Perrault, writing towards the end of the seventeenth century, says it is a great pity that Homer allows his heroes to be too familiar with swineherds. He does not, I suppose, wish to deny that perhaps Homer’s heroes, or persons from whom he drew his originals, might have been as familiar with swineherds as they are represented as being, but if so, they should not have been. The business of the painter is not simply realistically to reproduce what is there – that is what the Dutch too often do, and this merely populates the world with a number of copies of entities which originally had no need to be there.

Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism

This method of Sainte-Beuve ignores what a very slight degree of self-acquaintance teaches us: that a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices. If we would try to understand that particular self, it is by searching our own bosoms, and trying to reconstruct it there, that we may arrive at it. … In fact, it is the secretions of one’s innermost self, written in solitude and for oneself alone that one gives to the public. What one bestows on private life – in conversation…or in those drawing-room essays that are scarcely more than conversation in print – is the product of a quite superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world.

Marcel Proust, Against Sainte-Beuve

The notion that ‘it all somehow must make sense’, or ‘there is a best decision here’, preserves from despair: the difficulty is how to entertain this consoling notion in a way which is not false. As soon as any idea is a consolation the tendency to falsify it becomes strong: hence the traditional problem of preventing the idea of God from degenerating in the believer’s mind. It is true that the intellect naturally seeks unity; and in the sciences, for instance, the assumption of unity consistently rewards the seeker. But how can this dangerous idea be used in morals? It is useless to ask ‘ordinary language’ for a judgment, since we are dealing with concepts which are not on display in ordinary language or unambiguously tied up to ordinary words. Ordinary language is not a philosopher.

Iris Murdoch, ‘On “God” and ‘Good”‘