When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.
Edith HamiltonRead
When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that isolating one's thoughts and ignoring reality leads to disorder and confusion.
Edith Hamiltonβs quote emphasizes the importance of grounding our thoughts in factual reality. When individuals allow their minds to disconnect from tangible facts and withdraw into a subjective state, it often results in disorderly thinking and chaos, highlighting the necessity of maintaining a balance between introspection and external knowledge.
In practice
In a debate on mental health, someone might quote this to stress the importance of facing reality.
When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.
The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.
Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.
To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful ... was a mark of the Greek spirit.
Responsibility is the price every man must pay for freedom.
So far, we do not seem appalled at the prospect of exactly the same kind of education being applied to all the school children from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but there is an uneasiness in the air, a realization that the individual is growing less easy to find; an idea, perhaps, of what standardization might become when the units are not machines, but human beings.
If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to bind, imprison and destroy.
We reap what we sow. We are the makers of our own fate. None else has the blame, none has the praise.
The sleeping fox catches no poultry.
Rid of craving and without clinging, an expert in the study of texts, and understanding the right sequence of the words, he may indeed be called "In his last body", "Great in wisdom" and a "Great man."
People may refuse to see the truth of our arguments, but they cannot evade the evidence of a holy life.
My thing is this; if I'm sick enough to think it, then I'm sick enough to say it.
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