Marcus Aurelius

 

This...

Louise Bourgeois

 

Gosh, she is just lovely.

Nothing but herself.

Inspiringly contemplative.

An independent thinker. 

Seraphim Rose

I love this quote by the monk, Seraphim Rose. It perfectly describes the modern and nihilistic man. 

What, more realistically, is this "mutation," the "new man"? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogue's dream; the "free-thinker" and skeptic, closed only to the truth but "open" to each new intellectual fashion because he himself has no intellectual foundation; the "seeker" after some "new revelation," ready to believe anything new because true faith has been annihilated in him; the planner and experimenter, worshipping "fact" because he has abandoned truth, seeing the world as a vast laboratory in which he is free to determine what is "possible"; the autonomous man, pretending to the humility of only asking his "rights," yet full of the pride that expects everything to be given him in a world where nothing is authoritatively forbidden; the man of the moment, without conscience or values and thus at the mercy of the strongest "stimulus"; the "rebel," hating all restraint and authority because he himself is his own and only god.

-Seraphim Rose  

Acedia

 

This quote makes me think of the term "acedia", which is in Christian theology the sin of sloth or spiritual apathy. It is characterized by a lack of care, boredom, and a general disinterest in spiritual matters, leading to a detachment from God and a neglect of one's duties. It's considered by many to be the modern sin. 

It is so beautifully articulated in the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. In this book, Aldous paints a picture of a society that is so rich in pleasure, it forgets all desire for meaning. In this society, the people are easily controllable because their wills and intellects are dampened by constant stimulation and hedonistic pleasures. The desire for deep spiritual and emotional meaning is replaced with faith in the government and societal structure and rules.  

Thomas Wright

 Taken from Public Domain Review:

“I own I can never look upon the Stars without wondering why the whole World does not become Astronomers”. So admits Thomas Wright in An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750). Written in the form of nine letters to a nameless friend, the book puts forwards “my Theory of the Universe, and the Ideas I have form’d of the known Creation.”

In a manuscript sequel to An Original Theory, he proposed “that the sky was solid and studied with inward-pointing volcanoes down whose shafts we see the stars”.

The thirty-two “graven and mezzotinto” plates found at the end of An Original Theory — printed “by the Best Masters” and likely based on Wright's drawings — reveal his remarkable range of vision.