Jiwon Kim

“A reconfiguring work that opens a new world would have to have a threefold structure.

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Finally, the work of the reconfigurer would be so radical that people could not understand what it called them to do. People would need an articulator—something or someone that made sense of what the reconfigurer was up to and spelled it out as a paradigm incarnating their new world.”
― Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age

“Luther’s story reminds us that not every kind of mental, spiritual, or psychological effect can be achieved by dint of hard work and control. Like falling asleep, some spiritual tasks require a more glancing approach. But Wallace is not alone in thinking that self-control is the key. Western culture in the twentieth century can be read, in part, as a series of responses to the death of God—to the death in the culture, in other words, of a grounded, public, and shared sense that there is a single, unquestioned set of virtues—Judeo-Christian virtues—in accordance with which one’s life is properly led.”
― Hubert Dreyfus Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus Sean Dorrance Kelly

“The distinction between reading for information and reading for understanding is deeper than this.
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What are the conditions under which this kind of reading -reading for understanding-takes place? There are two. First, there is initial inequality in understanding. The writer must be "superior" to the reader in understanding, and his book must convey in readable form the insights he possesses and his potential readers lack. Second, the reader must be able to over­ come this inequality in some degree, seldom perhaps fully, but always approaching equality with the writer. To the extent that equality is approached, clarity of communication is achieved.”
― Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to read a bookthe art of getting a liberal education

“He had a sense that the deterioration he was experiencing in his focus was happening to a lot of the people around him – but he also knew that at many points in history, people have thought they were experiencing some kind of disastrous social decline, when in fact, they were merely ageing. It’s always tempting to confuse your personal decline for the decline of the human species.”
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again