Debt
Debt 992 A man in debt is…a slave. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Wealth.
Decision Making
Decision-making 535 JFK: “We see little value in a [UN] resolution which would be primarily a means for a discharge of our emotions, which would be unlikely to be fully implemented and which calls for measures which could be easily evaded….” Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
Decision-making 316 The Iroquois believed that no decision should be made without considering its impact seven generations into the future. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past.
Decisions 983 But in our flowing affairs a decision must be made,--the best, if you can; but any is better than none. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Power.
Decisions 983 [On decision-making]: There are twenty ways of going to a point, and one is the shortest; but set out at once on one. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Power.
Decisions 826 …instinct is to search for precedent. Emerson, English Traits.
Definition
Definition 681 …Mr. Robert Bolton, an individual who defines himself as “a gentleman connected with the press,” which is a definition of peculiar indefiniteness. Dickens, Sketches by Boz.
Definition 38 There are only three things worthwhile in this world—justice, beauty and truth; and perhaps none of them can be defined. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato.
Definition 180 Johnson: “To explain requires the use of terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained, and such terms cannot always be found.” Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Definition 180 Johnson: …nothing can be defined but by the use of words too plain to admit of definition. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Definition 8 …the relation between an analogy and a pun: in the former one truth lies under two expressions, and in the latter two truths lie under one expression. R V Jones. A Random Walk in Science.
Definition 105 It is indeed much easier to describe what is not humor than what is. Addison, 3/10/1711. The Spectator.
Déjà vu
Déjà vu 612 Natasha glanced at her, and at the crack in the pantry door, and it seemed to her that she remembered the light falling through that crack once before, and Sonya passing with a glass in her hand. Tolstoi, War and Peace.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Perspectives on Ideas. April 22, 2007. Dark Ages, Darwinism, Daydreams and Death.
Dark Ages
Dark Ages 346 The things that made the Dark Ages so dark—the isolation, the lack of mobility, the lack of curiosity, the hopelessness…. Clark, Civilization.
Darwinism
Darwinism 361 Spencer: …that the theory of evolution might be applied in every science as well as biology; that it could explain not only species and genera but planet and strata, social and political history, moral and esthetic conceptions. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Herbert Spencer.
Daydream
Daydream 57 I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives…in my mind I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
Death
Death 138 Chorus: No wedding march/ No dancing song/ A sudden vista down stark avenues/ To Hades halls;/ Then Death at last. Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus.
Death 180 Antigone: We’ll all die anyway…And if this hurries me to death before my time/ Why, such a death is gain. Sophocles. Antigone.
Death 113 He left a world for which he was unfit; and we trust, that among the innumerable stars of heaven, there is one where he had found happiness. Hawthorne, Fanshawe
Death 404 For, as we have only the testimony of the eye to M. Du Miroir’s existence, while all the other senses would fail to inform us that such a figure stands at arm’s length, wherefore should there not be beings innumerable, close beside us filling heaven and earth with their multitude, yet of whom no corporeal perception can take cognizance? Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches
Death “Tomorrow, the shadow on the wall be that of another.” 1963. Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: Loren Eiseley.
Death 172 Death is the only successful collector. Eiseley, The Star Thrower
Death 361 Fergus: But I am no boy, to sit down and weep because the luck has gone against me; I knew the stake which I risked; we played the game boldly, and the forfeit shall be paid manfully. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley.
Death 363 Fergus on his pending execution: Nature has her tortures as well as art, and how happy should we think the man who escapes from the throes of a mortal and painful disorder, in the space of a short half hour? Sir Walter Scott, Waverley.
Death 243 Some kind gentleman take my love to my poor old father; five years ago, he said he wished that I had died a child…I wish I had…I wish I had…the nurse bent over the girl for a few seconds, and then drew the sheet over her face; it covered a corpse. Dickens, Sketches by Boz.
Death 494 Not five seconds had passed when he rose to the water’s surface—but what a change had taken place in that short time, in all his thoughts and feelings! Life-life in any form, poverty, misery starvation—anything but death. Dickens, Sketches by Boz.
Death 235 …and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Death 478 "There's that little rockin' chair o' her'n, I set an' notice it an' think how strange 'tis a creatur' like her should be gone an' that chair be here right in its old place." Jewett, The country of the Pointed Firs.
Death 482 "Poor dear," I repeated to myself half aloud; "I wonder where she is and what she knows of the little world she left." Jewett, The country of the Pointed Firs.
Death 108 The notion that it is against human nature to want to die is…absurd[;] many men, in fact, show an active desire to die and have it over. Mencken, Minority Report.
Death 198 There was a new unsheltered grave on the slope above the river, the farm house door was shut and locked, and the light was out in the kitchen window. Jewett, A Country Doctor.
Death 206 Joel Sayre: …I hate everything that pertains to funerals: Not only undertakers themselves, not only undertakers proper, but tombstone cutters, florists, compounders of embalming fluid, drivers of …hearses, grave diggers, and even the little guy that arranges the folding chairs. Hull, ed. The Writer’s Book.
Death 123 Before the people had entered the house, there had been, I am sure, an indifferent, business-like look, but when they came out, all that was changed; their faces were awed by the presence of death, and the indifference had given place to uncertainty. Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven.
Death 343 Inscription on the dial-plate of Johnson’s watch: “The night cometh when no man can work.” Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Death 378 Johnson on death: A man knows it must be so, and submits; it will do him no good to whine. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Death 391 Johnson: Every man…at last wishes for retreat: he sees his expectations frustrated in the world, and begins to wean himself from it, and to prepare for everlasting separation. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Darth 11 But in this last scene between death and ourselves there is no more counterfeiting. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Death 30 So many millions of men buried before us encourage us not to fear to go seek such company in the other world. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Death 85 He is killed, not conquered. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Death 120 It seemed to me that my life just hung upon the edge of my lips; I shut my eyes to help, so I thought, to thrust it out, and took pleasure in languishing and letting myself go…an idea that only floated on the surface of my mind, as weak and feeble as all the rest, but, in truth, not only free from distress, but mixed with that pleasant tranquillity felt by us when we are gliding into slumber. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Death 480 Dying is not a social role. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Death 488 I am particularly pleased that in dying I shall hardly please or displease anyone. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Death 571 Consider how artfully and gently she makes life distasteful to you and detaches you from the world…. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Death 667 How many men, I wonder, does one meet with, in a lifetime, whom he would choose for his death-bed companions! Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance.
Death 840 We all stood around the narrow niche in the cold earth; all saw the coffin lowered in, all heard the rattle of the crumbly soil upon its lid--that final sound...as if in the vain hope of bringing an echo from the spiritual world. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance.
Death 618 It may be remembered, however, that, of all the events which constitute a person’s biography, there is scarcely one--none, certainly, of anything like a similar importance—to which the world so easily reconciles itself, as to his death. Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables.
Death 407 One dies and either finds out about everything or ceases asking. Tolstoi, War and Peace.
Death 915 Prince Andrei: And tomorrow I shall be killed, perhaps not even by a Frenchman but by one of our own side, by a soldier discharging a musket close to my ear, as one of them did yesterday; and the French will come along and take me by my head and heels and pitch me into a hole that I may not stink under their noses; and life generally will go on under new conditions, just as natural in their turn as the old ones, and I shall not know about them, for I shall be no more. Tolstoi, War and Peace.
Death 915 Prince Andrei: To die...to be killed tomorrow...to be no more...that all this should still be, but no me. Tolstoi, War and Peace.
Death 915 He [Prince Andrei] pictured the world without himself...the birches with their light and shade, the curly clouds and the smoke of the camp-fires.... Tolstoi, War and Peace.
Death 1141 Then who was it who was executing him, killing him, taking his life—his, Pierre’s, with all his memories, yearnings, hopes and ideas? Tolstoi, War and Peace
Death 1158 She understood it to signify that he [Prince Andrei] had suddenly become gentle and resigned, and that this sweet humility could only be the precursor of death. Tolstoi, War and Peace
Death 1159 His speech, his voice, and especially that calm, almost antagonistic look betrayed the detachment from all earthly things which is so terrible for a living man to witness. Tolstoi, War and Peace
Death 1167 Natasha and Princess Maria wept too now, but they wept not because of their own personal grief: they wept from the emotion and awe which took possession of their souls before the simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished before their eyes. Tolstoi, War and Peace
Death 98 All of that immense mass of flesh and bone and consciousness will disappear by absorption into the earth, without recognition by the transient survivors. L. Thomas, Lives of a Cell.
Death 52 ...there is still that permanent vanishing of consciousness to be accounted for: ...where on earth does it go? L. Thomas, Lives of a Cell.
Death 193 Even as he [Hector] spoke, the end came, and death hid him;/ spirit from body fluttered to undergloom. Homer, Iliad.
Death 286 They little knew, who coldly talk of the poor man’s bereavements, as a happy release from pain to the departed, and a merciful relief from expense to the survivor--they little knew, I say, what the agony of those bereavements is. Dickens, Pickwick.
Death 628 But he had grown so like death in life, that they knew not when he died. Dickens, Pickwick.
Dark Ages 346 The things that made the Dark Ages so dark—the isolation, the lack of mobility, the lack of curiosity, the hopelessness…. Clark, Civilization.
Darwinism
Darwinism 361 Spencer: …that the theory of evolution might be applied in every science as well as biology; that it could explain not only species and genera but planet and strata, social and political history, moral and esthetic conceptions. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Herbert Spencer.
Daydream
Daydream 57 I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives…in my mind I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
Death
Death 138 Chorus: No wedding march/ No dancing song/ A sudden vista down stark avenues/ To Hades halls;/ Then Death at last. Sophocles. Oedipus at Colonus.
Death 180 Antigone: We’ll all die anyway…And if this hurries me to death before my time/ Why, such a death is gain. Sophocles. Antigone.
Death 113 He left a world for which he was unfit; and we trust, that among the innumerable stars of heaven, there is one where he had found happiness. Hawthorne, Fanshawe
Death 404 For, as we have only the testimony of the eye to M. Du Miroir’s existence, while all the other senses would fail to inform us that such a figure stands at arm’s length, wherefore should there not be beings innumerable, close beside us filling heaven and earth with their multitude, yet of whom no corporeal perception can take cognizance? Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches
Death “Tomorrow, the shadow on the wall be that of another.” 1963. Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: Loren Eiseley.
Death 172 Death is the only successful collector. Eiseley, The Star Thrower
Death 361 Fergus: But I am no boy, to sit down and weep because the luck has gone against me; I knew the stake which I risked; we played the game boldly, and the forfeit shall be paid manfully. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley.
Death 363 Fergus on his pending execution: Nature has her tortures as well as art, and how happy should we think the man who escapes from the throes of a mortal and painful disorder, in the space of a short half hour? Sir Walter Scott, Waverley.
Death 243 Some kind gentleman take my love to my poor old father; five years ago, he said he wished that I had died a child…I wish I had…I wish I had…the nurse bent over the girl for a few seconds, and then drew the sheet over her face; it covered a corpse. Dickens, Sketches by Boz.
Death 494 Not five seconds had passed when he rose to the water’s surface—but what a change had taken place in that short time, in all his thoughts and feelings! Life-life in any form, poverty, misery starvation—anything but death. Dickens, Sketches by Boz.
Death 235 …and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Death 478 "There's that little rockin' chair o' her'n, I set an' notice it an' think how strange 'tis a creatur' like her should be gone an' that chair be here right in its old place." Jewett, The country of the Pointed Firs.
Death 482 "Poor dear," I repeated to myself half aloud; "I wonder where she is and what she knows of the little world she left." Jewett, The country of the Pointed Firs.
Death 108 The notion that it is against human nature to want to die is…absurd[;] many men, in fact, show an active desire to die and have it over. Mencken, Minority Report.
Death 198 There was a new unsheltered grave on the slope above the river, the farm house door was shut and locked, and the light was out in the kitchen window. Jewett, A Country Doctor.
Death 206 Joel Sayre: …I hate everything that pertains to funerals: Not only undertakers themselves, not only undertakers proper, but tombstone cutters, florists, compounders of embalming fluid, drivers of …hearses, grave diggers, and even the little guy that arranges the folding chairs. Hull, ed. The Writer’s Book.
Death 123 Before the people had entered the house, there had been, I am sure, an indifferent, business-like look, but when they came out, all that was changed; their faces were awed by the presence of death, and the indifference had given place to uncertainty. Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven.
Death 343 Inscription on the dial-plate of Johnson’s watch: “The night cometh when no man can work.” Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Death 378 Johnson on death: A man knows it must be so, and submits; it will do him no good to whine. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Death 391 Johnson: Every man…at last wishes for retreat: he sees his expectations frustrated in the world, and begins to wean himself from it, and to prepare for everlasting separation. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Darth 11 But in this last scene between death and ourselves there is no more counterfeiting. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Death 30 So many millions of men buried before us encourage us not to fear to go seek such company in the other world. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Death 85 He is killed, not conquered. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Death 120 It seemed to me that my life just hung upon the edge of my lips; I shut my eyes to help, so I thought, to thrust it out, and took pleasure in languishing and letting myself go…an idea that only floated on the surface of my mind, as weak and feeble as all the rest, but, in truth, not only free from distress, but mixed with that pleasant tranquillity felt by us when we are gliding into slumber. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Death 480 Dying is not a social role. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Death 488 I am particularly pleased that in dying I shall hardly please or displease anyone. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Death 571 Consider how artfully and gently she makes life distasteful to you and detaches you from the world…. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Death 667 How many men, I wonder, does one meet with, in a lifetime, whom he would choose for his death-bed companions! Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance.
Death 840 We all stood around the narrow niche in the cold earth; all saw the coffin lowered in, all heard the rattle of the crumbly soil upon its lid--that final sound...as if in the vain hope of bringing an echo from the spiritual world. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance.
Death 618 It may be remembered, however, that, of all the events which constitute a person’s biography, there is scarcely one--none, certainly, of anything like a similar importance—to which the world so easily reconciles itself, as to his death. Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables.
Death 407 One dies and either finds out about everything or ceases asking. Tolstoi, War and Peace.
Death 915 Prince Andrei: And tomorrow I shall be killed, perhaps not even by a Frenchman but by one of our own side, by a soldier discharging a musket close to my ear, as one of them did yesterday; and the French will come along and take me by my head and heels and pitch me into a hole that I may not stink under their noses; and life generally will go on under new conditions, just as natural in their turn as the old ones, and I shall not know about them, for I shall be no more. Tolstoi, War and Peace.
Death 915 Prince Andrei: To die...to be killed tomorrow...to be no more...that all this should still be, but no me. Tolstoi, War and Peace.
Death 915 He [Prince Andrei] pictured the world without himself...the birches with their light and shade, the curly clouds and the smoke of the camp-fires.... Tolstoi, War and Peace.
Death 1141 Then who was it who was executing him, killing him, taking his life—his, Pierre’s, with all his memories, yearnings, hopes and ideas? Tolstoi, War and Peace
Death 1158 She understood it to signify that he [Prince Andrei] had suddenly become gentle and resigned, and that this sweet humility could only be the precursor of death. Tolstoi, War and Peace
Death 1159 His speech, his voice, and especially that calm, almost antagonistic look betrayed the detachment from all earthly things which is so terrible for a living man to witness. Tolstoi, War and Peace
Death 1167 Natasha and Princess Maria wept too now, but they wept not because of their own personal grief: they wept from the emotion and awe which took possession of their souls before the simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished before their eyes. Tolstoi, War and Peace
Death 98 All of that immense mass of flesh and bone and consciousness will disappear by absorption into the earth, without recognition by the transient survivors. L. Thomas, Lives of a Cell.
Death 52 ...there is still that permanent vanishing of consciousness to be accounted for: ...where on earth does it go? L. Thomas, Lives of a Cell.
Death 193 Even as he [Hector] spoke, the end came, and death hid him;/ spirit from body fluttered to undergloom. Homer, Iliad.
Death 286 They little knew, who coldly talk of the poor man’s bereavements, as a happy release from pain to the departed, and a merciful relief from expense to the survivor--they little knew, I say, what the agony of those bereavements is. Dickens, Pickwick.
Death 628 But he had grown so like death in life, that they knew not when he died. Dickens, Pickwick.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Perspectives on Ideas. April 19, 2007.
Crowds
Crowds 159 ...for it’s not at all necessary for a crowd to know what they are cheering about. Dickens, Pickwick.
Cruelty
Cruelty 218 …the intoxication of cruelty…. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Cruelty 177 Among other vices I hate cruelty, both by nature and judgment, as the extreme of all vices. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Culture
Cultural differences 124 In Damascus, after I had shown a certain polite (I thought) interest in a young Syrian woman whose backyard lay right below our hotel window, I was warned by a representative of the hotel that under Islamic law the father could have my hand chopped off for such boldness…I stopped waving to her. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past.
Cultural differences 144 A key to our world leadership as a pluralistic democracy with a growing economy is our knowledge of other cultures. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past.
Cultural differences 144 Different languages challenge; different customs enrich; different political ideas broaden; different attitudes about the world surprise; different perceptions of American reality enlighten. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past.
Cultural differences 144 If we can absorb these new influences that make us a world society, even as we take note of the perspectives they offer about who we are as Americans, we can truly show the world the future. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past.
Culture 717 All cultures have evolved out of a suppression of instincts. Irving Stone, The Passions of the Mind (Life of Freud).
Culture 239 Culture…is…an atmosphere and a heritage--say that of the Renaissance or that of the pre-Revolutionary Eighteenth Century. Mencken, Minority Report.
Culture 239 Take a boy from one cultural milieu and try to outfit him with the ideas, traditions, tastes and prejudices of another, and you succeed only in bewildering and demoralizing him. Mencken, Minority Report.
Culture 1051 As respects the delicate question of culture, I do not think that any other than negative rules can be laid down. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Behavior.
Culture 51 Schopenhauer remarked that the duel and venereal diseases were the only contributions to culture the race had made since the classical period…. W M Wheeler. A Random Walk in Science.
