The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economics—great industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability....The prestige of what was until very lately the world economic order lingers on despite the fact that the system itself is now revealed as a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world.
A commonplace book: an old-fashioned literary diary for recording interesting items from reading you've done. I use mine to record snippets from reading, conversation and life in general. (The early 2003 entries are from a period some years ago -- before the blog age -- when I tried an online commonplace book as a straight web page.)
Showing posts with label learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label learning. Show all posts
Sunday, May 24, 2020
Tuesday, December 03, 2019
Thursday, October 03, 2019
Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.... It is in changing that things find repose.
Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars.
Heraclitus (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)
Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars.
Heraclitus (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)
Saturday, April 06, 2019
I am not obliged not to utter absurdities, provided I am not deceived in them and know them to be such....
We easily enough confess in others an advantage of courage, strength, experience, activity, and beauty, but an advantage in judgment we yield to none....
This capacity of trying the truth, whatever it be, in myself, and this free humour of not over easily subjecting my belief, I owe principally to myself; for the strongest and most general imaginations I have are those that, as a man may say, were born with me; they are natural and entirely my own. I produced them crude and simple, with a strong and bold production, but a little troubled and imperfect; I have since established and fortified them with the authority of others and the sound examples of the ancients, whom I have found of the same judgment.
Montaigne, Essays, Second Book, Chapter 17.
We easily enough confess in others an advantage of courage, strength, experience, activity, and beauty, but an advantage in judgment we yield to none....
This capacity of trying the truth, whatever it be, in myself, and this free humour of not over easily subjecting my belief, I owe principally to myself; for the strongest and most general imaginations I have are those that, as a man may say, were born with me; they are natural and entirely my own. I produced them crude and simple, with a strong and bold production, but a little troubled and imperfect; I have since established and fortified them with the authority of others and the sound examples of the ancients, whom I have found of the same judgment.
Montaigne, Essays, Second Book, Chapter 17.
Tuesday, November 27, 2018
I leave the choice of my arguments to fortune, and take that she first presents to me; they are all alike to me, I never design to go through any of them; for I never see all of anything…. Of a hundred members and faces that everything has, I take one, one while to look it over only, another while to ripple up the skin, and sometimes to pinch it to the bones: I give a stab, not so wide but as deep as I can, and am for the most part tempted to take it in hand by some new light I discover in it.
Michel de Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of
our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome,
charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in
one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
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