Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Some aphorisms I found worthwhile, originally penned by the polymathic autodidact and political theoretician Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913-1994)

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"To have opinions is the best way to escape the obligation of thinking."

"To refuse to wonder is the mark of the beast."

"To be civilized is to be able to criticize what we believe without ceasing to believe in it."

"Every solution seems trivial to the one who does not understand the problem."

"There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures."

"The genuine reader is the one who reads for pleasure the books that others only study."

"All literature is contemporary to the reader who knows how to read."

"Politics is the pastime of empty souls."

"Modern persons believe that they live in a plurality of opinions, whereas in
fact what reigns today is an asphyxiating unanimity."

"An individual declares himself a member of some group or other with the goal of demanding in its name what he is ashamed to claim in his own name."

"The number of votes which elect a ruler is not a measure of his legitimacy but of his mediocrity."

"Nowadays public opinion is not the sum of private opinions. On the contrary, private opinions are an echo of public opinion."

"Modern man does not love, but seeks refuge in love; does not hope, but seeks refuge in hope; does not believe, but seeks refuge in a dogma."

"Contrary to the modernist prejudice, the perfect adaptation of an object to its use has to always be paid for by the absence of style."

"Adaptation to the modern world requires sclerosis of sensibility and degradation of character. "

"Truth is so subtle that it never inspires as much confidence as an erroneous thesis."

"Ideas of the left give birth to revolutions. Revolutions give birth to ideas of the right."

"The function of revolutions is to destroy the illusions that created them."

"Contemporary political ideologies are false in what they affirm and true in what they deny."

"The difference between "organic" and "mechanical" in social matters is a moral one: the "organic" is the result of innumerable humble acts; the
"mechanical" is the result of one decisive act of arrogance."

"In augmenting its power, humanity is multiplying its own servitudes."

"No public cause deserves the unlimited allegiance of an intelligent man."

"The wealthy man's sin isn't his wealth but the importance he attaches to it."

"The modernist thirst for originality makes the mediocre artist believe that the secret of originality consists simply in being different."

"If philosophy does not resolve any scientific problem, science, in its turn, does not resolve any philosophical problem."

"Replacing the concrete sensory perception of an object with its abstract intellectual construction gains the world for man, but loses his soul."

"In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn't know."

"Truths are not relative. What are relative are opinions about truth."

"Philosophy's aim is not to paint new objects but to give their true color to familiar objects."

"Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal."

http://www.mmisi.org/ma/52_01/davila.pdf