Curse
Curse 152 Formula for excommunication: ...we anathematize, execrate, curse and cast out.... Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Curse 152 Formula for excommunication: Let him be accursed by day, and accursed by night; let him be accursed in his lying down; and accursed in his rising up; accursed in going out and accursed in coming in. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Curse 156 Formula for excommunication: May the Lord never more pardon or acknowledge him; may the wrath and displeasure of the Lord burn henceforth against this man, load him with all the curses written in the Book of the Law, and blot out his name from under the sky; may the Lord sever him...from all the tribes of Israel, weight him with all the maledictions of the firmament.... Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Curse 152 Formula for excommunication: Hereby then are all admonished that none hold converse with him by word of mouth, none hold communication with him by writing; that no one do him any service, no one abide under the same roof with him, no one approach within four cubits length of him, and no one read any document dictated by him, or written by his hand. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Curse 888 Sanchicha [Sancho’s daughter]: A bad year and a bad month to all the backbiting bitches in the world. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote of La Mancha. Part Two: 1615.
Cynicism
Cynicism 692 With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans: our life is like an ass led to market by a bundle of hay being carried before him: he sees nothing but the bundle of hay. Emerson, Representative Men: Montaigne, or The Skeptic.
Cynicism 693 “There is so much trouble coming into the world,” said Lord Bolingbroke, “and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that ‘tis hardly worth while to be here at all.” Emerson, Representative Men: Montaigne, or The Skeptic.
Cynicism 721 …the professor’s tone represented that of worldly society at large, where a cold skepticism smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations, and makes the rest ridiculous. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance.
Cynicism 87 “Relativism leads to skepticism, skepticism to indifference, and indifference leads to cynicism…corrosive of all good human institutions.” Justice Anthony Kennedy. Jeffrey Rosen, “Annals of Law: The Agonizer.” The New Yorker, November 1966.
Crowds 159 ...for it’s not at all necessary for a crowd to know what they are cheering about. Dickens, Pickwick.
Cruelty
Cruelty 218 …the intoxication of cruelty…. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Cruelty 177 Among other vices I hate cruelty, both by nature and judgment, as the extreme of all vices. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Culture
Cultural differences 124 In Damascus, after I had shown a certain polite (I thought) interest in a young Syrian woman whose backyard lay right below our hotel window, I was warned by a representative of the hotel that under Islamic law the father could have my hand chopped off for such boldness…I stopped waving to her. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past.
Cultural differences 144 A key to our world leadership as a pluralistic democracy with a growing economy is our knowledge of other cultures. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past.
Cultural differences 144 Different languages challenge; different customs enrich; different political ideas broaden; different attitudes about the world surprise; different perceptions of American reality enlighten. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past.
Cultural differences 144 If we can absorb these new influences that make us a world society, even as we take note of the perspectives they offer about who we are as Americans, we can truly show the world the future. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past.
Culture 717 All cultures have evolved out of a suppression of instincts. Irving Stone, The Passions of the Mind (Life of Freud).
Culture 239 Culture…is…an atmosphere and a heritage--say that of the Renaissance or that of the pre-Revolutionary Eighteenth Century. Mencken, Minority Report.
Culture 239 Take a boy from one cultural milieu and try to outfit him with the ideas, traditions, tastes and prejudices of another, and you succeed only in bewildering and demoralizing him. Mencken, Minority Report.
Culture 1051 As respects the delicate question of culture, I do not think that any other than negative rules can be laid down. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Behavior.
Culture 51 Schopenhauer remarked that the duel and venereal diseases were the only contributions to culture the race had made since the classical period…. W M Wheeler. A Random Walk in Science.
Curse
Curse 152 Formula for excommunication: ...we anathematize, execrate, curse and cast out.... Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Curse 152 Formula for excommunication: Let him be accursed by day, and accursed by night; let him be accursed in his lying down; and accursed in his rising up; accursed in going out and accursed in coming in. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Curse 156 Formula for excommunication: May the Lord never more pardon or acknowledge him; may the wrath and displeasure of the Lord burn henceforth against this man, load him with all the curses written in the Book of the Law, and blot out his name from under the sky; may the Lord sever him...from all the tribes of Israel, weight him with all the maledictions of the firmament.... Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Curse 152 Formula for excommunication: Hereby then are all admonished that none hold converse with him by word of mouth, none hold communication with him by writing; that no one do him any service, no one abide under the same roof with him, no one approach within four cubits length of him, and no one read any document dictated by him, or written by his hand. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
Curse 888 Sanchicha [Sancho’s daughter]: A bad year and a bad month to all the backbiting bitches in the world. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote of La Mancha. Part Two: 1615.
Cynicism
Cynicism 692 With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans: our life is like an ass led to market by a bundle of hay being carried before him: he sees nothing but the bundle of hay. Emerson, Representative Men: Montaigne, or The Skeptic.
Cynicism 693 “There is so much trouble coming into the world,” said Lord Bolingbroke, “and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that ‘tis hardly worth while to be here at all.” Emerson, Representative Men: Montaigne, or The Skeptic.
Cynicism 721 …the professor’s tone represented that of worldly society at large, where a cold skepticism smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations, and makes the rest ridiculous. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance.
Cynicism 87 “Relativism leads to skepticism, skepticism to indifference, and indifference leads to cynicism…corrosive of all good human institutions.” Justice Anthony Kennedy. Jeffrey Rosen, “Annals of Law: The Agonizer.” The New Yorker, November 1966.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Perspectives on Ideas. April 16, 2007.
Criticism
Criticism 205 Emerson on Hawthorne: “N. Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer...is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.” Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 280 Poe claimed that … was ‘grossly uneducated’ and that he could not write ‘three consecutive sentences of grammatical English.’ Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 281 Hawthorne was clearly tainted with the didactic impulse Poe considered the major failing of New England writers. Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 315 E.P. Whipple: “…bears on every page the evidence of a mind thoroughly alive….” Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 521 The great failure of The Marble Faun is his separation of plot and scenery. Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 521 The Marble Faun is the same high allegory on the “fortunate fall,” the loss of innocence, the bitter wisdom of sin, that Hawthorne had written before in many of his tales and romances; like “Young Goodman Brown,” or The Scarlet Letter, it could as easily have taken place in the New England forest as in the Borghese Gardens. Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 527 Hawthorne: “It is odd enough, moreover, that my own individual taste is for quite another class of works than those which I myself am able to write.” Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 527 Hawthorne confessed to Fields [his publisher] that if he read such books as his own, written by some other writer, he doubted that he would be able to get through them. Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 582 Curtis: Although Hawthorne could produce ‘harrowing allegories' of the theme of sin in Salem Village, he 'did not see a Carolina slave-pen….' Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 292 Editor: “It’s cute, but is it science?” Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: Loren Eiseley
Criticism 292 Loomis: “I think the author’s real value is in his ability to make us aware, to shake up our egotistic complacency, of the unfathomable mystery of life and the wonder of the world.” Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: Loren Eiseley
Criticism 296 “…each page cries out to be quoted.” Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: Loren Eiseley
Criticism 307 His is the myth of the loner gazing down from the mountain slope, of the solitary hiker in the woods, of man against society giving permanent form to Thoreau’s dream of turning his back on an impoverished world of polluted skies and teeming cities. Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: Loren Eiseley
Criticism 318 Hiram Haydn’s criticism of a poem: “...for in all honesty I don’t think it a good poem, but I do feel the thought and feeling behind it good and also a number of individual lines and phrases.” Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: Loren Eiseley
Criticism 223 [Thoreau]…a banal writer who somehow managed to produce a classic work of literature. Eiseley, The Star Thrower
Criticism 278 On Thomas E. Dewey: “The boy orator of the platitude”; “intellectual halitosis.” Blum, V Was for Victory.
Criticism 689 E. M. Dealey: “We need a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas and the Southwest think you [Kennedy] are riding Caroline’s bicycle.” Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
Criticism 348 He [Kennedy] could find and fret over one paragraph of criticism deep in ten paragraphs of praise. Sorenson, Kennedy
Criticism 598 Liberals denounced [the Peace Corps] as a gimmick…conservatives dismissed it as a nonsensical haven for beatniks and visionaries…Communist nations denounced it as an espionage front…and its own backers threatened to dissipate its momentum by talking, even before it started, of a UN Peace Corps and a domestic Peace Corps and a dozen other diversions. Sorenson, Kennedy
Criticism 617 [The Mormon Bible]: …chloroform in print. Twain, Roughing It
Criticism Kafka 448 His longer narratives--Amerika, The Trial, even The Castle--are better in parts than as complete works; and his longer stories, even 'The Metamorphosis,' begin more acutely than they tend to close. Bloom, Western Canon.
Criticism 152 [Criticism] disturbs us…because it jogs a firmly held set of beliefs and forces us to re-examine them. Zinsser, On Writing Well.
Criticism 507 He consoled himself that he was treated badly because he was ahead of his time. Irving Stone, The Passions of the Mind (Life of Freud).
Criticism 411 Harrisburg Patriot and Union on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: We pass over the silly remarks of the President; for the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.
Criticism 411 The Chicago Times on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, and dish-watery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.
Criticism 411 The American correspondent of the London Times wrote [of the Gettysburg Address] that ‘the ceremony was rendered ludicrous by some of the sallies of that poor President Lincoln…anything more dull and commonplace it would not be easy to produce.’ Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.
