Suspicious minds
Wittgenstein on Shakespeare

Hmph. High time I restarted this damn thing, I suppose. This popped up in my inbox, thought it was interesting, though I'm not quite sure why:

It is remarkable how hard we find it to believe something that we do not see the truth of for ourselves. When, for instance, I hear the expression of admiration for Shakespeare by distinguished men in the course of several centuries, I can never rid myself of the suspicion that praising him has been the conventional thing to do; though I have to tell myself that this is not how it is...

But I don't of course mean by this that I don't believe an enormous amount of praise to have been, and still to be, lavished on Shakespeare without understanding and for the wrong reasons by a thousand professors of literature.

... from Ludwig Wittgenstein's notebooks