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A review by kyscg
From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life by Jacques Barzun
challenging
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
3.0
Very comprehensive, very illuminating, took me a long time to finish. I collected a bunch of quotes that I really enjoyed reading...
"Perform the acts of faith and faith will come", by Ignatius of Loyola
"Science has cut Man down to size and broken his pride: Copernicus removed him from the center of the universe; Darwin reduced him to the status of animal; and Jung dethroned his intellect and put instinct in its place"
"The importance attached to Time in the West is a distinctive trait: Swift’s Gulliver looks at his watch so often that his hosts the Brobdingnagians think he is consulting his god"
"As Goethe’s Faust says at the start of his adventure, ‘In the beginning was not the Word, but the Act.’ The Word—an abstraction—comes after"
"Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson rank with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and it is hard to think of a third partnership of equal renown. Indeed, in a fundamental sense they are the same pair, bent on a similar quest but in a different costume, 300 years apart"
"Finding oneself is a misnomer. A self is not found but made"
"Perform the acts of faith and faith will come", by Ignatius of Loyola
"Science has cut Man down to size and broken his pride: Copernicus removed him from the center of the universe; Darwin reduced him to the status of animal; and Jung dethroned his intellect and put instinct in its place"
"The importance attached to Time in the West is a distinctive trait: Swift’s Gulliver looks at his watch so often that his hosts the Brobdingnagians think he is consulting his god"
"As Goethe’s Faust says at the start of his adventure, ‘In the beginning was not the Word, but the Act.’ The Word—an abstraction—comes after"
"Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson rank with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and it is hard to think of a third partnership of equal renown. Indeed, in a fundamental sense they are the same pair, bent on a similar quest but in a different costume, 300 years apart"
"Finding oneself is a misnomer. A self is not found but made"