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/