Robert > Robert's Quotes

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”
― Will Durant

“When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.”
― Will Durant

“Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.”
― Will Durant

“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Indeed, one of the functions of the structures of normality is that by making it unnecessary for almost everybody almost all the time to provide justifications for what they are doing or are about to do, they relieve us of what would otherwise be an intolerable burden.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“The neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks goes one further: If you’re working on two completely separate projects, dedicate one desk or table or section of the house for each. Just stepping into a different space hits the reset”
― Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

“This is a book about thinking. One cannot talk about thinking in the abstract, at least not usefully. But one can talk about thinking about digital filters, and by studying how great scientists thought about digital filters, one learns, however gradually, to think like a great scientist.”
― Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

“The primary element in any civilization is a stable relation between man and his environment. When man becomes the plaything of abstract decisions, a civilization can no longer be created.”
― Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Genius is talent exercised with courage.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Instead of teaching doctrines and developing theories, Wittgenstein came to think, a philosopher should demonstrate a technique, a method of achieving clarity.”
― Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”
― Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

“There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man—but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Man's character is his fate.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing for the known way is an impasse.”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“...institutional self-reform is rare; the conscience is willing, but the culture is rough.”
― Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present

“The present dominant values (xenophilia, cosmopolitanism, narcissistic individualism, humanitarianism, bourgeois economism, hedonism, homophilia, permissivenes, etc.) are actually anti-values - values of devirilising weakness, since they deplete a civilization's vital energies and weaken its defensive or affirmative capacities.”
― Guillaume Faye, Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance

“One day, Nikos asked Father Makarios, “Do you still wrestle with the devil?”

Father Makarios said, “No. I used to wrestle with the devil all the time. But now I have grown old and tired, and the devil has grown old and tired with me. So I leave him alone and he leaves me alone.”

Nikos asked, “Then life is easy now?”

Father Makarios responded, “Oh, no. Life is much harder now. For now I wrestle with God.”

Nikos exclaimed, “You wrestle with God and hope to win?”

“No,” said Father Makarios, “I wrestle with God and hope to lose.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

“Love responsibility. Say: It is my duty, and mine alone, to save the earth. If it is not saved, then I alone am to blame.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Ascetica, De redders van God en Symposium

“Discipline is the highest of all virtues. Only so may strength and desire be counterbalanced and the endeavors of man bear fruit.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Saviors of God

“Die every day. Be born every day. Deny everything you have every day. The superior virtue is not to be free but to fight for freedom.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Saviors of God

“War against the unbelievers! The unbelievers are the satisfied, the satiated, the sterile.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Saviors of God

“Void fascinates those who daren't look into it. They throw themselves in, for fear of falling.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“Arsenius always used to say this, ‘Why, words, did I let you get out? I have often been sorry that I have spoken, never that I have been silent.”
― Benedicta Ward, The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks

“Macarius said also, ‘If you are stirred to anger when you want to reprove someone, you are gratifying your own passions. Do not lose yourself in order to save another.”
― Benedicta Ward, The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks

“The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders. Many Outsiders unify themselves, realize themselves as poets or saints. Others remain tragically divided and unproductive, but even they supply soul-energy to society; it is their strenuousness that purifies thought and prevents the bourgeois world from foundering under its own dead-weight; they are society’s spiritual dynamos.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider