Lost in Thought Quotes

“The Varieties of Religious Experience more than the saccharine pious literature she encountered elsewhere that prepared her for her Catholic conversion.23 Perhaps she resisted its heavy sweetness; or perhaps too the pious literature was narrow and factional, written in a sort of jargon that only insiders could understand. James’s work in Varieties consists in an earnest attempt to find what is generally human in the various kinds of religious experience.”
― 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

“There is an almost unearthly directness to the interaction with books that Day describes here. She reads about something and walks out to look at it. Over time, the books open up reality to her, through the medium of words and authors. It is for this reason, I think, that she refers to the books as “companions” and compares her life with books to her life with the living human beings who lived in her houses. And yet her reading could have gone in any number of directions. A reader of Sinclair, London, or Dickens could take refuge in empty, self-aggrandizing talk about the injustice of things. Such talk would find a hospitable audience among the liberal middle class of New York or Chicago, as Day knows well. Or the books could have remained distractions, idle forms of entertainment. Day is a writer committed to encouragement, unwilling to speak ill of anyone, even her preconverted self. Yet in her autobiography From Union Square to Rome, Day describes using reading to escape from a feeling of profound depression, in which she is “overwhelmed by the terror and the blackness of both life and death”:”
― 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

“A local church invites the prisoners to a viewing of slapstick cartoons. Amid the roars of laughter of his fellow inmates, Sullivan comes to understand the value of his previous work. Once a final plot twist returns him to his former state of comfort and affluence, he renounces his attempts at more serious filmmaking. He concludes, “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Don’t you know that’s all some people have? It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”
― 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

“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

“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)

“De esta manera disminuimos el valor de aquellos a quienes hablamos; los tratamos como herramientas y les negamos dignidad. Simon predice nuestra respuesta inmediata ante la dificultad de hacer frente a las mentiras y falsedades de nuestros amigos y familiares más queridos: tratar de aislar las falsedades y las mentiras y limitarlas a los del otro bando —los ricos (si somos pobres), los pobres (si somos ricos), republicanos (si somos demócratas), demócratas (si somos republicanos), etc., etc.—. Simulamos que los demás se tragan las mentiras, pero que nosotros mismos hemos escapado ilesos. Imaginamos que nuestra clase o grupo social nos facilita una vía de acceso especial a la verdad. En consecuencia, nuestro enfoque en la verdad y la falsedad debe comenzar con nosotros mismos. La negación y la rebelión son actitudes que tienen cierto encanto, siempre que la actitud que rechazo y contra la que me rebelo se exprese a una distancia cómoda de mi propia persona. Pero si adopto la actitud de decir no a todas las falsedades, incluidas las que se fabrican y propagan a mi alrededor, así como las que siento brotar en mí, sé que me dirijo a una terrible soledad, a un país desértico sin límites, ni carreteras, ni agua. Allí mis queridos compañeros me fallarán. Mis hábitos, mis gustos, mis pasiones me abandonarán. Sin más apoyo que la verdad, seguiré adelante, desnudo y temblando70. Una vez que uno se aleja de la satisfacción de fingir que solo otros cayeron en las garras de la mentira y la falsedad, uno se encuentra aislado y desorientado, en «un país desértico»: Simon describe aquí la pobreza que no es una cuestión de que haya descarrilado la rueda económica, sino la condición humana, la pobreza de tener que cambiar las consolaciones sociales por la verdad y la dignidad. Esta pobreza también podría calificarse de alienación, una suerte de culminación de la soledad, de retrospección, el recogimiento que requiere la vida intelectual. Evoca la soledad, el sacrificio que exige nuestra ansia por la verdad.”
― Zena Hitz, Pensativos: Los placeres ocultos de la vida intelectual (Nuevo Ensayo nº 97)

“Cuando miento a alguien, me aprovecho de la apertura al mundo de esa persona, de su capacidad de percepción y de su juicio racional, como un medio para obtener lo que quiero. Quiero una esposa y una amante, así que miento para lograr ambas.”
― Zena Hitz, Pensativos: Los placeres ocultos de la vida intelectual (Nuevo Ensayo nº 97)

“Para Agustín, nuestra vida cotidiana no pasa de la superficie de las cosas. Buscamos experiencias bonitas o placenteras, o el honor de sentir la aprobación de un grupo. Los esfuerzos intelectuales nos llevan hacia adentro, a las profundidades.”
― Zena Hitz, Pensativos: Los placeres ocultos de la vida intelectual (Nuevo Ensayo nº 97)

“La recreación también se caracteriza por la atemporalidad.”
― Zena Hitz, Pensativos: Los placeres ocultos de la vida intelectual (Nuevo Ensayo nº 97)

