Carolina QuotesThe realization that just as no action is really indifferent, so no utterance is without its responsibility introduces, it is true, a certain strenuosity into life.
Richard M. Weaver Carolinian
Source
“The Phaedrus and the Nature of Rhetoric,” p. 24.
- work
- The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953)
- year
- 1953
- locator
- p. 24
Cite this record
“The realization that just as no action is really indifferent…” Richard M. Weaver. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-F7B9CE6845. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/f7b9ce6845
More from Richard M. Weaver
In the popular arena, one can tell … that the average man … imagines that an industrious acquisition of particulars will render him a man of knowledge. With what pathetic trust does he recite his facts! He has been told that knowledge is power, and knowledge consists of a great many small things.
The word is a sort of deliverance from the shifting world of appearances. The central teaching of the New Testament is that those who accept the word acquire wisdom and at the same time some identification with the eternal.
It is characteristic of the barbarian … to insist upon seeing a thing “as it is.” The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.