from "zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance"

[butter_fly_]

"Phaedrus remembered a line from Thoreau: 'You never gain something but that you lose something.' And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena

Comments

[cranbonite]

Actually, "virtue" is an equally good, if not better translation for the Greek "arete" than is excellence...I've always been taught that it means "goodness" or "virtue" first and foremost.

A lot IS caught up in translation. It's amazing how we build philosophies and meanings around texts that only a carefully educated few can read, and believe in and depend on them for our understanding. Even more striking is how many of those which we depend on have been dead for centuries...