BeaconRay's Books Philosophy and Religion Shelf

EINSTEIN ON CLASSIC LITERATURE: "Somebody who reads only newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an exremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent upon the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous. There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good tatse within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of mankind. We owe it to a few writers of antiquity that the people of the Middle Ages could slowly extricate themselves from the superstitions and ignorance that had darkened life for more than half a millenium. Nothing is more needed to overcome the modernist's snobbishness."-- Ideas and Opinions

This is a great book with a lot of cool stories told by Feyman himself-- read this before you read any of his other biographies!

"Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on." It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. . . It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations."-- R.P. Feynman

"Eliot distrusted the new elite, recruited from the mob of the spiritually impoverished. Trained at uniform state schools in the new orthodoxies of secular collectivism, arrogant with the presumption of those who rule without the restraining influences of tradition and reverence and family honor, such an elite must be no more than an administrative corps; they cannot become the guardians of culture. . .The elites, in consequence, will consist solely of individuals whose only common bond will be their professional interest; with no social cohhesion, with no social continuity. . .No high culture is conceivable in a society dominated by this arid caste of officialdom."-- Russel Kirk

"No less than politicians do, great poets move nations, even though the generality of men may not know the poet's name."-- Russel Kirk

First broadcast as informal radio "talks" and later published as three separate books, The Case for Christianity, Christian Behaviour, and Beyond Personality are presented together in Mere Christianity. In his remarkably direct and accessible style, the renowned Christian apologist shows how the power of Christianity manifests itself-- not in any single denomination but as "mere" Christianity, a total force. For Lewis sets out to prove only that "in the center of each there is something, or a Someone, who against all divergencies of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice."

The Dialogues of Plato (427-347 B.C.) rank with the writings of Aristotle as the most important and influential works in Western Thought. In them Plato cast his teacher Socrates as the central disputant in colloquies that brilliantly probe a vast spectrum of philsophical ideas and issues.
In Euthyphro, Socrates explores the concepts and aims of piety and religion; in Apology, he courageously defends the integrity of his teachings; in Crito, he demonstrates his deep respect for the law of the land in his refusal to flee his death sentence; and in Phaedo he embraces death and discusses the immortality of the soul. All these dialogues are marked by Socrates perpetual search for the Truth. The four dialogues are presented here in the authoritative translation by the distinguished classical scholar Benjamin Jowett, renowned for his translations of Plato.

"In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with the truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident Thoreau said the works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only the great poets can read them. But the great works have been felt by mankind."-- Thoreau on Great Literature.