John Carroll: Quotes about life

John Carroll is Australian professor and author. Explore interesting quotes on life.

John Carroll: 116 quotes8 likes

“The attachment to a rationalistic, teleological notion of progress indicates the absence of true progress; he whose life does not unfold satisfyingly under its own momentum is driven to moralize it, to set up goals and rationalize their achievement as progress.”

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 34

“Nietzsche … combines, in effect, Christ’s harsh sayings: ‘let the dead bury their dead’ and ‘narrow is the way which leadeth unto life’.”

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 98

“The real task is not to rid life of ethics but to rid ethics of its ideological content.”

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 38

“Nietzsche … argues that all that passes in the life of a society is ephemeral and banausic except for the presence of great personalities, of men like Goethe … who seem to forge their own destinies, who seem to move unhampered by those burdens of existence which keep most men from rising above the vicissitudes of their daily toil.”

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 93

“Any attempt to break with the past, or with existing social structures, is a failure if it leads to a bored, listless, and colourless style of life; assertive and enduring innovation, like the mastering of a new environment, requires the confidence and discipline which are founded on exuberant emotions.”

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), pp. 95-96, note

“Modern anthropology … opposes the utilitarian assumption that the primitive chants as he sows seed because he believes that otherwise it will not grow, the assumption that his economic goal is primary, and his other activities are instrumental to it. The planting and the cultivating are no less important than the finished product. Life is not conceived as a linear progression directed to, and justified by, the achievement of a series of goals; it is a cycle in which ends cannot be isolated, one which cannot be dissected into a series of ends and means.”

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), pp. 150-151

“The egoist … destroys the universal importance accorded to moral law by showing that life independent of it is possible. Secondly, and even more intolerably to the pious, he manages to do so with shameless enjoyment.”

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 33

“Life is more than thought: what a man feels, and what his senses awaken in him, are more indispensable to his life’s fullness than subsequent reflection on their significance. Both Stirner and Nietzsche have elaborated Faust’s opening speech in which he bemoans his wasted years in academia: this speech is Goethe’s own impeachment of Kant and Hegel. Philosophy proceeds always under the risk of making a fetish of thinking.”

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 105