Great Throughts Treasury

"Idealism tends to absorb all of objective reality into a system made up solely of experience… Sooner or later the idealist has to admit that his experience touches something beyond its own content."

"Human existence has no such simple and direct meaning or goodness as the humanistic American dream... A comfortable chair, a hi-fi set, a pwoerful car, the protection of a deoderant, a college romance and a paying job, cannot even in combination provide meaning for our life."

"Art has a prophetic role, denouncing the culture it lays bare. "

"If we use our waning preponderance of power in a fit of anxiety, pride, and the lust to remain dominant and secure, we shall only bring down ourselves, our world, and the noble house of our traditional cultural life more quickly."

"Art pierces opaque subjectivity, the not seeing of conventional life, and discloses reality. "

"Persons are thinking and reflective as well as merely existing beings. They have unanswered puzzles in their minds as well as unrelieved estrangement in their souls. They have skeptical doubts about the truth they possess as well as despair about the meaning of life that is theirs. They are curious about intellectual answers as well as hungry for a new mode of being or existing. And clearly these two levels, the existential and the intellectual-reflective, are interacting and interrelated all the time."