Said to portrait painter Samuel Johnson Woolf, cited in Here am I (1941), Samuel Johnson Woolf; this has often been abbreviated: Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.
Context: A critic never made or killed a book or a play. The people themselves are the final judges. It is their opinion that counts. After all, the final test is truth. But the trouble is that most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession and therefore are most economical in its use.
“Dogmatism as Nietzsche means it implies that one possesses the truth, or at least the most important or the most valuable truth. Yet the truth is elusive like that woman of whom he spoke at the very beginning. Elsewhere he says we are the first generation which no longer believes that it possesses the truth. That is what he means by the end of dogmatism.”
Seminar on Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (1971–1972)
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Leo Strauss 78
Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservati… 1899–1973Related quotes
Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 30
Section 83
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 64.
Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.31 ,[ellipsis added]
Said to portrait painter Samuel Johnson Woolf, cited in Here am I (1941), Samuel Johnson Woolf; this has often been abbreviated: Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.
“It is a natural illness of man to think that he possesses the truth directly…”
C'est une maladie naturelle à l'homme de croire qu'il possède la vérité directement…
Section I
Variant translation: It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.
On the Spirit of Geometry
Source: Short fiction, Midsummer Century (1972), Chapter 9 (p. 61)