Leonard Houx > Leonard's Quotes

“At last,' Padma says with satisfaction, 'you've learned how to tell things really fast.”
― Salman Rushdie

“The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.”
― Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

“Billy took off his tri-focals and his coat and his necktie and his shoes, and he closed the venetian blinds and then the drapes, and he lay down on the outside of the coverlet. But sleep would not come. Tears came instead. Billy turned on the Magic Fingers, and he was jiggled as he wept.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.”
― Immanuel Kant

“The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom”
― Jacques Lacan

“This book is intended for calm readers.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

“philosophy of art usually lacks one of two things: either the philosophy or the art”
― Friedrich Schlegel

“It was not surprising that after the war Dostoevsky was linked to Kierkegaard as a prophet of social resignation.”
― Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School & the Institute of Social Research, 1923-50

“Maybe even more important than the D.B.P. [Divine Brotherhood of Pythagoras], ∞-wise is the protomystic Parmenides of Elea (c.515-? BCE), not only because of his distinction between the 'Way of Truth' and 'Way of Seeing' framed the terms of Greek metaphysics and (again) influenced Plato, but because Parmenides' #1 student and defender was the aforementioned Zeno, the most fiendishly clever and upsetting philosopher ever (who can be seen actually kicking Socrates' ass, argumentatively speaking, in Plato's Parmenides).”
― David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity

“Modernity could be identified with the gradual disappearance of ritual, of those kind of communal bonds founded upon a symbolically shared sense of guilt.”
― Thomas Brockelman, Zizek and Heidegger: The Question Concerning Techno-Capitalism

“Design cannot rescue failed content.”
― Edward R. Tufte

“I wince now to think of when I was a new teacher, and said things like "This is really important stuff" or "You'll be really glad you know this stuff later on.”
― Julie Dirksen, Design for How People Learn

“Research and development projects on educational media pay quantities of hard cash for development, lip-service to evaluation, and no attention to implementation.”
― Diana Laurillard, Rethinking University Teaching: A Conversational Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“Shut up,' he explained.”
― Ring Lardner

“The composition of these rooms represents the basic intention behind my design: simplicity, essentiality and openness.”
― Dieter Rams, Less but Better / Weniger, aber besser

“A sex symbol becomes a thing. I hate being a thing.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“A critical analysis of the present global constellation-one which offers no clear solution, no “practical” advice on what to do, and provides no light at the end of the tunnel, since one is well aware that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us-usually meets with reproach: “Do you mean we should do nothing? Just sit and wait?” One should gather the courage to answer: “YES, precisely that!” There are situations when the only true “practical” thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to “wait and see” by means of a patient, critical analysis. Engagement seems to exert its pressure on us from all directions. In a well-known passage from his ‘Existentialism and Humanism’, Sartre deployed the dilemma of a young man in France in 1942, torn between the duty to help his lone, ill mother and the duty to enter the war and fight the Germans; Sartre’s point is, of course, that there is no a priori answer to this dilemma. The young man needs to make a decision grounded only in his own abyssal freedom and assume full responsibility for it.

An obscene third way out of this dilemma would have been to advise the young man to tell his mother that he will join the Resistance, and to tell his Resistance friends that he will take care of his mother, while, in reality, withdrawing to a secluded place and studying.

There is more than cheap cynicism in this advice. It brings to mind a well-known Soviet joke about Lenin. Under socialism; Lenin’s advice to young people, his answer to what they should do, was “Learn, learn, and learn.” This was evoked all the time and displayed on the school walls. The joke goes: Marx, Engels, and Lenin are asked whether they would prefer to have a wife or a mistress. As expected, Marx, rather conservative in private matters, answers, “A wife!” while Engels, more of a bon vivant, opts for a mistress. To everyone’s surprise, Lenin says, “I’d like to have both!” Why? Is there a hidden stripe of decadent jouisseur behind his austere revolutionary image? No-he explains: “So that I can tell my wife that I am going to my mistress and my mistress that I am going to my wife. . .” “And then, what do you do?” “I go to a solitary place to learn, learn, and learn!”

Is this not exactly what Lenin did after the catastrophe in 1914? He withdrew to a lonely place in Switzerland, where he “learned, learned, and learned,” reading Hegel’s logic. And this is what we should do today when we find ourselves bombarded with mediatic images of violence. We need to “learn, learn, and learn” what causes this violence.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections

“Glass flowers exploding. Slow trail of colors down the sky like stains dispersing in the sea, candescent polyps extinguished in the depths.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.”
― Albert Einstein