Favorite Quotes

These are all from Cornell West because I felt like I had to pause and write down what he was saying to really absorb it. I liked what the others had to say a lot, but I didnt write down what they said because they talked at a pace where I could follow them easier.

On Truth:
"You cant talk about truth without talking about learning how to die.
You're really talking about truth as a way of life as opposed to simply truth as a set of propositions that correspond to a set of things in the world.

Human beings are unable to ever gain a monopoly on Truth, capital T. We might have access to truth, small t, but they are fallible claims about truth. We could be wrong, so we have to be open to revision. So there is a certain kind of mystery that goes in hand with Truth...

So this is why some of the great existential thinkers are accenting our finitude; our inability to fully grasp the ultimate nature of reality; the Truth about things.

So there, you talk about truth being tied to the way to Truth, because once you give up on the notion of fully grasping the way the world is, the question becomes, What are the ways in which I sustain my quest for Truth?

Scientists talk about evidence and the scientific method ... Religous folk talk about surrendering one's arrogance and pride in the face of the divine, but its all a way of acknowledging our finitude; our fallibility.

On Intellectual Stimulation:
Theres a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied. Its true that you might be socially isolated in the library or at home reading a book or whatever. But you're intensley alive. In fact, you're much more alive than the average person walking down the street in crowds, where theres no intellectual interrogation and questioning going on.

If you read Ruskin, or Twain, or Melville, you might have to take a break and get a little dullness in your life. Throw the book against the wall.

On Blues Music:
How do you generate an elegance of self-togetherness, so that you have a stick-to-it-ness in the face of the catastrophic, the calamatous, the monstrous?