Julien Benda - Passions Quotes

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The true clerc is Vauvenargues, Lamarck, Fresnel, … Spinoza, Schiller, Baudelaire, César Franck, who were never diverted from single-hearted adoration of the beautiful and the divine by the necessity of earning their daily bread. But such clercs are inevitably rare. … The rule is that the living creature condemned to struggle for life turns to practical passions, and thence to the sanctifying of those passions.

Julien Benda

Teachers … preach the superiority of the intelligence ; but they preach it because in their opinion it is the intelligence which shows us the actions required for our interests, i. e. from exactly the same passion for the practical.

Julien Benda

One of the principle causes is that the modern world has made the clerc into a citizen, subject to all the responsibilities of a citizen, and consequently to despise lay passions is far more difficult for him than for his predecessors.

Julien Benda