Tagged: Analects

Analects of the Core: Burke on reality, and pleasure in tragedy

It is a common observation, that objects which in the reality would shock, are in tragical, and such like representations, the source of a very high species of pleasure. – Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful, (“Sympathy“)

Analects of the Core: Burke on engrossing ideas

When men have suffered their imaginations to be long affected with any idea, it so wholly engrosses them as to shut out by degrees almost every other, and to break down every partition of the mind which would confine it. – Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful, (“Of the Passions Which Belong to Society”)

Analects of the Core: Burke on the sublimity of pain

WHATEVER is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the […]

Analects of the Core: Cervantes on having one’s own fish to fry

Let them eat the lie and swallow it with their bread. Whether the two were lovers or no, they’ll have accounted to God for it by now. I have my own fish to fry. – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, author of Don Quixote

Analects of the Core: Coleridge on nations and mankind

A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation; but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Unsourced

Analects of the Core: Van Gogh on fallibility

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again. -Vincent Van Gogh

Analects of the Core: Bourdieu on successful ideologies

The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicit silence. — sociologist Pierre Bourdieu

Analects of the Core: Austen on vanity and pride

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us. -Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 5. Lynn Festa will be lecturing to the students of […]

Analects of the Core: Virgil on Euryalus’ death

“Euryalus, Poor fellow, where did I lose you? Where shall I Hunt for you? Back all the winding way, That maze of woodland?” – Virgil, The Aeneid (Boox IX, 551-554)

Analects of the Core: Virgil on Aeneas’ last words to Dido

“Dido, do forlorn, The story then that came to me was true, That you were out of life, had met your end By your own hand. Was I, was I the cause? I swear by heaven’s stars, by the high gods, By any certainty below the earth, I left your land against my will, my […]