Michael Oakshott Quotes

... the intellect, everywhere invasive, shows everywhere its shallowing effect.

You can live your whole life in your brain and not experience what's around you. You go crazy that way.

As long as a society's best minds were occupied by theological questions, it was possible to speak of a given religion as the way of thinking of the whole social organism. All the matters which most actively concerned the people were referred to it and discussed in its terms. But that belongs to a dying era. We have come by easy stages to a lack of a common system of thought that could unite the peasant cutting his hay, the student poring over formal logic, and the mechanic working in an automobile factory. Out of this lack arises the painful sense of detachment or abstraction that oppresses the "creators of culture."

Everything solid was first an idea.

Intellect is neither practical nor impractical; it is extra-practical.

If you don't generalize you don't philosophize.

Age certainly hadn't conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russian writers have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.

It is interesting to observe how real the object remains, in spite of all abstractions.

Thinking is the most overrated human activity.

I lived too much in my head instead of the real world.

The best way to kill a good thing is question it to death.

If the Creator were to bestow a new set of senses upon us, or slightly remodel the present ones, leaving all the rest of nature unchanged, we should never doubt we were in another world, and so in strict reality we should be, just as if all the world besides our senses were changed.

Give me lust, baby. Flash. Give me malice. Flash. Give me detached existentialist ennui. Flash. Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism. Flash.

Sometimes people use thought to not participate in life.

How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound.

The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory.

Perfect sincerity, holiness, gigantic intellect, and all-conquering will. Let only a handful of men work with these, and the whole world will be revolutionized.

This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.

Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.

I perceive a necessary gap between seeing and being. I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things - things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way to pay the price for saying or seeing things.

Reaction is what changes your understanding of the world.

Once innocence--an all too-brief state of being, if such a one exists--encounters experience, it is transformed. If that transformation is understood, it becomes knowledge. And if that knowledge is employed, then it becomes wisdom.

Four years and everything was the same, except me.

I thought using three cameras was a lot better than one, because you could see where you were going, where you'd been, and all kinds of things - more like life. I think photography has colored our vision. We're now in an area where it might break something. I think this is a time. I feel it. I don't know whether I'll be here long enough to experience it. I've no plans to leave yet.

It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.