Literary Scholar

Quotes & Thinkers in Literary Scholar

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Literature

Age of Enlightenment

1749–1832

"Only mankind Can do the impossible: He can distinguish, He chooses and judges, He can give permanence To the moment."

"Abraxas was the god who was both god and devil."

"I don't even have an E-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages."

"Closed societies are now the flimsiest of illusions, for all the outsiders are demanding in."

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

"The window opened gently and a still Autumn night entered cat-like. Edwin smelt freedom and London autumn – decay, smoke, cold, motor oil."

"To Freud's confusion on what do women want, I would say we want to dismantle a racist and misogynist heteronormative patriarchy that sucks the life out of women."

3 quotes

🇬🇧Christopher Caudwell

Literature

1907–1937

"The bourgeois ... is free not because he is conscious of his causality, but because he is ignorant of the social causes that determine his being."

"Bibliography at Electronic Poetry Center"

"Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking."

"Poetry can only change the notion of relationships between things. Culture cannot change without a change in institutions."

"There is nothing remarkable about the people in premodern South Asia having a clear and accurate conception of the spatial organization of their world."

"Arguing with them in a way that is better means using the best method of argumentation which is the method of kindness and gentleness without gruffness and harshness."

"Dear reader dearest inscrutable listener inscrutably harking or regrettably more likely not harking except in that chamber in me that posits you with me every moment I’m speaking or trying to speak"

"The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present."

52 quotes

🇨🇭John Pentland Mahaffy

Literature

1839–1919

"With Alexander the stage of Greek influence spread across the world."

"Both dogmatism and metaphysics … are attempts to project one’s own views on the world, and they are just as much attempts to hide precisely this projection from themselves as well as from their audience."

7 quotes

🇮🇹Giorgio Agamben

Literature

continental philosophy

"The heart of Rousseau's thinking, as Arthur Melzer and others have shown, is to honor modern individualism but at the same time to subject it to a devastating critique."

"American society has always exercised a stronger pressure on individual behavior than Western European societies; but in time of war this pressure is notched a few degrees, and starts to become quite alarming."

6 quotes

🇮🇷Mohammad Ali Foroughi

"I am one of the endangered species: people who still write in meter and rime."

"John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. I like to read Archie Ammons, my great friend. And Harold Bloom, another former student."

"In the roots of grammar, the stems of logic and the flowers of rhetoric take their being."

"There's no victory-condition for being human."

"In love, no question is ever preposterous."

"Poetry cannot report the event, it must be the event, lived through in a form that can speak about itself while remaining wholly itself."

"English translations of Clenched My Hands... Grey Eyed King"

"One way of looking at poetic periods is to notice what contemporary interests and knowledge penetrate the best verse written at the time and what moods are permitted in treating of these matters."

"Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others."

"We all need joy, and we can all receive joy in only one way, by adding to the joy of others."

"Talk of the "imperial decay" of your invalid port. "Its gracious withdrawal from perfection, keeping a hint of former majesty withal, as it hovers between oblivion and the divine Untergang of infinite recession."

7 quotes