11 quotes
A philosopher's renown is increased more by inventing a new error than by repeating a truth that has already been expressed by others.
The Crisis of the Modern World (1927)
If an idea is true, it belongs equally to all who are capable of understanding it.
The Crisis of the Modern World (1927)
There can be only one way out of the chaos, in the social domain as in all others: the restoration of intellectuality, which would result in the formation once more of an elite.
The Crisis of the Modern World (1927)
There are people whose mind would recoil from actual negation, but who have no objection to complete indifference; this is what is most to be feared, for to deny something one must think about it to some extent, however little that may be, whereas an attitude of indifference makes it possible not to think about it at all.
The Crisis of the Modern World (1927)
The masses are made to believe that they are not being led, but that they are acting spontaneously and governing themselves, and the fact that they believe this is a sign from which the extent of their stupidity may be inferred.
The Crisis of the Modern World (1927)
There is an exact correspondence between a world where everything seems to be in a state of mere 'becoming', leaving no place for the changeless and the permanent, and the state of mind of men who find all reality in this 'becoming', thus implicitly denying true knowledge as well as the object of that knowledge, namely transcendent and universal principles.
The Crisis of the Modern World (1927)
Multiplicity, considered apart from its principle, and therefore as no longer capable of being reduced to unity, takes the form in the social realm of a community conceived only as the arithmetical sum of its component individuals; in fact, a community is no more than this, once it has ceased to be attached to any principle superior to these individuals.
The Crisis of the Modern World (1927)
Is it because Westerners have come to lose their intellectuality by over-developing their capacity for action that they console themselves by inventing theories that set action above everything else, and even, as in the case of pragmatism, go so far as to deny that there exists anything of value beyond action; or is the contrary true, namely, that it is the acceptance of this point of view that has led to the intellectual atrophy we see today?
The Crisis of the Modern World (1927)
It was however only in the nineteenth century that men began to glory in their ignorance–for to proclaim oneself an agnostic means nothing else–and claimed to deny to others any knowledge to which they had no access themselves; and this marked yet one more stage in the intellectual decline of the West.
The Crisis of the Modern World (1927)
The traditional spirit cannot die, being in its essence above death and change; but it can withdraw completely from the outward world […] We may see the 'beginning of the end', the preliminary sign of the moment when, according to the Hindu tradition, the whole of the sacred doctrine is to be shut in a conch-shell, from which it will once more come forth intact at the dawn of the new world.
The Crisis of the Modern World (1927)
Aristocracy', […] taken in its etymological sense, means precisely the power of the elite. The elite can by definition only be the few, and their power, or rather their authority, deriving as it does from their intellectual superiority, has nothing in common with the numerical strength on which democracy is based, a strength whose inherent tendency is to sacrifice the minority to the majority, and therefore quality to quantity, and the elite to the masses.
The Crisis of the Modern World (1927)