Adversaria (23)
‘Men may come and men may go, but the truth of the multiplication table does not budge’ —Philip Wheelwright (Heraclitus, p. 29)
‘The carer, after all, also eats, wears clean clothes, washes herself. The more you read, the more Dorothy Wordsworth seemed to be describing a radically sane life, rooted in the hour-by-hour reconciliation of responsibilities and pleasures, acts required and desired in the short and long term for the welfare of household, community and self’ —Sarah Moss (My Good Bright Wolf, p. 237)
‘But a single word is likely to say too little, or too much, or both too little and too much in different ways’ —Philip Wheelwright (Heraclitus, p. 49)
‘Fashion and the zeal of the literati would have us think that the specialist can to-day be spared, or degraded to a position subordinate to that of the seer. Almost all sciences owe something to dilettantes, often very valuable view-points. But dilettantism as a leading principle would be the end of science. He who yearns for seeing should go to the cinema’ —Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, p. 29)
‘It is better to be a man of calm wisdom than a fluttering fool, and better for one’s intelligence to be dry and bright than to be a victim of moist emotions; nevertheless the foolish and dissolute have their roles to play in the ever shifting universe, like everything else’ —Philip Wheelwright (Heraclitus, p. 109)
‘In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudæmonistic, not to say hedonistic, admxiture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational’ —Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, p. 53)
‘It is a pure passion of the intelligence, implying no terrestrial love. It is quite easy to conceive of a person lunging into the concept of what is human without having the least desire even to see a man. This is the form assumed by love of humanity in the great patricians of the mind like Erasmus, Malebranche, Spinoza, Goether, who all were men, it appears, not very anxious to throw themselves into the arms of their neighbors’ —Julien Benda (The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington, p. 61).