What are kings, when regiment is gone, but perfect shadows in a sunshine day?
Christopher MarloweRead
I am Envy...I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.
Interpretation
The quote personifies envy as a destructive force that cannot appreciate knowledge and seeks to eliminate it.
In this quote, Christopher Marlowe gives voice to Envy, suggesting that it is a consuming emotion that hates knowledge and understanding. It implies that those who feel envy may not be able to embrace what they cannot comprehend, resulting in a desire to destroy the source of their frustration, which in this case, is represented through books and knowledge.
In practice
This quote could be used in a philosophical discussion about emotions and their consequences.
What are kings, when regiment is gone, but perfect shadows in a sunshine day?
Till swollen with cunning, of a self-conceit, His waxen wings did mount above his reach, And, melting, Heavens conspir'd his overthrow.
Our swords shall play the orators for us.
I'm armed with more than complete steel, - The justice of my quarrel.
Ah fair Zenocrate, divine Zenocrate, Fair is too foul an epithet for thee.
Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.
What is more absurd and more impious than to attribute the name of Lucifer to the devil, that is, to personified evil. The intellectual Lucifer is the spirit of intelligence and love; it is the paraclete, it is the Holy Spirit, while the physical Lucifer is the great agent of universal magnetism.
The modern believer is not suspicious enough, which is perhaps why when they try to construct arguments in their defence, the convictions are left doing all the work and reason, debilitated by neglect, weakly fails to prop them up.
It was when I was the age where you can, as they say, "hear voices" without worrying that something is wrong with you. I "heard voices" all the time as a small child.
Moral justification is a powerful disengagement mechanism. Destructive conduct is made personally and socially acceptable by portraying it in the service of moral ends. This is why most appeals against violent means usually fall on deaf ears.
Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often loses himself.
Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomized life as a voracious appetite, and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance, merciless, planless, endless.
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