not everyone has the opportunity to make such a dramatic and costly choice.27 But anyone furnished with the basic necessities of life can aspire to the splendor of humanity, even if his or her individual splendor is not widely known or recognized”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“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

“[A former croft worker] hated the industrial system and had found liberation by operating a market garden on the edge of the moors where he had the use of a powerful telescope erected on his land. Indoors he gave magic-lantern shows of the heavens and their constellations, and on clear evenings at the dark of the year we were invited to view the rings around Saturn, the beauty of the Milky Way or the craters and valleys of the Moon. After carefully sighting the objects he turned to us solemnly, “Sithee, lasses, isn’t that a marvelous seet; a stupendous universe, yet we fritter our lives away i’ wars and petty spites!” As youngsters we gazed, inclined to giggle; then came a moment of silent awe as awareness of “night clad in the beauty of a thousand inauspicious stars—the vast of night and its void”—seeped into consciousness.26”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Intellectual life provides an escape in that it is beyond “straitened … circumstances,” but that escape is again a flight into realities beyond oneself: animal behavior, astronomy, and the mechanics of the inner life. The intellect has no limit to its subject matter: it reaches greedily for the whole of everything. It was the prospect of somehow holding the whole world within oneself that led Plato and Aristotle to think of the intellect as something divine, as offering the furthest heights to which a human being could reach.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual 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

“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