June 19, 2003
A snippet from my world history.
Was playing with the
world history, which I haven't done since I started blogging, and stumbled onto
a selection by Averroes, one of last great philosophers of Moorish Spain. He was exiled from Spain in 1195 and died soon after. These two quotes caught my fancy.
Among the most dangerous of these fictions concerning a future life are those which counsel virtue as a means of arriving at happiness. In that case virtue is no longer worth anything, since one only abstains from voluptuousness in the hope of being doubly repaid in the future. The brave will only seek death to evade a worse evil. The good will only respect the belongings of others in order to acquire twice as much.
Wine is forbidden because it excites wickedness and quarrels; but I am preserved from those excesses by wisdom: I take it only to sharpen my wits.
I really have to work on the history more. I have many more readings I collected years ago, I just haven't transferred them from the old Hypercard stacks to the web. I did write the scripts that would create an entire web site from a stack though, so I could do them all pretty quickly if I got down to it. There are hundreds of them, plus a few dozen complete books. One of these days.
If you go by the history, you'll see in the search area above the readings keywords for each selection. You should be able to click on any word and have it entered in the search box. Let me know if it works for you, it seems to come and go sometimes. Works on some pages and not on others, even though it's all the exact same code.
