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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“Witnessing all of those hardworking female street vendors in Vietnam also made me understand why my mom felt so passionate about me and my sisters working. While we were in Vietnam together, she explained that the country had a history of always being in wartime, so women were expected to rise to the occasion of making money for the family. Vietnamese women were always ready to take over roles traditionally filled by men, Like A League of Their Own (but where everyone is Marla Hooch). I also understood why my mom wasn't into processing her feelings, and how she was taught to just get over tragedy. To survive, she had to believe things like depression and allergies were a choice. In a culture entrenched in wartime, those who chose to be unhappy or to refuse gluten didn't last long.”

“Witnessing the panoply of beauty in all of nature takes us out of our shell of self-absorption and makes us realize that we are merely bit players in the game of life. Witnessing the majesty of beauty confirms that the real show lies outside us to observe and appreciate and not inside us to transfix us. True beauty charms us into seeing the grandeur of goodness that surrounds us and by doing so, the pristine splendor of nature releases us from wallowing in the poverty of our self-idealization. The bewitching spell cast by the exquisiteness of nature levitates our souls and transforms our psyche. When we see, hear, taste, smell, or touch what is beautiful, we cannot suppress the urge to replicate its baffling texture by singing, dancing, painting, or writing. Opening our eye to the loveliness of a single flower is how we stay in touch with the glorious pageantry of living.”

“Wittgenstein imagined that the philosopher was like a therapist whose task was to put problems finally to rest, and to cure us ofbeing bewitched by them. So we are told to stop, to shut off lines of inquiry, not to find things puzzling nor to seek explanations. This is intellectual suicide.”

“Wittgenstein wrote a comprehensive critique of the Scottish anthropologist J. G. Frazer's masterpiece "The Golden Bough" (1890), a comparative study of religion and mythology. One of Wittgenstein's main objections was that Frazer ascribes the natives he discusses with irrational beliefs for which there is no evidence: for example, that a certain ritual will make it rain. The problem is that Frazer is unable to see what the natives are actually doing. Wittgenstein states: "Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages... His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves." While Frazer believes that the natives' actions are based on mistaken beliefs about causal relationships, Wittgenstein suggests that they are not based on such beliefs at all. Once, after a very bad game, I smashed my tennis racket. Had my opponent thought like Frazer, he would have believed that my action was a ritual sacrifice aimed at changing the outcome of the tournament for me. But my action was not based on any such expectation. It was simply an immature expression of anger and disappointment. The most reasonable understanding of the natives' ritual practices involves considering them as expressions of hope, among other things, not as irrational notions of causal relationships. Our idea of causation stems from us observing regularities. We will have repeatedly seen that A is followed by B. What regularities would have led the natives to see a causal relationship between a specific ritual and a specific natural phenomenon such as rain? Is is unlikely that rain was usually brought about by a specific dance, and the natives must have seen that it sometimes rains despite no ritual being performed. Not least, the natives should have danced a lot during the driest parts of the year, but they didn't. So it's far more plausible to consider this dance an expression of hoping for rain. From that perspective there is nothing irrational about the natives' actions. The dancing is a shared expression of their understanding that the desired rain might come.”

“Wittkower's response - which resonated for decades - to the manifest lack of robustness of modern civilization was to reassert the absolute difference between the past and the present: premodern societies were oriented, and they knew hierarchy. Wittkower argued, on the basis of the texts by Alberti and Palladio, that the architecture of the Italian Renaissance materialized a mathematical program: a system of ratios that pictured the invisible structure of the cosmos. Architecture placed the human body within this system. It is hard to see the difference between this and Sedlmayr's view except that the one believes that man's image was best framed by forms based on the divinely measured proportions of the human body, and the other believes that man's image was best framed by an image of divinity itself. Wittkower recovers a religious conception of architecture but detached from Christianity: the Renaissance church as a Hindu temple, as it were.”

“Wives are good on paper, at least. until they turn into harpies with sharp claws and open check books. Then they're kind of frightening. And they put on all kinds of makeup and parade around the street with their shopping cart yelling "Sale on aisle seven!" at anyone who will listen. Their wooden clog sandals make a helluva racket on linoleum tile. Their plastic jewelry clatters like the bones of little children.”