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.
An active mind cannot exist in an inactive body.
I don't care whether the people believe me to be a prophet, seer, or revelator or not - I have been very profitable to this people, and I have seen a good many things, and I have revealed many things.
. . .There are moments when time does stop. We must be alert enough to notice such moments . . .
I think judicial temperament is a willingness to step back from your own committed views of the correct jurisprudential approach and evaluate those views in terms of your role as a judge. It's the difference between being a judge and being a law professor.
How do I control my emotions? How do I stop getting angry so often, or how do I stop being sad? And I think there's a really important distinction to understand is that you can't completely control your emotions. What you control is your reaction to your own emotions. And a lot of people don't ever make that separation for what goes on with them.
...to many it is not knowledge but the quest for knowledge that gives greater interest to thought-to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
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