What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed, ...and how are they unformed? I think that all these quite traditional questions can take one simplistic but still dialectical question as their summing up: do we choose tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If God bestowed immortality on every man then when he made him, and he made many to whom he never purposed to give his saving grac...e, what did his Lordship think that God gave any man immortality with purpose only to make him capable of immortal torments? It is a hard saying, and I think cannot piously be believed. I am sure it can never be proved by the canonical Scripture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have ...been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Almost all marriages are only concubinages, liaisons, or rather provisional attempts, remote approximations of real marriage. The ...true nature of marriage does not conform to the paradoxes of this or that system, but rather according to all canonical and secular laws that more than one person should become only one. This ought to warrant the least possible infringement of free will, which certainly has a right to be consulted when the question at issue is whether one is to be an individual or only the integral part of a common personality; it is even hard see what legitimate argument can be raised against a marriage à quatre. But if the state must insist on holding together those attempts at marriage that have failed, it is actually obstructing marriage, for its cause would be advanced by new and possibly more successful attempts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »