The climate of his mind is so salubrious, so invigorating, that dull thoughts and heavy cares are dispelled by contact with it. And is not this the true end of scholarship? It is to make us wise, of course, but what is the use of being wise if we are not sometimes merry? The merriment of wise men is not the uninformed, gross fun of ignorant men, but it has more kinship with that than the pinched, frightened fun of those who are neither learned nor ignorant, gentle nor simple, bound nor free. The idea that a wise man must be solemn is bred and preserved among people who have no idea what wisdom is, and can only respect whatever makes them feel inferior.
Robertson DaviesRelated topics
bound breed climate contact course dispel end free fun gentle gross heavy idea ignorant inferior men kinship man merriment merry mind nor people respect scholarship simple use whatever wisdom wiseRelated quotes
In this book I try to show how models of self-organization can be applied to many economic phenomena - how the principle of "order from instability," which explains the growth of hurricanes and embryos, can also explain the formation of cities and business cycles; how the principle of "order from random growth" can explain the strangely simple rules that describe the sizes of earth quakes, meteorites, and metropolitan areas. I believe that the ideas of self-organization theory can add substantially to our understanding of the economy; whatever their ultimate usefulness, these ideas are very exciting, and playing around with them is tremendous fun.
Paul Krugman
Each province has got a speciality of its own, I admit, but over and above that, all these different provinces are bound together in one common culture... If the whole of the Hindu races are bond up in that way you must also realise that the whole of the Mahomedan races all over India are also similarly bound up together and we must not forget that the two great cultures must meet together, and the result will be a great culture which is not purely Hindu, not purely Mahomedan but something which is made up of the contact of these two great races. And that is the ideal of Indian Nationality which must be preserved and developed to the fullest extent.
Chittaranjan Das
Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality; a contact that is defined as the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of yet unknown (and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications. It seems reasonable to describe this fusion of the personal and the objective as Personal Knowledge. Personal knowledge is an intellectual commitment, and as such inherently hazardous. Only affirmations that could be false can be said to convey objective knowledge of this kind.
Michael Polanyi
This ideal University of Life ... would never take the importance of culture for granted. It would know that culture is kept alive by a constant respectful questioning-not by an excessive and snobbish attitude of respect. Therefore, rather than leaving it hanging why one was reading Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, an ideal course covering nineteenth-century literature would ask plainly "What is it that adultery ruins in a marriage?” Students in the ideal University of Life would end up knowing much the same material as their colleagues in other institutions, they would simply have learned it under a very different set of headings.
Alain de Botton
For as when much superfluous matter has gathered in simple bodies, nature makes repeated efforts to remove and purge it away, thereby promoting the health of these bodies, so likewise as regards that composite body the human race, when every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove elsewhere, every region being equally crowded and over-peopled, and when human craft and wickedness have reached their highest pitch, it must needs come about that the world will purge herself in one or another of these three ways, to the end that men, becoming few and contrite, may amend their lives and live with more convenience.
Niccolò Machiavelli
