34 quotes
There are individuals … who propagate lessons inviting self-abasement, bitterness, self-waste, and cynicism; there are those who high pride, like that of Lucifer, is to dethrone everything they perceive as superior and summoning men to what lies above them.
The New Patricians (1998)
The plebeian … will return [after a traumatic event] to his life of transient surface meanings, still deaf and blind to the deeper symbolisms with which his experience is fraught and to everything that does not thrust itself peremptorily upon his material senses.
The New Patricians (1998)
… the plebeian tendency to become engrossed with the means and to avert one’s eyes from the end
The New Patricians (1998)
Talk of the sublime, the exalted, the eternal, the passionate, of glory, challenge, or majesty fills some of us with bewilderment, discomfort, and embarrassment; others with sour resentment or scornful disbelief. To reinstate such values seems to us like trying to reinstate Ptolemaic astronomy—equally misguided, incomprehensible, and inimical to our perceived interests.
The New Patricians (1998)
When writers with the reputation of intelligent and perceptive critics of human life teach us, day in and day out, that vileness is distinguishable from decency only in respect of being less hypocritical, … it is small wonder that ordinary people come to disbelieve in any objective principles by appeal to which one form of conduct can be regarded as morally better than another.
The New Patricians (1998)
The true rebel … may incidentally lend his support to this or that finitely realizable cause, but his unique vocation is to keep the rebellious consciousness alive. In his eyes the crucial feature of any cause is the degree to which it fosters the spirit of private defiance.
The New Patricians (1998)
Optimism draws its strength from what it perceives as the underlying themes of human life rather than from the incidental if frequent and hateful discords of particular notes—from the depth and persistence of dreams compared with the sheer meaninglessness of the miscellaneous evils which may mark our daily experience.
The New Patricians (1998)
Ideals are not summaries of the empirical facts about human personality and behaviour: they are the standards by reference to which we pass judgment on the facts. Since ideals are not empirical generalizations, to cite counterinstances, however plentiful, would merely be to betray one’s total failure to understand the nature of the subject-matter under discussion.
The New Patricians (1998)
Sociologists, economists, and anthropologists, who notoriously decline to distinguish between the value judgements men make and the moral realities about which men make these judgments, are occupationally prone to treat all value judgements, however sharply opposed, as if they were of equal merit.
The New Patricians (1998)
Artist, philosopher, lover, mystic—these words name levels of consciousness which are accessible to all of us. It is not a question of training, education, or degree of sophistication. It is rather a question of openness, of courage and endeavour, of willingness to dwell elsewhere than in the midst of demeaning preoccupations with material fortune, status, and power.
The New Patricians (1998)
Literature and drama, which ought to breathe life into our imaginings and stir us into a sense of unlimited possibilities, instead manage to convince us that all doors are closed and that in the end nothing is worth the effort. Instead of creating passion out of luminous vision, out of bewilderment they manufacture apathy.
The New Patricians (1998)
When those around us perceive the world as if it were a narrow and humdrum shopping precinct, in which the best life possible consists in avoiding all risk and striking bargain after bargain in order to multiply and spin out a succession of manageable pleasures, all else being folly, we can easily come to doubt any version of reality in which there is space for grandeur.
The New Patricians (1998)
One of the most prevalent fallacies is the so-called genetic fallacy, which tempts men to argue that the first lowly origins of a thing demonstrate what it essentially is even in its most highly developed forms. Psychoanalysis and anthropologists have sometimes specialized in tracing the golden fruits to their grubby roots, and they have had some success in convincing the credulous that greatness is only triviality writ large. A kindred fallacy—which to state is to expose—teaches that the surest way of understanding a type is to inspect its poorest instances.
The New Patricians (1998)
The consciousness of the patrician remains open to the symbolisms which surround him. He believes that they may be rungs on a ladder of being which he can ascend. … He has the courage to dwell in their midst and thus to form his life by reference to dimensions of significance which transcend his narrow mundane interests as a physical organism.
The New Patricians (1998)