Christopher (Donut)

“If men are forbid to speak their minds seriously on certain subjects, they will do it ironically. If they are forbid to speak at all upon such subjects, or if they find it really dangerous to do so, they will then redouble their disguise, involve themselves in mysteriousness, and talk so as hardly to be understood, or at least not plainly interpreted, by those who are disposed
to do them a mischief And thus raillery is brought more in fashion, and runs into an extreme. 'Tis the persecuting spirit has raised the bantering one ; and want of liberty may account for want of a true politeness, and for the corruption or wrong use of pleasantry and humour.

If in this respect we strain the just measure of what we call urbanity, and are apt sometimes to take a buffooning rustic air, we may thank the ridiculous solemnity and sour humour of our pedagogues ; or rather, they may thank themselves, if they in particular meet with the heaviest of this kind of treatment. For it will naturally fall heaviest where the constraint has been the severest. The greater the weight is,
the bitterer will be the satire. The higher the slavery, the more exquisite the buffoonery.”
― Shaftesbury-A, Essai Sur l'Usage de la Raillerie Et de l'Enjoument, Dans Les Conversations Qui Roulent: Sur Les Matières Les Plus Importantes (Philosophie)

“The child raised for his station, never leaving it, could not be exposed to the disadvantages of another. But given the mobility of human things, given the unsettled and restless spirit of this age which upsets everything in each generation, can one conceive of a method more senseless than raising a child as though he never had to leave his room, as though he were going to be constantly surrounded by his servants? If the unfortunate makes a single step on the earth, if he goes down a single degree, he is lost. This is not teaching him to bear suffering; it is training him to feel it. One thinks only of preserving one’s child. That is not enough. One ought to teach him to preserve himself as a man. to bear the blows of fate, to brave opulence and poverty, to live, if he has to. in freezing Iceland or on Malta’s burning rocks. You may very well take precautions against his dying. He will nevertheless have to die. And though his death were not the product of your efforts, still these efforts would be ill conceived. It is less a question of keeping him from dying than of making him live. To live is not to breathe; it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

“No one society and no one age of it realises all the values of civilisation. Not all of these values may be compatible with each other: what is at least as certain is that in realising some we lose the appreciation of others.”
― T.S. Eliot

“There are many modern biographies and histories, full of carefully authenticated fact, which afflict the reader with a weight of indigestion. The author has no right to his facts, no ownership in them. They have flitted through his mind on a calm five minutes'
passage from the notebook to the immortality of the printed page. But no man can hope to make much impression on a reader with facts which he has not thought it worth his own while to remember. Every considerable book, in literature or science, is an engine whereby, mind operates on mind. It is an ignorant
worship of Science which treats it as residing in books, and reduces the mind to a mechanism of transfer. The measure of an author's power would be best found in the book which he should sit down to write the day after his
library was burnt to the ground.”
― Walter Alexander Raleigh, Six Essays on Johnson