Criticism 159 Johnson on Lord Chesterfield’s published letters to his natural son: They teach the morals of whore and the manners of a dancing master. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Criticism 180 A lady once asked [Johnson] how he came to define pastern the knee of a horse [in his dictionary]: instead of making an elaborate defense as she expected, he at once answered, “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.” Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Criticism 253 Johnson on the right to be a critic of a play, although you could not write one so good: You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Criticism 244 Chinese proverb: Do not remove a fly from your friend’s forehead with a hatchet. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
Criticism 147 John Berryman: I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
Criticism 142 Every day and every hour we say things of another that we may more properly say of ourselves. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Criticism 421 A hundred times a day we laugh at ourselves in the person of our neighbor and detest in others the defects which are more clearly in us and wonder at them with extraordinary impudence and heedlessness. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Criticism 104 …assault the vice without hurting the person. Addison, 4/9/1711. The Spectator.
Criticism 310 Censure, says a late ingenious author, is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent. Addison, 6/26/1711. The Spectator.
Criticism 310 There is no defense against reproach [criticism?], but obscurity. Addison, 6/26/1711. The Spectator.
Criticism 205 Emerson on Hawthorne: “N. Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer...is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.” Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 280 Poe claimed that … was ‘grossly uneducated’ and that he could not write ‘three consecutive sentences of grammatical English.’ Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 281 Hawthorne was clearly tainted with the didactic impulse Poe considered the major failing of New England writers. Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 315 E.P. Whipple: “…bears on every page the evidence of a mind thoroughly alive….” Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 521 The great failure of The Marble Faun is his separation of plot and scenery. Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 521 The Marble Faun is the same high allegory on the “fortunate fall,” the loss of innocence, the bitter wisdom of sin, that Hawthorne had written before in many of his tales and romances; like “Young Goodman Brown,” or The Scarlet Letter, it could as easily have taken place in the New England forest as in the Borghese Gardens. Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 527 Hawthorne: “It is odd enough, moreover, that my own individual taste is for quite another class of works than those which I myself am able to write.” Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 527 Hawthorne confessed to Fields [his publisher] that if he read such books as his own, written by some other writer, he doubted that he would be able to get through them. Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 582 Curtis: Although Hawthorne could produce ‘harrowing allegories' of the theme of sin in Salem Village, he 'did not see a Carolina slave-pen….' Mellow, Hawthorne in His Times.
Criticism 292 Editor: “It’s cute, but is it science?” Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: Loren Eiseley
Criticism 292 Loomis: “I think the author’s real value is in his ability to make us aware, to shake up our egotistic complacency, of the unfathomable mystery of life and the wonder of the world.” Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: Loren Eiseley
Criticism 296 “…each page cries out to be quoted.” Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: Loren Eiseley
Criticism 307 His is the myth of the loner gazing down from the mountain slope, of the solitary hiker in the woods, of man against society giving permanent form to Thoreau’s dream of turning his back on an impoverished world of polluted skies and teeming cities. Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: Loren Eiseley
Criticism 318 Hiram Haydn’s criticism of a poem: “...for in all honesty I don’t think it a good poem, but I do feel the thought and feeling behind it good and also a number of individual lines and phrases.” Christianson, Fox at the Wood’s Edge: Loren Eiseley
Criticism 223 [Thoreau]…a banal writer who somehow managed to produce a classic work of literature. Eiseley, The Star Thrower
Criticism 278 On Thomas E. Dewey: “The boy orator of the platitude”; “intellectual halitosis.” Blum, V Was for Victory.
Criticism 689 E. M. Dealey: “We need a man on horseback to lead this nation, and many people in Texas and the Southwest think you [Kennedy] are riding Caroline’s bicycle.” Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
Criticism 348 He [Kennedy] could find and fret over one paragraph of criticism deep in ten paragraphs of praise. Sorenson, Kennedy
Criticism 598 Liberals denounced [the Peace Corps] as a gimmick…conservatives dismissed it as a nonsensical haven for beatniks and visionaries…Communist nations denounced it as an espionage front…and its own backers threatened to dissipate its momentum by talking, even before it started, of a UN Peace Corps and a domestic Peace Corps and a dozen other diversions. Sorenson, Kennedy
Criticism 617 [The Mormon Bible]: …chloroform in print. Twain, Roughing It
Criticism Kafka 448 His longer narratives--Amerika, The Trial, even The Castle--are better in parts than as complete works; and his longer stories, even 'The Metamorphosis,' begin more acutely than they tend to close. Bloom, Western Canon.
Criticism 152 [Criticism] disturbs us…because it jogs a firmly held set of beliefs and forces us to re-examine them. Zinsser, On Writing Well.
Criticism 507 He consoled himself that he was treated badly because he was ahead of his time. Irving Stone, The Passions of the Mind (Life of Freud).
Criticism 411 Harrisburg Patriot and Union on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: We pass over the silly remarks of the President; for the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.
Criticism 411 The Chicago Times on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, and dish-watery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.
Criticism 411 The American correspondent of the London Times wrote [of the Gettysburg Address] that ‘the ceremony was rendered ludicrous by some of the sallies of that poor President Lincoln…anything more dull and commonplace it would not be easy to produce.’ Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.
Criticism 159 Johnson on Lord Chesterfield’s published letters to his natural son: They teach the morals of whore and the manners of a dancing master. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Criticism 180 A lady once asked [Johnson] how he came to define pastern the knee of a horse [in his dictionary]: instead of making an elaborate defense as she expected, he at once answered, “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.” Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Criticism 253 Johnson on the right to be a critic of a play, although you could not write one so good: You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
Criticism 244 Chinese proverb: Do not remove a fly from your friend’s forehead with a hatchet. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
Criticism 147 John Berryman: I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
Criticism 142 Every day and every hour we say things of another that we may more properly say of ourselves. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Criticism 421 A hundred times a day we laugh at ourselves in the person of our neighbor and detest in others the defects which are more clearly in us and wonder at them with extraordinary impudence and heedlessness. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Criticism 104 …assault the vice without hurting the person. Addison, 4/9/1711. The Spectator.
Criticism 310 Censure, says a late ingenious author, is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent. Addison, 6/26/1711. The Spectator.
Criticism 310 There is no defense against reproach [criticism?], but obscurity. Addison, 6/26/1711. The Spectator.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Perspectives on Ideas. April 11, 2007
Crime
62 The foreign criminal, they say, rarely repents, for the very doctrines of today confirm him in the idea that his crime is not a crime, but only a reaction against an unjustly oppressive force. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
621 “I am not mad…only a murderer,” Ivan began again. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
699 You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory…but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education…and, if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us…perhaps, that one memory may keep him from great evil and he will reflect and say, ‘Yes, I was good and brave and honest then.’ Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
197 Jacobi, refusing all measure of right and wrong except the determinations of the private spirit, remarks that there is no crime but has sometimes been a virtue. Emerson, The Transcendentalist.
1028 Every crime destroys more Edens than our own. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun.
6 The late Judge Frederick Bausman of Seattle…proposed…that a sharp distinction be made between murderers whose crimes are of such a character that any normal persons, under the circumstances, might be imagined committing them, and murderers who kill strangers for gain. Mencken, Minority Report.
7 [In favor of sterilization of criminals]: Even if it is argued that their criminality is thus the product of environment rather than of heredity, it follows that the environment they themselves provide for children is very likely to produce more criminals. Mencken, Minority Report.
92 In case of murder I think it should be written into the law that no murderer, under any circumstances, whatever, shall ever be released until his victim's natural expectation of life has expired…no reason that I can imagine why he should enjoy liberty while that victim is deprived of life. Mencken, Minority Report.
Crisis
219 …the middle class, whose fear of crisis made such a vital contribution to the victory of National Socialism…. Bracher, The German Dictatorship
Critic
119 Katherine Anne Porter: You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly. Hull, ed. The Writer’s Book.
137 T.S. Eliot: He [Ezra Pound] was a marvelous critic because he didn’t try to turn you into an imitation of himself [but]...tried to see what you were trying to do. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
Critical Thinking
392 “Space forbids” (The author [Durant] has often smiled at this cloak for laziness….) Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Herbert Spencer.
258 Angus Wilson: The natural habit of any good and critical reader is to disbelieve what you are telling him and try to escape out of the world you are picturing. Cowley, ed., Writers at Work.
779 For so long a time now in one crisis after another the President had seen the judgments of supposedly good minds, some rated among the “best minds,” so utterly wrong, so completely mistaken, so ready with advice that would have wrought wreck and ruin beyond retrieving, that he had a deeper and surer feeling about his own reasons and vision in the face of chaos. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.
279 JFK: ...salvation lay in man’s liberation from myth, stereotype and fanaticism. [Note: What are the unquestioned assumptions in education?] Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
463 All this made strategic analysis far less exact than the pseudo-precision of its terminology suggested. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
464 Kennedy faced no greater problem of public education than that of convincing both Capitol Hill and the Kremlin that his demands for strength and disarmament, far from being contradictory, were complementary. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
469 …the sense he [Kennedy] gave of freedom from preconception…. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
593 JFK: …every past generation had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truism and stereotype…must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
593 JFK: For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
593 JFK: Too often, we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
593 JFK: We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
664 He [Kennedy] perceived himself…as a man who, unlike the Trumans and Robert Tafts of American politics, generally saw reason on both sides of complex issues. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
823 JFK: Too many Americans…regarded peace as impossible and therefore war was inevitable. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
240 He began for the first time in his life to have a strong distrust of all generalities and epigrams. Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise.
