
Preface (1910) to The Bible of Amiens by John Ruskin, translated by Proust (1904); from Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin, trans. Jean Autret and Philip J. Wolfe (Yale University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-300-04503-4, p. 53
Academy of Achievement Address, published by Corporate Valley (12 August 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54xWQPq0fuk
2010s
Preface (1910) to The Bible of Amiens by John Ruskin, translated by Proust (1904); from Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin, trans. Jean Autret and Philip J. Wolfe (Yale University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-300-04503-4, p. 53
“The pleasures that give most joy are the ones that most rarely come.”
Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Golden Sayings of Democritus
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)
“You're a self-centered rascal, aren't you!”
Spoken to Hakuin Ekaku; as cited in: Hakuin Ekaku (author), Norman Waddell (translator). Wild Ivy: The Spiritual Autobiography of Zen Master Hakuin. 2010. p. xxii
Outline of a Morality Without Obligation or Sanction https://www.marxists.org/archive/guyau/1885/morality.htm (1885).
Context: A third equivalent of duty is borrowed from sensibility and not, like the preceding, from intelligence and activity. It’s the growing fusion of sensibilities, and the ever increasing sociable character of elevated pleasures, from which results a kind of duty or superior necessity which pushes us naturally and rationally towards others. By virtue of evolution, our pleasures grow and become increasingly impersonal; we cannot experience enjoyment within our selves as if on a deserted isle. Our milieu, to which we better adapt ourselves every day, is human society, and we can no more be happy outside of this milieu than we can breathe outside the air. The purely selfish happiness of certain Epicureans is a chimera, an abstraction, an impossibility; the true human pleasures are all more or less social. Pure egoism, rather than being an affirmation of the self, is a mutilation of the self.
“The self is a center of relationships.”
The World's Religions (1991)
Context: The point is not merely that human relationships are fulfilling; the Confucian claim runs deeper than that. It is rather that apart from human relationships there is no self. The self is a center of relationships. It is constructed through its interactions with others and is defined by the sum of its social roles.
“Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.”
The Power of Now (1997)