The world is not dialectical--it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or s...ynthesis. This is also the principle of evil.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The human imagination ... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It ...dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »
Man is by nature a pragmatic materialist, a mechanic, a lover of gadgets and gadgetry; and these are qualities that characterize t...he "establishment" which regulates modern society: pragmatism, materialism, mechanization, and gadgetry. Woman, on the other hand, is a practical idealist, a humanitarian with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, an altruist rather than a capitalist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As thinkers, mankind has ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the seco...nd on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final and say, The senses give us representations of things, but what are the things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insists on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealists on the power of Thought and Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tolstoy's aristocratic nature is, above all, responsible for the fact that his whole art and thought are rooted in the idea of the... physical, the organic and the natural. Dostoevsky's spiritualism, his speculative mind, his dynamic, dialectical mode of thinking, can be traced back just as definitely to his bourgeois descent and plebeian uprootedness. The aristocrat owes his position to his mere existence, his birth, his race, whereas the plebeian owes it to his talent, his personal ability and achievements.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I cannot be a materialist--but Oh, how is it possible that a God who speaks to all hearts can let Belgravia go laughing to a vicio...us luxury, and Whitechapel cursing to a filthy debauchery--such suffering, such dreadful suffering--and shall the short years of Christ's mission atone for it all?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »