Quotessence
Home / Authors / Kenny Smith
Kenny Smith

Kenny Smith Quotes

Basketball player

Filter quotes by topic

AllPhilosophySelfThinkingHumansCultureFormValuesEgoPeopleMindWayConsciousnessDelusionIfsTryingKindKnowsModernWholeInsight

Famous Kenny Smith Quotes

“But for the Jews this moral-spiritual issue raises the same societal problem it does for the Greeks: how can a man have the "right" to make himself spiritually or rationally destitute or retarded when this corrupts the whole quality of the culture that we all together need and depend on? If anyone wants a cloistered and closed-minded life, an anti-aristic life, let him either go off and live among the wolves-or else join the community of like-minded idiots that (alas) compose and define the basic terms of modern society.”

IfsMenWantNeedsDoePhilosophyWholeProblemTogetherSpiritualCultureSpiritualityTermCommunityQualityMoralIssuesModernDependsMoralityRaisesJewIdiotGreekAlasModern SocietyRetardedDestituteClosed Minded
Author:Kenny Smith
Create image

“All that the posture of skepticism accomplishes is to freeze the ego in an ignorantist poverty that never stretches or diversifies its resources of imagination or understanding. Any uncultured cretin can close his eyes and try to reduce the issues down to linear simplisms and say, "I am doubting, I am proving my magisterial or sovereign control over my own mind." Doubt is a useful and significant test of one's critical powers, but by itself it bears little if any significant cultural charge of enlightenment or satori; indeed it is the very opposite kind of thing.”

IfsTryingMindKindLittlesEyeUnderstandingImaginationMy OwnPovertyIssuesDoubtBearsProveEgoEnlightenmentResourcesTestsOppositesAccomplishCriticalSignificantHis EyesSkepticismSovereignFreezePostureLinearSatori
Author:Kenny Smith
Create image

“Hegel understood the Heisenbergian reality of knowing: yes, it would be nice if we could somehow delicately capture the truth and bring it closer to ourselves without altering it, "like a bird caught with a limestick." But the reality is, every truth we manage to know is altered, deformed by our very "encheiresis naturae," by the act of our taking-in-hand of nature (to borrow the alchemists' phrase from Goethe's Faust).”

IfsKnowsHandsRealityWould BeTruthKnowingNiceBirdUnderstoodCaughtManagePhrasesCaptureBeing NiceAlteredAlchemistHegelFaust
Author:Kenny Smith
Create image

“(The terms douloi, banausoi and aristoi) are in a way more precise, but what is more vital and valuable, they are more comprehensive: they project a concept of psychic order that embraces entire fields that we have no other way of seeing all together as the working of a single principle. If we think of the human domain as the collaboration and the conflict of these three diverse character-types, we can understand the weave and the stress and polemics of their very different basal teleologies or ultimate governing purposes of life.”

IfsThinkingWayHumansDifferentPhilosophyCharacterTogetherPurposeOrderThreeTermPrinciplesSeeingFieldsLife PhilosophyTypeConflictProjectsConceptsUltimateStressEmbraceValuablePurpose Of LifeCollaborationDiversePrecisePsychicsDomainGoverningComprehensivePolemics
Author:Kenny Smith
Create image

“The music of all the different media of life-memories, images, feeling-tones, poetic-musical connotations of phrasing-is kaleidoscopic and doesn't repeat itself or recur. -People who think they are trapped in a river of regularized and ever-repeating time are merely the victims of their own ordinarizing minds that have elaborated for them a prison-cell of everydayness. The fountains of time, history, life, inspiration, etc. are fresh every instant, if one knows how to grasp them with some finesse: every instant within natural, historical, and personal time is unique.”

PeopleIfsThinkingKnowsMindDifferentPhilosophyFeelingsInspirationNaturalMemoriesKnow HowMediaUniqueRiversVictimPrisonHistoricalMusicalCellsInstantToneRepeatsEtcPoeticTrappedFountainConnotationFinessePrison CellsPersonal Time
Author:Kenny Smith
Create image

“Misfortune occurs or can occur to anyone, of any sort of character. The eudaimonic has more resources to avoid it (being in autonomous control of his appetites and assumptions) and more resources to deal with it if it occurs (being better able to put it in perspective and maintain his own evenness of self-mastery). Tragedy as a dramatic form is meant to foster the ethos of sophrosyne or moderation, "nothing to excess"; it nurtures a sense of distance from the dominant illusions and delusions that may infect even aristoi.”

IfsMaySelfPhilosophyCharacterAbleFormDealsPerspectiveIllusionResourcesTragedyDistanceDramaticAssumptionDelusionMisfortunesAppetiteExcessMasteryDominantNurtureModerationSelf MasteryAutonomousEthos
Author:Kenny Smith
Create image