Allan Bloom, Excerpt from "The Closing of the American Mind"

The teacher's standpoint is not arbitrary. It is neither simply dependent on what students think they want or happen to be in this place or time, nor is it imposed on him by the demands of a particular society or the vagaries of the market. Although much effort has been expended in trying to prove that the teacher is always the agent of such forces, in fact he is, willy-nilly, guided by the awareness, or the divination, that there is a human nature, and that assisting its fulfillment is his task. He does not come to this by way of abstractions or complicated reasoning. He sees it in the eyes of his students. Those students are only potential, but potential points beyond itself; and this is the source of the hope, almost always disappointed but ever renascent, that man is not just a creature of accident, chained to and formed by the particular cave in which he is born.
--Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

Miscellaneous quotation

"Every body, every quality of a body, resolves itself into an enormous number of vibrations, movements, changes. . . . Philosophy has long dismissed the notion of substance and modern physics had endorsed the dismissal. . . . How then does the world come to appear to us as a collection of solid, static objects extended in space? Because of the intellect, which presents us with a false view of it."
--Dr. Joad, quoted by Wallace Stevens in "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Miscellaneous quotation

"Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent must function also as a deflection of reality."
--Kenneth Burke

Lewis Carroll, Excerpt from "Through the Looking-Glass"

"There's no use trying," 
she said; "one can't 
believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't 
had much practice," 
said the Queen. 

"When I was your age, 
I always did it for 
half-an-hour a day. 
Why, sometimes I've 
believed as many as 
six impossible things 
before breakfast."

--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

William Cowper, "Retirement"

Philologists who chase 
A panting syllable through time and space, 
Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, 
To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah’s Ark. 
--William Cowper, "Retirement"

Giacomo Leopardi, "Zibaldone"

"Reason is the enemy of all greatness: reason is the enemy of nature: nature is great, reason is small. I mean that it will be more or less difficult for a man to be great the more he is governed by reason, that few can be great (and in art and poetry perhaps no one) unless they are governed by illusions."

--Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115276/giacomo-leopardis-zibaldone-reviewed-adam-kirsch

cf. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/oct/10/greatest-intellectual-diary-italian-literature/;

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/feb/10/magic-leopardi/

Herman Hesse, "The Fog"

To wander in fog—how queer!
Lonely are bush and stone,
No tree sees the other near,
Each is alone.

Once my world was full of friends,
When my life still had light;
Now that the fog descends,
Not one is in sight.

Only he is wise who knows
The steady gloom to fall
That slowly round him grows,
Severed from all.

To wander in fog—how queer!
Solitude is life’s own.
No man sees the other near,
Each is alone.

--Herman Hesse, "The Fog"

William James, Excerpt from "The Principles of Psychology"

When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the summariness of its allusions and the rapidity of its transitions. Before one of them is half through a sentence, the other knows his meaning and replies. Such genial play with such massive materials, such an easy flashing of light over far perspectives, such careless indifference to the dust and apparatus that ordinarily surround a subject and seem to pertain to its essence, make these conversations seem true feasts for gods to a listener who is educated enough to follow them at all. . . .

--William James, The Principles of Psychology

Louis MacNeice, "Pindar Is Dead"

PINDAR IS DEAD

There are hikers on all the roads-
     Pindar is dead-
The petrol pumps are doing a roaring business,
Motors are tuning up for the Easter races,
Building companies are loaning to the newly married-
     Pindar is dead and that's no matter.

There are climbers on all the hills-
     Pindar is dead-
With oiled boots and ropes they are tackling Snowdon,
The swimming-baths are filled for Easter Monday,
Doctored with chlorine to prevent infection-
     Pindar is dead and that's no matter.

There is money on all the horses-
     Pindar is dead-
One belongs to a proud and plethoric peer,
Ode to a maharajah, one to a midland magnate,
One to a dago count and one to a tweeded spinster-
     Pindar is dead and that's no matter.

There are flowers in all the markets-
     Pindar is dead-
Daffodils, tulips, and forced roses,
New potatoes and green peas for Easter,
Wreaths of moss and primrose for the churches
But no wreaths for runners, whether of olive or laurel-
     Pindar is dead and that's no matter.

