#m

The arts of conversation which his circle cultivated were, in great part, the gossipacious arts: that of making much out of little, of displaying your wit and inventive facility, your ability to amuse, without boring your listeners with too many ideas, or unpleasantly stretching their minds on the rack of an “issue.” It was a world which took an intense but mainly anecdotal interest in people, and which was therefore also on its guard against just the same exposure of itself which it so assiduously sought to gain against others. ↗

— William H. Gass

#art

I was born into a world full of 'specialists'. I'm not sure whether it's the result of our education system or just natural entropy, but it's very uncommon to know a poet with even a mediocre knowledge about art, or an artist with a good taste in poetry, and so on and on. What this really is: lack of general education in a structural sense: god knows how many people I've met that are actually PROUD about proclaiming their ignorance about another field: it is as if it signifies their 'devotion to one path' while in reality they really only look like a buffoon if you ask me. New is that I am encountering 'Literary Critics' that proudly proclaim to 'never have read any foreign poetry' as if a 'movie critic' that only has watched Dutch films would be somehow capable of criticizing them in any true sense of the word. ↗

— Martinus Hendrikus Benders

#specialists #art

Unfortunately, fact checking has become a lost art ↗

— Gary Hopkins

#energy-healing #enlightenment #facts #god #higher-self

Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human. ↗

— Joshua Foer

#art

But eventually it's a question of access: Getting access to fields is on top of the oil companies' agenda. We see a substantial build-up of supply occurring over the coming years. ↗

— Daniel Yergin

#agenda #build-up #coming #companies #eventually

But the key thing is that Iraq, while it's got very large oil reserves, has marginalized itself as an oil exporter and these days its exports are only about one tenth that of neighboring Saudi Arabia. ↗

— Daniel Yergin

#arabia #days #exporter #exports #got

Over the last few millennial, we've invented a series of technologies … that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to outsource this fundamental human capacity. ↗

— Joshua Foer

#fundamental #human-capacity #memories #memory #millennial

Seek first to respect Then to understand ↗

— Jo Murphy

#understanding-freedom #art

To the fantastic mental illness of Rationalism, hard facts are regrettable things, and to talk about them is to create them. ↗

— Francis Parker Yockey

#create #facts #fantastic #hard #illness

Though they love people, the Christians are enemies of our life, our gods and our crimes; hence she fled from me, as from a man who belongs to our [Roman] society, and with whom she would have to share a life counted criminal by Christians...I should not have stopped her from believing in her Christ, and would myself have reared an altar to Him in the atrium. What harm could one more god do me? Why might I not believe in Him, - I who do not believe over much in the old gods? ...It would not be difficult for me even to renounce other gods, for no reasoning mind believes in them at present. But it seems that all this is not enough yet for the Christians. It is not enough to honor Christ, one must also live according to His teachings; and here thou art on the shore of a sea which they command thee to wade through. Quo Vadis ↗

— Henryk Stanczyk

#nero #persecuted-christians #quo-vadis #art