Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'teachings' and 'Prerequisite to Dignity of Labour'

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3 ideas

21. Aesthetics / A. Aesthetic Experience / 4. Beauty
We both desire what is beautiful, and want it to remain as it is [Weil]
     Full Idea: Everything beautiful is the object of desire but one desires that it be not otherwise, that it be unchanged, that it be exactly what it is.
     From: Simone Weil (Prerequisite to Dignity of Labour [1941], p.268)
     A reaction: This seems to be mostly true, though I don't think it reveals the essence of beauty. I might love a particular landscape, but want to plant a carefully place tree within it. Or change one or two words in a great poem.
21. Aesthetics / C. Artistic Issues / 7. Art and Morality
Musical performance can reveal a range of virtues [Damon of Ath.]
     Full Idea: In singing and playing the lyre, a boy will be likely to reveal not only courage and moderation, but also justice.
     From: Damon (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B4), quoted by (who?) - where?
29. Religion / C. Spiritual Disciplines / 3. Buddhism
Nagarjuna and others pronounced the world of experience to be an illusion [Nagarjuna, by Armstrong,K]
     Full Idea: Many later Buddhists (after Nagarjuna, c.120 CE) developed a belief that everything we experience is an illusion: in the West we would call them idealists.
     From: report of Nagarjuna (teachings [c.120]) by Karen Armstrong - A History of God Ch.3
     A reaction: This is just one step beyond Plato (who at least hung onto the immediate world as an inferior reality), and is presumably intended to motivate meditators to break out of the misery of existence into a higher realm. Personally I am against it.