Quote

Beneath the surface of repartee and mock seriousness, [Plato's Phaedrus] is asking whether we ought to prefer a neuter form of speech to the kind which is ever getting us aroused over things and provoking an expense of spirit.

Richard M. Weaver

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Richard M. Weaver
Age: 53 †
Born: 1910
Born: March 3
Died: 1963
Died: April 3
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Ever
Surface
Mock
Kind
Asking
Seriousness
Things
Speech
Provoking
Ought
Plato
Getting
Expense
Whether
Expenses
Neuter
Spirit
Beneath
Repartee
Form
Prefer
Aroused

More quotes by Richard M. Weaver

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Any utterance is a major assumption of responsibility, and the assumption that one can avoid that responsibility by doing something to language itself is one of the chief considerations of the Phaedrus.
Richard M. Weaver
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The scientists have given [modern man] the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have.
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It is not that things give meaning to words it is that meaning makes things things. It does not make things in their subsistence but it does make things in their discreteness for the understanding.
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In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them.
Richard M. Weaver
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Most [people] see education only as the means by which a person is transported from one economic plane to a higher one.
Richard M. Weaver
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When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder , we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason .
Richard M. Weaver
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When you're on the wrong road, sometimes the most progressive man is the one who goes backwards first. As long as there are such people, hope lies in our future.
Richard M. Weaver
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The remark has been made that in the Civil War the North reaped the victory and the South the glory.
Richard M. Weaver
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Ideas have consequences.
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Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our world. If schools of journalism knew their business, they would graduate no one who could not render the Greek poets.
Richard M. Weaver
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The aristocratic mind ... is anti-analytical. It is concerned more with the status of being than with the demonstrable relationship of parts.
Richard M. Weaver
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We are more successfully healed by the vis medicatrix naturae (healing power of nature) than by the most ingenious medical application.
Richard M. Weaver
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In any piece of rhetorical discourse, one rhetorical term overcomes another rhetorical term only by being nearer to the term which stands ultimate. There is some ground for calling a rhetorical education necessarily aristocratic education in that the rhetorician has to deal with an aristocracy of notions.
Richard M. Weaver
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We cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and positivists that this is a world of action and history.
Richard M. Weaver
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The home was a school. Farm and cabin households, though bookless save for the Family Bible and The Sacred Harp, taught the girls to spin, weave, quilt, cook, sew, and mind their manners the boys to wield gun, ax, hammer and saw, to ride, plow, sow and reap, and to be men. Nobody need ever be bored. Amusement did not have to be bought.
Richard M. Weaver
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Man ... feels lost without the direction-finder provide by progress.
Richard M. Weaver
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Man is an organism, not a mechanism and the mechanical pacing of his life does harm to his human responses, which naturally follow a kind of free rhythm.
Richard M. Weaver
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Before the age of adulteration it was held that behind each work there stood some conception of its perfect execution. It was this that gave zest to labor and served to measure the degree of success.
Richard M. Weaver
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The realization that just as no action is really indifferent, so no utterance is without its responsibility introduces, it is true, a certain strenuosity into life.
Richard M. Weaver
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Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind.
Richard M. Weaver