Human beings have overwhelmingly powerful cravings for novelty and unanimity. We want new problems to face, because we’re tired of the old ones: they bore us, and remind us of our failures to solve them. And, especially in times of stress, we crave environments in which dissent is silenced and even mere difference is erased. We call that “solidarity,” but it‘s more like an instinctual bullying. You must attend to the thing I am attending to. I despise both of those tendencies. They’ve turned everyone into attention muggers.
Alan Jacobs
Tag Archives: Quotes
A Man Can Do Things Badly
Anything’s possible. Or if
Sally Thomas, “New Year’s Day”
Impossible, still possibly worth doing.
Why a Man Cannot Define Beauty
[W]hen we observe, as we must allow, that art is no better at one age than at another, but only different; that it is subject to modification, but certainly not to development; may we not safely accept this stationary quality as a proof that there does exist, out of sight, unattained and unattainable, a positive norm of poetic beauty? We cannot define it, but in each generation all excellence must be the result of a relation to it. It is the moon, heavily wrapt up in clouds, and impossible exactly to locate, yet revealed by the light it throws on distant portions of the sky.
Edmund Gosse, “On Fluctuations of Taste”
A Man’s Day is Indepictable
There is only one thing that a drama cannot depict—that is a hard day’s work.
G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World
A Man Winces
The Bible is not designed for lazy people.
~ A. W. Pink, Practical Christianity
Christian Leithart 