--Louis MacNeice

Thomas Hardy, "The Darkling Thrush"

I leant upon a coppice gate
      When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
      The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
      Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
      Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
      The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
      The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
      Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
      Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
      The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
      Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
      In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
      Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
      Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
      Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
      His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
      And I was unaware.

--Thomas Hardy, "The Darkling Thrush"

Wallace Stevens, "The Motive for Metaphor"

You like it under the trees in autumn,

Because everything is half dead.

The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves

And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,

With the half colors of quarter-things,

The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,

The single bird, the obscure moon—

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world

Of things that would never be quite expressed,

Where you yourself were never quite yourself

And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:

The motive for metaphor, shrinking from

The weight of primary noon,

The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer

Of red and blue, the hard sound—

Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,

The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

--Wallace Stevens, "The Motive for Metaphor"

James Thurber, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"

"WE'RE going through!" The Commander's voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. "We can't make it, sir. It's spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me." "I'm not asking you, Lieutenant Berg," said the Commander. "Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8500! We're going through!" The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" he shouted. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" repeated Lieutenant Berg. "Full strength in No. 3 turret!" shouted the Commander. "Full strength in No. 3 turret!" The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. "The Old Man'll get us through," they said to one another. "The Old Man ain't afraid of hell!" . . . 

"Not so fast! You're driving too fast!" said Mrs. Mitty. "What are you driving so fast for?" 

"Hmm?" said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. "You were up to fifty-five," she said. "You know I don't like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five." Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind. "You're tensed up again," said Mrs. Mitty. "It's one of your days. I wish you'd let Dr. Renshaw look you over." 

Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the building where his wife went to have her hair done. "Remember to get those overshoes while I'm having my hair done," she said. "I don't need overshoes," said Mitty. She put her mirror back into her bag. "We've been all through that," she said, getting out of the car. "You're not a young man any longer." He raced the engine a little. "Why don't you wear your gloves? Have you lost your gloves?" Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the gloves. He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again. "Pick it up, brother!" snapped a cop as the light changed, and Mitty hastily pulled on his gloves and lurched ahead. He drove around the streets aimlessly for a time, and then he drove past the hospital on his way to the parking lot. 

. . . "It's the millionaire banker, Wellington McMillan," said the pretty nurse. "Yes?" said Walter Mitty, removing his gloves slowly. "Who has the case?" "Dr. Renshaw and Dr. Benbow, but there are two specialists here, Dr. Remington from New York and Dr. Pritchard-Mitford from London. He flew over." A door opened down a long, cool corridor and Dr. Renshaw came out. He looked distraught and haggard. "Hello, Mitty," he said. `'We're having the devil's own time with McMillan, the millionaire banker and close personal friend of Roosevelt. Obstreosis of the ductal tract. Tertiary. Wish you'd take a look at him." "Glad to," said Mitty. 

In the operating room there were whispered introductions: "Dr. Remington, Dr. Mitty. Dr. Pritchard-Mitford, Dr. Mitty." "I've read your book on streptothricosis," said Pritchard-Mitford, shaking hands. "A brilliant performance, sir." "Thank you," said Walter Mitty. "Didn't know you were in the States, Mitty," grumbled Remington. "Coals to Newcastle, bringing Mitford and me up here for a tertiary." "You are very kind," said Mitty. A huge, complicated machine, connected to the operating table, with many tubes and wires, began at this moment to go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. "The new anesthetizer is giving away!" shouted an intern. "There is no one in the East who knows how to fix it!" "Quiet, man!" said Mitty, in a low, cool voice. He sprang to the machine, which was now going pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep . He began fingering delicately a row of glistening dials. "Give me a fountain pen!" he snapped. Someone handed him a fountain pen. He pulled a faulty piston out of the machine and inserted the pen in its place. "That will hold for ten minutes," he said. "Get on with the operation. A nurse hurried over and whispered to Renshaw, and Mitty saw the man turn pale. "Coreopsis has set in," said Renshaw nervously. "If you would take over, Mitty?" Mitty looked at him and at the craven figure of Benbow, who drank, and at the grave, uncertain faces of the two great specialists. "If you wish," he said. They slipped a white gown on him, he adjusted a mask and drew on thin gloves; nurses handed him shining . . . 

