As I engage in the so-called "bull sessions" around and about the school, I too often find that most college men have a misconception of the purpose of education. Most of the "brethren" think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses. Still [...]
Pushkin brings a desire for spiritual fulfillment between prisoners and their guard.
"As long as poets express merely their puny subjective impressions, they are not worth the name; but as soon as they know how to appropriate and express the world, they are poets. For then they are inexhaustible and can be constantly new, as opposed to a subjective nature, which quickly expresses its meagre inner life [...]
Every society is based on aristocracy, because this one, the true one, is demanding with regard to itself, and without this demand every society would die. Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1954
We are mistaken when we believe that culture and the humanities are being served by scholarship. The truth is that art and culture do not belong in a university. It cannot be a home for them, because culture proper and scholarship proper are diametrically opposed.... [T]he objects of culture are not analyzable.... Great works of [...]
The stoicism of his thought could not be disturbed by this or any other failure. Next time, or the time after next, a telling stroke would be delivered – something really startling – a blow fit to open the first crack in the imposing front of the great edifice of legal conceptions sheltering the atrocious [...]
The angry north wind proved its strength one stormy night on a noble oak tree. Now it stood racked, and a great many lower branches lay shattered under it. A fox, which had its hollow nearby, saw it the next morning. "What a tree!" it exclaimed. "I would have never thought it was so large!" Gotthold [...]
Journalists have erected for themselves a small wooden chapel that they call the Temple of Fame, in which they continuously affix and remove portraits, making such a racket that one cannot hear oneself speak. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms
How language lends itself to the sciences.
Seeing how useful the vine was, the peasant supported it at a height with many props. Then, once he had harvested its grapes, he raised the stakes and let it fall, building a fire with the props. Leonardo da Vinci, Fables
