#hubris

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

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel. -Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924) ↗

— Anatole France

#irony #politics #men

It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men, and its own judgments for absolute truth. ↗

— Aleister Crowley

#thelema #men

The first lesson every child of Athena learned: Mom was the best at everything, and you should never, ever suggest otherwise. ↗

— Rick Riordan

#athena #heroes-of-olympus #hubris #mother-knows-best #mothers-and-daughters

Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God. ↗

— Thomas Sowell

#hubris #identity

Annabeth: Don't you ever feel like, what if the world really IS messed up? What uf we COULD Do it all over again from scratch? No more war. Nobody homeless. No more summer reading homework. Percy: I'm listening. Annabeth: I mean, the West represents a lot of the best things mankind ever did--that's why the fire is still burning. That's why OlympusIs still around. But sometimes you just see the bad stuff, you know? And you start thinking the way Luke does: 'If I could tear this all down, i would do it better.'. Don't you ever feel that way? Like YOU could do a better job I'd you ran the world? Percy:Um...no. Me running the world would be kind of a nightmare. Annabeth: then you're lucky. Hubris isn't your fatal flaw. Percy: what is? Annabeth: I don't know, Percy, but every hero has one. If you don't find it and learn to control it...well, they don't call it 'fatal' for nothing. Percy(thinking to himself): I thought about that. It didn't exactly cheer me up. ↗

— Rick Riordan

#fatality #flaws #hubris #percy-jackson #percy-jackson-and-the-olympians

I think there's a lot of naivete and hubris within our mix of personalities. That's probably our worst crime. I keep wondering what a "mature" record means. ↗

— Ian Williams

#hubris #i #i think #keep #lot

Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama; fathers and sons, martyred heroes, star-crossed lovers, the deaths of kings - stories that taught us of the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. ↗

— Tom Hiddleston

#centuries #danger #deaths #drama #expanding