Russell Adler Quotes

I found Shanghai to be the very essence of the Surrealist doctrine: If the world is mad, then the maddest man is the most sane." - Damian Adler

we must not forget that the restful experience of enjoyable beauty is not limited to the contemplation of sensible objects. We can experience it as well in the contemplation of purely intelligible objects—the contemplation of truths we understand. “Mathematics,” wrote Bertrand Russell, “rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere … without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music …” Or, as the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in the opening line of her sonnet on Euclid, “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.

Books that were pillars of our parents’ culture, the Chilean little bourgeoisie of the 30s-40s-50s: The Revolt of the Masses (Ortega), Tragic Sense of Life (Unamuno), The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck), The Importance of Living (Lin Yutang), Grand Hotel (Vicki Baum), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Voyage of the Beagle (Darwin), Gog (Papini), Why I Am Not a Christian (Russell), The Mediocre Man (Ingenieros), Broad and Alien is the World (Ciro Alegría), The World of Yesterday (S. Zweig), The Life of Jesus (Renan), Napoléon (Emil Ludwig), The Goose Man (Wassermann), The Prophet (Gibran), The inferiority complex (Adler), Civilization and its Discontents (Freud), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), The Human Beast (Zola), The Lily of the Valley (Balzac), Representative Men (Emerson), Modern Medical Counselor (?), How Green Was my Valley (Llewellyn), The Foxes of Harrow (Yerby), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), Amiel’s Journal (Amiel), The Story of San Michele (Munthe), Maxims and Morals from Dr. Franklin (Franklin), The Kon-Tiki Expedition (Heyerdahl), My Life (many), Desolation (Mistral), The Old Man and the Sea, Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), Letter from an Unknown Woman (Zweig), The City and the Mountains (Eça de Queirós), All Quiet on the Western Front (E. M. Remarque), Encyclopedia Britannica, Enciclopedia Espasa, The Treasure Book of Youth, La tournée de Dios (Jardiel Poncela), Don Juan (Zorrilla), La Tía Pepa (cook book), Almanaque 18, The Magic Mountain (Mann), The Unloved Woman (Benavente). To be continued.