"Back it up, Mac!! Look out for that Buick!" Walter Mitty jammed on the brakes. "Wrong lane, Mac," said the parking-lot attendant, looking at Mitty closely. "Gee. Yeh," muttered Mitty. He began cautiously to back out of the lane marked "Exit Only." "Leave her sit there," said the attendant. "I'll put her away." Mitty got out of the car. "Hey, better leave the key." "Oh," said Mitty, handing the man the ignition key. The attendant vaulted into the car, backed it up with insolent skill, and put it where it belonged. 

They're so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main Street; they think they know everything. Once he had tried to take his chains off, outside New Milford, and he had got them wound around the axles. A man had had to come out in a wrecking car and unwind them, a young, grinning garageman. Since then Mrs. Mitty always made him drive to a garage to have the chains taken off. The next time, he thought, I'll wear my right arm in a sling; they won't grin at me then. I'll have my right arm in a sling and they'll see I couldn't possibly take the chains off myself. He kicked at the slush on the sidewalk. "Overshoes," he said to himself, and he began looking for a shoe store. 

When he came out into the street again, with the overshoes in a box under his arm, Walter Mitty began to wonder what the other thing was his wife had told him to get. She had told him, twice before they set out from their house for Waterbury. In a way he hated these weekly trips to town--he was always getting something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb's, razor blades? No. Tooth paste, toothbrush, bicarbonate, Carborundum, initiative and referendum? He gave it up. But she would remember it. "Where's the what's-its- name?" she would ask. "Don't tell me you forgot the what's-its-name." A newsboy went by shouting something about the Waterbury trial. 

. . . "Perhaps this will refresh your memory." The District Attorney suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness stand. "Have you ever seen this before?'' Walter Mitty took the gun and examined it expertly. "This is my Webley-Vickers 50.80," he said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the courtroom. The Judge rapped for order. "You are a crack shot with any sort of firearms, I believe?" said the District Attorney, insinuatingly. "Objection!" shouted Mitty's attorney. "We have shown that the defendant could not have fired the shot. We have shown that he wore his right arm in a sling on the night of the fourteenth of July." Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly and the bickering attorneys were stilled. "With any known make of gun," he said evenly, "I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand." Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman's scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty's arms. The District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising from his chair, Mitty let the man have it on the point of the chin. "You miserable cur!" . . . 

"Puppy biscuit," said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking and the buildings of Waterbury rose up out of the misty courtroom and surrounded him again. A woman who was passing laughed. "He said 'Puppy biscuit,'" she said to her companion. "That man said 'Puppy biscuit' to himself." Walter Mitty hurried on. He went into an A. P., not the first one he came to but a smaller one farther up the street. "I want some biscuit for small, young dogs," he said to the clerk. "Any special brand, sir?" The greatest pistol shot in the world thought a moment. "It says 'Puppies Bark for It' on the box," said Walter Mitty. 

His wife would be through at the hairdresser's in fifteen minutes' Mitty saw in looking at his watch, unless they had trouble drying it; sometimes they had trouble drying it. She didn't like to get to the hotel first, she would want him to be there waiting for her as usual. He found a big leather chair in the lobby, facing a window, and he put the overshoes and the puppy biscuit on the floor beside it. He picked up an old copy of Liberty and sank down into the chair. "Can Germany Conquer the World Through the Air?" Walter Mitty looked at the pictures of bombing planes and of ruined streets. 

. . . "The cannonading has got the wind up in young Raleigh, sir," said the sergeant. Captain Mitty looked up at him through tousled hair. "Get him to bed," he said wearily, "with the others. I'll fly alone." "But you can't, sir," said the sergeant anxiously. "It takes two men to handle that bomber and the Archies are pounding hell out of the air. Von Richtman's circus is between here and Saulier." "Somebody's got to get that ammunition dump," said Mitty. "I'm going over. Spot of brandy?" He poured a drink for the sergeant and one for himself. War thundered and whined around the dugout and battered at the door. There was a rending of wood and splinters flew through the room. "A bit of a near thing," said Captain Mitty carelessly. 'The box barrage is closing in," said the sergeant. "We only live once, Sergeant," said Mitty, with his faint, fleeting smile. "Or do we?" He poured another brandy and tossed it off. "I never see a man could hold his brandy like you, sir," said the sergeant. "Begging your pardon, sir." Captain Mitty stood up and strapped on his huge Webley-Vickers automatic. "It's forty kilometers through hell, sir," said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. "After all," he said softly, "what isn't?" The pounding of the cannon increased; there was the rat-tat-tatting of machine guns, and from somewhere came the menacing pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of the new flame-throwers. Walter Mitty walked to the door of the dugout humming "Aupres de Ma Blonde." He turned and waved to the sergeant. "Cheerio!" he said. . . . 

Something struck his shoulder. "I've been looking all over this hotel for you," said Mrs. Mitty. "Why do you have to hide in this old chair? How did you expect me to find you?" "Things close in," said Walter Mitty vaguely. "What?" Mrs. Mitty said. "Did you get the what's-its-name? The puppy biscuit? What's in that box?" "Overshoes," said Mitty. "Couldn't you have put them on in the store?" 'I was thinking," said Walter Mitty. "Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?" She looked at him. "I'm going to take your temperature when I get you home," she said. 

They went out through the revolving doors that made a faintly derisive whistling sound when you pushed them. It was two blocks to the parking lot. At the drugstore on the corner she said, "Wait here for me. I forgot something. I won't be a minute." She was more than a minute. Walter Mitty lighted a cigarette. It began to rain, rain with sleet in it. He stood up against the wall of the drugstore, smoking. . . . He put his shoulders back and his heels together. "To hell with the handkerchief," said Walter Mitty scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.

--James Thurber, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"

Rainer Maria Rilke, "Day in Autumn"

After the summer's yield, Lord, it is time
to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials
and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.

As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness.
Direct on them two days of warmer light
to hale them golden toward their term, and harry
the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.

Whoever's homeless now, will build no shelter;
who lives alone will live indefinitely so,
waking up to read a little, draft long letters,   
and, along the city's avenues,
fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, "Day in Autumn"

Translated by Mary Kinzie

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sonnet LXII: "Inclusiveness"

SONNET LXIII. 
INCLUSIVENESS.

The changing guests, each in a different mood,
Sit at the roadside table and arise:
And every life among them in likewise
Is a soul's board set daily with new food.
What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?—
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
May not this ancient room thou sit'st in dwell
In separate living souls for joy or pain?
Nay, all its corners may be painted plain
Where Heaven shows pictures of some life spent well;
And may be stamped, a memory all in vain,
Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell.

--Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Jorge Luis Borges, Excerpt from "Labryinths"

"Any great and lasting book must be ambiguous, Borges says; it is a mirror that makes the reader's features known, but the author must seem to be unaware of the significance of his work -- which is an excellent description of Borges's own art. 'God must not engage in theology; the writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.'"
--Borges, Labyrinths

Ernest Hemingway, Excerpt from "Death in the Afternoon"

"If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing."
--Ernest Hemingway, "Death in the Afternoon"

Friedrich Nietzsche, Excerpt from "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense"

"What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms--in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins."

--Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense"

Paul Ricoeur, Excerpt from "Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation"

"Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud . . . “truth as lying” would be the negative heading under which one might place these three exercises of suspicion."
--Paul Ricoeur, "Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation"

Miscellaneous quotation

“Men are disturbed not by events but by their opinion about events.”
--Epictetus

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/wellbeing/10146546/Anxious-Depressed-Try-Greek-philosophy.html

Miscellaneous quotation

“Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of the utterance. A political speech may be, and sometimes is, literature; a sonnet to the moon may be, and often is, trash. Style is what distinguishes literature from trash.”
--Evelyn Waugh

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/is-philosophy-literature/

Miscellaneous quotation

"Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven."
--Walter Benjamin

Donna Tartt, "The Secret History"

"Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?"
--Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay"

Nature's first green is gold, 
Her hardest hue to hold. 
Her early leafs a flower; 
But only so an hour. 
Then leaf subsides to leaf. 
So Eden sank to grief, 
So dawn goes down to day. 
Nothing gold can stay.

--Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay"

Lewis Carroll, "The Walrus and the Carpenter"

The sun was shining on the sea,

      Shining with all his might:

He did his very best to make

      The billows smooth and bright —

And this was odd, because it was

      The middle of the night.

