With his contrasting vision of anxious, work-obsessed, overly disciplined Italians and happy-go-lucky, carefree Germans,
What was ridiculous about Christianity, from the perspective of a cultivated pagan, was not only its language—the crude style of the Gospels’ Greek resting on the barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Ara...
Virtually the entire output of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace.
Unappeasable desire and the fear of death are the principal obstacles to human happiness, but the obstacles can be surmounted through the exercise of reason.
The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal wor...
Independence & self-reliance had no cultural purchase; indeed, they could scarcely be conceived, let alone prized...The best course was humbly to accept the identity to which destiny assigned you: the...
IN DEPICTING THE aspiring tyrant’s strategy, Shakespeare carefully noted among the landed classes of his time the strong current of contempt for the masses and for democracy as a viable political poss...
Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping. One educational theorist of the time speculated that the buttocks were created in order to facilitate the learning of Latin.
Always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life.
What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure...
The group shared a combination of extreme marginality and arrogant snobbishness.
The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
It was better that monastic scribes had been forced to copy everything exactly at it appeared before their eyes, even those things that made no sense at all.
Although insecurity, overconfidence, and murderous rage are strange bedfellows, they all coexist in the tyrant’s soul. He has servants and associates, but in effect he is alone. Institutional restrain...
This man, remarked a contemporary, dismayed at the wanton damage, knew as much of antiquities as the moon does of lobsters.)
Progress—like those cartoons that begin with an ape and end with a man sitting at a computer—now gets lost in a hundred detours and false starts, intersecting paths and dead ends. It is difficult to f...
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat, dog, And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work. The...
Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know. And so far will I trust thee,
I am, Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, an Epicurean.