Brian Haslett

“Small, busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals,
And their faint cracklings o’er our silence creep
Like whispers of the household gods that keep
A gentle empire o’er fraternal souls.”
― John Keats, The Complete Poems

“Leibniz, perhaps alone with Spinoza, grasped the general direction of modern history. But, unlike his eerily self-sufficient rival, he had a far greater concern with the price that humanity would have to pay for its own progress. He understood that even as science tells us more and more about what everything is, it seems to tell us less and less why; that even as technology reveals utility in all things, it seems to find purpose in nothing; that as humanity extends its powers without limit, it loses its faith in the value of the same beings who exercise that power; and that, in making self-interest the foundation of society, modern humankind finds itself pining for the transcendent goals that give life any interest at all.”
― Matthew Stewart, Courtier and the Heretic

“the love of fate is not for the faint of heart. Human beings are weak not just with respect to outside forces, Spinoza cautions, but also with respect to the demons within. The passions are so strong that they can overrule the mind with ease and lead us “to follow the worse course even when we know the better.” The only way to overcome the emotions, he says, is with a higher kind of emotion: you have to fight fire with fire. Spinoza thus distinguishes himself from the Stoics, who argued that the only thing to do with the surly crowd of human emotions is to have them all shot, as it were.”
― Matthew Stewart, Courtier and the Heretic

“Stop and consider! life is but a day;
A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way
From a tree’s summit; a poor Indian’s sleep
While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep”
― John Keats, The Complete Poems