“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.” WritingHumansStillsPlaySeemsRememberSufferingHouseHuman BeingsFictionFourMiddleMaterialsCreaturesEdgesCornersInstanceAttachmentTornSpidersHookedMaterial ThingsSpunShakespeare's Plays Author:Virginia Woolf
“Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan, and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age, I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure, more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.” WritingHumansLittlesAgeLastsYoungSpiritHuman BeingsPleasureMiddleYouthAdventurePureQuietAnxietyDialogueOld AgeDrunkEnjoyedDescriptionJoyfulMiddle AgesTurmoilPuritanAnnoyancePleasures Of LifeLimboYoung FriendsWriting Dialogue Author:George Santayana
“One of the characteristics of the university is that it is made up of professors who train professors, or professionals training professionals. Education was this no longer directed toward people who were to be educated with a view to become fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in other that they might learn how to train other specialists. This is the danger of "Scholasticism," that philosophical tendency which began to be sketched at the end of antiquity, developed in the Middle Ages, and whose presence is still recognizable in philosophy today.” PeopleHumansMadeStillsEndsPhilosophyMightAgeTodayHuman BeingsViewsMiddleDangerTrainingPhilosophicalTrainUniversityTendenciesEducatedCharacteristicsProfessorsMiddle AgesAntiquitySpecialistsScholasticism Author:Pierre Hadot
“Whereas the property-owning middle class could win freedom for themselves on the basis of rights to property--thus excluding others from the freedom they gain--the property-less working class possess nothing but their title as human beings. Thus they can liberate themselves only by liberating all humanity.” HumansHumanityWinningHuman BeingsClassRightsMiddleGainsBasesPropertyTitlesMiddle ClassWorking ClassLiberating Book:Marx: A Very Short Introduction Source: Marx: A Very Short Introduction
“Here is the tragedy of theology in its distilled essence: The employment of high-powered human intellect, of genius, of profoundly rigorous logical deduction—studying nothing. In the Middle Ages, the great minds capable of transforming the world did not study the world; and so, for most of a millennium, as human beings screamed in agony—decaying from starvation, eaten by leprosy and plague, dying in droves in their twenties—the men of the mind, who could have provided their earthly salvation, abandoned them for otherworldly fantasies.” MenWorldMindHumansAgeHuman BeingsFantasyStudyMiddleDyingHe ManGeniusCapableEssenceTragedyTwentiesSalvationIntellectTheologyEmploymentLogicalAbandonedAgonyPlagueMiddle AgesTransformingStarvationMillenniumGreat MindsDeductionsLeprosyTransforming The World Author:Andrew Bernstein