Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Perspectives on Ideas February 28, 2007

Athens
177 The idea of the Athenian state was a union of individuals free to develop their own powers and live in their own way, obedient only to the laws they passed themselves and could criticize and change at will. E. Hamilton. The Greek Way.

191 He [Xenophon] was truly a man of his times, when poets and dramatists and historians were soldiers and generals and explorers. E. Hamilton. The Greek Way.

274 ...Delphi, the shrine of Apollo the most Greek of all the gods, the artist-god, the poet and musician, who ever brought fair order and harmony out of confusion, who stood for moderation and sobriety, upon whose temple was graven the great Delphic saying, ‘Nothing in excess.’ E. Hamilton. The Greek Way.

xv …he [Euripides] lived in an age of startling discovery and invention and, in particular, an age of questioning during which all established notions of thought and behavior came in for examination and criticism. Warner, Euripides.

316 They [the Greeks] saw what is permanently important in man and unites him to the rest. E. Hamilton. The Greek Way.

26 To be merely an athlete is to be nearly a savage.... Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato.

Attic
121 The attic was the attic of Victorian fiction…pleasant with beams of late light slanting in on piles and piles of magazines…and several dozen scrap books…and photograph books and albums and “baby books” and great envelopes of unfiled items. F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing.

Attitude
66 The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims. Emerson, The American Scholar.

265 Erich Frank: “History and the world do not change, but man’s attitude to the world changes.” Eiseley, The Star Thrower

Author
1165 [Of Goethe]: …the poet of prose, and not of poetry. Emerson, Uncollected Prose.

Authority
426 Astonished at the greatness of an affair, I once learned from those who carried it out their motives and their management of it; I found nothing in them but very commonplace ideas. Montaigne, Selected Essays.

722 Some of the animals were drowned, some, too, of the men; the rest struggled to swim on and reach the opposite bank; and though there was a ford only about a quarter of a mile away they were proud to be swimming and drowning in the river under the eyes of the man [the emperor Napoleon] who sat on the log and was not even looking at what they were doing…occasionally casting a glance of displeasure at the drowning Uhlans who distracted his thoughts. Tolstoi, War and Peace.

Automation
822 Machinery has been applied to all work, and carried to such perfection, that little is left for the men but to mind the engines and feed the furnaces. Emerson, English Traits.

Autumn
84 Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn…. Austen, Persuasion.
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85 The sweet scenes of autumn were for a while put by—unless some tender sonnet, fraught with the apt analogy of the declining year, with declining happiness and the images of youth and hope, and spring, all gone together…. Austen, Persuasion.
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100 Autumn: …doesn't the sun seem a bit thin in the afternoon compared even to last week? Browning, Notes from Turtle Creek.

Axiom
275 Lincoln: “Let us have faith that right makes might….” Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years.

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