The moon was shining sulkily,

      Because she thought the sun

Had got no business to be there

      After the day was done —

"It's very rude of him," she said,

      "To come and spoil the fun."

The sea was wet as wet could be,

      The sands were dry as dry.

You could not see a cloud, because

      No cloud was in the sky:

No birds were flying overhead —

      There were no birds to fly.

The Walrus and the Carpenter

      Were walking close at hand;

They wept like anything to see

      Such quantities of sand:

If this were only cleared away,'

      They said, it would be grand!'

If seven maids with seven mops

      Swept it for half a year,

Do you suppose,' the Walrus said,

      That they could get it clear?'

I doubt it,' said the Carpenter,

      And shed a bitter tear.

O Oysters, come and walk with us!'

      The Walrus did beseech.

A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,

      Along the briny beach:

We cannot do with more than four,

      To give a hand to each.'

The eldest Oyster looked at him,

      But never a word he said:

The eldest Oyster winked his eye,

      And shook his heavy head —

Meaning to say he did not choose

      To leave the oyster-bed.

But four young Oysters hurried up,

      All eager for the treat:

Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,

      Their shoes were clean and neat —

And this was odd, because, you know,

      They hadn't any feet.

Four other Oysters followed them,

      And yet another four;

And thick and fast they came at last,

      And more, and more, and more —

All hopping through the frothy waves,

      And scrambling to the shore.

The Walrus and the Carpenter

      Walked on a mile or so,

And then they rested on a rock

      Conveniently low:

And all the little Oysters stood

      And waited in a row.

The time has come,' the Walrus said,

      To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

      Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

      And whether pigs have wings.'

But wait a bit,' the Oysters cried,

      Before we have our chat;

For some of us are out of breath,

      And all of us are fat!'

No hurry!' said the Carpenter.

      They thanked him much for that.

A loaf of bread,' the Walrus said,

      Is what we chiefly need:

Pepper and vinegar besides

      Are very good indeed —

Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,

      We can begin to feed.'

But not on us!' the Oysters cried,

      Turning a little blue.

After such kindness, that would be

      A dismal thing to do!'

The night is fine,' the Walrus said.

      Do you admire the view?

It was so kind of you to come!

      And you are very nice!'

The Carpenter said nothing but

      Cut us another slice:

I wish you were not quite so deaf —

      I've had to ask you twice!'

It seems a shame,' the Walrus said,

      To play them such a trick,

After we've brought them out so far,

      And made them trot so quick!'

The Carpenter said nothing but

      The butter's spread too thick!'

I weep for you,' the Walrus said:

      I deeply sympathize.'

With sobs and tears he sorted out

      Those of the largest size,

Holding his pocket-handkerchief

      Before his streaming eyes.

O Oysters,' said the Carpenter,

      You've had a pleasant run!

Shall we be trotting home again?'

      But answer came there none —

And this was scarcely odd, because

      They'd eaten every one."

--Lewis Carroll, "The Walrus and the Carpenter"

John Keats, "On first looking into Chapman's Homer"

MUCH have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told	5
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;	10
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

--John Keats, "On first looking into Chapman's Homer"