355 ...a study of Time [Magazine's] treatment of Eisenhower’s first year as compared with Kennedy’s...amassed considerable evidence to show that, by the use of loaded adjectives, clever picture captions and a careful selection of quotations out of context...the two administrations were put in very different lights [Eisenhower positive, Kennedy negative].... Schlesinger, A Thousand Days.
614 JFK: “The Soviets and ourselves give wholly different meanings to the same words—war, peace, democracy, and popular will.” Sorenson, Kennedy
112 Emma...amusing herself in the consideration of the blunders which often arise from a partial knowledge of circumstances, of the mistakes which people of high pretensions to judgment are for ever falling into.... Austen, Emma
17 This fundamental question—is light waves or is it particles?—has been answered only by asserting that it must be both. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein.
22 By itself neither concept [wave or particle] suffices to explain light, but together they do. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein.
48 …it is because of Einstein’s unwillingness ever to accept any unproven principle as self-evident that he was able to penetrate closer to the underlying realities of nature than any scientist before him. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein
766 Lincoln: Mr. Moorhead, haven’t you lived long enough to know that two men may honestly differ about a question and both be right? Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.
199 Facts shall speak. Austen, Persuasion.
153 To make an enemy of the media is fatal for a public figure…not because the press will print lies…but because so much depends on where reporters want to put the emphasis, or on how they want to see events that are often subject to several interpretations. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past.
6 Plato: …uncovering assumptions and questioning certainties. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato.
13 ...every extreme was seen as a half-truth.... Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato.
59 “If you wish to converse with me,” said Voltaire, “define your terms.” Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Aristotle.
59 How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Aristotle.
59 …once done, it [defining terms] is half of any task. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Aristotle.
108 F. Bacon: I possessed a passion for research, a power of suspending judgment with patience, of meditating with pleasure, of assenting with caution, of correcting false impressions with readiness, and of arranging my thoughts with scrupulous pains. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Francis Bacon.
131 ...fig-leaf phrases used to cover naked ignorance.... Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Francis Bacon.
132 F. Bacon: ...we find no new truth because we take some venerable but questionable proposition as an indubitable starting-point, and never think of putting this assumption itself to the test of observation or experiment. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Francis Bacon.
164 Spinoza: …the vivid and metaphorical forms of speech which the founders of religion by the nature of their mission and their own emotional intensity, are driven to adopt. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
446 Towards the end Nietzsche’s work grew in bitterness; he attacked persons as well as ideas. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Nietzsche.
478 Perhaps the source of most of the innovations in modern mathematics is the rejection of axioms; and Russell delights in men who challenge “self-evident truths” and insist upon the demonstration of the obvious. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell.
199 People crave certainties in this world and are hostile to ifs and buts. Mencken, Minority Report.
615 Johnson: If my antagonist writes bad language, though that may not be essential to the question, I will attack him for his bad language. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
630 Johnson on a doctor’s changing religion with consequent distrust in his medical skills: …when people see a man absurd in what they understand, they may conclude the same of him in what they do not understand. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
694 Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had? Emerson, Representative Men: Montaigne, or The Skeptic.
810 Into this English logic, however, an infusion of justice enters, not so apparent in other races,--a belief in the existence of two sides, and the resolution to see fair play. Emerson, English Traits.
45 ...the end is lost sight of in attention to the means. Emerson, Nature.
65 The world is his who can see through its pretension.... Emerson, The American Scholar.
261 He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Emerson, Self-Reliance.
234 His [McNamara’s] power was facts, no one had more, and no one used them better, firing them out, one after another, devastating his opponents (though sometimes his friends would feel that there was a missing piece, that sometimes this brilliant reasoning was based…on a false assumption). Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.
328 Here was a man [Rusk] who believed…the democracies were ipso facto good and the totalitarians were ipso facto bad…the danger of his tenets [being]…he did not reckon with the whimsical quality of history, that the forces of history can just as easily make the democracies aggressive, that to some small states, large democracies look tyrannical, that justice and decency have various definitions in different parts of the world. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.
346 State simply did not pose deep and probing questions…instead…geared itself up on straight operational questions: how much fertilizer for this province, how much barbed wire for that. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.
363 About McNaughton: When he taught evidence at Harvard Law School, he specialized in defining the difference between reality and illusion…would walk into a law class, pull out a toy pistol, shoot a student and then take sixteen different versions of what had happened…would point out to his class the difference between what they thought they had seen and what they actually saw, carefully extracting the hearsay. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.
365 [A young sociologist to McNaughton]: “Mr. McNaughton, I’ve had enough [of]…all your facts, all your statistics, all your slide rules, all your decisions—you speak it all so well, and yet where is Man in all this, Mr. McNaughton?” Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.
385 After only four years, the [experimental] school was closed, largely upon the protests of parents who objected to their children coming back and asking too many disturbing questions…. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.
335 …Goering tried to dismiss by ridicule, by placing the responsibility on others, by feigning ignorance, or by resorting…to the argument of tu quoque [If I am guilty, you are, too.]. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg.
206 Ralph Ellison: In any society there are many rituals...which, for the most part, go unquestioned. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
420 …for it is always a tyrannical harshness not to be able to endure a way of thinking differing from your own. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
47 Huxley to Bishop Wilberforce: If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would be a man of restless and versatile intellect who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by aimless rhetoric and distract the attention of his hearers from the point at issue by digressions and appeals to religious prejudice. Caullery and Tetry. A Random Walk in Science.
90 Book: 100 Authors Against Einstein which sought to show that Einstein must be wrong because so many opinions were ranged against him. A Random Walk in Science.
xx …the courage of …doubts in a world of dangerously passionate certainties. Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream.
212 Lincoln: To a boy fishing: “Well it’s good to be out here where there is so much fact and so little opinion.” Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years
26 Dicaeopolis: And yet I fear; for well I know the moods/ Of our good country people, how they love to hear the city and themselves be praised/ By some intriguing humbug, right or wrong,/ Nor ever dreamed they are being bought and sold. Aristophanes, Acharnians.
133 Strepsiades: You have the rogue’s trick of looking injured when you’re injuring. Aristophanes, Clouds.
62 The foreign criminal, they say, rarely repents, for the very doctrines of today confirm him in the idea that his crime is not a crime, but only a reaction against an unjustly oppressive force. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
621 “I am not mad…only a murderer,” Ivan began again. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
699 You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory…but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education…and, if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us…perhaps, that one memory may keep him from great evil and he will reflect and say, ‘Yes, I was good and brave and honest then.’ Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
197 Jacobi, refusing all measure of right and wrong except the determinations of the private spirit, remarks that there is no crime but has sometimes been a virtue. Emerson, The Transcendentalist.
1028 Every crime destroys more Edens than our own. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun.
6 The late Judge Frederick Bausman of Seattle…proposed…that a sharp distinction be made between murderers whose crimes are of such a character that any normal persons, under the circumstances, might be imagined committing them, and murderers who kill strangers for gain. Mencken, Minority Report.
7 [In favor of sterilization of criminals]: Even if it is argued that their criminality is thus the product of environment rather than of heredity, it follows that the environment they themselves provide for children is very likely to produce more criminals. Mencken, Minority Report.
92 In case of murder I think it should be written into the law that no murderer, under any circumstances, whatever, shall ever be released until his victim's natural expectation of life has expired…no reason that I can imagine why he should enjoy liberty while that victim is deprived of life. Mencken, Minority Report.
Crisis
219 …the middle class, whose fear of crisis made such a vital contribution to the victory of National Socialism…. Bracher, The German Dictatorship
Critic
119 Katherine Anne Porter: You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly. Hull, ed. The Writer’s Book.
137 T.S. Eliot: He [Ezra Pound] was a marvelous critic because he didn’t try to turn you into an imitation of himself [but]...tried to see what you were trying to do. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
Critical Thinking
392 “Space forbids” (The author [Durant] has often smiled at this cloak for laziness….) Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Herbert Spencer.
258 Angus Wilson: The natural habit of any good and critical reader is to disbelieve what you are telling him and try to escape out of the world you are picturing. Cowley, ed., Writers at Work.
779 For so long a time now in one crisis after another the President had seen the judgments of supposedly good minds, some rated among the “best minds,” so utterly wrong, so completely mistaken, so ready with advice that would have wrought wreck and ruin beyond retrieving, that he had a deeper and surer feeling about his own reasons and vision in the face of chaos. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.
279 JFK: ...salvation lay in man’s liberation from myth, stereotype and fanaticism. [Note: What are the unquestioned assumptions in education?] Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
463 All this made strategic analysis far less exact than the pseudo-precision of its terminology suggested. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
464 Kennedy faced no greater problem of public education than that of convincing both Capitol Hill and the Kremlin that his demands for strength and disarmament, far from being contradictory, were complementary. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
469 …the sense he [Kennedy] gave of freedom from preconception…. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
593 JFK: …every past generation had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truism and stereotype…must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
593 JFK: For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
593 JFK: Too often, we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
593 JFK: We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
664 He [Kennedy] perceived himself…as a man who, unlike the Trumans and Robert Tafts of American politics, generally saw reason on both sides of complex issues. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
823 JFK: Too many Americans…regarded peace as impossible and therefore war was inevitable. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days
240 He began for the first time in his life to have a strong distrust of all generalities and epigrams. Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise.
