
“Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.”
Book II, ch. 3.
Knickerbocker's History of New York http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/13042 (1809)
“Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.”
The Dagger with Wings (1926)
“Everything great in western civilization has come from struggling against our origins.”
Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 40
Context: The book of Genesis is a male declaration of independence from the ancient mother-cults. Its challenge to nature, so sexist to modern ears, marks one of the crucial moments in western history. Mind can never be free of matter. Only by mind imagining itself free can culture advance. The mother-cults, by reconciling man to nature, entrapped him in matter. Everything great in western civilization has come from struggling against our origins. Genesis is rigid and unjust, but it gave man hope as a man. It remade the world by male dynasty, canceling the power of mothers.
“From Thee, great God: we spring, to Thee we tend,
Path, motive, guide, original, and end.”
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 257
“Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.”
Anathemas and Admirations (1987)
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet
No. 166 (10 September 1711).
The Spectator (1711–1714)
The Nature of Rationality (1993), Ch. V : Instrumental Rationality and Its Limits; Rationality's Imagination, p. 181
President Saddam Hussein's Speech on National Day (1981)