E. V. Lucas, Excerpt from "Over Bemerton's: An Easy-going Chronicle"

     "The art of life," says Trist, "is the pigeon-holing of women." True enough of Englishmen, at any rate, who want women only when they want them (and then they must behave); but no Frenchman would say it.
     "The art of life," says Trist, "is to say the same things to everybody. To differentiate one's treatment of people may be interesting, but it leads to complications."
     "The art of life," says Trist, "is to assume that no one else has any feelings."
     "The art of life," says Trist, "is the use and not abuse of alcohol. A wise aperitif can make a bad dinner almost good, and a bad partner almost negligible."
     "The art of life," says Trist, "is to be so well known at a good restaurant that you can pay by cheque."
     "The art of life," says Trist, "is to make your tailor come to you."
     "The art of life," says Trist, who hates gossip, "is never to see two unrelated people together; but if you must,--and it can't be helped very easily,--never to mention it again. Three-quarters of the ills of life proceed from the report that So-and-so has been seen with So-and-so. There is too much talk. A wise autocrat would cut out the tongue of every baby. A silent society would probably be a happy one; because it would be largely without scandal." That seemed to me, I said, too drastic, and I recommended instead the example (from my Chinese book) of Hsin Shao, of the second and third century A.D., "who is now chiefly remembered in connection with his practice of devoting the first day of every month to criticism of his neighbors and their conduct."
     "The art of life," says Trist, "is never to be out of small change."
     "The art of life," says Trist, "is to keep down acquaintances. One's friends one can manage, but one's acquaintances can be the devil."
     "The art of life," says Trist, "is to show your hand. There is no diplomacy like candour. You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do. Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception."
     "The art of life," says Trist, "is to live near a post office, but never to go there one's self."
     "The art of life," says Trist, "is never to think you know what other people are feeling about you. You are sure to be wrong."
     "The art of life," says Trist, "is to be thought odd. Everything will then be permitted to you. The best way to be thought odd is to return a cheque now and then on a conscientious scruple. There is no such investment."
     Trist also has a very interesting and ingenious theory that goes more deeply into the management of life. "I do not believe," he once said to me, "in carving out our own destiny, but I believe that the unexpected happens so often, and the expected so seldom, that one might by steadily anticipating ills avoid calamity."
     Trist, however, is not really as monstrous as these maxims would make him out to be. For the full play of his personality he must undoubtedly be calm and prosperous and spoiled; but once he is in that state of bliss he can be extraordinarily kind. One would not see him carrying a poor woman's bundle, or putting himself out over a street casualty, but he has befriended several young artists and musicians, and he lends money capriciously to needy persons at the very moment when money means most to them. He likes to play Fate.

--Edward Verall Lucas, Over Bemerton's: An Easy-going Chronicle, Chapter X

Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Parable of the Madman"

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" -- As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? -- Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us -- for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Parable of the Madman

http://www.historyguide.org/europe/madman.html

Charles Bukowski, "i wanted to over throw the government but all i brought down was somebody's wife"

". . . a tottering dynasty myself, always drunk as possible,
well read, starving, depressed, but actually
a good young piece of ass would have solved all my rancor,
but I didn't know this . . ."
--Charles Bukowski, "i wanted to over throw the government but all i brought down was somebody's wife"

Miscellaneous quotation

"The cutting edge isn’t the cutting edge without the rest of the blade.”
--Joshua Sosin

http://www.thedurhamnews.com/2013/07/05/216106/brodhead-remind-people-why-humanities.html

Giorgio Agamben, Excerpt from "What Is A Paradigm"

Feuerbach once wrote that the philosophical element in each work is its Entvicklungsfahigkeit, literally, its capability to be developed. If a work, be it a work of science or art or scholarship has some value, it will contain this philosophical element. It is something which remains unsaid within the work but which demands to be unfolded and worked out. By the way I think this is a very good definition of philosophy. Philosophy has no specificity, no proper territory, it is within literature, within art or science or theology or whatever, it is this element which contains a capability to be developed. In a sense philosophy is scattered in every territory. It is always a diaspora, and must be recollected and gathered up.
--Giorgio Agamben, "What Is A Paradigm"

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/what-is-a-paradigm/

Ulysses' Speech (Dante, "Inferno")

"O frati", dissi "che per cento milia
perigli siete giunti a l'occidente,
a questa tanto picciola vigilia
d'i nostri sensi ch'è del rimanente,
non vogliate negar l'esperienza,
di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente.
Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza".

'Brothers,' I said, 'o you, who having crossed
a hundred thousand dangers, reach the west,
to this brief waking-time that still is left
unto your senses, you must not deny
experience of that which lies beyond
the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled.
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes,
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.'

--Dante, Inferno (Canto XXVI)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Excerpt from "Tender is the Night"

"On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose- colored hotel."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

D. S. Carne-Ross, "The Two Voices of Translation"

Our first response to a translation must be, “Yes, this is a good piece of writing.” But we cannot go on to say, “This is a good translation,” until we have made sure that it stands in a satisfactory relation to its original.

. . .

What translation cannot do, except at a primitive level of communication, and what it is commonly supposed to do, is “give you the original,” provide a means of access to work in languages that we do not know. . . In poetry, especially lyric poetry, the proportion of what will not come across increases vertiginously.

