Literary Critics

"These expressions — "culture" and "civilization" — have to be used in their Continental sense to make the point clear. "Culture" is the sum of all products which represent a personal manifestation, like painting, poetry, religion, philosophy, and the humanities. "Civilization" is nonpersonal. It is the sum total of all efforts which contribute to the increase of comfort or "usefulness" in the practical sense. Bathtubs, dentists' tools, railways, and traffic regulations are products of civilization. […] Yet while civilization is basically lack of friction, smoothness, comfort, and material enjoyment we have to look at traditional Christianity as being something "uncomfortable." […] It is difficult to project into the frame of a comfortistic civilization the picture of Christ, hanging on the cross with a body convulsed by pain, the palms torn to shreds by the heavy nails, the hairs glued to the scalp by sweat and coagulated blood. It ought to be repeated again that culture is always "magnificent." […] Civilization is geocentric comfort. But culture, which must be bought by bitter suffering (there is neither art nor sanctity without suffering), points always toward heaven. And the ochlocratic millennium hell bent upon avoiding suffering will turn its back toward heaven."

"There is hierarchy as well as function in every organism. One man may be more important than another just as the eye is more important than the finger."

"It should not be forgotten that none of us lacks the herd instinct completely and that there is scarcely a human being who is totally devoid of the romantic spirit. But while the herd instinct of those "who want to march through life together, along the collective path, shoulder to shoulder, wool rubbing wool and the head down" (José Ortega y Gasset)—is of the animalistic order, the romantic spirit is purely human, divine. The plenitude of life so eagerly sought by the Romantic, as here conceived, is inaccessible to the animal. The terrifying diversity of the total cosmos (visible as well as invisible) has no meaning for the termite or the herdist with their limited existences in their limited buildings."

"If medieval man would have been told that he could "appoint" his kings or superiors, he might have become quite interested in the proposition. Yet on discovering that his vote was scheduled to be drowned in an ocean of millions of other votes his reaction would have been that of a man whose leg had been pulled successfully."

"For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution."

"Patriotism, not nationalism, should inspire the citizen. The ethnic nationalist who wants a linguistically and culturally uniform nation is akin to the racist who is intolerant toward those who look (and behave) differently. The patriot is a "diversitarian"; he is pleased, indeed proud of the variety within the borders of his country; he looks for loyalty from all citizens. And he looks up and down, not left and right."

"Liberty is the ideal of aristocracy, just as equality stands for the bourgeoisie and fraternity for the peasantry. One can combine liberty with fraternity but neither of them with equality."

"We witness in the eighteenth century the preparation of the French Revolution by individualism and the degeneration of the old "liberal" trends into economical liberalism of the deterministic Manchesterian pattern. Egalitarianism only appears in strongly collectivistic societies where strong exogenous powers try to shape persons into "individuals," deprived of their original character. The "individual" is merely the last indivisible unit of the "mass," and individualism the last, grotesque, and hopeless fight of depersonalized man within the ocean of collectivism to withstand the encroachment of the masses. Charles V had a personality but Gustave de Nerval, who promenaded a tamed lobster in the streets of Paris, was a mere individualist."

"Suffer fools gladly; they may be right."

"There are idle students and cavillers, who have advertised Burton as the creator of a peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiæ, loosely tied, the creator, in short, of a book for a rainy day and a cosy corner."

"It seems to me imperative to re-establish the true dualism—that between vital impulse and vital control—and to this end to affirm the higher will first of all as a psychological fact. The individual needs, however, to go beyond this fact if he is to decide how far he is to exercise control in any particular instance with a primary view to his own happiness: in short, he needs standards. To secure standards, at least critically, he cannot afford, like the Rousseauist, to disparage the intellect."

"This higher will is felt in its relation to the impressions and impulses and expansive desires of the natural man as a will to refrain. ... The failure to exercise the will to refrain in some form or degree means spiritual anarchy. A combination such as we are getting more and more at present of spiritual anarchy with an ever-increasing material efficiency—power without wisdom, as one is tempted to put it—is not likely to work either for the happiness of the individual or for the welfare of society."

"Everything in our modern substitutes for religion—whether Baconian or Rousseauistic—will be found to converge upon the idea of service. The crucial question is whether one is safe in assuming that the immense machinery of power that has resulted from activity of the utilitarian type can be made, on anything like present lines, to serve disinterested ends; whether it will not rather minister to the egoistic aims either of national groups or of individuals."

"Rousseauist and Baconian, though often superficially at odds with one another, have co-operated in undermining, not merely religious tradition, but another tradition which in the Occident goes back finally, not to Judea, but to ancient Greece. This older tradition may be defined as humanistic. The goal of the humanist is poised and proportionate living. This he hopes to accomplish by observing the law of measure. ... Decorum is supreme for the humanist even as humility takes precedence over all other virtues in the eyes of the Christian. Traditionally the idea of decorum has been associated, often with a considerable admixture of mere formalism, with the idea of the gentleman. Humanism and religion in their various forms have at times conflicted, but have more often been in alliance with one another. As Burke says in a well-known passage: "Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things that are connected with manners and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion.""

"According to Mr. Walter Lippmann, the belief the modern man has lost is "that there is an immortal essence presiding like a king over his appetites." This immortal essence of which Mr. Lippmann speaks is, judged experimentally and by its fruits, a higher will. But why leave the affirmation of such a will to the pure traditionalist? Why not affirm it first of all as a psychological fact, one of the immediate data of consciousness, a perception so primordial that, compared with it, the denial of man's moral freedom by the determinist is only a metaphysical dream? The way would thus be open for a swift flanking movement on the behaviorists and other naturalistic psychologists."

"Our most urgent problem just now is how to preserve in a positive and critical form the soul of truth in the two great traditions, classical and Christian, that are crumbling as mere dogma."

"What seems to me to be driving our whole civilization toward the abyss at present is a one-sided conception of liberty, a conception that is purely centrifugal, that would get rid of all outer control and then evade or deny openly the need of achieving inner control."

"To glorify man in his natural and unmodified self is no less surely, even if less obviously, idolatry than actually to bow down before a graven image."

"Since every man desires happiness, it is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in terms of work or of enjoyment. If he work in the full ethical sense that I have attempted to define, he is pulling back and disciplining his temperamental self with reference to some standard. In short, his temperamental self is, in an almost literal sense, undergoing conversion. The whole of life may, indeed, be summed up in the words diversion and conversion. Along which of these two main paths are most of us seeking the happiness to the pursuit of which we are dedicated by our Declaration of Independence? The author of this phrase, Thomas Jefferson, remarks of himself: "I am an Epicurean.""

"Those who are filled with concern for the lot of humanity as a whole, especially for the less fortunate portions of it, are wont nowadays to call themselves idealists. We should at least recognize that ideals in this sense are not the same as standards and that they are often indeed the opposite of standards. It would be easy to mention institutions of learning in this country that are at present engaged in breaking down standards in the name of ideals."

"The complaint is often heard at present that there is an increasing exodus from the difficult and disciplinary subjects and a rush into the soft subjects. One good sign is that those who stand for the difficult and disciplinary subjects, e.g., the professors of physics and the professors of the ancient classics, are coming more and more to see that they must co-operate and not work at cross-purposes, as they have done only too often in the past, if they are to make head against the drift toward softness."

"Three or four years ago a distinguished Frenchman, M. Hovelacque, published an article on America in the Revue de Paris in which he maintained that the essential weakness of our American civilization lay in the failure of our education to produce any equivalent of the superior man of Confucius or the καλὸς κἀγαθός of the Greeks."

"The reasons for putting humanistic truth above scientific truth are not metaphysical but very practical: the discipline that helps man to self-mastery is found to have a more important bearing on his happiness than the discipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature. If scientific discipline is not supplemented by a truly humanistic or religious discipline the result is unethical science, and unethical science is perhaps the worst monster that has yet been turned loose on the race. Man in spite of what I have termed his stupidity, his persistent evasion of the main issue, the issue of his own happiness, will awaken sooner or later to the fearful evil he has already suffered from a science that has arrogated to itself what does not properly belong to it; and then science may be as unduly depreciated as it has, for the past century or two, been unduly magnified; so that in the long run it is in the interest of science itself to keep in its proper place, which is below both humanism and religion."

"Both emotional nationalism and emotional internationalism go back to Rousseau, but in his final emphasis he is an emotional nationalist; and that is because he saw that patriotic 'virtue' is a more potent intoxicant than the love of humanity. The demonstration came in the French Revolution which began as a great international movement and ended in imperialism and Napoleon Bonaparte."

"True democracy consists not in lowering the standard but in giving everybody, so far as possible, a chance of measuring up to the standard."

"The true dualism I take to be the contrast between two wills, one of which is felt as vital impulse (élan vital) and the other as vital control (frein vital)."

"The greatest of vices according to Buddha is the lazy yielding to the impulses of temperament (pamada); the greatest virtue (appamada) is the opposite of this, the awakening from the sloth and lethargy of the senses, the constant exercise of the active will."

"When we consider carefully what many of our so-called humanists stand for, we find that they are not humanists but humanitarians."

"When the element of conversion with reference to a standard is eliminated from life, what remains is the irresponsible quest for thrills."

"The question I propose to consider is in what way one may justify the study of English on cultural and disciplinary, and not merely on sentimental or utilitarian, grounds. My own conviction is that if English is to be thus justified it must be primarily by what I am terming the discipline of ideas."

"I chanced recently to be glancing over … a book on Japanese Buddhism, and I read among other things that several centuries ago there was a sect of Japanese Buddhism known as the Way of Hardships, and that shortly after there arose another sect known as the Easy Way which at once gained great popularity and tended to supplant the Way of Hardships. But the Japanese Way of Hardships is itself an easy way if one compares it with the original way of Buddha. One can follow indeed very clearly the process by which Buddhist doctrine descended gradually from the austere and almost inaccessible height on which it had been placed by its founder to the level of the prayer mill."