355 ...a study of Time [Magazine's] treatment of Eisenhower’s first year as compared with Kennedy’s...amassed considerable evidence to show that, by the use of loaded adjectives, clever picture captions and a careful selection of quotations out of context...the two administrations were put in very different lights [Eisenhower positive, Kennedy negative].... Schlesinger, A Thousand Days.
614 JFK: “The Soviets and ourselves give wholly different meanings to the same words—war, peace, democracy, and popular will.” Sorenson, Kennedy
112 Emma...amusing herself in the consideration of the blunders which often arise from a partial knowledge of circumstances, of the mistakes which people of high pretensions to judgment are for ever falling into.... Austen, Emma
17 This fundamental question—is light waves or is it particles?—has been answered only by asserting that it must be both. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein.
22 By itself neither concept [wave or particle] suffices to explain light, but together they do. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein.
48 …it is because of Einstein’s unwillingness ever to accept any unproven principle as self-evident that he was able to penetrate closer to the underlying realities of nature than any scientist before him. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein
766 Lincoln: Mr. Moorhead, haven’t you lived long enough to know that two men may honestly differ about a question and both be right? Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years.
199 Facts shall speak. Austen, Persuasion.
153 To make an enemy of the media is fatal for a public figure…not because the press will print lies…but because so much depends on where reporters want to put the emphasis, or on how they want to see events that are often subject to several interpretations. Bradley, Time Present, Time Past.
6 Plato: …uncovering assumptions and questioning certainties. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato.
13 ...every extreme was seen as a half-truth.... Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato.
59 “If you wish to converse with me,” said Voltaire, “define your terms.” Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Aristotle.
59 How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Aristotle.
59 …once done, it [defining terms] is half of any task. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Aristotle.
108 F. Bacon: I possessed a passion for research, a power of suspending judgment with patience, of meditating with pleasure, of assenting with caution, of correcting false impressions with readiness, and of arranging my thoughts with scrupulous pains. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Francis Bacon.
131 ...fig-leaf phrases used to cover naked ignorance.... Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Francis Bacon.
132 F. Bacon: ...we find no new truth because we take some venerable but questionable proposition as an indubitable starting-point, and never think of putting this assumption itself to the test of observation or experiment. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Francis Bacon.
164 Spinoza: …the vivid and metaphorical forms of speech which the founders of religion by the nature of their mission and their own emotional intensity, are driven to adopt. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Spinoza.
446 Towards the end Nietzsche’s work grew in bitterness; he attacked persons as well as ideas. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Nietzsche.
478 Perhaps the source of most of the innovations in modern mathematics is the rejection of axioms; and Russell delights in men who challenge “self-evident truths” and insist upon the demonstration of the obvious. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell.
199 People crave certainties in this world and are hostile to ifs and buts. Mencken, Minority Report.
615 Johnson: If my antagonist writes bad language, though that may not be essential to the question, I will attack him for his bad language. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
630 Johnson on a doctor’s changing religion with consequent distrust in his medical skills: …when people see a man absurd in what they understand, they may conclude the same of him in what they do not understand. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
694 Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had? Emerson, Representative Men: Montaigne, or The Skeptic.
810 Into this English logic, however, an infusion of justice enters, not so apparent in other races,--a belief in the existence of two sides, and the resolution to see fair play. Emerson, English Traits.
45 ...the end is lost sight of in attention to the means. Emerson, Nature.
65 The world is his who can see through its pretension.... Emerson, The American Scholar.
261 He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Emerson, Self-Reliance.
234 His [McNamara’s] power was facts, no one had more, and no one used them better, firing them out, one after another, devastating his opponents (though sometimes his friends would feel that there was a missing piece, that sometimes this brilliant reasoning was based…on a false assumption). Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.
328 Here was a man [Rusk] who believed…the democracies were ipso facto good and the totalitarians were ipso facto bad…the danger of his tenets [being]…he did not reckon with the whimsical quality of history, that the forces of history can just as easily make the democracies aggressive, that to some small states, large democracies look tyrannical, that justice and decency have various definitions in different parts of the world. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.
346 State simply did not pose deep and probing questions…instead…geared itself up on straight operational questions: how much fertilizer for this province, how much barbed wire for that. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.
363 About McNaughton: When he taught evidence at Harvard Law School, he specialized in defining the difference between reality and illusion…would walk into a law class, pull out a toy pistol, shoot a student and then take sixteen different versions of what had happened…would point out to his class the difference between what they thought they had seen and what they actually saw, carefully extracting the hearsay. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.
365 [A young sociologist to McNaughton]: “Mr. McNaughton, I’ve had enough [of]…all your facts, all your statistics, all your slide rules, all your decisions—you speak it all so well, and yet where is Man in all this, Mr. McNaughton?” Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.
385 After only four years, the [experimental] school was closed, largely upon the protests of parents who objected to their children coming back and asking too many disturbing questions…. Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest.
335 …Goering tried to dismiss by ridicule, by placing the responsibility on others, by feigning ignorance, or by resorting…to the argument of tu quoque [If I am guilty, you are, too.]. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg.
206 Ralph Ellison: In any society there are many rituals...which, for the most part, go unquestioned. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
420 …for it is always a tyrannical harshness not to be able to endure a way of thinking differing from your own. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
47 Huxley to Bishop Wilberforce: If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would be a man of restless and versatile intellect who, not content with success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by aimless rhetoric and distract the attention of his hearers from the point at issue by digressions and appeals to religious prejudice. Caullery and Tetry. A Random Walk in Science.
90 Book: 100 Authors Against Einstein which sought to show that Einstein must be wrong because so many opinions were ranged against him. A Random Walk in Science.
xx …the courage of …doubts in a world of dangerously passionate certainties. Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream.
212 Lincoln: To a boy fishing: “Well it’s good to be out here where there is so much fact and so little opinion.” Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years
26 Dicaeopolis: And yet I fear; for well I know the moods/ Of our good country people, how they love to hear the city and themselves be praised/ By some intriguing humbug, right or wrong,/ Nor ever dreamed they are being bought and sold. Aristophanes, Acharnians.
133 Strepsiades: You have the rogue’s trick of looking injured when you’re injuring. Aristophanes, Clouds.
Sunday, April 8, 2007
Perspectives on Ideas April 8, 2007
Coordinator
45 In war time, as Vice President Henry Wallace once wryly remarked, a coordinator was only a man trying to keep all the balls in the air without losing his own. Blum, V Was for Victory
Courage
415 He [Kennedy] never self-consciously thought of himself as “courageous,” but he lived by the Hemingway definition with which he had opened Profiles: “grace under pressure.” Sorenson, Kennedy
843 “A man does what he must,” he [Kennedy] had written in Profiles in Courage, “in spite of personal consequences, in spite of…dangers—and that is the basis of all human morality.” Sorenson, Kennedy
417 …three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest. Thoreau, Walden.
609 The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards. T. H. White, The Once and Future King.
1019 A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Culture.
381 In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour when we are deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy those who have seen safely to an end their manful endeavor? Emerson, Prudence.
407 Valor consists in the power of self-recovery…. Emerson, Circles.
727 When a valiant man flees, it is obvious that there is foul play, and it is a wise man’s duty to reserve himself for a better occasion. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote of La Mancha. Part Two: 1615.
391 To consider and judge the danger is in some sort the reverse of being scared by it. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
471 I sometimes get from nonchalance and unconcern the means of strengthening myself…. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
19 …under the London Blitz—Ed Murrow…said: “I have never gone down into a shelter because I was afraid…that if I did it once I could not stop doing it.” Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream.
Creativity
68 In accordance with his usual mode of creative thought Einstein set the stage with an imaginary situation. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein
xviii The technical objections raised were themselves a spur to invention. Clark, Civilization.
xviii I could see the truth of those familiar words, ‘How often has a difficult rhyme led me to a beautiful thought.’ Clark, Civilization.
417 [Nietzche] Zarathustra: He who must be a creator…verily, he must first be a destroyer, and break values into pieces. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Nietzche.
473 Leonardo: The minds of men of lofty genius are most active in invention when they are doing the least external work. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Benedetto Croce.
473 Everybody knows the story told of DaVinci, that when he was painting the “Last Supper,” he sorely displeased the Abbot who had ordered the work, by sitting motionless for days before an untouched canvas; and revenged himself for the importunate Abbot’s persistent query--when would he begin to work?--by using the gentleman as an unconscious model for the figure of Judas. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Benedetto Croce.
481 Russell: ...those creative powers within him that struggle on in the face of failure.... Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell.
188 The process of creation is only partly intellectual[;] the rest of it seems to be based on instinct rather than on idea. Mencken, Minority Report.
335 Dr. Beatrice Hinkle: When one looks back over human existence, however, it is very evident that all culture has developed through an initial resistance against adaptation to the reality in which man finds himself…resistance acts as a stimulus to his inner impulse to action and to creation, thus causing him to shape and remake his environment to suit better his need and desire. Hull, ed. The Writer’s Book.
