Julien Benda - Practical Quotes

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For M. Maurras the practical is the divine, and his atheism consists less in denying God than in shifting him to man and his political work. … It is the divinizing of politics.

Julien Benda
That teaching according to which intellectual activity is worthy of esteem to the extent that it is practical and to that extent alone.

Julien Benda
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
What these thinkers despise in the man of study is precisely the man who … does not predicate the capture of its environment by the species, or who, if he does predicate it, as the scientist does by his discoveries, retains for himself only the joy of knowledge and abandons the practical exploitation of his discoveries to others.

Julien Benda
Christianity exhorted man to set himself up against Nature, but did so in the name of his spiritual and disinterested attributes. Pragmatism exhorts him to do so in the name of his practical attributes. Formerly man was divine because he had been able to acquire the concept of justice, the idea of law, the sense of God; today he is divine because he has been able to create equipment which makes him the master of matter.

Julien Benda
From his loftiest pulpit the modern clerc assures man that he is great in proportion as he is practical.

Julien Benda
The modern moralists extol … the cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life.

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