Perspectives on Ideas. April 26, 2007

Desires
Desire, fulfillment 323 Schopenhauer : Desire is infinite, fulfillment is limited. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Schopenhauer.

Desire, fulfillment 323 Schopenhauer : …fulfillment never satisfies. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Schopenhauer.

Desire, fulfillment 323 Schopenhauer : Each individual bears within himself a disruptive contradiction; the realized desire develops a new desire, and so on endlessly. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Schopenhauer.

Desires 72 …certainly, the mistakes that we male and female animals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it. George Eliot, Middlemarch.

Despair
Despair 267 Hester: There is no path to guide us out of this dismal maze. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter.

Destiny
Destiny 385 I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine. Emerson, The Over-Soul.

Destiny 1349 …so every individual bears within himself his own aims and yet bears them so as to serve a general purpose unfathomable by man. Tolstoi, War and Peace

Devil
Devil 53 It will be seen...that for all the devil’s inventiveness, the scheme remained daily the same: first he would tempt me--and then thwart me, leaving me with a dull pain in the very root of my being. Nabokov, Lolita.

Devil 216 I think if the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

Devotion
Devotion 15 All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives. Hoffer, The True Believer

Dialogue
Dialogue 246 Interviewers: Do you try to write a poetic prose? N. Algren: No, I’m not writing it, but so many people say things poetically, they say it for you in a way you never could. Cowley, ed., Writers at Work.

Dickens
Dickens 317 Dickens: ...fairy tales...told as though they were sagas of social realism. Bloom, Western Canon.

Dickens x …the eyes which observed the tragedy and comedy of life in such vivid detail; which saw and recorded brutality and pathos, courage and despair, and all the innumerable absurdities of human behavior. Intro. by Thea Holme. Dickens, Sketches by Boz.

Diplomacy
Diplomacy 326 Second Athenian: This is the advice I’d give the Athenians--/ See our ambassadors are always drunk/ For when we visit Sparta sober, then/ We’re on the alert for trickery all the while/ So that we miss half of the things they say/ And misinterpret things that were never said,/ And then report the muddle back to Athens. Aristophanes, Lysistrata.

Diplomats 382 ...empty bundles of good manners. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days

Discipline
Discipline 225 [Johnson on the popularity of monastic life]: Man will submit to any rule, by which they may be exempted from the tyranny of caprice and of chance…are glad to supply by external authority their own want of constancy and resolution, and court the government of others, when long experience has convinced them of their own inability to govern themselves. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.

Discipline 434 Johnson: The master who punishes not only consults the future happiness of him who is the immediate subject of correction, but he propagates obedience through the whole school; and establishes regularity by exemplary justice. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.

Discipline 436 Johnson: It [severity] is the way to govern them [schoolboys]…[but] I know not whether it be the way to mend them. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.

Discipline 564 Johnson: The objection in which is urged the injustice of making the innocent suffer with the guilty, is an objection…against society…[since] all societies, great and small, subsist upon this condition: that as the individuals derive advantages from union, they may likewise suffer inconveniences. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.

Discipline 589 Johnson: There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.

Discipline 75 Joseph Heller: There’s an essay of T.S. Eliot’s in which he praises the disciplines of writing, claiming that if one is forced to write within a certain framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its richest ideas. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook