15 quotes
Allusions to "hidden counsels" and "mysterious reasons" are almost always the mark of doctrinal incoherence.
Hamlet in Purgatory (2002)
The pattern of dreaming and deferral and compromise is an altogether familiar one: it is the epitome of a failed life.
The Swerve (2011)
It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse.
Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (2018)
The quintessential emblem of religion—and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core—is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.
The Swerve (2011)
Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life.
The Swerve (2011)
I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read.
The Swerve (2011)
Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
The Swerve (2011)
The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fear.
The Swerve (2011)
Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping. One educational theorist of the time speculated that the buttocks were created in order to facilitate the learning of Latin.
Will in the World (2004)
He saw in Falstaff...a debauched genius; a fathomlessly cynical, almost irresistible confidence man; a diseased, cowardly, seductive, lovable monster; a father who cannot be trusted.
Will in the World (2004)
The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone. What is needed is to refuse the lies proffered by priests and other fantasymongers and to look squarely and calmly at the true nature of things.
The Swerve (2011)
Ever since I was quite young I’ve been fascinated by the idea that something would hit you — not just that you would find something, but that something would find you.
Conversation with Alex Shephard (2011)
In Gilgamesh the human formed from clay is a wild man, with flowing hair (possibly all over his body) and the strength and manner of life of the animals. In Genesis the clay human is created "in the image of God" and has from the beginning the status of one who is not a companion to the other animals but of one who dominates them.
The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (2017)
Tyrannical power is more easily exercised when it appears that the old order continues to exist. The reassuring consensual structures may now be hollowed out and merely decorative, but they are all still in place, so that the bystanders, who crave psychological security and a sense of well-being, can persuade themselves that the rule of law is being upheld.
Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (2018)
A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure—an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation—characterizes Montaigne’s restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes’s chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo’s depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo’s sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio’s loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ’s feet.
The Swerve (2011)