Category: Thought

There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm that is not to be doubted.

Washington Irving, “The Adventure of the German Student,” Tales of a Traveller, by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.(1824).

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

George Meredith, The Egoist (1879), seventh chapter.

Optimism laid down the railroad, but pessimism made it practicable with the air brake and the block-signal system. Optimism designed a ship to sail daringly into the skies — and fall perhaps at times. So pessimism designed the parachute.

W. H. H. MacKellar, The Rotarian (May 1939).

Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if it is not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another. Sapere Aude! Have the courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.

Immanuel Kant, Doctrine of Virtue as translated by Mary J. Gregor (1964), p. 93.

And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more “drive,” or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or “creativity.” In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Clive Staples Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943).

By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. A man who himself does not believe what he tells another . . . has even less worth than if he were a mere thing. . . . makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself.

Immanuel Kant, Doctrine of Virtue as translated by Mary J. Gregor (1964), p. 93.

We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.

Clive Staples Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942).

In a climate of confusion, one of the surest ways of confounding the enemy is to tell him the plain truth.

Gordon R. Dickson, No Room for Man (Manor Books, 1974 — from which the image above was taken), originally titled Necromancer and published in 1962.

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.

Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.

Consider your origin;
you were not born to live like brutes,
but to follow virtue and knowledge.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto XXVI, lines 118–120.