“The house must be the case of life, the happiness machine” The architect, urban planner, painter and sculptor Le Corbusier, one of the leading figures of the avant-garde of the 20th century, did not hide his admiration for Gaudí’s work, which he knew on his visit...
Socrates was punished by his society. People like Socrates are bound to be punished, because they are individuals and they don’t allow anybody to dominate them. He was given poison. He was lying in the bed and the man who was going to give him poison...
The path of certainty never leads to glory! The history has recorded that a knight errant, in company with a friend sought his fortune in a romantic country. He had not traveled far when his companion observed a post, on which was written the following...
WHAT DO WE THINK about when we think about football? Football is about so many things, so many complex, contradictory and conflicting things: memory, history, place, social class, gender in all its troubled variations (especially masculinity, but increasingly femininity too), family identity, tribal identity, national...
Mill’s response to the second objection to utilitarianism—that it reduces all values to a single scale—also turns out to lean on moral ideals independent of utility. InUtilitarianism (1861), a long essay Mill wrote shortly after On Liberty, he tries to show that utilitarians can distinguish...
There is a beautiful story by Turgenev, The Fool. Once in a town there was a man who was condemned by the whole crowd as the greatest idiot who had ever lived. Obviously he was continuously in difficulty. Whatsoever he would say, people would start laughing,...
Questioner: What is the origin of desire, and how can I get rid of it? Krishnamurti: It is a young man who is asking this question; and why should he get rid of desire? Do you understand? He is a young man, full of life, vitality;...
George Gurdjieff used to tell a story: A magician deep in the mountains had many sheep, and to avoid servants and to avoid looking after the sheep and going in search of them every day when they were lost in the forest, he hypnotized all the...
When you comb your hair, when you put on clean clothes and make yourself look nice, that is all part of your desire to be happy, is it not? When you pass your examinations and add a few letters of the alphabet after your name,...
DOORWAY TO HEAVEN Imagine a prisoner in a cell with heavy bars, in a prison with high walls, with armed guards everywhere. But this is a most unusual prison. The cell door is always unlocked, as is the prison gate, and the guards are there to...
