Steve Greenleaf

“As presented in thinkers like Sartre, Heidegger, and Camus, it is a grim affair, stoically affirming human freedom, limited as it is, in a contingent, accidental universe. But aside from the explicit beliefs—or lack of them—associated with existentialism, its essence is a concern with the meaning of human existence, a question that religion also used to address but which it seems to have mislaid some time ago. And this meaning, existentialism argues, cannot be discovered by sitting in an armchair and contemplating life. It can only be found by living—which, in any case, is unavoidable.”
― Gary Lachman, Revolutionaries of the Soul: Reflections on Magicians, Philosophers, and Occultists

“Style,” the well-known historian Peter Gay once wrote, “is not the dress of thought but part of its essence.”
― Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method

“The person who doesn’t read lives only one life. The reader lives 5,000. Reading is immortality backwards.”
― Umberto Eco

“I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series