Peter Watson > Quotes

“...for example, if Freud is wrong, as i and many others believe, where does that leave any number of novels and virtually the entire corpus of surrealism, Dada, and certain major forms of expressionism and abstraction, not to mention Richard Strauss' 'Freudian' operas such as Salome and Elektra, and the iconic novels of numerous writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf? It doesn't render these works less beautiful or pleasurable, necessarily, but it surely dilutes their meaning. They don't owe their entire existence to psychoanalysis. But if they are robbed of a large part of their meaning, can they retain their intellectual importance and validity? Or do they become period pieces? I stress the point because the novels, paintings and operas referred to above have helped to popularise and legitimise a certain view of human nature, one that is, all evidence to the contrary lacking, wrong.”
― Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty : The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind - A History

“One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so 'easy' as they had been.”
― Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty : The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind - A History

“For many scientists, as Lyotard concedes, scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge there is, but if so, how then do we understand fairy stories and law?”
― Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty : The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind - A History

“Doubt is an awful snake of an emotion. Once it has you in it's grip, it won't let go. It spoils everything.”
― Peter Watson, Madeleine's War

“The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”
― Peter Watson, The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century

“Live with the consequences of your deeds and enjoy the warmth they create. The only warmth in the cold, indifferent universe is that which we create ourselves. And that is what a work of art is, it is what a constructed life is, a fulfilled life, the warmth of acts.”
― Peter Watson, The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

“The final new elements in music making (as opposed to listening, considered in the next section) were introduced by Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826). Weber had a diseased hip and walked with a limp but he was a virtuoso of the guitar and an excellent singer, until he damaged his voice by accidentally drinking a glass of nitric acid.”
― Peter Watson, The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century

“...a useful coorective to the triumphalism of some scientists. For example, Maddox went out of his way to emphasise the provisional nature of much physics - he referred to black holes as 'putative' only, to the search for theories of everything as 'the embodiment of a belief, even a hope' and stated that the reason why the quantum gravity project is 'becalmed' right now is because 'the problem to be solved is not yet fully understood' and that the idea that the universe began with a Big Bang 'will be found to be false'.”
― Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty : The People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind - A History

“From 1781, by which time Goethe had been in Weimer for six years, he confided to Charlotte that he no longer felt able to address her as "Sie," and must use the more intimate "du." This brought about a sea change. As one critic put it, Goethe's letters now became "prose poems of happy love with few parallels in any literature.”
― Peter Watson, The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century

“According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra was the source of the ‘profoundest error in human history – namely the invention of morality’.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“Computable Numbers’ into practice.21 This was”
― Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

“This was due to the intervention of a benevolent ruler, King Sejong, who in 1403 issued an extraordinary decree, which sounds enlightened even today and must have been extremely so at the time. ‘To govern well,’ he said, ‘it is necessary to spread knowledge of the laws and the books, so as to satisfy reason and to reform men’s evil nature; in this way peace and order may be maintained.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“There were no lawns, flowers were never patterned – instead, individual plants were placed next to craggy rocks. And there was a complex symbolism of flowers. For example, the chrysanthemum, the flower of autumn, ‘stands for retirement and culture’; the water lily, ‘rising stainless from its bed of slime’, stands for purity and truth; the bamboo, ‘unbroken by the fiercest storm’, represents suppleness and strength but also lasting friendship and hardy age.65 ‘Asymmetrical and spontaneous, the Chinese garden is a statement of faith in Nature”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“«Es posible que la existencia carezca de sentido. Y sin embargo, la pasión de vivir es más fuerte que la explicación de la vida.»”
― Peter Watson, La edad de la nada: El mundo después de la muerte de Dios (Serie Mayor)

“...returning to Russia, where he met his first wife, Ekaterina. She thought Heinrich [Schliemann] was richer than he was, and when she discovered her mistake, she withheld conjugal rights. This had the desired effect, and he cornered the market in indigo, to such effect that Ekaterina bore him three children.”
― Peter Watson, The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century

“Varro produced an influential encyclopaedia, Nine Books of Disciplines, in which he outlined nine arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine and architecture. Later writers omitted the last two arts.79 In Rome, by the end of the first century AD, education had been more or less standardised and the seven liberal arts identified. In turn, these would become the basis of medieval education,”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“reader is asked, for the moment, to accept this as a reasonable statement of fact, that in a part of the world that had for centuries been civilised, and quite highly civilised, there gradually emerged a people, not very numerous, not very powerful, not very well organised, who had a totally new conception of what human life was for, and showed for the first time what the human mind was for.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“This contrasted with logos, which also meant ‘word’ but in the sense of a truth which can be argued and maybe changed (as in, ‘what’s the word on . . .?’). Unlike logoi, which were written in prose, myths were recorded in verse.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“Above all we get by in societies where the often anonymous state is there to guard against the crude selfishness of human nature.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“The significance of this is that it supports the view that the Bible was first assembled by Jews returning from the ‘second exile’ in Babylon (the ‘first’ being in Egypt), who compiled a narrative which was designed to do two things. In the first place, it purported to show that there was a precedent in ancient history for Jews to arrive from outside and take over the land; and second, in order to justify the claims to the land, the Covenant with God was invented, meaning that the Israelites needed a special God for this to happen, an entity very different from any other deity in the region.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“This complex structure, in which people were required to predict the behaviour of others in social situations, is generally regarded as the mechanism by which consciousness evolved. In predicting the behaviour of others, an individual would have acquired a sense of self.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

“At the same time the government must not be too strong to threaten the liberty of its citizens or the prosperity that derived from local government.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

“Our century has been dominated intellectually by a coming to terms with science.”
― Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

“Cardinal Bellarmino, whom we shall meet in Chapter 25 as the leader of the Catholic Church’s resistance to Copernicus, also said: ‘God wills that man should in some measure know him through his creatures, and because no single created thing could fitly represent the infinite perfection of the Creator, he multiplied creatures, and bestowed on each a certain degree of goodness and perfection, that from these we might form some idea of the goodness and perfection of the Creator, who, in one most simple and perfect essence, contains infinite perfections.’32 On this reading, Copernicus’ breakthrough was an infinitesimal increase in man’s ascent to God. Rousseau, in Émile, said: ‘O Man! Confine thine”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“In Plato and in many Greek tragedies we learn that the Athenians did not seem to believe in rewards and punishments after death. ‘In fact, they do not seem to have expected very much at all. “After death every man is earth and shadow: nothing goes to nothing”.’ (This is a character in one of Euripides’ plays.) In Plato’s Phaedo, Simmias betrays his worry that at his death his soul will be scattered ‘and this is their end’.52”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“He adored talking about the rich….
But his real wealth was literary. He had read many thousands of books. He said that history was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night’s rest. Insomnia made him more learned.”
― Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

“conocimiento”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: Historia intelectual de la humanidad (Serie Mayor)

“John of Salisbury, an Englishman who had studied in numerous places, including Paris, placed logic central to understanding: ‘It was the mind which, by means of the ratio [reason], went beyond the experience of the senses and made it intelligible, then, by means of the intellectus, related things to their divine cause and comprehended the order of creation, and ultimately arrived at true knowledge, sapentia.’15 For us today, logic is an arid, desiccated word and has lost much of its interest.”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“Did ancient people see sacrifice as cruel? Sacrifice”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud

“Nor should we forget that, in Hebrew, the very name of Jesus (Ieshouah) means salvation. Allied”
― Peter Watson, Ideas: A history from fire to Freud