338 Dr. Beatrice Hinkle: The creator does not create only for the pleasure of creating but…he also desires to subdue other minds. Hull, ed. The Writer’s Book.
431 What is that abridgment and selection we observe in all spiritual activity, but itself the creative impulse? Emerson, Art.
471 In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished and much was begun in us. Emerson, Experience.
113 John Hersey: It may be that the mystery [of creativity] is among the things that attract those of us who write. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
118 Marianne Moore: Life is energy and energy is creativity. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
101 Edward Albee: If you intellectualize and examine the creative process too carefully, it can evaporate and vanish. [Tells story of centipede who is asked about how it manipulates its hundreds of legs—thinks about it and then can’t walk.] Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
68 Albert Schweitzer: To create means evolution. Anderson, The Schweitzer Album.
100 The Renaissance historian of art, Vasari, when he asked himself...why it was in Florence and not elsewhere that men became perfect in the arts, gave as his first answer: ‘the spirit of criticism: the air of Florence making minds naturally free, and not content with mediocrity.’ Clark, Civilization.
45 In war time, as Vice President Henry Wallace once wryly remarked, a coordinator was only a man trying to keep all the balls in the air without losing his own. Blum, V Was for Victory
Courage
415 He [Kennedy] never self-consciously thought of himself as “courageous,” but he lived by the Hemingway definition with which he had opened Profiles: “grace under pressure.” Sorenson, Kennedy
843 “A man does what he must,” he [Kennedy] had written in Profiles in Courage, “in spite of personal consequences, in spite of…dangers—and that is the basis of all human morality.” Sorenson, Kennedy
417 …three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest. Thoreau, Walden.
609 The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards. T. H. White, The Once and Future King.
1019 A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Culture.
381 In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour when we are deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy those who have seen safely to an end their manful endeavor? Emerson, Prudence.
407 Valor consists in the power of self-recovery…. Emerson, Circles.
727 When a valiant man flees, it is obvious that there is foul play, and it is a wise man’s duty to reserve himself for a better occasion. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote of La Mancha. Part Two: 1615.
391 To consider and judge the danger is in some sort the reverse of being scared by it. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
471 I sometimes get from nonchalance and unconcern the means of strengthening myself…. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
19 …under the London Blitz—Ed Murrow…said: “I have never gone down into a shelter because I was afraid…that if I did it once I could not stop doing it.” Sevareid, Not So Wild a Dream.
Creativity
68 In accordance with his usual mode of creative thought Einstein set the stage with an imaginary situation. Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein
xviii The technical objections raised were themselves a spur to invention. Clark, Civilization.
xviii I could see the truth of those familiar words, ‘How often has a difficult rhyme led me to a beautiful thought.’ Clark, Civilization.
417 [Nietzche] Zarathustra: He who must be a creator…verily, he must first be a destroyer, and break values into pieces. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Nietzche.
473 Leonardo: The minds of men of lofty genius are most active in invention when they are doing the least external work. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Benedetto Croce.
473 Everybody knows the story told of DaVinci, that when he was painting the “Last Supper,” he sorely displeased the Abbot who had ordered the work, by sitting motionless for days before an untouched canvas; and revenged himself for the importunate Abbot’s persistent query--when would he begin to work?--by using the gentleman as an unconscious model for the figure of Judas. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Benedetto Croce.
481 Russell: ...those creative powers within him that struggle on in the face of failure.... Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell.
188 The process of creation is only partly intellectual[;] the rest of it seems to be based on instinct rather than on idea. Mencken, Minority Report.
335 Dr. Beatrice Hinkle: When one looks back over human existence, however, it is very evident that all culture has developed through an initial resistance against adaptation to the reality in which man finds himself…resistance acts as a stimulus to his inner impulse to action and to creation, thus causing him to shape and remake his environment to suit better his need and desire. Hull, ed. The Writer’s Book.
338 Dr. Beatrice Hinkle: The creator does not create only for the pleasure of creating but…he also desires to subdue other minds. Hull, ed. The Writer’s Book.
431 What is that abridgment and selection we observe in all spiritual activity, but itself the creative impulse? Emerson, Art.
471 In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished and much was begun in us. Emerson, Experience.
113 John Hersey: It may be that the mystery [of creativity] is among the things that attract those of us who write. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
118 Marianne Moore: Life is energy and energy is creativity. Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
101 Edward Albee: If you intellectualize and examine the creative process too carefully, it can evaporate and vanish. [Tells story of centipede who is asked about how it manipulates its hundreds of legs—thinks about it and then can’t walk.] Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
68 Albert Schweitzer: To create means evolution. Anderson, The Schweitzer Album.
100 The Renaissance historian of art, Vasari, when he asked himself...why it was in Florence and not elsewhere that men became perfect in the arts, gave as his first answer: ‘the spirit of criticism: the air of Florence making minds naturally free, and not content with mediocrity.’ Clark, Civilization.
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Perspectives on Ideas April 3, 2007
Consistency
27 [On his inconsistency]: JFK: “We all learn...from the time you are born to the time you die...events change...conditions change, and...you would be extremely unwise...to pursue policies that are unsuccessful. Sorenson, Kennedy
265 A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. Emerson, Self-Reliance.
265 Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today. Emerson, Self-Reliance.
58 Why do we not recall how much contradiction we perceive even in our own judgment, how many things were yesterday articles of faith to us that today are fables to us? Montaigne, Selected Essays.
113 Our actions are only pieces patched together. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
285 So it is that I, indeed, contradict myself upon occasion, but truth as Demades said, I do not contradict. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Constitution (U.S.)
437 JFK: “The Constitution has served us extremely well…but…all its clauses had to be interpreted by men and had to be made to work by men, and it has to be made to work today in an entirely different world from the day in which it was written.” Sorenson, Kennedy
172 Lincoln on the Constitution: Better not take the first step [in altering the Constitution], which may lead to a habit of altering it; new provisions would introduce new difficulties, and thus create, and increase appetite for still further change. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years
Contradiction
83 [The true believer] cannot be…baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence. Hoffer, The True Believer
Conversation
66 “I’ve got an adjective that just fits you” …one of his favorite starts—he seldom had a word in mind, but it was a curiosity provoker, and he could always produce something complimentary if he got in a tight corner. Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise.
76 ...and the agreeable manner in which he [Wickham] immediately fell into conversation, though it was only on its being a wet night, and on the probability of a rainy season, made her feel that the commonest, dullest, most threadbare topic might be rendered interesting by the skill of the speaker. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
91 It is your turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy--I talked about the dance and you ought to make some kind of remark on the size of the room or the number of couples. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
91 We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the éclat of a proverb. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
152 Sir William Lucas, and his daughter Maria, a good-humored girl, but as empty-headed as himself, had nothing to say that could be worth hearing, and were listened to with about as much delight as the rattle of the chaise. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
21 Miss Bates...was a great talker upon little matters. Austen, Emma
273 Emma made as slight a reply as she could; but it was fully sufficient for Mrs. Elton, who only wanted to be talking herself. Austen, Emma
125 …success in Cambridge conversation frequently came from saying something preposterous, hoping that someone would take you seriously. Watson, The Double Helix.
34 This brief account of the family is intended to supersede the necessity of a long and minute detail from Mrs. Thorpe herself…in which the worthlessness of lords and attorneys might be set forth, and conversations, which had passed twenty years before, be minutely repeated. Austen, Northanger Abbey.
36 …never satisfied with the day unless she spent the chief of it by the side of Mrs. Thorpe, in what they called conversation, but in which there was scarcely ever any exchange of opinion, and not often any resemblance of subject, for Mrs. Thorpe talked chiefly of her children and Mrs. Allen of her gowns. Austen, Northanger Abbey.
68 The admiral, after taking two or three refreshing turns about the room with his hands behind him…now came up to Captain Wentworth, and without any observation of what he might be interrupting, thinking only of his own thoughts, began with…. Austen, Persuasion.
155 …but when…has half an hour’s leisure to bestow on me, she is sure to have something to relate that is entertaining and profitable, something that makes one know one’s species better. Austen, Persuasion.
204 No. It [the information] does not come to me in quite so direct a line as that; it takes a bend or two, but nothing of consequence. Austen, Persuasion.
230 Mrs. Musgrove was giving Mrs. Croft the history of her eldest daughter’s engagement, and just in that inconvenient tone of voice which was perfectly audible while it pretended to be a whisper. Austen, Persuasion.
231 The two ladies continued to talk, to re-urge the same admitted truths…. Austen, Persuasion.
252 …conversation can flourish only in a small company where no one is stuck up. Clark, Civilization.
124 F. Bacon: Do not betray even to your friends too much of your real purposes and thoughts; in conversation, ask questions oftener than you express opinions; and when you speak, offer data and information rather than beliefs and judgments. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Francis Bacon.
426 "There, it does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance that knows what you know[;] I see so many of these new folks nowadays, that seem to have neither past nor future[;] conversation's got to have some root in the past, or else you've got to explain every remark you make, an' it wears a person out." Jewett, The country of the Pointed Firs.
