Richard M. Weaver: Trending quotes (page 5)

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“Man is an organism, not a mechanism; and the mechanical pacing of his life does harm to his human responses, which naturally follow a kind of free rhythm.”

Richard M. Weaver

“Individuality and Modernity,” Essays on Individuality (Philadelphia: 1958), p. 66.

Life , Nature

“The aristocratic mind … is anti-analytical. It is concerned more with the status of being than with the demonstrable relationship of parts.”

Richard M. Weaver

“Two Types of American Individualism,” The Modern Age, Spring 1963, p. 127.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Parting

“There is no difficulty in securing enough agreement for action on the point that education should serve the needs of the people. But all hinges on the interpretation of needs; if the primary need of man is to perfect his spiritual being … then education of the mind and the passions will take precedence over all else. The growth of materialism, however, has made this a consideration remote and even incomprehensible to the majority.”

Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 49.

People , Education , Passion , Perfection

“The trouble with the contemporary generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting.”

Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 176.

Reading

“The man of frank and strong prejudices, far from being a political and social menace and an obstacle in the path of progress, is often a benign character and helpful citizen. The chance is far greater, furthermore, that he will be more creative than the man who can never come to more than a few gingerly held conclusions, or who thinks that all ideas should be received with equal hospitality. There is such a thing as being so broad you are flat.”

Richard M. Weaver

“Life without prejudice,” p. 11-12.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Idea , Thinking , Strong , Chance

“Fanaticism has been properly described as redoubling one’s effort after one’s aim has been forgotten, and this definition will serve as a good introduction to the fallacy of technology, which is the conclusion that because a thing can be done it must be done. The means absorb completely, and man becomes blind to the very concept of ends.”

Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 60.

Effort

“There is … a good deal of empirical evidence for saying that rationalistic men are more intolerant than “prejudiced” men. The former take the position that their judgments are reasoned conclusions, and why should one swerve or deflect from what can be proved to all reasonable men? Such are often the authors of persecutions, massacres, and liquidations. The man who frankly confesses to his prejudices is usually more human and more humane. He adjusts amicably to the idea of his limitations. A limitation once admitted is a kind of monition not to try acting like something superhuman. The person who admits his prejudices, which is to say, his unreasoned judgments, has perspective on himself. … When H. L. Mencken wrote his brilliant series of essays on men, life, and letters, he gave them a title as illuminating as it was honest—Prejudices. What he meant … was that these were views based on such part of experience as had passed under his observation. There was no apology because some figures were praised and others were roundly damned, and there was no canting claim to “objectivity.””

Richard M. Weaver

Mencken knew that life and action turn largely on convictions which rest upon imperfect inductions, or sampling of evidence, and he knew that feeling is often a positive factor.
“Life without prejudice,” p. 10.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Life , Men , Feeling , Idea

“A prejudice may be an unreasoned judgment, he [Hibben] pointed out, but an unreasoned judgment is not necessarily an illogical judgment. … First, there are those judgments whose verification has simply dropped out of memory. … The second type of unreasoned judgments we hold is the opinions we adopt from others … The third class of judgments in Professor Hibben’s list comprises those which have subconscious origin. The material that furnishes their support does not reach the focal point of consciousness, but psychology insists upon its existence.”

Richard M. Weaver

“Life without prejudice,” pp. 8-9.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Support , Memory

“No one can take culture seriously if he believes that it is only the uppermost of several layers of epiphenomena resting on a primary reality of economic activity.”

Richard M. Weaver

“The Importance of Cultural Freedom,” p. 25.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Reality

“The very possibility that there may exist timeless truths is a reproach to the life of laxness and indifference which modern egotism encourages. … Ideas which have their reference to the periphery or individuum, to the particular in space and time, are false and stand in the way of integration.”

Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 68.

Life , Truth , Way , Idea

“Man … feels lost without the direction-finder provide by progress.”

Richard M. Weaver

“Ultimate Terms in Contemporary Rhetoric,” p. 93.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Feeling

“When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder, we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason.”

Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 19.

“Before the age of adulteration it was held that behind each work there stood some conception of its perfect execution. It was this that gave zest to labor and served to measure the degree of success. To the extent that the concept obtained, there was a teleology in work, since the laborer toiled not merely to win sustenance but to see this ideal embodied in his creation. Pride in craftsmanship is well explained by saying that to labor is to pray, for conscientious effort to realize an ideal is a kind of fidelity. The craftsman of old time did not hurry, because the perfect takes no account of time and shoddy work is a reproach to character. But character itself is an expression of self-control, which does not come of taking the easiest way. Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around. When utilitarianism becomes enthroned and the worker is taught that work is use and not worship, interest in quality begins to decline. … There is a difference between expressing one’s self in form and producing quantity for a market with an eye to speculation. Péguy wished to know what had become of the honor of work. It has succumbed to the same forces as have all other expressions of honor.”

Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), pp. 73-74.

Age , Way , Effort , Time

“The member of a culture … purposely avoids the relationship of intimacy; he wants the object somehow depicted and fictionalized. … He is embarrassed when this is taken out of its context of proper sentiments and presented bare, for he feels that this is a reintrusion of that world which his whole conscious effort has sought to banish. Forms and conventions are the ladder of ascent. And hence the speechlessness of the man of culture when he beholds the barbarian tearing aside some veil which is half adornment, half concealment.”

Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 26.

World , Feeling , Tear , Effort

“The scientistic sociologist wishes people to feel that he is just as empirical and thoroughgoing as the natural scientist, and that his conclusions are based just as relentlessly on observed data. The desire to present this kind of façade accounts, one may suspect, for the many examples and the extensive use of statistical tables found in the works of some of them. It has been said of certain novelists that they create settings having such a wealth of realistic detail that the reader assumes that the plot which is to follow will be equally realistic, when this may be far from the case. What happens is that the novelist disarms the reader with the realism of his setting in order that he may “get away with murder” in his plot. The persuasiveness of the scene is thus counted on to spill over into the action of the story. In like manner, when a treatise on social science is filled with this kind of data, the realism of the latter can influence our acceptance of the thesis, which may, on scrutiny, rest on very dubious constructs, such as definitions of units. Along with this there is sometimes a great display of scientific preciseness in formulations. But my reading suggests that some of these writers are often very precise about matters which are not very important and rather imprecise about matters which are. Most likely this is an offsetting process. If there are subjects one cannot afford to be precise about because they are too little understood or because one’s views of them are too contrary to traditional beliefs about society, one may be able to maintain an appearance of scientific correctness by taking great pains in the expressing of matters of little consequence. These will afford scope for a display of scholarly meticulousness and of one’s command of the scientific terminology.”

Richard M. Weaver

“Concealed Rhetoric in Scientistic Sociology,” pp. 148-149.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Pain , People , Feeling , Nature

“The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetite.”

Richard M. Weaver

Ideas have Consequences (1948)

Past

“To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world.”

Richard M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” p. 37.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

World , Personality

“Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our world. If schools of journalism knew their business, they would graduate no one who could not render the Greek poets.”

Richard M. Weaver

“The Power of the Word,” p. 53.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

World , School , Way , Business

“It is not that things give meaning to words; it is that meaning makes things “things.” It does not make things in their subsistence; but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.”

Richard M. Weaver

“Relativism and the Use of Language,” p. 121.
Language is Sermonic (1970)

Understanding

“… contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.”

Richard M. Weaver

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 56.

Parting