“A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.”
Graham Greene book The Heart of the Matter
Source: The Heart of the Matter
“That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect.”
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard — of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.
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Friedrich Nietzsche655
German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and cl… 1844–1900Related quotes
Walter James, 4th Baron Northbourne (1896–1982) British rower, agriculturalist and translater
Intellectual Freedom (1971)
James D. Watson (1928) American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist.
Source: DNA: The Story of the Genetic Revolution (2003/2017), Chapter 9, “Reading Genomes: Evolution in Action” (p. 242)
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), II : The Starting-Point
Context: Knowledge is employed in the service of the necessity of life and primarily in the service of the instinct of personal preservation. The necessity and this instinct have created in man the organs of knowledge and given them such capacity as they possess. Man sees, hears, touches, tastes and smells that which it is necessary for him to see, hear, touch, taste and smell in order to preserve his life. The decay or loss of any of these senses increases the risks with which his life is environed, and if it increases them less in the state of society in which we are actually living, the reason is that some see, hear, touch, taste and smell for others. A blind man, by himself and without a guide, could not live long. Society is an additional sense; it is the true common sense.
George D. Herron (1862–1925) American clergyman, writer and activist
Source: Between Caesar and Jesus (1899), p. 15
José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses
Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 103
Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster
Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
pp. 65-66
Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) Italian philosopher
Source: Five Questions Concerning the Mind (1495), p. 199
Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human
Section IX, "Man Alone with Himself" / aphorism 513
Human, All Too Human (1878), Helen Zimmern translation