"Equality as it is currently pursued is incompatible with true liberty; for liberty involves an inner working with reference to standards, the right subordination, in other words, of man's ordinary will to a higher will. There is an inevitable clash, in short, between equality and humility."

"One does not go to the theater to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright."

"Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible a plea as baseball in Italian."

"Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness."

"The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth."

"No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched."

"The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism."

"I have no patriotism, for patriotism, as I see it, is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles."

"The great problems of the world - social, political, economic and theological - do not concern me in the slightest...If all the Armenians were to be killed tomorrow and if half of Russia were to starve to death the day after, it would not matter to me in the least. What concerns me alone is myself and the interests of a few close friends."

"The excursus upon the origin of Odysseus’ scar is not basically different from the many passages in which a newly introduced character, or even a newly appearing object or implement, though it be in the thick of a battle, is described as to its nature and origin; or in which, upon the appearance of a god, we are told where he last was, what he was doing there, and by what road he reached the scene; indeed, even the Homeric epithets seem to me in the final analysis to be traceable to the same need for an externalization of phenomena in terms perceptible to the senses. Here is the scar, which comes up in the course of the narrative; and Homer’s feeling simply will not permit him to see it appear out of the darkness of an unilluminated past; it must be set in full light, and with it a portion of the hero’s boyhood. … To be sure, the aesthetic effect thus produced was soon noticed and thereafter consciously sought; but the more original cause must have lain in the basic impulse of the Homeric style: to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations. Nor do psychological processes receive any other treatment: here too nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed. With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even passion does not disturb, Homer’s personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, they speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it. Much that is terrible takes place in the Homeric poems, but it seldom takes place wordlessly: Polyphemus talks to Odysseus; Odysseus talks to the suitors when he begins to kill them; Hector and Achilles talk at length, before battle and after; and no speech is so filled with anger or scorn that the particles which express logical and grammatical connections are lacking or out of place."

"[It] would have been all the easier [if] the entire story of the scar had been presented as a recollection which awakens in Odysseus’ mind at this particular moment. It would have been perfectly easy to do; the story of the scar had only to be inserted two verses earlier, at the first mention of the word scar, where the motifs “Odysseus” and “recollection” were already at hand. But any such subjectivistic‐perspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background, resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past, is entirely foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present."

""Epilegomena to Mimesis", trans. Jan Ziolkowski, in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 50th anniversary edition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003 (reprinted 2013), p. 570"

"The digressions [in Homer] are not meant to keep the reader in suspense ... An episode that will increase suspense by retarding the action must be so constructed that it will not fill the present entirely, will not put the crisis, whose resolution is being awaited, entirely out of the reader’s mind, and thereby destroy the mood of suspense; the crisis and the suspense must continue, must remain vibrant in the background. But Homer—and to this we shall have to return later—knows no background. What he narrates is for the time being the only present, and fills both the stage and the reader’s mind completely."

"The genius of the Homeric style becomes even more apparent when it is compared with an equally ancient and equally epic style … God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told. He does not come, like Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethiopians, where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast. Nor are we told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly. He has not, like Zeus, discussed them in set speeches with other gods gathered in council; nor have the deliberations in his own heart been presented to us; unexpected and mysterious, he enters the scene from some unknown height or depth and calls: Abraham! It will at once be said that this is to be explained by the particular concept of God which the Jews held and which was wholly different from that of the Greeks. True enough—but this constitutes no objection. For how is the Jewish concept of God to be explained? Even their earlier God of the desert was not fixed in form and content, and was alone; his lack of form, his lack of local habitation, his singleness, was in the end not only maintained but developed even further in competition with the comparatively far more manifest gods of the surrounding Near Eastern world. The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things."

"Many reviewers have ascribed to the book, in praise or blame, tendencies that were far removed from me: that the method of the book is sociological, even that the tendency was socialist; that it is focused all too much on the Middle Ages, but also the opposite: it is antimedieval and anti-Christian; that it is wholly pro-Romance, especially pro-French, neglects German, is unjust toward German literature. But there have also been patriotic readers who have congratulated me on the observation that the tragic in the Hildebrandslied and in the Nibelungenlied is deeper than that of Roland. One reviewer concluded on the basis of the first paragraph of the Roland chapter that I am an enlightened pacifist."

"In the Old Testament stories, … the sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the everyday are not only actually unseparated but basically inseparable."

"A scene like Peter's denial fits into no antique genre. It is too serious for comedy, too contemporary and everyday for tragedy, politically too insignificant for history—and the form which was given it is one of such immediacy that its like does not exist in the literature of antiquity."

"[The Passion story] completely destroys the aesthetics of the separation of styles; it engenders a new elevated style, which does not scorn everyday life and which is ready to absorb the sensory realistic, even the ugly, the undignified, the physically base. Or—if anyone prefers to have it the other way around—a new sermo humilis is born, a low style, such as would properly only be applicable to comedy, but which now reaches out far beyond its original domain, and encroaches upon the deepest and the highest, the sublime and the eternal."

"The price of freedom is to decide moral and political issues."