Jonas

“Of books, though, very little. And of the books
which to most literary persons are bread and butter, novels, history, poetry, plays, almost nothing at
all. It isn’t that they’re not interested in the psychological or moral or social life. In the social life,
they certainly are, more than most of us. In the
moral, they are by and large the soundest group of
intellectuals we have; there is a moral component
right in the grain of science itself, and almost all
scientists form their own judgments of the moral
life. In the psychological they have as much interest as most of us, though occasionally I fancy they
come to it rather late. It isn’t that they lack the interests. It is much more that the whole literature of
the traditional culture doesn’t seem to them relevant to those interests. They are, of course, dead
wrong. As a result, their imaginative understanding is less than it could be. They are self-impoverished.”
― C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures

“To thoroughly understand the world, to explain it, to despise it, may be the thing great thinkers do. But I'm only interested in being able to love the world, not to despise it, not to hate it and me, to be able to look upon it and me and all beings with love and admiration and great respect.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“But what about the other side? They are impoverished too—perhaps more seriously, because they are vainer about it. They still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of ‘culture’, as though the natural order didn’t exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of
no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the
physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful
and wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all. Even if they want to have it, they can’t. It is rather as though, over an immense range of intellectual experience, a whole group was tone deaf. Except that this tone-deafness doesn’t come by nature, but by training, or rather the absence of training.”
― C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures

“Es ist auch überdies jammerschade, wenn ein Mensch in Verzweiflung stirbt. Die Verzweiflung schickt uns Gott nicht, um uns zu töten, er schickt sie uns, um neues Leben in uns zu wecken.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game