I’ve been going through lots of old to-do lists, cleaning out the junk and putting the good bits into iGTD. I’ve dug up several quotes that I’d transcribed and saved for future, uh… blogging, probably. So, without further ado, I’ll record them here.
The first one comes from the Holy Bible—more specifically, the KJV of Isaiah 30.15. If I recall correctly, I encountered it while enrolled in RELI 212 with Wills, and saved it because it reflects a demeanor to which I aspire:
In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.
Also from the Holy Bible comes a quote from Matthew 22.14 (KJV):
For many are called, but few are chosen.
The next passage comes from Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, something I read for Lang’s PHIL 219 class:
It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love. But this does not dispose of the technique of living based on the value of love as a means to happiness.
Love is still worth it, guys. Even if it sucks sometimes.
Kudos to McCann for assigning us Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, one of the most beautiful novels I think I’ve ever read. The following passage comes from said novel:
If her image flashed into his mind, it came with a brightness of dark eyes, her pale triangular cheeks with long earrings, and her many-coloured laugh. When he was dull, dull and tired of everything, he used to think that if he could hear that long-lost lady laugh again, he would be gay.
This one’s from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:
But he will do well to keep his small personal commentaries to himself, as one does at the sight of the sea or of majestic mountains, unless he knows himself to be called and gifted to give them expression in artistic or prophetic form. In most other cases the voluminous talk about intuition does nothing but conceal a lack of perspective toward the object, which merits the same judgment as a similar lack of perspective toward men.
The next two are from William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, which I had to read for RELI 101 with Gottschalk. I like James because he has a really good perspective on the difference between the “religion of healthy-mindedness” and “the sick soul” or, more generally, the basis for an optimistic view of the world and the gradations possible within that view.
This first quote touches on the individual perspective that we each bring to observation and judgment, and is from Lectures IV and V, “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness”:
The experiences which we have been studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But why in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total experience is that the world can be handled according to many systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men, and will each time give some characteristic kind of profit, for which he cares, to the handler, while at the same time some other kind of profit has to be omitted or postponed. […] Evidently, then, the science and the religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world’s treasure-house to him who can use either of them practically. […] And why, after all, may not the world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can thus approach in alternation by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes, just as mathematicians handle the same numerical and spatial facts by geometry, by analytical geometry, by algebra, by the calculus, or by quaternions, and each time come out right?
And finally, from Lecture VI, “The Sick Soul”:
It is notorious that facts are compatible with opposite emotional comments, since the same fact will inspire entirely different feelings in different persons, and at different times in the same person; and there is no rationally deducible connection between any outer fact and the sentiments it may happen to provoke. These have their source in another sphere of existence altogether, in the animal and spiritual region of the subject’s being. Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance, character, expression, or perspective. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with are thus pure gifts of the spectator’s mind.
