Qaso

“Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self. […] If the same person were to write his autobiography twice, first in one mode and then in the other, the two accounts would be so different that it would be hard to believe that they referred to the same person. In one he would appear as an obsessed creature, a passionate Knight forever serenading Faith or Beauty, humorless and over-life-size; in the other as coolly detached, full of humor and self-mockery, lacking in a capacity for affection, easily bored and smaller than life-size. As Don Quixote seen by Sancho Panza, he never prays; as Sancho Panza seen by Don Quixote, he never giggles.”
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

“My title “The Fabrication of Facts,” has the virtue not only of indicating pretty clearly what I am going to discuss but also of irritating those fundamentalists who know very well that facts are found not madder, that facts constitute the one and only real world, and that knowledge consists of believing the facts. These articles of faith so firmly possess most of us, they so bind and blind us, that “fabrication of fact” has a paradoxical sound. “Fabrication” has become a synonym for “falsehood” or “fiction” as contrasted with “truth” or “fact.” Of course, we must distinguish falsehood and fiction from truth and fact; but we cannot, I am sure, do it on ground that fiction is fabricated and fact found. - 91”
― Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking

“اننا نعيش في عالم أصبحنا غرباء فيه، لم نعد نعرف كيف نتصرف لأننا نسينا كل شيء عن أنفسنا وعن ماضينا. نتذكر أننا كنا في وقت مضى قوة فاعلة فوق هذه الأرض وانتصرنا على غيرنا وحكمنا نصف المعمور حتى خاف منا الداني والقاصي.. ولكن لم نعد ندرك الأسباب الملموسة التي كانت وراء انتصارات خالد وقتيبة وعمرو وموسى وطارق، ولا حتى يوسف وصلاح الدين.. كل ذلك بهت واختلط فعاد لغزا من الألغاز، ذهب سره باختفاء أصحابه.”
― عبد الله العروي, أوراق

“In accepting and defending the social institution of slavery, the Greeks were harder-hearted than we but clearer-headed; they knew that labor as such is slavery, and that no man can feel a personal pride in being a laborer. A man can be proud of being a worker – someone, that is, who fabricates enduring objects, but in our society, the process of fabrication has been so rationalized in the interests of speed, economy and quantity that the part played by the individual factory employee has become too small for it to be meaningful to him as work, and practically all workers have been reduced to laborers. It is only natural, therefore, that the arts which cannot be rationalized in this way – the artist still remains personally responsible for what he makes – should fascinate those who, because they have no marked talent, are afraid, with good reason, that all they have to look forward to is a lifetime of meaningless labor. This fascination is not due to the nature of art itself, but to the way in which an artists works; he, and in our age, almost nobody else, is his own master. The idea of being one’s own master appeals to most human beings, and this is apt to lead to the fantastic hope that the capacity for artistic creation is universal, something nearly all human beings, by virtue, not by some special talent, but due to their humanity, could do if they tried.”
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays