Category: Thought

All knowledge is sacred, but it should not be secret.

Susan Cooper, Over Sea, Under Stone (1965).

None has more contempt for what it is to be a man than they who make it their profession to lead the crowd.

Søren Kierkegaard, in Walter Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, p. 96.

He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.

Sinclair Lewis on the protagonist of Elmer Gantry (1927).

What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.

George Santayana, The Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress, Volume II: Reason in Society (1905), Chapter V, “Democracy.”

It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920).

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

George Santayana, The Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress, Volume II: Reason in Society (1905), Chapter VII, “Free Society.”