The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
Interpretation
Delusion prevents us from experiencing true pleasure, more than any pain could.
This quote by Stephen Greenblatt emphasizes that the ability to enjoy life and find happiness is often hindered not by external hardships or pain, but rather by our misconceptions and misunderstandings—our delusions. It suggests that recognizing and confronting these delusions is essential for achieving true pleasure and satisfaction in life.
In practice
This quote could be used in a talk about mental health to illustrate how self-deception prevents happiness.
I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough.
What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.
What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off.
The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.
Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.
Violence among young people is an aspect of their desire to create. They don't know how to use their energy creatively so they do the opposite and destroy.
I don't let go of concepts -I meet them with understanding. Then they let go of me.
There is one grand lie - that we are limited. The only limits we have are the limits we believe.
There were many terrible things in my life and most of them never happened.
We believe that salvation is to be found in wholesome work in a beloved land. Work will provide our people with the bread of tomorrow, and moreover, with the honor of the tomorrow, the freedom of the tomorrow.
I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.
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