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I can't understand why most people believe in medicine and don't believe in art, without questioning either.

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Julien Benda

The modern moralists extol. . . the cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life.

Activity, Cult, Defiance, Modern
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Peace is only possible if men cease to place their happiness in the possession of things "which cannot be shared," and if they raise themselves to a point where they adopt an abstract principle superior to their egotisms. In other words, it can only be obtained by a betterment of human morality.

Men, Morality, Possession, Principles, Raise, Words

Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind. In this sense the most insignificant writer can serve peace, where the most powerful tribunals can do nothing.

Mind, Powerful, Sense, Serve, Tribunals, War

Philosophy, which formerly raised man to feel conscious of himself because he was a thinking being and to say, 'I think therefore I am," now raises him to say. . . "I think, therefore I am not," (unless he takes thought into consideration only in that humble region where it is confused with action).

Confused, Humble, Man, Philosophy, Raised, Region

The true clerc is Vauvenargues, Lamarck, Fresnel,. . . Spinoza, Schiller, Baudelaire, César Franck, who were never diverted from single-hearted adoration of the beautiful and the divine by the necessity of earning their daily bread. But such clercs are inevitably rare. . . . The rule is that the living creature condemned to struggle for life turns to practical passions, and thence to the sanctifying of those passions.

Beautiful, Creature, Passion, Rule, Schiller, Struggle

Since the Greeks the predominant attitude of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as (like aesthetic activity) it finds its satisfaction in itself, apart from any attention to the advantages it may procure. Most thinkers would have agreed with. . . Renan's verdict that the man who loves science for its fruits commits the worst of blasphemies against that divinity. . . . The modern clercs have violently torn up this charter. They proclaim the intellectual functions are only respectable to the extent that they are bound up with the pursuit of concrete advantage.

Attitude, Glorify, Greek, Intellectual, Men, Towards
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