“Aristóteles decía que debe haber algo más allá del trabajo, el ocio, por el cual trabajamos y sin el cual nuestro trabajo es en vano. El ocio no es meramente recreación, que podríamos emprender en aras del trabajo, para relajarnos o descansar antes de emprender una nueva tarea. El ocio se trata más bien de una recámara interior cuyo buen empleo podría contar como la culminación de todos nuestros esfuerzos. Para Aristóteles, solo la contemplación, la actividad de ver, comprender y saborear el mundo tal como es, podría considerarse el uso final y satisfactorio del ocio.”
― Zena Hitz, Pensativos: Los placeres ocultos de la vida intelectual (Nuevo Ensayo nº 97)

“Nuestros fines últimos a menudo presentan una fragilidad impredecible; de ahí la ansiedad juvenil por el futuro, nuestras crisis de mediana edad y los arrepentimientos de la vejez.”
― Zena Hitz, Pensativos: Los placeres ocultos de la vida intelectual (Nuevo Ensayo nº 97)

“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)

“So we have examined two ways in which the love of learning might overcome typical abuses of the intellect: ambition, self-deception, or ways of using the mind to create soothing or exciting spectacles. The love of learning has emerged as something profoundly serious, something that can change a life, a source of our highest aspirations—to know, to love, to flourish in our full humanity.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Ambition and the Work of Art The old philosophers imagine what the life of the wise will be in the Islands of the Blest, that they will be free from every care, needing none of the necessities of life, and with nothing else to do but to spend all their time on learning and inquiring in the study of nature. We on the other hand see not only the delight of a happy life but also the solace of misfortune; hence many when they were in the power of enemies or tyrants, many in prison, many in exile, have solaced their sorrow with the pursuit of learning. —CICERO, ABOUT THE ENDS OF GOODS AND EVILS, TRANS. H. RACKHAM”
― 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

“The difference between a basic orientation toward the love of learning and one toward the love of spectacle is that between two kinds of basic restlessness. The one sort, exemplified by Augustine’s own journey as he describes it, unceasingly moves past the surfaces of things to what is more real. The second flees unceasingly from object to object, all on the same level—never culminating in anything further, never achieving anything beyond the thrill of experience. It is the bare existence of a human possibility that inspires the exercise of the love of spectacle. The lovers of spectacle seek no good of the kind Malcolm X, André Weil, or Irina Ratushinskaya sought—indeed, it is the bad, the sad, and the ugly as such that hold special fascination for them. The love of learning always wants more; the love of spectacle is satisfied at the surface, like someone scratching an itch rather than trying to heal a wound.28”
― 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

“The Love of Spectacle and Life at the Surfaces 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, 561C-D”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Augustine describes his fourteen-year course of reading as a passage through various ideas and ways of thinking but more importantly, through certain motivations, through affections of his heart.13 At the age of eighteen, he is passionately inflamed for learning after he reads an oration by Cicero on the value of philosophy: “The one thing that delighted me in Cicero’s exhortation was that I should love, and seek, and win, and hold, and embrace, not this or that philosophical school, but Wisdom itself, whatever that might be.”14 Cicero’s exhortation ignites in Augustine a restless seeking after wisdom, a form of truth and knowledge that could guide and organize his life.”
― 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

“Our vision of the love of learning is distorted by notions of economic and civic usefulness. I can be more blunt. We do not see intellectual life clearly, because of our devotion to lifestyles rich in material comfort and social superiority. We want the splendor of Socratic thinking without his poverty. We want the thrill of his speaking truth to power without the full absorption in the life of the mind that made it possible. We want the profits of Thales’ stargazing without the ridicule. We want Einstein’s brilliant insights without the humiliation of joblessness followed by years of obscurity working in a patent office. Instead of facing reality head on and making a choice to accept the costs of a certain pursuit as they are, we pretend that there is no need to make a choice. Intellectual life can bring you wealth and high social status. We can have it all. So we lie to ourselves that what we really care about is the realm of the intellect, when in reality we would sacrifice it in a second to our idols—comfort, wealth, and status.”
― 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

“Even the dignity of intellectual excellence, the dignity of Einstein or Aristotle, is not our ultimate dignity. We perhaps all know people of high intelligence who have particular difficulty facing illness and decline. Past the asceticism of discipline for the sake of excellence is the discipline of going eyeball to eyeball with reality, letting our fantasies about ourselves die a quiet death.”
― 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

“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

“For the Sake of What? Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. A thinking reed.—It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world. PASCAL, PENSÉES, TRANS. A. J. KRAILSHEIMER”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“After all, it is impossible to deprive oneself completely of all bodily or worldly objects of desire. The powers of perception and desire cannot be simply turned off—we can turn the dial where we like, but the instrument goes on receiving. Rather, the soul has the capacity of refusing attachment to them while they are present. If its focus and desire are directed elsewhere, we can possess rejected goods without being ultimately attached to them.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life