Quotes About Strenuousness

the carefully cultivated moral seriousness—strenuousness might be a better word—coexisted with a fantastical, mrs. jellyby–like absurdity. sontag's complicated and charismatic sexuality was part of this comic side of her life. the high-mindedness, the high-handedness, commingled with a love of gossip, drollery, and seductive acting out—and, when she was in a benign and unthreatened mood, a fair amount of ironic self-knowledge.

The vitality of the ordinary members of society is dependent on its Outsiders. Many Outsiders unify themselves, realize themselves as poets or saints. Others remain tragically divided and unproductive, but even they supply soul-energy to society; it is their strenuousness that purifies thought and prevents the bourgeois world from foundering under its own dead-weight; they are society's spiritual dynamos.