Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Perspectives on Ideas February 21, 2007

Anecdotes
609 …the President used stories as a laugh cure for a drooping friend or for his own melancholy, yet also to clinch an argument, to lay bare a fallacy, to disarm an antagonist…. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.

Angels and Saints
1110 His [Fra Angelico’s] angels look as if they had never taken a flight out of heaven; and his Saints seem to have been born saints, and always to have lived so. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun.

Anger
29 John Hersey: Humorless anger is dead anger…. Hull, ed. The Writer’s Book.

516 Not only does anger cause confusion…this fire benumbs and consumes…strength. Montaigne, Selected Essays.

155 Achilles: …let strife and rancor/ perish from the lives of gods and men,/ with anger that envenoms even the wise/ and is far sweeter than slow-dripping honey,/ clouding the hearts of men like smoke. Homer, Iliad.

137 Antigone: …realize how catastrophic anger brings catastrophe. Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus.

Animals
25 In a world older and more complete than ours they [animals] move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. Henry Beston, The Outermost House.
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25 [Animals] are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travails of the earth. Henry Beston, The Outermost House.
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50 The survivors of the winter passed over the disintegrating cardinal…no function of memory or instinct recalled his life. Russell, Watchers at the Pond.

95 The hunters could easily misjudge the dynamic instinct to live of their defenseless prey.
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11 Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. L. Thomas, Lives of a Cell.
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49 Albert Schweitzer: Precisely because the animal has, by serving in the realm of experimentation, made it possible for such precious information to be obtained for suffering humanity--but at the cost of its pain--a new bond of solidarity has been created between the animal and us. Anderson, The Schweitzer Album.

174 Albert Schweitzer: Has any man so far been able to create a fly? Anderson, The Schweitzer Album.

114 The worm gulped down the rotifer, and the frog swallowed the worm; the kingfisher killed the frog, and the hunt passed endlessly from creature to creature. Russell, Watchers at the Pond.

14 Herring and other fish in schools are at times so closely integrated, their actions so coordinated, that they seem to be functionally a great multi-fish organism. L. Thomas, Lives of a Cell.

174 Albert Schweitzer: The poor fly...knows anxiety, it knows hope for happiness, it knows fear of not existing any more. Anderson, The Schweitzer Album.

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