31 Quotes for 31
31 Quotes for 31
Quotes on ordinary life, ancient philosophy, and Stoicism
I’m turning 31. Following last year, here’s a list of 31 quotes from books and articles I’ve read this year. Some of them are amusing, some correct, while others are simply intriguing. Let me know if you have more to share that I should consider on this wonderful day.
I was also encouraged by reading a remark by C. S. Lewis that the significant something, the something of great power and moment, which each of the basic myths seems to suggest, is communicable not only when a good ancient author tells them but even in the most atrocious modern summary.
Michael Grant, The Myths of The Greeks And Romans
A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
George Santayana, from Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile
They must know that everything except virtue changes its name and becomes now good and now bad.
Seneca, Moral Letters 95
I see the mother as an overwhelming force who condemns men to lifelong sexual anxiety, from which they escape through rationalism and physical achievement.
Camile Paglia, Sexual Personae
Freud called himself a scientist, but he will survive as a great essayist like Montaigne or Emerson, not as the founder of a therapy already discredited (or elevated) as another episode in the long history of shamanism.
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon
Psychologists have studied the states of mind that tend to make us more successful, whatever the challenge. There are at least two we can adopt: “action orientation” and “state orientation.”
Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy
I wrote about Bad Therapy here:
I am of the opinion that only experience – experience always seems to mean bad experience? – can entitle us to participate in the discussion of such higher questions of rank, lest we talk like blind men about colors-against science the way women and artists do ("Oh, this dreadful science!" sigh their instinct and embarrassment; "it always gets to the bottom of things!").
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil
A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
If Bruno felt the need to talk about how his life was a failure, it was probably because he was hoping for something, some new beginning; it was probably a good sign.
Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles
Orderliness is a knowledge of when something must be done and in what sequence and, overall, of the order of actions.
Arius Didymus, The Stoic Epitome of Ethics
The seasons are no longer what they once were,
But it is the nature of things to be seen only once,
As they happen along …
John Ashbery, Syringa
Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of the police and of its opinion.
John Gray, The Silence of Animals
A second child always undermines parents’ belief in their power to mold their children, but child-rearing books hush this up because their market is first-time parents.
Steve Sailer, from Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Children
I wrote about
‘s book here:
That showed me in an instant that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them.
Socrates, The Apology
What nonsense it is, then, to talk of liberty as if it were a happy-go-lucky breaking of chains...the iconoclasts didn't free us. They threw us into the water, and now we have to swim.
Walter Lippmann, from Nobody Likes The Present Situation Very Much
My folks weren’t like other parents. In a world of ants, I was raised by two grasshoppers. I felt loved and secure. I didn’t yet know that ants ruled the planet.
Dana Gioia, The Imaginary Operagoer: A Memoir
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vex'd a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears:
What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Money is human happiness in abstracto; consequently he who is no longer capable of happiness in concreto sets his whole heart on money.
Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
The boys were taught to use a sarcastic yet graceful style of speaking, and to compress much thought into few words; for Lykurgus made the iron money have little value for its great size, but on the other hand he made their speech short and compact, but full of meaning, teaching the young, by long periods of silent listening, to speak sententiously and to the point.
Plutarch, Lycurgus
William James used to say that there is not much difference between one man and another but that the little difference there is is of great importance.
Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition
This danger comes from the fact that the status of hero-victim is nonrenewable. In the long run, victims are considered as impaired and incur pity or contempt. That is a harsh fact of human nature, permanent and irremediable by wise words, I think. Victims cannot be winners except in the momentary upsurge of public indignation.
Eva Brann, A Tiny Essay on Taking Offense
There is no work of Nietzsche’s that does not say to us, like Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”: “You must change your life.”
Walter Kaufmann, The Basic Writings of Nietszche
The friendships which last are those wherein each friend respects the other's dignity to the point of not really wanting anything from him. Therefore a man with a will to power can have no friends. He is like a boy with a chopper. He tries it on flowers, he tries it on sticks, he tries it on furniture, and at last he breaks it on a stone.
Palinurus, The Unquiet Grave
Lucan did not see Cato as simply a model, as his uncle Seneca did. Lucan grasped a larger reality: once begun, a civil war is difficult to end. To chain the beast, a society might invite in an almost equally awful jailer. People give up their own freedom or the freedom of others. They bury their history in myths.
Josiah Osgood, Uncommon Wrath
You can listen to my conversation with Josiah here.
Writing is thinking in slow motion. We see what at normal speeds escapes us, can rerun the reel at will to look for errors, erase, interpolate, and rethink. Most thoughts are a light rain, fall upon the ground, and dry up. Occasionally they become a stream that runs a short distance before it disappears. Writing stands an incomparably better chance of getting somewhere.
Walter Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy
Ancient philosophy, therefore, never involves the construction of an abstract system, but rather appears as a call to conversion through which a person will find again their original nature through a violent extraction from the perversion in which common mortals live, and a profound disruption of the whole of their being
Pierre Hadot, The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot
Socrates did not set up grandstands for his audience and did not sit upon a professorial chair; he had no fixed timetable for talking or walking with his friends. Rather, he did philosophy sometimes by joking with them, or by drinking or going to war or to the market with them, and finally by going to prison and drinking poison. He was the first to show that at all times and in every place, in everything that happens to us, daily life gives us the opportunity to do philosophy.
Plutarch, Whether A Man Should Engage In Politics When He is Old
What is ‘virtue’ in Stoicism? Virtue is a form or expertise or skill, knowledge how to live well in every way, a form of knowledge that shapes the whole personality and life.
Chris Gill, What Is Stoic Virtue
Administrators Will Be the End of Us
Alternative title for David Brooks’ Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts
The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it.
J. S. Mill, On Liberty
Caesarism is human idolatry in its worst form—a worship of mere power, as degrading in its effects as the worship of mere wealth would be.
Samuel Smiles
When evening comes, I go back home, and go to my study. On the threshold I take off my work clothes, covered in mud and filth, and put on the clothes an ambassador would wear. Decently dressed, I enter the ancient courts of rulers who have long since died. There I am warmly welcomed, and I feed on the only food I find nourishing, and was born to savor. I am not ashamed to talk to them, and to ask them to explain their actions. And they, out of kindness, answer me. Four hours go by without my feeling any anxiety. I forget every worry. I am no longer afraid of poverty, or frightened of death. I live entirely through them.
Niccolò Machiavelli