'The writers of classical antiquity were on the whole as little concerned with the future as the past. Thucydides believed that nothing significant had happened in time before the events which he described, and that nothing significant was likely to happen thereafter. History was not going anywhere: because there was no sense of the past, there was equally no sense of the future... It was the Jews, and after them, the Christians, who introduced an entirely new element by postulating a goal toward which the historical process is moving - the teleological view of history. History thus acquired a meaning and a purpose, but at the expense of losing its secular character.'
"Churches once held sacred are now but heaps of dust and ashes; and yet we have our minds set on the desire of gain. We live as though we were going to die tomorrow; yet we build as though we were going to live always in this world. Our walls shine with gold, our celings also... yet Christ dies before our doors naked and hungry in the person of his poor."
"Like the pleasure of friendship, the pleasure of beauty is curious. It aims to understand its object, and to value what it finds. Hence it tends toward a judgement of its own validity. And like every other rational judgement, this one makes implicit appeal to the community of rational beings. This is what Kant meant when he said that, in the judgement of taste, I am 'a suitor for agreement', expressing my judgement not as a private opinion but as a binding verdict that would be agreed upon by all."
roger scruton | immanuel kant | jack black | high fidelity
"Few people would fall in love had they never heard of love. Passion and expression are not really seperable. Passion comes to birth in that powerful impetus of the mind which also brings language into existence. So soon as passion goes beyond instinct and becomes truly itself, it tends toward self-description, either in order to justify or intensify its being, or else simply in order to keep going.
pre-raphaelites | denis de rougement | love | passion | beata beatrix
"When I want to make a statue of a beautiful woman, I have a great number of them undress; all offer both beautiful parts and badly shaped parts; I take from each what is beautiful."
'When faced with the myth, the questions to ask are not about women’s faces and bodies but about the power relations of the situation. Who is this serving? Who says? Who profits? What is the context?
