Beliefs
Monfreid was far from a calculating merchant. Indeed, he affirmed himself to be "sick and disgusted with businessmen... who ruin with impunity the poor innocents who believe in the value of justice, honesty, integrity and conscience." Yet there was nothing more he feared than "to be obliged to accept the slavery of some dreary job and become a domestic animal." His business dealings were little more than a means for Monfreid to follow his star through the African skies and seas. He fully acknowledged his naïvete in the realm of business and trusted most in his intuition and Providence to sustain him on his precarious course.
Above all, Monfreid loved to be engaged in struggle with the elements: while navigating his way through tempests at sea, his life and the lives of his crew hanging by a thread, existence itself became something pure and precious. He longed only to be with "the sea, the wind, the virgin sand of the desert, the infinity of far-off skies in which wheel the numberless hosts of the skies... and the dream that I became one with them." The works of humanity held little sway for him compared to the majesty of nature itself. The desert taught him about the futility of ambition and when he finally beheld the Pyramids he couldn't wait to leave: "The only thing that one might possibly admire is the stupendous effort it took to build them, and this admiration demands the mentality of a German tourist."
Read more about this topic: Henry De Monfreid
Famous quotes containing the word beliefs:
“It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“To a first approximation, the intentional strategy consists of treating the object whose behavior you want to predict as a rational agent with beliefs and desires and other mental states exhibiting what Brentano and others call intentionality.”
—Daniel Clement Dennett (b. 1942)