The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
Thorstein VeblenRead
The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man's moral nature.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that a strong obsession with sports reflects an immaturity in moral development.
Thorstein Veblen implies that when individuals become excessively invested in sports, it signifies a stagnation in their ethical growth. Instead of nurturing deeper moral values, the fixation on athletic competition can divert attention from more profound societal issues, indicating a level of developmental delay in understanding and engaging with the complexities of human nature.
In practice
Discussing the impact of sports culture in a school assembly.
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.
In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth.
With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper.
The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods.
In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.
Charity feeds the poor, so does pride; charity builds an hospital, so does pride. In this they differ: charity gives her glory to God; pride takes her glory from man.
On the other hand, the concept owes its meaning and its justification exclusively to the totality of the sense impressions which we associate with it.
People know things and have a remarkable capacity to act in their individual immediate interests all the time.
It seems that the whole world is beginning to decay, and that its putrefaction has chosen to spread outward from here, from the land of the Pashtuns, where desertification proceeds at a steady, implacable crawl even in the consciences and intellects of men.
A total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature can alone lift humanity beyond itself. . . It is only the full emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental Supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.