/lit/ - Literature

Have sex. Just because you read some obscure book written in the 16th century doesn't make you special nor does it make you a good person. You're just an incel freak who wants to complain about the modern world. You want to think you're better than everyone because you read a single book. You want to feel special. Well let me tell you something: you're not special and you're going to be a lonely freak for the rest of your life if you think that reading the classics gives you any value as a person.

>>13093503
You don't have advice so much as you are the walking lips, teeth, and tongue of everything culture has shit down your throat. Spare us your vomit.

Churchill literally started with the Greeks in the way that people here do, after completing their education and realizing it was insufficient.

>>13093486
Abraham Lincoln was also very well-read. I think reading the classics does teach you things that are tough to learn otherwise, how to understand humanity, its history, how predict its future. There’s this book I read a year or so ago, The Road to Character, about all kinds of successful people through history, generals, writers, presidents, etc., and the author tries to draw similarities to figure out how they developed strong character. Classic literature and education was definitely a through-line for a lot of them.

>>13093532
Unironically, five star post

>>13093486
well in order to write good novels you need to like other people (lots)

>>13093503
You’re the weird one suggesting sex will somehow save you, the point of sex is to produce children, and with children you need marriage, and to sustain a marriage you need not be a sex fiend, and so on and so forth.

>>13093486

The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest,
most complete and most nearly continuous record we have
of what the strange creature known as Homo sapiens has been
busy about in virtually every department of spiritual, intellectual and social activity. That record covers nearly twentyfive hundred years in an unbroken stretch of this animated
oddity's operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, logic, politics, botany, zoology, medicine, geography,
theology,—everything, I believe, that lies in the range of
human knowledge or speculation. Hence the mind which
has attentively canvassed this record is much more than a
disciplined mind, it is an experienced mind. It has come, as
Emerson says, into a feeling of immense longevity, and it
instinctively views contemporary man and his doings in the
perspective set by this profound and weighty experience. Our
studies were properly called formative, because beyond all
others their effect was powerfully maturing. Cicero told the
unvarnished truth in saying that those who have no knowledge
of what has gone before them must forever remain children;
and if one wished to characterise the collective mind of this
present period, or indeed of any period,—the use it makes of
its powers of observation, reflection, logical inference,—one
would best do it by the one word immaturity

+

I was much impressed by my learned friend Hendrik Willem van Loon's remark that "a sense of the inevitable" is the
most valuable thing one can get out of one's classical studies.
I have already shown in these pages how steadily from the
very beginning my own studies were directed towards an
intensive cultivation of this sense; and I can never be thankful
enough for the good fortune which brought me that advantage.
In speaking of William the Taciturn, who had "absorbed some
slight admixture of the old Roman and Greek philosophies
with his more formal Christian training," Mr. van Loon shows
how almost automatically this saving sense, when it is well
developed, gets itself applied to every appraisal of mankind's
ways and doings. One may wish they were better and wiser
than they are, but the sense of the inevitable gives warning
that no force of wishing or striving can make them so; and
therefore the less they are meddled with, the better.
It is interesting to see how often the poet's conclusions,
arrived at by the light of this sense, are identical with the
philosopher's. Goethe's sense of the inevitable made his forecast
of mankind's progress identical with Mr. Cram's. "Man will
become more clever and sagacious," said Goethe, "but not
better, happier or showing more resolute wisdom; or at least,
only at periods."

>>13093532
Based reply

>>13093486
>Could there be any place for such an attitude today?
There is always a place for that mindset. Yes. The most successful people think that way and push themselves to be better than mediocre.Take Churchill's example to heart.

>>13093503

This

>>13093532
It's a troll post, but the following should be said:
Reading books might not necessarily make you feel special, but espousing the attitude of "have sex" is likely to make you much LESS special. Reading classics will, at the very least, never hurt you.

>>13093782
it might make you very bored

>>13093486

For you to be great you wild need enough intelligence and willpower to make that intelligence flourish into something worthwhile.

There’s no need for war. Figures like Churchil can’t hold a candle to the likes of Einstein, Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Newton and Michelangelo. Great art and great scientific achievement are the most demanding activities of the human spirit, and for you to achieve greatness in such areas no armed conflict is required.

But of course you will not achieve anything; you can’t even free yourself from the fashion of our era among young people of dreaming with battles and wars and the good old days and all that crap.

>>13093857
>dreaming with battles and wars and the good old days and all that crap
You're describing Churchill. Also Theodore Roosevelt.

>>13093872
also shakespeare (dreaming about the good old days)

>>13093872

I don’t have them as heroes.

>>13093503
This

>>13093486
>do you have a noble goal toward which to apply your readings?
Yes. To aid in the eradication of capitalism and statism.
>I wonder if being great in general is possible anymore,
Don’t fall for the old great man of history gag
>given the lack of grand conflict in the world
You live under a rock, my friend? There’s never been a more dire conflict in history than the one we’re living in right now.

>>13093693
It’s a meme. It means well
>he Implies that sex is a Jewish plot to sap his manly essence