Choice Words

Extreme love must bring terror with it, & great terror, like some kinds of prayer which lean upon the omniscience of the Almighty, has a vast unlimited all-embracing compass.

If I call myself "I"' or use a name which has accompanied me since birth and by which some will remember me, if I detail facts that coincide with facts others would attribute to my life, if I use the term "my house" for the house inhabited by others before and after me but where I lived for two years, it is simply because I prefer to speak in the first person and not because I believe that the faculty of memory alone is any guarantee that a person remains the same in different times and different places. The person recounting here and now what he saw and what happened to him then is not the same person who saw those things and to whom those things happened; neither is he a prolongation of that person, his shadow, his heir, or his usurper.

S'il y avait une manière d'exprimer ce qui nous rassemble - écrivains, philosophes, penseurs, artistes - c'est l'art du récit. Et c'est cette manière, encore une fois politique, de dire : au fond, si on ne veut pas se laisser tellement gouverner, comme disait Michel Foucault, il faut reprendre pied dans le récit de nos vies.

The work is not the vision itself, certainly. It is not the vision filled in, as if it had been a coloring book. It is not the vision reproduced in time; that were impossible. It is rather a simulacrum and a replacement. It is a golem. You try every time to reproduce the vision, to let your light so shine before men. But you can only come along with your bushel and hide it.

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself. In the democracies, you may even write and publish anything you please about any governments or institutions, even if what you write is demonstrably false. The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days’ triviality.

Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state.

Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly does so more quickly.

Il y a, dans tout, de l'inexploré, parce que nous sommes habitués à ne nous servir de nos yeux qu'avec le souvenir de ce qu'on a pensé avant nous sur ce que nous contemplons. La moindre chose contient un peu d'inconnu. Trouvons-­le. Pour décrire un feu qui flambe et un arbre dans une plaine, demeurons en face de ce feu et de cet arbre jusqu'à ce qu'ils ne ressemblent plus, pour nous, à aucun autre arbre et à aucun autre feu. C'est de cette façon qu'on devient original.

Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.

...the mast-head and yard-arm-ends shone with St Elmo's light; and the form of the vane could almost be traced, as if it had been rubbed with phosphorous.

I confess, however, there is a very great difficulty in imaging any one spot to be the birthplace of the millions of millions of animalcula and confervae: for whence comes the germs at such points?–the parent bodies having been distributed by the winds and waves over the immense ocean.

On ne possède éternellement que ce qu'on a perdu.

We all recognise that reasons for belief do not … simply count for a certain belief with a certain weight, and deciding what to believe is not in general simply a matter of balancing such weights. There certainly are cases in which deciding what to believe is a matter of ‘weighing’ evidence for and against the proposition in question, but this is so only because our other beliefs about the nature of the case identify those considerations as relevant for a belief of the kind in question. In general, a given consideration counts in favour of a certain belief only given a background of other beliefs and principles which determine its relevance … Because of these connections, accepting a reason for or against one belief affects not only that belief, but also other beliefs and the status of other reasons … My claim is that reasons for action, intention, and other attitudes exhibit a similarly complex structure. I do not mean to deny that deciding what to do is sometimes a matter of deciding which of several competing considerations one wants more or cares more about. My point is rather that when this is so in a particular case it is because a more general framework of reasons and principles determines that these considerations are the relevant ones on which to base a decision. Much of our practical thinking is concerned with figuring out which considerations are relevant to a given decision, that is to say, with interpreting, adjusting and modifying this more general framework of principles of reasoning.

Identity is a wrong notion