“One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.”

Frag. B12, in Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (1984), p. 190.

Copyright is Brain Damage (2015)

"Susan Sontag Finds Romance," interview by Leslie Garis, The New York Times (2 August 1992)
Context: To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one's feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one's self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.

"Lectures On The Elevation Of The Labouring Portion Of The Community: Lecture II", in The Works of William Ellery Channing, D.D. (1844) Vol. III, p. 81
Context: Undoubtedly some men are more gifted than others, and are marked out for more studious lives. But the work of such men is not to do others' thinking for them, but to help them to think more vigorously and effectually. Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves. The light and life which spring up in one soul are to be spread far and wide. Of all treasons against humanity, there is no one worse than his, who employs great intellectual force to keep down the intellect of his less-favoured brother.

Letter to the Protestant Episcopal Church (19 August 1789) Scan at American Memory (Library of Congress). http://memory.loc.gov/mss/mgw/mgw2/038/0580042.jpg
1780s

Art Psalms (2008), Let Love Draw the Line

Source: During the pandemic in India
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Le Mystère Laïc (1928); later published in Collected Works Vol. 10 (1950)