4 Quotes & Sayings By John Chaffee

John Chaffee is a professor of English and director of graduate studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author of The Masks of Narcissus: A Study in Poetic Self-Revelation and Theory and Practice in American Poetry: A Critical Introduction to Major Poets and Their Works. His book on Keats and his work on Romantic poetry, "Romanticism and the Absolute," has been reviewed by the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Times, the Literary Review, Poetry, College English, and elsewhere. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, a Ford Foundation Fellow in Portugal, a Guggenheim Fellow in Italy, a recipient of three grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a recipient of a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, a fellow in Poetry at Emory University, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa Read more

He has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and from Oxford University Press.

1
Dr. Frankl discovered that even under the most inhumane of conditions, one can live a life of purpose and meaning. But for the majority of prisoners at Auschwitz, a meaningful life did not seem possible. Immersed in a world that no longer recognized the value of human life and human dignity, that robbed them of their will and made them objects to be exterminated, most inmates suffered a loss of their values. If a prisoner did not struggle against this spiritual destruction with a determined effort to save his self-respect, he lost his feeling of being an individual, a being with a mind, with inner freedom, and with personal value. His existence descended to the level of animal life, plunging him into a depression so deep that he became incapable of action. No entreaties, no blows, no threats would have any effect on his apathetic paralysis, and he soon died, underscoring the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky's observations: "Without a firm idea of himself and the purpose of his life, man cannot live, and would sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if he was surrounded with bread. . John Chaffee
2
Everybody "thinks" - Homo sapiens means "thinking man" - but most people don't "think" very well. John Chaffee
3
When we expand our thinking, we expand who we are as human beings: the perspective from which we view the world, and the concepts and values we use to guide our choices. John Chaffee