"There are two kinds of danger awaiting the individual who stakes his life on the conviction that the symbols of romance and grandeur which summon him express ultimate realities wherein he can truly find himself. It may be that our dreams are no more than the pathetic illusions of creatures who are driven by various biological, psychological, and social causes to deceive themselves about their actual status in the scheme of things, and therefore that the patrician’s commitments to ideals of glory and majesty are no better than empty posturings. He may be relinquishing this world’s goals for pathways which lead nowhere. Yet even if this were so, he could still give the reply made by Pascal in recommending his Wager: ‘if you lose, you lose nothing’; for the patrician has already judged that worldly pleasure and profit, if devoid of all higher significance, are not worth having."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p. 57.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/R._W._K._Paterson
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
R. W. K. Paterson
71 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by R. W. K. Paterson →
Related Quotes
"Far from settling his interests on a single, fixed and final object, the nihilistic egoist preserves himself in a con…"
"A world in to whose settled meaning he [the egoist] had committed himself would be a world to which he had alienated …"
"Optimism draws its strength from what it perceives as the underlying themes of human life rather than from the incide…"
"On the one hand, the existentialist seeks to remain true to his original vision of the meaninglessness and futility o…"
"The refusal to make the truth of nihilism one’s own and build one’s life entirely within its shadow is indeed a refus…"
"As proprietor of his beliefs, the egoist never allows them to grow into ‘fixed ideas’: he never allows them to grow i…"
"They are supposed to be mature, and it is on this necessary supposition that their adulthood justifiably rests."
"Education refers to no particular process; rather it encapsulates criteria to which any one of a family of processes …"
"The works of Sartre and Heidegger abound in description of the multifarious ways in which men seek to lose themselves…"
"The fundamental optimism which is an element of all true nobility … is obviously related to courage since it refuses …"