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Most people traffic in abstractions and generalizations because they are grossly incompetent at culturing their intuition or powers of evidency, refining it to grasp the Thisness (Haecceitas) of what is before them. Thinking is like a Stradivarius that has more potential variations in how it is played than any human can finitely perform or capture.

Kenny Smith

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Kenny Smith
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: March 8
Basketball Player
Sports Commentator
Queens
New York
Kenneth Smith
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More quotes by Kenny Smith

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The only measures that count are progress over your own self, and triumph over the vacant abstractions that most people mistake for thinking.
Kenny Smith
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A vital part of philosophizing is learning to trust one's own intuitivist intelligence, getting one's center of gravity back between one's feet. In our culture-so outer-directed, objective or extraverted-this is already heresy. This is self-mastering thinking, centered in what has been well-tested as certainties: autarkia or self-rule.
Kenny Smith
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We should bear the intelligence and taste of the architect or the gardener in how we shape the becoming of our self. Too much precision (stringency) is simply misplaced, a formalism inappropriate to the kind of matter we have to deal with (and to be).
Kenny Smith
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Like the priestly cult of the Middle Ages, the modern priestly cult of scientific psychotherapists exist overwhelmingly to stultify or blunt a too-acute insight into the powers benumbed in our personalities by our prevailing culture.
Kenny Smith
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Bourgeois society, rife with an atomism or monadism of secluded egos, is profoundly uncomfortable with topics of domination just because of the rift between how it sees itself (Kantian autonomism) and how it actually exists (pathetic prole-culture).
Kenny Smith
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Wisdom is the aristic craving for extraordinary insights, for incandescent revelations that have the power to burst through banausic and doulic ordinariness: wisdom is the lust to be transfigured, transvaluated.
Kenny Smith
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As always, the illusion of self-transcendence is far more facile and available than self-transcendence itself: in the vast majority of cases what human consciousness opens up to is merely a more encompassing form of finitude (another captivating illusion or delusion).
Kenny Smith
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Terence: nihil humanum alienum a me-nothing human is alien to me, the greatest expression of ancient megalopsychia or great-souled and cosmopolitan magnanimity.
Kenny Smith
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Thinking is the subtlest form of self-polemics, the art of a certain finesse in psychological self-vivisection and self-crucifixion (Hegel of course called the path of self-disillusion the via dolorosa or highway of despair, in Baillie's fine and florid rendering, like Jesus' route to Golgotha).
Kenny Smith
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Intellect is merely a narrow and highly specific kind of thing that we DO, but our immediacy relates us to what we naturally and essentially ARE, the actualities of our full-dimensional existence.
Kenny Smith
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I know one thing. If a NASCAR driver ever got on the court with me, they wouldn't be able to keep up. That would be like me driving a bus in a NASCAR race.
Kenny Smith
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Philosophy exists in profoundest opposition to rhetoric, which is speaking for the sake of producing or controlling some effect in others' perceptions. Philosophy is about the caustic or cauterizing effect of the truth, not the currying of sensibilities.
Kenny Smith
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Between what human beings so naively and stupidly fear and what they most profoundly ought to fear-i.e. what they so pathogenically and addictively do to their own selves-there is a horrendous gulf and disparity.
Kenny Smith
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Human beings belong to some minor comity or enclave of faith at the expense of the clarity and autarkia of their intelligence and conscience, of course. Belonging is another way of saying: capitulating to.
Kenny Smith
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I think we all have great opportunities individually but collectively our unit is so much bigger. Collectively our unit is something I've never seen on television. I don't look at our show as a basketball show. I look at our show as a sports and entertainment show.
Kenny Smith
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In late modernity we grow more and more accustomed to politicians and public figures who are indebted to their appetites for their values, to their intellectual sloth for their principles, to their rhetorical cleverness for their conscience, and to their regimented conformism for their philosophy.
Kenny Smith
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It is the cruelest of all ironies that moderns imagine themselves to be (abstractly understood) individuals, because in actuality moderns are types, abstracted and self-abstractive victims of a process of stereotyping that afflicts even would-be rebels and anarchists.
Kenny Smith
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Always, a form of self-equilibration, a soul or psyche, is trying to assert itself, to continue the melody of its self-realized life.
Kenny Smith
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I regret not getting brutally forthright with human beings a hell of a lot sooner than I did. Civility and obliquity are wasted on people who will not make the effort to be harsher or stricter on their own gooey egos than they are on other people.
Kenny Smith
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Damian Lillard is having a better year than Chris Paul. Lillard got snubbed when he was left off of the USA Men’s Basketball team, and now the All-Star team.
Kenny Smith