#hubris

Nothing is more beautiful than to know all. ↗

— Athanasius Kircher

#knowledge #beauty

The Duke has decreed that the Castle is not cold." The gentleman's lips are almost blue from this lack of cold. "And the Duke is right and correct in this as in all things." ...some very beautiful tapestries line the walls, but many of them are also full of holes. Perhaps the Duke has decreed that there are no moths, either. ↗

— Christopher Peter Grey

#hubris #royalty #beauty

And there they ring the walls, the young, the lithe. The handsome hold the graves they won in Troy; the enemy earth rides over those who conquered. ↗

— Aeschylus

#greece #hubris #troy #war #youth

Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#hubris #innocense #dreams

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave. ↗

— Mark Twain

#censorship #christianity #evil #hubris #moral-corruption

No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence. ↗

— Babara Tuchman

#leadership #experience

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60). ↗

— Joseph Campbell

#god #hubris #impudence #understanding #art

Can anything be imagined so ridiculous, that this miserable and wretched creature [man], who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole? ↗

— Michel de Montaigne

#hubris #mankind #mastery #perspective #world

In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree -- the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence -- antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#gardening #hubris #nature #wild #wilderness

To the contrary: His life hummed with meaning and purpose. But the meaning he wrestled from existence lay beyond the comfortable path: McCandless distrusted the value of things than came easily. ↗

— Jon Krakauer Into the Wild

#meaning-of-life #life