“From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light.”
Aphorism 22
Les Caractères (1688), Du mérite personnel
Context: From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light. Like those extraordinary stars of whose origins we are ignorant, and of whose fate, once they have vanished, we know even less, such men have neither forebears nor descendants: they are the whole of their race.
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Jean de La Bruyère65
17th-century French writer and philosopher 1645–1696Related quotes
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Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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Context: Lightning hits!
Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But aretê. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric.
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mystic poetry and spirituality
“From some, the light was scarcely more than a gloom:
From some, a dazzling desire.”
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The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)