Might be why he lives in Omaha..........

 Wall Street’s love affair with this hocus-pocus intensified as the 1960s rolled by. The Street’s denizens are always ready to suspend disbelief when dubious maneuvers are used to manufacture rising per-share earnings, particularly if these acrobatics produce mergers that generate huge fees for investment bankers. Auditors willingly sprinkled their holy water on the conglomerates’ accounting and sometimes even made suggestions as to how to further juice the numbers. For many, gushers of easy money washed away ethical sensitivities.

-Warren Buffett, from this recent letter

seeks.........................

 Philosophy, as Spinoza understands it, does not peddle in temporary cheer, modest improvements in well-being, or chicken soup for the soul; it seeks and claims to find a basis for happiness that is absolutely certain, permanent, and divine.  The principal—indeed, the sole—purpose of his mature philosophy, as expressed in his masterwork, the Ethics, is to achieve this kind of blessedness or salvation. . . . Like Socrates, Spinoza avers that blessedness comes only from a certain kind of knowledge—specifically, the "knowledge of the union the that mind has with the whole of Nature."

-Matthew Stewart, Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World

Life its ownself.........................

      The ethical vision of our nature gives sense to our lives.  But it is demanding.  It asks us to stand up to judgment.  We must be fully human, while breathing the air of angels; natural and supernatural at once.  A community that has survived its gods has three options.  It can find some secular path to the ethical life.  Or it can fake the higher emotions, while living without them.  Or it can give up pretending, and so collapse, as Burke put it, into the 'dust and powder of individuality'.  These are the stark choices that confront us, and the rest of this book defends the first of them—the way of high culture, which teaches us to live as if our lives mattered eternally.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture