Thought-full Physics

              A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than in action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries. A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 49.

            The great artists, the great thinkers, and the great religious teachers of the world have had quite other standards. They have valued the individual; they have praised spontaneous impulse; they have conceived the good life as one lived from within, not forced into conformity to an external mechanism. They have not sought to make men convenient material for the manipulations of rulers, but to make them spiritually free to pursue what they believed to be good, regardless of law and public opinion. This was the teaching of Christ, of Buddha, of Lao-tsze; in another form, the same emphasis on the individual is to be found in Shakespere, and in Galileo’s resistance to the Inquisition.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 68.

            Patriotism and the class war are the two great dangers to the world in the present age. Material progress has increased men’s power of injuring one another, and there has been no correlative moral progress. Until men realize that warfare, which was once a pleasant pastime, has now become race suicide, until they realize that the indulgence of hatred makes social life impossible with modern powers of destruction, there can be no hope for the world. It is moral progress that is needed; men must learn toleration and the avoidance of violence, or civilization must perish in universal degradation and misery.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 75

            I contend that the ultimate constituents of matter are not atoms or electrons, but sensations, and other things similar to sensations as regards extent and duration. As against the view that introspection reveals a mental world radically different from sensations, I propose to argue that thoughts, beliefs, desires, pleasures, pains, and emotions are all built up out of sensations and images alone, and that there is reason to think that images do not differ from sensations in their intrinsic character. We thus effect a mutual rapprochement of mind and matter, and reduce the ultimate data of introspection (in our second sense) to images alone.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 99.

            Physics and psychology are not distinguished by their material. Mind and matter alike are logical constructions; the particulars out of which they are constructed, or from which they are inferred, have various relations, some of which are studied by physics, others by psychology. Broadly speaking, physics group particulars by their active places, psychology by their passive places.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 99.

            Pure science—the understanding of natural processes, and the discovery of how the universe is constructed—seems to me the most godlike thing that men can do. When I am tempted (as I often am) to wish the human race wiped out by some passing comet, I think of scientific knowledge and of art; these two things seem to make our existence not wholly futile. But the uses of science, even at the best, are on a lower plane. A philosophy which values them more than science itself is gross and cannot in the long run be otherwise than destructive of science.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 113.

            Physical is mathematical, not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 113.

            As a matter of fact, any man who can obviously afford a car but genuinely prefers travel or a good library will in the end be much more respected than if he behaved exactly like every one else. There is of course no point in deliberately flouting public opinion; this is still to be under its domination, though in a topsy-turvy way. But to be genuinely indifferent to it is both a strength and a source of happiness.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 120.

Spirit of the Matter

             These four passions—acquisitiveness, vanity, rivalry, and love of power—are, after the basic instincts, the prime movers of almost all the happiness in politics. Their operation is intensified and regulated by the herd instinct. . . . Among men, as among other gregarious animals, the united action, in any given circumstances, is determined partly by the common passions of the herd, partly by imitation of leaders. The art of politics consists in causing the latter to prevail over the former. . . . Of the four passions we have enumerated, only one, namely acquisitiveness, is concerned at all directly with men’s relations to their material conditions. The other three—vanity, rivalry, and love of power—are concerned with social relations. I think this is the source of what is erroneous in the Marxian interpretation of history, which tacitly assumes that acquisitiveness is the source of all political actions.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 22.

            The prevention of free inquiry is unavoidable so long as the purpose of education is to produce belief rather than thought, to compel the young to hold positive opinions on doubtful matters rather than to let them see the doubtfulness and be encouraged to independence of mind. Education ought to foster the wish for truth, not the conviction that some particular creed is the truth.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 26.

            In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free from our fellowmen, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we are alive, from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, that energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always before us.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 43.    

            A life lived in this spirit—the spirit that aims at creating rather than possessing—has a certain fundamental happiness, of which it cannot be wholly robbed by adverse circumstances. This is the way of life recommended in the Gospels, and by all the great teachers of the world. Those who have found it are freed from the tyranny of fear, since what they value most in their lives is not at the mercy of outside power.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 45.

            Of all the characteristics of ordinary human nature envy is the most unfortunate; not only does the envious person wish to inflict misfortune and do so whenever he can with impunity, but he is also himself rendered unhappy by envy. Instead of deriving pleasure from what he has, he derives pain from what others have.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 47.

            If, on the other hand, you have as part of the habitual furniture of your mind the past ages of man, his slow and partial emergence out of barbarism, and the brevity of his total existence in comparison with astronomical epochs—if, I say, such thoughts have molded your habitual feelings, you will realize that the momentary battle upon which you are engaged cannot be of such importance as to risk a backward step towards the darkness out of which we have been slowly emerging. . . . If you have attained to this outlook, a certain deep happiness will never leave you, whatever your personal fate may be. Life will become a communion with the great of all ages, and personal death no more than a negligible incident.

— Bertrand Russell, in The Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell, Lester E. Denonn (selected & edited), p. 48.

Timely Game

….And yet, even if it had gone as well as this, even if they [James Joyce and Proust] had later enjoyed  an animated cab ride and sat up until sunrise exchanging thoughts on music and the novel, art and nationality, love and Shakespeare, there would have been a critical discrepancy between the conversation and the work, between the chat and the writing, for Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time would never have resulted from their dialogue, even though these novels were among the most profound and sustained utterances both men were capable of—a point that highlights the limitations of conversation, when viewed as a forum in which to express our deepest selves.

What explains such limitations? Why would one be unable to chat, as opposed to write, In Search of Lost Time? In part, because of the mind’s functioning, its condition as an intermittent organ, forever liable to lose the thread or be distracted, generating vital thoughts only between stretches of inactivity or mediocrity, stretches in which we are not really “ourselves,” during which it may be no exaggeration to say that we are not quite all there as we gaze at passing clouds with a vacant, childlike expression. Because the rhythm of a conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we have said, and the missed opportunity of what we have not.

By contrast, a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments that might originally have arisen across a multitude of years and been separated by extended stretches of bovine gazing. To meet an author whose books one has enjoyed must, in this view, necessarily be a disappointment (“It is true that there are people who are superior to their books, but that’s because their books are not Books”), because such a meeting can only reveal a person as he exists within, and finds himself subject to, the limitations of time.

Furthermore, conversation allows us little room to revise our original utterances, which ill suits our tendency not to know what we are trying to say until we have had at least one go at saying it, whereas writing accommodates and is largely made up of rewriting, during which original thoughts—bare, inarticulate strands—are enriched and nuanced over time. They may thereby appear on a page according to the logic and aesthetic order they demand, as opposed to suffering the distortion effected by conversation, with its limits on the corrections or additions one can make before enraging even the most patient companion….

— Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life, pp. 112-113.

Yet something in this forceful defense of reading and scholarship intimated Proust’s reservations. Without drawing attention to how contentious or critical the point was, he argued that we should be reading for a particular reason: not to pass the time, not out of detached curiosity, not out of a dispassionate wish to find out what Ruskin felt, but because, to repeat with italics, “there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one finds in oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what the master has felt.” We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts that we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thoughts that help us do so. A fulfilled academic life would therefore require us to judge that the writers we were studying articulated in their books a sufficient range of our own concerns, and that in the act of understanding them through translation or commentary, we would simultaneously be understanding and developing the spiritually significant parts of ourselves.

— Alain de Botton, Ibid., pp. 178-179.

Basket of Light

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

— Marianne Williamson

Quick Thinks II

There probably is an easy road to success — the trouble is, it’s very hard to find.
— Ashleigh Brilliant, I Try to Take One Day at a Time, but Sometimes Several Days Attack Me at Once, July 27, p. 74. 

I would naturally prefer certainty, but it seems I will have to settle for hope.

— August 26, Ibid., p. 86.

At great expense, we have built a vast system of inter-connecting stupidities.

— September 1, Ibid., p. 91.

I want the maximum of progress with the minimum of change.

— October 3, Ibid., p. 103.

It’s no good being absolutely certain unless you also happen to be right.

— October 25, Ibid., p. 110.

Not being able to do everything is no excuse for not doing everything you can.

— November 2, Ibid., p. 114.

My life has been enriched with many wonderful insights, which I have now entirely forgotten.

— November 8, Ibid., p. 116.

Why should others have anything, when I don’t yet have everything?

— November 10, Ibid., p. 117.

I was hoping that, by the time I got this far, I would have gotten farther.

— November 29, Ibid., p. 123.

Cheer up! This is the yesterday that will not matter tomorrow.

— December 22, Ibid., p. 133.

You’d be surprised how often I had to go back in order to come this far forward.

— January 8, Ibid., p. 140.

Before you break the rules, remember that society took a long time making them.

— January 15, Ibid., p. 142.

Sometimes it’s hard to concentrate on this life, with the knowledge that eternity is just up ahead.

— January 18, Ibid., p. 143.

I am always exact and precise (more or less).

— January 19, Ibid., p. 144.

The best time to look for help is before you need it.

— January 25, Ibid., p. 146.

It’s not easy to stay sane in a world which offers such a wonderful choice of madnesses.

— February 6, Ibid., p. 151.

The greatest obstacle to discovering the truth is being convinced that you already know it.

— February 10, Ibid., p. 153.

Life is too important to be taken as a joke, but too ridiculous to be taken seriously.

— February 23, Ibid., p. 157.

By the time I reach the end of this, I’ll know exactly how I should have started.

— February 28, Ibid., p. 159.

If this is today, I must be where I am.

— February 29, Ibid., p. 159.

Quick Thinks I

I keep quite busy just trying to conceal the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing.

— Ashleigh Brilliant, I Try to Take One Day at a Time, but Sometimes Several Days Attack Me at Once, March 16, p. 23. 

I wonder where the good luck is stored, and why its release and distribution are so irregular.

— March 17, Ibid., p. 23. 

Who can release me from my self-imposed sense of obligation?

— March 18, Ibid., p. 23.

I’m impatient to reach wisdom, but, for some reason, being in a hurry doesn’t seem to help.

— March 31, Ibid., p. 28.

Praise the Lord! But remember, he can tell the difference between praise and flattery.

— April 3, Ibid., p. 30.

The only requirement for eventually getting there is to keep going in the right direction.

— April 14, Ibid., p. 34.

Don’t expect me to be perfect all the time, but please recognize it when I am.

— April 23, Ibid., p. 37.

Regardless of what you’ve lost, what matters is what you do with what you have left.

— April 24, Ibid., p. 37.

You can get anywhere from anywhere: Don’t wait to be sure you’re starting from the right place.

— May 18, Ibid., p. 47. 

If you can’t find any other meaning in everything that’s happening, try to consider it as entertainment.

— May 20, Ibid., p. 48.

You can’t stop progress, but you can decide what is progress and what isn’t.

— June 16, Ibid., p. 59.

Defeat is not necessarily fatal — that’s why the world seems to be so full of losers.

— June 17, Ibid., p. 59.

Whether I deserve it or not, I give myself another chance every day.

— June 21, Ibid., p. 60.

Many things need reasons, but beautiful things are allowed to be beautiful for no reason at all.

— June 22, Ibid., p. 61. 

Why do we suffer great evils in silence, yet protest so loudly against minor inconvenience?

— July 2, 2011, Ibid., p. 66. 

I’m still not sure whether the end of my life will be a landing or a taking-off.

— July 11, Ibid., p. 69.

I’m not really disorderly — it’s just that, for my kind of order, there’s never enough space.

— July 18, Ibid., p. 71.

Living Life Live

     As Jung suggests, we may identify with our role-masks so totally that we forget they are only masks. Sometimes, the masks become more important than the reality.

     There are as many masks as there are people: their variety is limited only by the ingenuity of the people who adopt them. Yet, the wearing of the mask is an excursion into a “let’s pretend” world. As the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone wrote, “Every mask and every pretense can be reduced to one great evasion: the desire to overcome the sorrows of life with . . . . tricks of the imagination rather than with sincerity….”

     Do we put on masks to put people on? If we do, Jung and Silone remind us that we pay a price for the cover-up: we lose touch with the “real” person behind the mask.

— Loraine Moline, from “Multiple-Choice or True or False,” in Standpoints I: Choice & Responsibility, Alan Embree/Loraine Moline (eds.), p. 212.

“It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment or the courage, to pay the price . . . . One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as a cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.”

— Morris L. West, from The Shoes of the Fisherman, in Ibid., p. 228.

“I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness . . . . I think that it all will come right, that this cruelty too will end and that peace and tranquility will return again.”

— Anne Frank, from The Diary of a Young Girl, in Ibid., p. 228.

In the formulation of Psychologist Abraham Maslow, work functions in a hierarchy of needs: first, work provides food and shelter, basic human maintenance. After that, it can address the need for security and then for friendship and “belongingness.” Next, the demands of the ego arise, and the need for respect. Finally, men and women assert a larger desire for “self-actualization.” That seems a harmless and even worthy enterprise but sometimes degenerates into self-infatuation, a vaporously selfish discontent that dead-ends in isolation, the empty face that gazes back from the mirror.

— Lance Morrow, from “What is the Point of Working?”, in Standpoints II:Distance & Encounter, Alan Embree/Loraine Moline (eds.), p. 207.

“We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling class. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in Ibid., p. 227.

“Thoughtful Americans understand that the highest patriotism is not blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one’s country deep enough to call her to a higher standard.”

— George McGovern, in Ibid., p. 227.

     Technological man will be his own master. Prior to his emergence, the outlines of technological civilization must remain dim save for the knowledge that it will have to rest upon a unified view of the universe, on ecological balance and on the essential identity of the human species. Technological man will create his own future, and it may contain some surprises even for him. The Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart wrote at the beginning of the long journey that brought Western man from the cocoon of medievalism through industrial civilization to our own day and its choice between chaos and transfiguration, but his words have timeless meaning: “There is no stopping place in this life — no, nor was there ever one for any man, no matter how far along his way he’d gone. This above all, then, be ready at all times for the gifts of God, and always for the new ones.”

— Victor C. Ferkiss, from Toward the Creation of Technological Man, in Standpoints III: Portent & Design, Alan Embree/Loraine Moline (eds.), p. 147.

Insightful Vision

The Miracle Worker

Observations about life from Helen Keller

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature…. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” 

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”

“Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows.”

“Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.”

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something.”

“Science may have found a cure for most evils, but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all — the apathy of human beings.”

“No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land.”

“It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.”

“There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.”

“As selfishness and complaint pervert and cloud the mind, so love clears and sharpens the vision.”

“The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.”

“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”

“The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but no vision.”

— Helen Keller, in Uncle John’s Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader, #15, p. 233.

The Present of the Present

I had rather men should ask why Cato had no statues, than why he had one.

— Cato, in A Treasury of the Familiar, Ralph L. Woods, p. 681.

….It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, peace, peace — but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it the gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

     March 23, 1775

— Patrick Henry, from the end of a speech, in Ibid., p. 685.

A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman, of the next generation.

— James Freeman Clarke, in Ibid., p. 688.

“Fay que vouldrass!”

(“Do what you want!”)

— Rabelais, in Warm Logic: The Art of the Intuitive Lifestyle, Louis Wynne/Carolyn Klintworth, p. 13.

“Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.”

— Woody Allen, in Ibid., p. 13.

“Seek not to understand what is too difficult for you,

search not for what is hidden from you.

Be not over-occupied with what is beyond you,

for you have been shown more than you can understand.”

— Apochrypha (Ben-Sira), in Ibid., p. 13.

When actions flow from intuitive sources, rather than from decisions and thinking, these actions are actually more responsible, not less. Intuitive actions are “responsible” to their supporting contingencies; rule-regulated acts are “responsible” to the person or persons who influenced your thinking and concocted those rules.

— Louis Wynne/Carolyn Klintworth, Warm Logic: The Art of the Intuitive Lifestyle, p. 24.

….All of which is to say, not only is there no such thing as a mistake, but also you can change your past. You cannot, of course, change what has happened, but you can change the importance of any event or action in your past simply by what you do in the present. You can make it very important, or you can make it irrelevant. Perhaps this is what Henry Ford meant when he said, “All history is bunk!”

     What about the much-recommended “taking the long view” of things? By all means you are most likely to benefit from taking the long view — but understand that we mean by this the long view back through the past, not into the future. When someone is “short-sighted,” he or she is failing to consider not what the future may bring, but what has happened in the past. Such a long view of the past will protect you, as much as it is possible to be protected in this uncertain world, from the undesirable and unhealthy long-term consequences of actions which in the short term may be pleasurable. The more you are sensitive to the long-term consequences in your and your acquaintances’ pasts, as they are now making themselves felt, of smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise, drug use, sexual promiscuity, or treating people in general with contempt or suspicion, the more protected you will be as you act in the present.

     When you live in the present, you become immediately free of the stress brought on by self-recriminations over the past, since you have never made a mistake. And you are immediately free of the stress brought on by worries over the future, worries about unfinished business, unsettled conflicts, unattained goals, and unfulfilled promises to yourself and to others.

— Louis Wynne/Carolyn Klintworth, in Ibid., pp. 64-65.

“Man is not troubled by events, but by the meaning he gives to them.”

— Epictetus, in Ibid., p. 101.

“It’s not what folks know that’s the problem; it’s what they know that ain’t so.”

— Josh Billings, in Ibid., p. 101.

“Our intention is to affirm life, not to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements to creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of the way and lets it act of its own accord.”

— John Cage, in Ibid., p.125.

“Some things have to be believed to be seen.”

— Ralph Hodgson, in Ibid., p. 125.

“It does not matter what has been made of us; what matters is what we ourselves make of what has been made of us.”

— Jan Kott, in Ibid., p. 125.

Where and Whyfore

MR. VALLIANT-FOR-TRUTH CROSSES THE RIVER

      After this, it was noised abroad the Mr. Valiant-for-truth was taken with a summons, by the same Post as the other, and had this for a Token that the Summons was true, That his Pitcher was broken at the fountain. When he understood it, he called for his Friends, and told them of it. Then he said, I am going to my Fathers, and though with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the Trouble I have been to arrive where I am. My Sword, I give to him that shall succeed me in my Pilgrimage, and my Courage and Skill, to him that can get it. My Marks and Scars I carry with me, to be a Witness for me, that I have fought his Battles who now will be my Rewarder. When the day that he must go hence, was come, many accompanied him to the River side, into which, as he went, he said, Death, where is thy Sting? And as he went down deeper, he said, Grave, where is thy Victory? So he passed over, and the Trumpets sounded for him on the other side.

— John Bunyan, from Pilgrim’s Progress, in A Treasury of the Familiar, Ralph L. Woods, p. 534.

      General Garcia is dead now, but there are other Garcias. No man who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed but has been well-high appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man — the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it. Slipshod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds unless, by hook or crook, or threat, he forces or bribes other men to assist him; or mayhap, God in his goodness performs a miracle and sends him an Angel of Light for as assistant.

 ……

     My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the “boss” is away as well as when he is at home. And the man who when given a letter to Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets “laid off” nor has to go on strike for higher wages. Civilization is one long, anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a man asks shall be granted; his kind is so rare that no employer can afford to let him go. He is wanted in every city, town, and village — in every office, shop, store, and factory. The world cries out for such; he is needed and needed badly — the man who can “Carry a message to Garcia.”

— Elbert Hubbard, from A Message to Garcia, in Ibid., p. 537/p. 540.

      When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

— Mark Twain, in Ibid., p. 589.

                                  IF—

 If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise; 

If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;

If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a tap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools; 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings — nor lose the common touch;

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty-seconds’ worth of distance run —

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!

— Rudyard Kipling, in Ibid., pp. 656-657.

     A man has two reasons for doing anything — a good reason and the real reason.

— J. P. Morgan, in Ibid., p. 660.

Quandaries

HAMLET CONTEMPLATES SUICIDE

 To be, or not to be; that is the question;

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them. To die; to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to; ‘tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die; to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream; aye, there’s the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of despised love, and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death —

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveler returns — puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

— William Shakespeare, from Hamlet, in A Treasury of the Familiar, Ralph L. Woods, pp. 328-329.

There is nothing more frightful than a bustling ignorance.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goëthe, in Ibid., p. 400.

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbors, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Ibid., p. 412.

If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence every one must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.

— Solon, in Ibid., p. 446.

          ON HIS BLINDNESS

When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent 

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he return and chide,

‘Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?’

I fondly, ask. But Patience, to prevent

 

That murmur, soon replies, ‘God doth not need

Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,

And post o’er land and ocean without rest;

They also serve who only stand and wait.’

— John Milton, in Ibid., p. 447.

To each his suffering; all are men,

Condemn’d alike to groan,

The tender for another’s pain,

The unfeeling for his own.

Yet, ah! Why should they know their fate,

Since sorrow never comes too late,

And happiness too swiftly flies?

Thought would destroy their paradise.

No more; — where ignorance is bliss,

‘Tis folly to be wise.

— Thomas Gray, from On a Distant Prospect of Eton College, in Ibid., p. 505.

Alas, a Lack

         THE FOOL’S PRAYER

The royal feast was done; the King

Sought some new sport to banish care,

And to his jester cried: “Sir Fool,

Kneel now, and make for us a prayer!”


The jester doffed his cap and bells,

And stood the mocking court before;

They could not see the bitter smile

Behind the painted grin he wore.


He bowed his head, and bent his knee

Upon the monarch’s silken stool;

His pleading voice arose: “O Lord,

Be merciful to me, a fool!


“No pity, Lord, could change the heart

From red with wrong to white as wool;

The rod must heal the sin; but, Lord,

Be merciful to me, a fool!


“’Tis not by guilt, the onward sweep

Of truth and right, O Lord, we stay;

‘Tis by our follies that so long

We hold the earth from heaven away.


“These clumsy feet, still in the mire,

Go crushing blossoms without end;

These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust

Among the heart-strings of a friend.



“The ill-timed truth we might have kept —

Who knows how sharp it pierced and stung!

The words we had not sense to say —

Who knows how grandly it had rung!



“Our faults no tenderness should ask.

The chastening strips must cleanse them all;

But for our blunders — oh, in shame

Before the eyes of heaven we fall. 


"Earth bears no balsam for mistakes;

Men crown the knave, and scourge the tool

That did his will; but Thou, O Lord,

Be merciful to me, a fool!”


The room was hushed; in silence rose

The King, and sought his gardens cool,

And walked apart, and murmured low,

“Be merciful to me, a fool!”

— Edward Rowland Sill, in A Treasury of the Familiar, Ralph L. Woods, pp. 160-161.



     PROSPERO ENDS THE REVELS

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

— William Shakespeare, from The Tempest, in Ibid., p. 215.



         OZYMANDIAS OF EGYPT

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing besides remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, in Ibid., p. 295.


MACBETH LEARNS OF HIS WIFE’S DEATH

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more; it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

— William Shakespeare, from Macbeth, in Ibid., p. 295.