--D. S. Carne-Ross, “The Two Voices of Translation”

Antoine Berman, Excerpt from "Toward A Translation Criticism"

A translator without historical consciousness is a crippled translator, a prisoner of his representation of translation and of those carried by the social discourses of the moment.

--Antoine Berman, Toward A Translation Criticism

Jacques Barzun, Excerpt from "Exeunt the Humanities"

     These several answers to the challenge, Of what use is the humanistic discipline? must be inculcated in the students from the outset. They must be made to see--or take on trust provisionally--that their studies are intensely practical. The humanities properly acquired will effect in them a transformation of mind and character which cannot be described, but which they will find useful all life long.
     Just as important as making this prediction is to refrain from making false promises. Studying the humanities will not make one more ethical, more tolerant, more cheerful, more loyal, more warmhearted, more successful with the other sex or popular at large. It may well contribute to these happy results, but only indirectly, through a better-organized mind, capable of inquiring and distinguishing false from true and fact from opinion; a mind enhanced in its ability to write, read, and compute; a mind attentive to the world and open to good influences, if only because of a trained curiosity and quiet self-confidence.
     All these things are likely results; they are not guaranteed. Life, like medicine, offers no certainties, but we go on living and going to the doctor's. So it must be said again: no exaggerated claims for the humanities, but a conviction in the teacher, in the department, in the faculty, in the administration, in the indispensable group of advisers, that this body of studies has a use--a practical use in daily life, even though no one can say, "I've made a more effective presentation to the board because I've studied Aeschylus."

--Jacques Barzun, "Exeunt the Humanities"

http://goblues.org/faculty/gregoryj/files/2011/06/Barzun-Exeunt-the-Humanities.pdf

Friedrich Nietzsche, Excerpt from "Daybreak"

. . . philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow — it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of ‘work,’ that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to ‘get everything done’ at once, including every old or new book: — this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously fore and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers.
--Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak

Saul Bellow, Excerpt from "The Adventures of Augie March"

And this is what mere humanity always does. It's made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe. The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that's what their power is. There's one image that gets out in front to lead the rest and can impose its claim to being genuine with more force than others, or one voice enlarged to thunder is heard above the others. Then a huge invention, which is the invention maybe of the world itself, and of nature, becomes the actual world - with cities, factories, public buildings, railroads, armies, dams, prisons, and movies - becomes the actuality. That's the struggle of humanity, to recruit others to your version of what's real. Then even the flowers and the moss on the stones become the moss and the flowers of a version.
-- Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, Chapter XIX

Thomas Mann, Excerpt from "The Magic Mountain"

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries. He may regard the general, impersonal foundations of his existence as definitely settled and taken for granted, and be as far from assuming a critical attitude toward them as our good Hans Castorp really was; yet it is quite conceivable that he may none the less be vaguely conscious of the deficiencies of his epoch and find them prejudicial to his own moral well-being. All sorts of personal aims, ends, hopes, prospects, hover before the eyes of the individual, and out of these he derives the impulse to ambition and achievement. Now, if the life about him, if his own time seem, however outwardly stimulating, to be at bottom empty of such food for his aspirations; if he privately recognize it to be hopeless, viewless, helpless, opposing only a hollow silence to all the questions man puts, consciously or unconsciously, yet somehow, puts, as to the final, absolute, and abstract meaning in all his efforts and activities; then, in such a case, a certain laming of the personality is bound to occur, the more inevitably the more upright the character in question; a sort of palsy, as it were, which may even extend from his spiritual and moral over into his physical and organic part. In an age that affords no satisfying answer to the eternal question of “Why?” “To what end?” a man who is capable of achievement over and above the average and expected modicum must be equipped either with a moral remoteness and single-mindedness which is rare indeed and of heroic mould, or else with an exceptionally robust vitality. Hans Castorp had neither the one nor the other of these; and thus he must be considered mediocre, though in an entirely honourable sense.
--Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Chapter II

commonplace-book, n.

commonplace-book, n.

A book in which ‘commonplaces’ or passages important for reference were collected, usually under general heads; hence, a book in which one records passages or matters to be especially remembered or referred to, with or without arrangement.

"ˌcommonˈplace-book, n.". OED Online. June 2013. Oxford University Press. 8 July 2013 

cf. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/dec/21/extraordinary-commonplaces/