Denham Sutcliffe Quotes

Do you think that romantic love is natural; that the life of trade is honorable; that freedom of worship is desirable? Very likely you think none of those things; you have uncritically absorbed them, and only since you came to college begun to learn that they are al comparatively recent and local notions, the products of past conflicts and choices. As the hand of the dyer is tinged by what it works in, so your tastes, ambitions, and values take their quality from a context that was created for you before you were born.

Our professional competence and pride should rest not alone in our possession of knowledge but as well in our ability to communicate it. Of course we shall carry on our research, and of course we shall applaud the colleague who 'produces,' but we shan't be happy if he offers that as a substitute for inspiring young people with a desire for knowledge, a sense of taste, and a regard for virtue.

The truth is that our enjoyments and our evaluations, like our trades, are learned; intensive knowledge, as well as extensive, is acquired. We learn how to value possessions as well as how to make them; our passions, our disgusts, and our ambitions are learned. Just as we have evolved ways of transmuting physical elements from one to another, so we have evolved ways of transmuting experience into meaning.

But it seems to me inevitable that any person who gives thoughtful and imaginative attention to literature must be awakened in his sensibilities, enlarged in his sympathies, sharpened in his critical faculties.

We want not only life but an intense awareness of being alive. The large tendency of our mechanical and standardized civilization is to blunt that awareness by surrounding us with ideas and forms that require the lowest degree of consciousness. One lives in it less by reflection than by reflex. The effect of the uniform blows with which the environment strikes us is to make us insensitive to any but the most violent stimuli; two-thirds of life ceases to exist for us because the valves of attention require cataclysmic upheavals before they will open. Lacking the capacity to be excited by any but the most gross and violent stimuli, we spend our lives in a frantic race with boredom.