The ascetic is often a sensualist who has reached the limit of his capacity.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that those who seek asceticism may be driven by an intense experience of pleasure.
Jacques Barzun highlights the paradoxical relationship between asceticism and sensuality, indicating that an ascetic—someone who renounces worldly pleasures—may actually be a sensualist who has experienced such pleasures deeply. This implies that the commitment to abstaining from indulgence stems not from an absence of desire, but rather from having reached the limits of enjoyment where further sensual experiences no longer hold value.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion on the nature of desire and self-denial.
Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
Machines are admirable and tyrannize only with the user's consent. Where, then, is the enemy? Not where the machine gives relief from drudgery but where human judgment abdicates. The smoothest machine-made product of the age is the organization man, for even the best organizing principle tends to corrupt, and the mechanical principle corrupts absolutely.
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
I can only think that the book is read because it deals with the difficulties of schooling, which do not change. Please note: the difficulties, not the problems. Problems are solved or disappear with the revolving times. Difficulities remain. It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and start one's education or anothers.
Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated, will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though never said, that uttering nonsense and half-truth without cease ends by destroying Intellect
The hallmark of our age is the tension between aspirations and sluggish institutions.
Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.
People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
The tragic reality of today is reflected in the true plight of our spiritual existence. We are spineless and cannot stand straight.
It seems to me that terrestrial beings, as they become more autonomous, psychologically richer, shut themselves up in a way against one another, and at the same time gradually become strangers to the cosmic environment and currents, impenetrable to one another, and incapable of exteriorizing themselves.
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.