“Does experience really show that pleasure becomes insipid if it lasts long—or is this just the sort of thing we say for comfort because it usually doesn’t?” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
“Being human means to strive to realize a world so perfect that its realization would undo us.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
“As an educational tool, pain has value nothing else can replace.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
“Freedom, if it’s universal freedom, must allow for the failure of others.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
“Recognizing one’s limits seems a form of fair trade: if we withdraw some of our claims on the world, surely those remaining will be met. Yet the wish to determine the world can’t be coherently limited, for you cannot know which event will turn out to be not just another event, but one that will change your life.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
“To imagine a God who judges many of the forms of life He created to be sinful, then tortures us eternally for our brief participation in them, is hardly to imagine a solution to the problem of evil.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
“What if the world were created by a Being whose whole purpose was to cause us torment and illusion? God knows it sometimes looks that way.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
“Everywhere I see people who talk continually about themselves. Their conversation is a mirror which always shows their own conceited faces. They will talk to you about the tiniest events in their lives, which they expect to be magnified in your eyes by the interest that they themselves take in them.” – Montesquieu, “Letter 50,” Persian Letters (trans. Betts)
“Those who enjoy learning are never idle.” – Montesquieu, “Letter 48,” Persian Letters (trans. Betts)
“The distant rear of an army engaged in battle is not the best place from which to judge correctly what is going on in front.” – Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs
“Nothing is more depressing than consolations based on the necessity of evil, the uselessness of remedies, the inevitability of fate, the order of Providence, or the misery of the human condition. It is ridiculous to try to alleviate misfortune by observing that we are born to be miserable. It is much better to prevent the mind from indulging in such reflections, and to treat men as emotional beings, instead of treating them as rational.” – Montesquieu, “Letter 33,” Persian Letters (trans. Betts)
“I would not have the anniversaries of our victories celebrated, nor those of our defeats made fast days and spent in humiliation and prayer; but I would like to see truthful history written.” – Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs
“A limp that tells the world we are compensating for an injury becomes a habit hard to break even when its cause has healed and there is no longer any ‘reason’ for it. Except that the limp wishes to remain. Our stutter wants to stay. Our fall from a ladder would be forever like a cast-out angel if we didn’t fetch up in a lake of fire or at least on a floor.” — William H. Gass, “Auguste Rodin,” from A Temple of Texts
“All of us have emotions urgently seeking release, and many of us have opinions we think would do the world some good; however, the poet must also be a maker, as the Greeks maintained, and, like the sculptor, like every other artist, should aim at adding real beings to the world, beings fully realized, not just things like tools and haberdashery that nature has neglected to provide, or memos and laws that society produces in abundance.” — William H. Gass, “Auguste Rodin,” from A Temple of Texts
“The world is not simply good and bad on different weekends like an inconsistent pitcher; we devour what we savor and what sustains us; out of ruins more ruins will after, in their polished towers, rise; lust is the muscle of love: its strength, its coarseness, its brutality; the heart beats and is beaten by its beating; not a shadow falls without the sun’s shine and the sun sears what it saves. These are not the simplicities my saying has suggested. In our civilization, the center has not held for a long time; neither the center nor the place where the center was can now be found. We are disordered, arthritic fingers without palms. Inside the silence of unmoving things, there are the sounds of repeated explosions. Perhaps it is catastrophe breathing.” — William H. Gass, “Humors of Blood & Skin,” from A Temple of Texts
“There are those who like to sail alone around the world; they shut themselves up in towers to write or watch for fires; in huts encased in ice, they give up their lives to loneliness; who hunt for pelts in the mountains or are driven with aimless intensity from place to place like sand through a desert; fly solo, take to the woods. Searching for a second self, they dislike distraction. They want something to pit their strength against: angel or shade or element of nature that will assume the shape, and become the substance, of their enemy within.” — William H. Gass, “On Heroes and Tombs,” from A Temple of Texts
“When Mies van der Rohe said that God was in the details, and Paul Valéry insisted that there were no details in execution, both meant the same thing—namely that every element of the work must be made to count.” — William H. Gass, “Three Lives,” from A Temple of Texts
“I must say I trust hatred more than love. It is frequently constructive, despite the propaganda to the contrary; it is less frequently practiced by hypocrites; it is more clearly understood; it is painfully purchased and therefore often earned; and its objects sometimes even deserve their hoped-for fate. If you love the good, you have to hate evil. I cannot imagine a love so puerile and thin and weak-kneed it cannot rage.” — William H. Gass, “Fifty Literary Pillars,” from A Temple of Texts
“Everything around us is terrifying. There is no longer a common language. No one understands anyone else. I believe no one wants to understand.” — Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies (quoted in “Influence,” from A Temple of Texts, by William H. Gass (emphasis in original))
“If you enjoy the opinions you possess, if they give you a glow, be suspicious. They may be possessing you. An opinion should be treated like a guest who is likely to stay too late and drink all the whiskey.” — William H. Gass, “Influence,” from A Temple of Texts
“True strength, throughout its spectrum, shows itself through unflustered gentleness and forbearance, since only such strength has nothing to fear.” — William H. Gass, “Influence,” from A Temple of Texts
“It may be that in a state of nature, since it is a state of war, the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, but in our present state of mediocrity, it is cowardly, shallow, tedious, banal, and uselessly drawn out.” — William H. Gass, “To a Young Friend Charged with Possession of the Classics,” from A Temple of Texts
“It is not death that is to be feared but, rather—and something history should be devoted to demonstrating—the loss of excellence.” — William H. Gass, “There Was an Old Woman Who,” from Tests of Time
“A fiction is forever a fiction, and everything that was will remain as it was eternally.” — William H. Gass, “There Was an Old Woman Who,” from Tests of Time
“No amount of relativism, no degree of deconstruction, no namby-pamby pluralism, despite debunking, the disclosure of bias, the so-called unreliability of observers and their cultural conditioning—their class and color blindness—or the oft-bewailed problems of representation, language’s betrayal of the mind, should be allowed to shake the singleness, consistency, and wholeness of any happening.” — William H. Gass, “There Was an Old Woman Who,” from Tests of Time
“To be stupid and selfish and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.” — Gustave Flaubert (quoted in Tests of Time, by William H. Gass)
“For the real writer, life does more than accept or resemble language; it coughs up words like gobs of bloody spit, suggests them, insists, and every one is more historical than history, deep beyond diving, wide beyond reach.” — William H. Gass, “Quotations from Chairman Flaubert,” from Tests of Time
“A writer should be wary of the world, as if it were a place of poisonous ivies and venomous snakes.” — William H. Gass, “Quotations from Chairman Flaubert,” from Tests of Time
“A book may have been published, but it is not available if I don’t know it exists; if it costs more than I can afford; if it is locked up and out of reach; if I am illiterate, or ashamed of bookishness, or teased or told I am uppity if I want to rise above my fellows. Entire societies are devoted to keeping their citizens ignorant, unskilled, unschooled, fanatical in support of their own stupidity and of the forces which would switch off every intellectual light.” — William H. Gass, “The Shears of the Censor,” from Tests of Time
“Ideally, magazines should be supported by their subscribers. But our educational system doesn’t produce such audiences. We publish poetry; we don’t read it. We like it performed for us so that it will, with the poet, take the plane. And we like our few books autographed, because they will, one day, be worth more to our heirs and our assigns.” — William H. Gass, “The Shears of the Censor,” from Tests of Time