Enrico

“The mass-man would never have accepted authority external to himself had not his surroundings violently forced him to do so. As to-day, his surroundings do not so force him, the everlasting mass-man, true to his character, ceases to appeal to other authority and feels himself lord of his own existence. On the contrary the select man, the excellent man is urged, by interior necessity, to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, whose service he freely accepts...Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline — the noble life.”
― José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

“You can’t, in other words, build a billion-dollar empire like Facebook if you’re wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Blaise Pascal famously wrote in the late seventeenth century.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself