Brian Haslett

“On an August afternoon in 1672, a surly mob cornered the brothers in the fortress in the center of The Hague. The rabble shot the door down, dragged the de Witts into the street, stripped them naked, clubbed, stabbed, and bit them, hung their (by now hopefully dead) bodies upside down, and hacked them into “two-penny pieces,” according to the report of a visiting English sailor. Some of the bits of flesh were roasted and served as a treat for the rebellious populace; others were sold as souvenirs.”
― 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

“I too have my blisses, which richly abound
In magical powers, to bless and to soothe.”
― John Keats, The Complete Poems

“Leibniz’s mathematical investigations initially centered on the summation of infinite series. The concern with indivisibility and the infinitely small was linked in his mind to some fundamental, metaphysical truths about the nature of substance, matter, and mind”
― Matthew Stewart, Courtier and the Heretic