470 Dr. Johnson…often “talked for victory.” Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
605 Boswell: In a moment he [Johnson] was in a full glow of conversation, and I felt myself elevated as if brought into another state of being. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
616 Boswell: But, Sir, may there not be very good conversation without a contest for superiority? Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
635 Johnson: Never speak of a man in his own presence…always indelicate, and may be offensive. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
1042 The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage, that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Behavior.
273 Francine du Plessix Gray: The vapid tiddlywinks conversation, and the tedium of the endless cocktail hours! Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
25 In one’s converse with the world, I have often observed this vice: that instead of gathering observations from others, we make it our only business to give them our own and are more concerned how to peddle our own than how to acquire new. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
25 Above all, let him be taught to surrender to truth as soon as ever he shall discover it, whether in his opponent’s argument…. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
26 Make him understand that to acknowledge the error he shall discover in his own argument, though only perceived by himself, is an act of judgment and sincerity, which are the principal things he is to seek after; that obstinacy and contention are common qualities, most often seen in the meanest souls; that to change his mind and correct himself, and to forsake a bad argument in the height and heat of dispute, are rare, strong, and philosophical qualities. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
412 …agreement is a very tiresome quality in conversation. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
415 I feel much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself when, in the very heat of combat [conversation], I make myself bow beneath the force of my adversary’s reason, than I feel pleased by the victory I obtain over him through his weakness. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
422 As in conversation, the gravity, the gown, and the fortune of the speaker often give authority to vain and absurd remarks. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
423 …they will knock you senseless with the authority of their experience; they have heard, they have seen, they have done; you are overwhelmed with examples. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
430 They make a good remark; let us examine how far they understand it, let us see where they got it. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
432 But as for things that are said in company or before other people, I never oppose them, either by word or sign, however false or absurd I may consider them. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
583 …for it tires me and disagrees with me to talk on a full stomach, whereas I find it a very wholesome and pleasant exercise to shout and argue before a meal. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
1097 …for the people talk about nothing as if they were terribly in earnest…. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun.
148 It is a secret known but to few, yet of no small use in the conduct of life, that when you fall into a man’s conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him. Steele, 4/26/1711. The Spectator.
308 It is a wonderful thing, that so many, and they not reckoned absurd, shall entertain those with whom they converse by giving them the history of their pains and aches; and imagine such narrations their quota of the conversation. Steele, 6/25/1711. The Spectator.
416 Story tellers, who are most religiously careful of keeping to the truth in every particular circumstance of a narration, whether it concern the main end or not. Steele, 8/8/1711. The Spectator.
27 [On his inconsistency]: JFK: “We all learn...from the time you are born to the time you die...events change...conditions change, and...you would be extremely unwise...to pursue policies that are unsuccessful. Sorenson, Kennedy
265 A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. Emerson, Self-Reliance.
265 Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today. Emerson, Self-Reliance.
58 Why do we not recall how much contradiction we perceive even in our own judgment, how many things were yesterday articles of faith to us that today are fables to us? Montaigne, Selected Essays.
113 Our actions are only pieces patched together. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
285 So it is that I, indeed, contradict myself upon occasion, but truth as Demades said, I do not contradict. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
Constitution (U.S.)
437 JFK: “The Constitution has served us extremely well…but…all its clauses had to be interpreted by men and had to be made to work by men, and it has to be made to work today in an entirely different world from the day in which it was written.” Sorenson, Kennedy
172 Lincoln on the Constitution: Better not take the first step [in altering the Constitution], which may lead to a habit of altering it; new provisions would introduce new difficulties, and thus create, and increase appetite for still further change. Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years
Contradiction
83 [The true believer] cannot be…baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence. Hoffer, The True Believer
Conversation
66 “I’ve got an adjective that just fits you” …one of his favorite starts—he seldom had a word in mind, but it was a curiosity provoker, and he could always produce something complimentary if he got in a tight corner. Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise.
76 ...and the agreeable manner in which he [Wickham] immediately fell into conversation, though it was only on its being a wet night, and on the probability of a rainy season, made her feel that the commonest, dullest, most threadbare topic might be rendered interesting by the skill of the speaker. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
91 It is your turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy--I talked about the dance and you ought to make some kind of remark on the size of the room or the number of couples. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
91 We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the éclat of a proverb. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
152 Sir William Lucas, and his daughter Maria, a good-humored girl, but as empty-headed as himself, had nothing to say that could be worth hearing, and were listened to with about as much delight as the rattle of the chaise. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
21 Miss Bates...was a great talker upon little matters. Austen, Emma
273 Emma made as slight a reply as she could; but it was fully sufficient for Mrs. Elton, who only wanted to be talking herself. Austen, Emma
125 …success in Cambridge conversation frequently came from saying something preposterous, hoping that someone would take you seriously. Watson, The Double Helix.
34 This brief account of the family is intended to supersede the necessity of a long and minute detail from Mrs. Thorpe herself…in which the worthlessness of lords and attorneys might be set forth, and conversations, which had passed twenty years before, be minutely repeated. Austen, Northanger Abbey.
36 …never satisfied with the day unless she spent the chief of it by the side of Mrs. Thorpe, in what they called conversation, but in which there was scarcely ever any exchange of opinion, and not often any resemblance of subject, for Mrs. Thorpe talked chiefly of her children and Mrs. Allen of her gowns. Austen, Northanger Abbey.
68 The admiral, after taking two or three refreshing turns about the room with his hands behind him…now came up to Captain Wentworth, and without any observation of what he might be interrupting, thinking only of his own thoughts, began with…. Austen, Persuasion.
155 …but when…has half an hour’s leisure to bestow on me, she is sure to have something to relate that is entertaining and profitable, something that makes one know one’s species better. Austen, Persuasion.
204 No. It [the information] does not come to me in quite so direct a line as that; it takes a bend or two, but nothing of consequence. Austen, Persuasion.
230 Mrs. Musgrove was giving Mrs. Croft the history of her eldest daughter’s engagement, and just in that inconvenient tone of voice which was perfectly audible while it pretended to be a whisper. Austen, Persuasion.
231 The two ladies continued to talk, to re-urge the same admitted truths…. Austen, Persuasion.
252 …conversation can flourish only in a small company where no one is stuck up. Clark, Civilization.
124 F. Bacon: Do not betray even to your friends too much of your real purposes and thoughts; in conversation, ask questions oftener than you express opinions; and when you speak, offer data and information rather than beliefs and judgments. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Francis Bacon.
426 "There, it does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance that knows what you know[;] I see so many of these new folks nowadays, that seem to have neither past nor future[;] conversation's got to have some root in the past, or else you've got to explain every remark you make, an' it wears a person out." Jewett, The country of the Pointed Firs.
470 Dr. Johnson…often “talked for victory.” Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
605 Boswell: In a moment he [Johnson] was in a full glow of conversation, and I felt myself elevated as if brought into another state of being. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
616 Boswell: But, Sir, may there not be very good conversation without a contest for superiority? Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
635 Johnson: Never speak of a man in his own presence…always indelicate, and may be offensive. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.
1042 The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the advantage, that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world over. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Behavior.
273 Francine du Plessix Gray: The vapid tiddlywinks conversation, and the tedium of the endless cocktail hours! Plimpton, ed. The Writer’s Chapbook
25 In one’s converse with the world, I have often observed this vice: that instead of gathering observations from others, we make it our only business to give them our own and are more concerned how to peddle our own than how to acquire new. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
25 Above all, let him be taught to surrender to truth as soon as ever he shall discover it, whether in his opponent’s argument…. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
26 Make him understand that to acknowledge the error he shall discover in his own argument, though only perceived by himself, is an act of judgment and sincerity, which are the principal things he is to seek after; that obstinacy and contention are common qualities, most often seen in the meanest souls; that to change his mind and correct himself, and to forsake a bad argument in the height and heat of dispute, are rare, strong, and philosophical qualities. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
412 …agreement is a very tiresome quality in conversation. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
415 I feel much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself when, in the very heat of combat [conversation], I make myself bow beneath the force of my adversary’s reason, than I feel pleased by the victory I obtain over him through his weakness. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
422 As in conversation, the gravity, the gown, and the fortune of the speaker often give authority to vain and absurd remarks. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
423 …they will knock you senseless with the authority of their experience; they have heard, they have seen, they have done; you are overwhelmed with examples. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
430 They make a good remark; let us examine how far they understand it, let us see where they got it. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
432 But as for things that are said in company or before other people, I never oppose them, either by word or sign, however false or absurd I may consider them. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
583 …for it tires me and disagrees with me to talk on a full stomach, whereas I find it a very wholesome and pleasant exercise to shout and argue before a meal. Montaigne, Selected Essays.
1097 …for the people talk about nothing as if they were terribly in earnest…. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun.
148 It is a secret known but to few, yet of no small use in the conduct of life, that when you fall into a man’s conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him. Steele, 4/26/1711. The Spectator.
308 It is a wonderful thing, that so many, and they not reckoned absurd, shall entertain those with whom they converse by giving them the history of their pains and aches; and imagine such narrations their quota of the conversation. Steele, 6/25/1711. The Spectator.
416 Story tellers, who are most religiously careful of keeping to the truth in every particular circumstance of a narration, whether it concern the main end or not. Steele, 8/8/1711. The Spectator.
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