Lost in Thought Quotes

“in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient liberation of poverty could have meant; the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly—the more athletic trim, in short, the fighting shape. —WILLIAM JAMES, THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The asceticism of intellectual life is related to what we might call the asceticism of life in general: the cancer may or may not respond to treatment; a woodworker or an engineer must accept the limitations of the materials, regardless of the grand vision he or she began with; there are some stains that just will not come out, no matter how important the garment is; the office can hire and fire as much as it likes, but in the end only the people who work there can accomplish its tasks. The encounter with a given reality, and the resultant crushing of our desires and hopes, is an essential part of being a human being. Every mode of learning is a school of hard knocks.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“That is not an observation, that is an idea!”33 But Goethe himself thought that much of reality lurked past the surfaces immediately visible to the eye. As he put it: When we try to recognize the idea inherent in a phenomenon we are confused by the fact that it frequently—even normally—contradicts our senses. The Copernican system is based on an idea that was hard to grasp; even now it contradicts our senses every day. We merely echo something we neither see nor understand. The metamorphosis of plants contradicts our senses this way.34 If the earth’s movement around the sun is so invisible to us (we still say, as Goethe points out, that the sun rises and sets), we ought to expect reality in many cases to be invisible, available only to those cognitive powers that go past sensory perception.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“What then are we doing when we diligently strive to be wise? Do we not seek, with as much energy as we can command, to gather our whole soul somehow to that which we attain by the mind, to station ourselves and become wholly entrenched there, so that we may no longer rejoice in our own private goods, which are bound up with ephemeral things, but instead cast aside all attachment to times and places and apprehend that which is always one and the same?27”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Once he left prison, Malcolm became a minister in the Nation of Islam, gathering fame as a clear and forceful voice for African American communities beaten down by the poverty and violence nurtured in racial prejudice. His profuse stream of public speeches masked a disciplined inwardness, a constant struggle to see things as they were and to commit himself accordingly. So over time he came to reject the anti-white teachings of the Nation and underwent a second conversion to the broader humanism of orthodox Islam. The culmination of the second conversion was a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he saw the stone house at the center of the Great Mosque: “It was being circulated by thousands upon thousands of praying pilgrims, both sexes, and every size, shape, color and race in the world.”25 The change of mind inspired by this vision cost him his life: he was killed by members of his former community. His murderers likely were aided by US officials who viewed the anti-white cast of his first conversion as a threat.26 Thus Malcolm staked his life on both of his major changes of mind.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Perhaps the most famous and dramatic example of intellectual development in prison is that of Malcolm X.21 Malcolm Little (as he was born) entered prison immersed in drugs, sex, and petty crime. In prison he met a polymath named John Elton Bembry who was steeped in culture and history, able to hold forth on a wide variety of fascinating topics. On his advice Malcolm began to read—first the dictionary, then books on etymology and linguistics. He studied elementary Latin and German. He converted to Islam, a faith introduced to him by his brothers. In the following years he read the Bible and the Qur’an, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, and Kant, as well as works of Asian philosophy. He pored over an especially loved book of the archaeological wonders of the East and the West. He learned the history of colonialism, of slavery, and of African peoples. He felt his old ways of thinking disappear “like snow off of a roof.”22 He filled his letters with verse, writing to his brother: “I’m a real bug for poetry. When you think back over all of our past lives, only poetry could best fit into the vast emptiness created by men.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Einstein’s closest friend was the brilliant chemist Fritz Haber, who turned his intellect to the invention of the poisonous gases that could be deployed in battle, thus playing his part in murdering and terrifying thousands of soldiers.15 The Germany of the early twentieth century was at the pinnacle of human culture: science, literature, scholarship, music. That it turned to conquest and large-scale murder gives the lie to the claim that higher culture is humanizing in itself.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Images of Inwardness Whatever lofty happiness man in his earthen bonds names with the names of the gods: the harmony of faith, that does not waver, of friendship, that knows no doubts; the light, that to the wise comes only in lonely thoughts, and for the poets burns only in lovely images. All that did I—in my best hours— Discover in her, and found there for myself. —GOETHE, “FÜR EWIG” (FOR ETERNITY)”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“There is rather some fundamental conflict, difficult to notice and even more difficult to describe, between the desires to know, learn, and understand and desires for anything else, especially anything involving social and political life.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Unless we treasure something beyond our own bare experience, we cannot distinguish gazing at a mighty river from gazing at the TV channels changing one to the other, over and over again.”
― 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.”
― 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.

Intellectual life uncovers a human being who is not reducible to his or her economic, social and political contributions.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Intellectual life uncovers a human being who is not reducible to his or her economic, social and political contributions.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Our desires for truth and understanding, driven on by both frustration and awe, bear us into the depths of the intellect where real learning takes place. But natural to us as these desires are, they fight against the other desires I have described: inbuilt sloth, the thrill of the spectacle, the easy rush of outrage, the drive for status or achievement, and the uneasy fortress of comfort given by belonging to a particular social group.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“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

“An impassible gulf lies between the poor and the socially concerned middle and upper classes. Concern without knowledge or experience reeks of self-serving condescension. But to experience poverty as one among many possible learning experiences is not to experience poverty at all. In the face of this gulf, concern for the poor quickly collapses under the narcissism of the narrative, and self-regard wins an easy victory over self-sacrifice.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The overwhelming impression of political activity presented by the novels is that political words and what passes for political thinking are empty pretense, the ticket to social advancement for individuals. Political action moves without contact with reality, and is in fact motivated by a concerted attempt to avoid the difficulties for which it pretends concern.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“It is a disgrace to our system of higher education that person-to-person teaching belongs only to a handful of liberal arts colleges and to elite doctoral programs. Our campuses burgeon with new buildings, food courts, and climbing walls; as class sizes become larger, the distance between teacher and student becomes wider, and the quality of the education less and less serious. Somehow learning is imagined as something that could be boiled down to the mastery of a set of sentences. There are useful subjects that can be learned this way, but nothing that would justify the expense or the inconvenience of a modern university.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Mauriac tells of a subtle pride and hypocrisy: “There is a kind of hypocrisy which is worse than that of the Pharisees; it is to hide behind Christ’s example in order to follow one’s own lustful desires and to seek out the company of the dissolute.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“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”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there. —JOHN BAKER, THE PEREGRINE”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Intellectual life is a way to recover one's real value when it is denied recognition by the power plays and careless judgments of social life. That is why it is a source of dignity. In ordinary social life, knowledge is exchanged for money or for power, for approval or for a sense of belonging, to mark out superiority in status or to achieve a feeling of importance. These are our common currencies, our ways of advancing ourselves or diminishing others. But since a human being is more than his or her social uses, other, more fundamental ways of relating are possible. These forms of communion can consist in the joyful friendship of bookworms or the gritty pursuit of the truth about something together with people one would otherwise find unbearable.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“For those of us without the strength or the insight to choose for ourselves such quiet, withdrawn places, failure is perhaps the best-trod route to inwardness.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“We speak to our own advantage: to feel comfortable, to assuage anxiety, to play a part in the struggles for power and status around us. Our purpose in speaking is rarely to communicate the truth about something.45 In this way we diminish the value of those we speak to; we treat them as our tools and deny their dignity.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The personal lie appeals not only to the audience’s rational judgment, but also to their own desires: they too do not want to be disturbed by a difficult truth. The same is true on a grander scale for public lies. As a political leader, I aggrandize myself by exaggerating threats. I rely on my audience’s concern for their own well-being and the facts that determine it. I appeal to natural fears of uncertainty and weakness as well as to fantasies of strength. The more successful I am as a leader, the more dependent I am on lies: the vague threat of war turns into a direct lie about the facts of the matter, the unprovoked attack, the enemy at the gates. Words and stories become a means not only to present a false reality, but also to flood the airwaves, to drive out alternatives. The lies resonate and take hold in us, their audience, because they help us to pretend that deprivation is temporary, that suffering is curable, or that a confrontation has vindicated us or shown our strength.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The social world is a realm of suspicion: the locus of ambition and competitive striving, the engine of using and instrumentalizing, the dissipation of energy into anxiety and petty spites. Only in withdrawing from it can the fundamentals of human and divine life become clear.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“According to the historian Plutarch, the great mathematician Archimedes was so absorbed in his proofs that he did not notice that the Romans had invaded and conquered his city, and was killed by a soldier when he insisted on finishing his work.5 Later writers gave him last words: “Don’t disturb my circles.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“The intellectual life as portrayed in this film has four key features: It is a form of the inner life of a person, a place of retreat and reflection. As such it is withdrawn from the world, where “the world” is understood in its (originally Platonic, later Christian) sense as the locus of competition and struggle for wealth, power, prestige, and status. It is a source of dignity—made obvious in this case by the contrast to Renée’s low status as an unattractive working-class woman without children and past childbearing age. It opens space for communion: it allows for profound connection between human beings.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“Learning and intellectual life are not the exclusive province of professional academics, but academics are their official guardians”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life