“No longer did philosophers aspire to the deep spiritual insights and broad moral vision”
Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian
Context: No longer did philosophers aspire to the deep spiritual insights and broad moral vision of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They divided into conflicting schools and wandered through the Greco-Roman world as permanent immigrants, picking up tutoring jobs as they could.... the upshot was a debased intellectual climate, fragmented and agnostic.
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Thomas Cahill 58
American scholar and writer 1940Related quotes

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 20. How the Sphere Encouraged Me in a Vision
Context: I could hear the mild voice of my Companion pointing the moral of my vision, and stimulating me to aspire, and to teach others to aspire. He had been angered at first — he confessed — by my ambition to soar to Dimensions above the Third; but, since then, he had received fresh insight, and he was not too proud to acknowledge his error to a Pupil. Then he proceeded to initiate me into mysteries yet higher than those I had witnessed, shewing me how to construct Extra-Solids by the motion of Solids, and Double Extra-Solids by the motion of Extra-Solids, and all "strictly according to Analogy", all by methods so simple, so easy, as to be patent even to the Female Sex.

Address at the Convocation of the University of Manitoba, October 28, 1952
Speaking Of Canada - (1959)

Sādhanā : The Realisation of Life http://www.spiritualbee.com/spiritual-book-by-tagore/ (1916)
Context: Man is not entirely an animal. He aspires to a spiritual vision, which is the vision of the whole truth. This gives him the highest delight, because it reveals to him the deepest harmony that exists between him and his surroundings. It is our desires that limit the scope of our self-realisation, hinder our extension of consciousness, and give rise to sin, which is the innermost barrier that keeps us apart from our God, setting up disunion and the arrogance of exclusiveness. For sin is not one mere action, but it is an attitude of life which takes for granted that our goal is finite, that our self is the ultimate truth, and that we are not all essentially one but exist each for his own separate individual existence.

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

“Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.”
Consciousness Explained (1991)
Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter VII: The Rise of the Second Men; Section 1, “The Appearance of a New Species” (p. 102)

“For wide learning and deep insight his judgments are, perhaps, unsurpassed.”
Apsley Petre Peter, Analysis and Digest of the Decisions of Sir George Jessel http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1XoDAAAAQAAJ&q=%22george+jessel%22&dq=%22george+jessel%22&num=100&cd=2 (1883).
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As quoted in No More Words : A Journal of My Mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (2001) by Reeve Lindbergh, p. 41
Context: So dazzling was the spread of constellations that it had the impact of a vision, of some hidden insight. I drove home saying to myself: The dead, too, are like this, blazing within us — invisibly.