What instances must pass before them of ardent, disinterested, self-denying attachment, of heroism, fortitude, patience, resignati...on--of all the conflicts and the sacrifices that enno ble us most. A sick room may often furnish the worth of volumes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Honesty, respectability, the "what-will-people-say", the wisdom of nations, nothing means anything any more. Everything disappears... before fear. Fear, eh, Caesonia, that noble sentiment, unallayed, pure and disinterested, one of those rare ones that get their nobility from the belly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sade has a curious ability to render every aspect of sexuality suspect, so that we see how the chaste kiss of the sentimental love...r differs only in degree from the vampirish love-bite that draws blood, we understand that a disinterested caress is only quantitatively different from a disinterested flogging.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There can be no doubt that the difference between the mind of the lowest man and that of the highest animal is immense. An anthrop...omorphous ape, if he could take a dispassionate view of his own case, would admit that though he could form an artful plan to plunder a garden--though he could use stones for fighting or for breaking open nuts, yet that the thought of fashioning a stone into a tool was quite beyond his scope. Still less, as he would admit, could he follow out a train of metaphysical reasoning, or solve a mathematical problem, or reflect on God, or admire a grand natural scene. Some apes, however, would probably declare that they could and did admire the beauty of the coloured skin and fur of their partners in marriage. They would admit, that though they could make other apes understand by cries some of their perceptions and simpler wants, the notion of expressing definite ideas by definite sounds had never crossed their minds. They might insist that they were ready to aid their fellow-apes of the same troop in many ways, to risk their lives for them, and to take charge of their orphans; but they would be forced to acknowledge that disinterested love for all living creatures, the most noble attribute of man, was quite beyond their comprehension. Nevertheless, the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is one of degree and not of kind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into th...e, if you will, ecological chain of breathing, growing, and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Destitution is the Muse of her genius,--Destitution and Death. I used to propose that her epitaph should be: "Here lies the angel ...of Death." And wonderfully as she varies and poetically repeats that image in every page and day, yet not less fondly and sublimely she returns to the other,--the grandeur of humility and privation, as thus: "The chief witness which I have had of a Godlike principle of action and feeling is the disinterested joy felt in others' superiority. For the love of superior virtue is mine own gift from God."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live; science, everything that sharpens the desire to know. Art, even the mo...st disinterested, the most disembodied, is the auxiliary of life. Born of the sensibility, it sows and creates it in its turn. It is the flower of life and, as seed, it gives back life. Science, or to use a broader term, knowledge, has its end in itself, apart from any idea of life and propagation of the species. Intelligence, that sublimation of the sensibility, that organ of the need to know, is sterilized sensibility. To know, and to know still more--the instinct for knowledge is insatiable, because the subject of knowledge is limitless.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An action is an aim of the subject, and it is his agency too which executes this aim: unless the subject were in this way even in ...the most disinterested action, i.e. unless he had an interest in it, there would be no action at all.... Impulse and passion are the very life- blood of all action: they are needed if the agent is really to be in his aim and the execution thereof. The morality concerns the content of the aim, which as such is the universal, an inactive thing, that finds it actualizing in the agent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You have lived longer than I have and perhaps may have formed a different judgment on better grounds; but my observations do not e...nable me to say I think integrity the characteristic of wealth. In general I believe the decisions of the people, in a body, will be more honest and more disinterested than those of wealthy men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »