1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)
On Jesus, in Ch. 1 : The Executive
The Man Nobody Knows (1924)
Love is not a feeling ~ The Article (1995)
Context: Feelings, even the best of them, turn to negativity - disappointment, anger, discontent, resentment, jealousy, guilt, etc. A good feeling starts off being elevating, exciting, like taking a drug substance, alcohol or having sex. But what goes up must come down and feelings are no exception. So in a couple of hours or days the down side starts and you perhaps wonder why you feel moody, depressed, suicidal or just plain unhappy. You're paying the piper for yesterday's music. And between the upside and the downside is the no-man's and no-woman's land of boredom, indifference, inertia, weariness and pointlessness.
Letter to Harriet Tubman (29 August 1868), as quoted in Harriet, the Moses of Her People (1886) by Sarah Hopkins Bradford, p. 135
1860s
Context: Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day — you in the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scarred, and foot-sore bondmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt " God bless you " has been your only reward. The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown — of sacred memory — I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have. Much that you have done would seem improbable to those who do not know you as I know you. It is to me a great pleasure and a great privilege to bear testimony to your character and your works, and to say to those to whom you may come, that I regard you in every way truthful and trustworthy.
"The Letter of Aristotle to Alexander on the Policy toward the Cities", translated from Lettre d’Aristote à Alexandre sur la politique envers les cités, an Arabic text translated and edited by Józef Bielawski and Marian Plezia (1970), p. 72; translated from an ancient Greek text that survived only in Arabic translation, there is little acceptance that this is an authentic letter of Aristotle.
Disputed
Part II, The Encyclopedists, section 2 (originally published as “Foundation” in Astounding (May 1942)
The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation (1951)
Context: “That insufferable, dull-witted donkey! That—”
Hardin broke in: “Not at all. He’s merely the product of his environment. He doesn’t understand much except that ‘I got a gun and you ain’t.’ ”
Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love
Context: I have been thinking about our conversation and about your book, and I am afraid that I expressed myself badly yesterday. When I said that one may love and be loved at any age I ought to have added that sometimes this love comes too late. It comes when one no longer has the right to prove to the loved one how much she is loved, except by love's sacrifice.
1880s, Reminiscences (1881)
Context: This worthy man, whose nephew is still minister of Eskdalemuir (and author of a book on the Jews), proved the greatest blessing to that household. My father would, in any case, have saved himself. Of the other brothers, it may be doubted whether William Brown was not the primary preserver. They all learned to he masons from him, or from one another; instead of miscellaneous laborers and hunters, became regular tradesmen, the best in all their district, the skilfullest and faithfullest, and the best-rewarded every way. Except my father, none of them attained a decisive religiousness. But they all had prudence and earnestness, love of truth, industry, and the blessings it brings.
1930s, Quarantine Speech (1937)
Context: There is a solidarity and interdependence about the modern world, both technically and morally, which makes it impossible for any nation completely to isolate itself from economic and political upheavals in the rest of the world, especially when such upheavals appear to be spreading and not declining. There can be no stability or peace either within nations or between nations except under laws and moral standards adhered to by all. International anarchy destroys every foundation for peace. It jeopardizes either the immediate or the future security of every nation, large or small. It is, therefore, a matter of vital interest and concern to the people of the United States that the sanctity of international treaties and the maintenance of international morality be restored.
Mary Douglas and B. Isherwood (1979). The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. London, Allen Lane, page 63.
1880s, Agnosticism (1889)
Context: Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to agnosticism. That which agnostics deny and repudiate as immoral is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe, without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions. The justification of the agnostic principle lies in the success which follows upon its application, whether in the field of natural or in that of civil history; and in the fact that, so far as these topics are concerned, no sane man thinks of denying its validity.
“So I never felt anything except how bad I was and like, "Oh, shame on you!"”
Interviewed by Cathay Che, The Advocate (8 May 2001)
Context: The message I got from my record label at the time — and this was on purpose — was that I wasn't selling enough. Even when the single was a hit, it wasn't enough of a hit — I never got to number 1; I only got to number 5. And MTV didn't like the first video for the song, and we had to do another one. So I never felt anything except how bad I was and like, "Oh, shame on you!"
Self cited in: Henry R. Towne in Foreword to the 1911 editions of: F.W. Taylor Shop management; a paper read before the American society of mechanical engineers New York. 1903/1911.
Industrial Engineering, 1905
Context: The dollar is the final term in almost every equation which arises in the practice of engineering in any or all of its branches, except qualifiedly as to military and naval engineering, where in some cases cost may be ignored. In other words, the true function of the engineer is, or should be, not only to determine how physical problems may be solved, but also how they may be solved most economically. For example, a railroad may have to be carried over a gorge or arroyo. Obviously it does not need an engineer to point out that this may be done by filling the chasm with earth, but only a bridge engineer is competent to determine whether it is cheaper to do this or to bridge it, and to design the bridge which will safely and most cheaply serve, the cost of which should be compared with that of an earth fill. Therefore the engineer is, by the nature of his vocation an economist. His function is not only to design, but also so to design as to ensure the best economical result. He who designs an unsafe structure or an inoperative machine is a bad engineer; he who designs them so that they are safe and operative, but needlessly expensive, is a poor engineer, and, it may be remarked, usually earns poor pay; he who designs good work, which can be executed at a fair cost, is a sound and usually a successful engineer; he who does the best work at the lowest cost sooner or later stands at the top of his profession, and usually has the reward which this implies.
From "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness," the introduction to the 1960 edition, pp. 199-201
Naked Lunch (1959)
Context: I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness... When I speak of drug addiction I do not refer to keif, marijuana or any preparation of hashish, mescaline, Banisteriopsis caapi, LSD6, Sacred Mushrooms or any other drugs of the hallucinogen group... There is no evidence that the use of any hallucinogen results in physical dependence.
Crabbed Age and Youth.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Context: Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?
“Bruno and Spinoza are to be entirely excepted. Each stands by himself and alone”
Arthur Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation (1818; 1844), Vol. I, p. 422, n. 2
Context: [From Schopenhauer's assessments of other philosophers] Bruno and Spinoza are to be entirely excepted. Each stands by himself and alone; and they do not belong either to their age or to their part of the globe, which rewarded the one with death, and the other with persecution and ignominy. Their miserable existence and death in this Western world are like that of a tropical plant in Europe. The banks of the Ganges were their spiritual home; there, they would have led a peaceful and honoured life among men of like mind.
“Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.”
This evokes Will Durant's famous summation of Aristotle: "Excellence then is not an act, but a habit."
2000s, The Powell Principles (2003)
Context: If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.
On The Algebra of Logic (1885)
Context: If the sign were not related to its object except by the mind thinking of them separately, it would not fulfil the function of a sign at all. Supposing, then, the relation of the sign to its object does not lie in a mental association, there must be a direct dual relation of the sign to its object independent of the mind using the sign. In the second of the three cases just spoken of, this dual relation is not degenerate, and the sign signifies its object solely by virtue of being really connected with it. Of this nature are all natural signs and physical symptoms. I call such a sign an index, a pointing finger being the type of the class.
The index asserts nothing; it only says "There!" It takes hold of our eyes, as it were, and forcibly directs them to a particular object, and there it stops. Demonstrative and relative pronouns are nearly pure indices, because they denote things without describing them; so are the letters on a geometrical diagram, and the subscript numbers which in algebra distinguish one value from another without saying what those values are.
Trip of a Lifetime (1999)
Context: A TV crew came over 10 years or so ago, on the anniversary of the discovery of LSD, and those guys were trying to push me towards saying how bad it was. They wanted me to talk about the dark underbelly of the drug culture. And I said, I'm not going to talk about that because I've never seen it, except in kids doing stuff that I don't know about and I'm not interested in... I've never taken crack and I've never taken ecstasy; none of us has. I don't want to take some strange drug and end up chewing my tongue for 12 hours.
Arrowsmith (1925)
Context: Perhaps I am a crank, Martin. There are many who hate me. There are plots against me—oh, you t'ink I imagine it, but you shall see! I make many mistakes. But one thing I keep always pure: the religion of a scientist.
To be a scientist—it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of ver-y obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious—he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.
He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws. He is equal opposed to the capitalists who t'ink their silly money-grabbing is a system, and to liberals who t'ink man is not a fighting animal; he takes both the American booster and the European aristocrat, and he ignores all their blithering. Ignores it! All of it! He hates the preachers who talk their fables, but he iss not too kindly to the anthropologists and historians who can only make guesses, yet they have the nerf to call themselves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a man that all nice good-natured people should naturally hate! ~ Gottlieb, Ch. 26
1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)
Context: It is objected to the Chinaman that he is secretive and treacherous, and will not tell the truth when he thinks it for his interest to tell a lie. There may be truth in all this; it sounds very much like the account of man’s heart given in the creeds. If he will not tell the truth, except when it is for his interest to do so, let us make it for his interest to tell the truth. We can do it by applying to him the same principle of justice that we apply to ourselves. But I doubt if the Chinese are more untruthful than other people. At this point I have one certain test. Mankind are not held together by lies. Trust is the foundation of society. Where there is no truth, there can be no trust, and where there is no trust, there can be no society. Where there is society, there is trust, and where there is trust, there is something upon which it is supported. Now a people who have confided in each other for five thousand years; who have extended their empire in all directions until it embraces one-fifth of the population of the globe; who hold important commercial relations with all nations; who are now entering into treaty stipulations with ourselves, and with all the great European powers, cannot be a nation of cheats and liars, but must have some respect for veracity. The very existence of China for so long a period, and her progress in civilization, are proofs of her truthfulness. This is the last objection which should come from those who profess the all-conquering power of the Christian religion. If that religion cannot stand contact with the Chinese, religion or no religion, so much the worse for those who have adopted it. It is the Chinaman, not the Christian, who should be alarmed for his faith. He exposes that faith to great dangers by exposing it to the freer air of America. But shall we send missionaries to the heathen to right to come to us? I think a few honest believers in the teachings of Confucius would be well employed in expounding his doctrines among us.
June 16
Addresses to the Virginia Ratifying Convention (1788)
Context: Mr. Chairman — A worthy member has asked, who are the militia, if they be not the people, of this country, and if we are not to be protected from the fate of the Germans, Prussians, &c. by our representation? I ask who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers. But I cannot say who will be the militia of the future day. If that paper on the table gets no alteration, the militia of the future day may not consist of all classes, high and low, and rich and poor; but may be confined to the lower and middle classes of the people, granting exclusion to the higher classes of the people. If we should ever see that day, the most ignominious punishments and heavy fines may be expected. Under the present government all ranks of people are subject to militia duty.
Introduction
Cosmopolis (1892)
Context: You, who know better than any one the motley world of cosmopolites, understand why I have confined myself to painting here only a fragment of it. That world, indeed, does not exist, it can have neither defined customs nor a general character. It is composed of exceptions and of singularities. We are so naturally creatures of custom, our continual mobility has such a need of gravitating around one fixed axis, that motives of a personal order alone can determine us upon an habitual and voluntary exile from our native land. It is so, now in the case of an artist, a person seeking for instruction and change; now in the case of a business man who desires to escape the consequences of some scandalous error; now in the case of a man of pleasure in search of new adventures; in the case of another, who cherishes prejudices from birth, it is the longing to find the "happy mean;" in the case of another, flight from distasteful memories. The life of the cosmopolite can conceal all beneath the vulgarity of its whims, from snobbery in quest of higher connections to swindling in quest of easier prey, submitting to the brilliant frivolities of the sport, the sombre intrigues of policy, or the sadness of a life which has been a failure. Such a variety of causes renders at once very attractive and almost impracticable the task of the author who takes as a model that ever-changing society so like unto itself in the exterior rites and fashions, so really, so intimately complex and composite in its fundamental elements. The writer is compelled to take from it a series of leading facts, as I have done, essaying to deduce a law which governs them.
Part XV - General corollary
The Natural History of Religion (1757)
Context: The more exquisite any good is, of which a small specimen is afforded us, the sharper is the evil, allied to it; and few exceptions are found to this uniform law of nature. The most sprightly wit borders on madness; the highest effusions of joy produce the deepest melancholy; the most ravishing pleasures are attended with the most cruel lassitude and disgust; the most flattering hopes make way for the severest disappointments. And, in general, no course of life has such safety (for happiness is not to be dreamed of) as the temperate and moderate, which maintains, as far as possible, a mediocrity, and a kind of insensibility, in every thing. As the good, the great, the sublime, the ravishing are found eminently in the genuine principles of theism; it may be expected, from the analogy of nature, that the base, the absurd, the mean, the terrifying will be equally discovered in religious fictions and chimeras.
"Who Did What?" in National Review (1 November 2005) http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley200511011324.asp.
Context: When in 1951 I was inducted into the CIA as a deep cover agent, the procedures for disguising my affiliation and my work were unsmilingly comprehensive. It was three months before I was formally permitted to inform my wife what the real reason was for going to Mexico City to live. If, a year later, I had been apprehended, dosed with sodium pentothal, and forced to give out the names of everyone I knew in the CIA, I could have come up with exactly one name, that of my immediate boss (E. Howard Hunt, as it happened). In the passage of time one can indulge in idle talk on spook life. In 1980 I found myself seated next to the former president of Mexico at a ski-area restaurant. What, he asked amiably, had I done when I lived in Mexico? "I tried to undermine your regime, Mr. President." He thought this amusing, and that is all that it was, under the aspect of the heavens.
We have noticed that Valerie Plame Wilson has lived in Washington since 1997. Where she was before that is not disclosed by research facilities at my disposal. But even if she was safe in Washington when the identity of her employer was given out, it does not mean that her outing was without consequence. We do not know what dealings she might have been engaging in which are now interrupted or even made impossible.... In my case, it was 15 years after reentry into the secular world before my secret career in Mexico was blown, harming no one except perhaps some who might have been put off by my deception.
Kalki : or The Future of Civilization (1929)
Source: A Gift From Earth (1968), Ch. 2 : The Sons Of Earth
Context: From the beginning there had been a revolutionary group. Its name had changed several times, and Matt had no idea what it was now. He had never known a revolutionary. He had no particular desire to be one. They accomplished nothing, except to fill the Hospital's organ banks. How could they, when the crew controlled every weapon and every watt of power on Mount Lookitthat? If this was a nest of rebels, then they had worked out a good cover. Many of the merrymakers had no hearing aids, and these seemed to be the ones who didn't know anyone here. Like Matt himself. In the midst of a reasonably genuine open-house brawl, certain people listened to voices only they could hear.
Jewels of Remembrance (1996)
Context: Are you fleeing from Love because of a single humiliation?
What do you know of Love except the name?
Love has a hundred forms of pride and disdain,
and is gained by a hundred means of persuasion.
Since Love is loyal, it purchases one who is loyal:
it has no interest in a disloyal companion.
The human being resembles a tree; its root is a covenant with God:
that root must be cherished with all one's might.
Part 3: "The Sense of Human Dignity", §3 (p. 56) <!-- I find this cited in several places but not actually quoted in full anywhere. -->
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)
Context: Positivists and analysts alike believe that the words is and ought belong to different worlds, so that sentences which are constructed with is usually have verifiable meaning, but sentences constructed with ought never have. This is because Ludwig Wittgenstein's unit, and Bertrand Russell's unit, is one man; all British empiricist philosophy is individualist. And it is of course clear that if the only criterion of true and false which a man accepts is that man's, then he has no base for social agreement. The question of how man ought to behave is a social question, which always involves several people; and if he accepts no evidence and no judgment except his own, he has no tools with which to frame an answer.
Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 10. Of the Suppression of the Chromatic Sedition
Context: p>The use of Colour was abolished, and its possession prohibited. Even the utterance of any word denoting Colour, except by the Circles or by qualified scientific teachers, was punished by a severe penalty. Only at our University in some of the very highest and most esoteric classes — which I myself have never been privileged to attend — it is understood that the sparing use of Colour is still sanctioned for the purpose of illustrating some of the deeper problems of mathematics. But of this I can only speak from hearsay. Elsewhere in Flatland, Colour is now non-existent. The art of making it is known to only one living person, the Chief Circle for the time being; and by him it is handed down on his death-bed to none but his Successor. One manufactory alone produces it; and, lest the secret should be betrayed, the Workmen are annually consumed, and fresh ones introduced. So great is the terror with which even now our Aristocracy looks back to the far-distant days of the agitation for the Universal Colour Bill.</p
Potterism (1921) p.196. https://books.google.com/books?id=9tDSm2WzQxsC&pg=PA196
Context: Jane: What do you think of his book Arthur?
Gideon: I don't think of it. I've had no reason to, particularly. I've not had to review it.... I'm afraid I'm hopeless about novels just now, that's the fact. I'm sick of the form—slices of life served up cold in three hundred pages. Oh, it's very nice; it makes nice reading for people. But what's the use? Except, of course, to kill time for those who prefer it dead. But as things in themselves, as art, they've been ruined by excess. My critical sense is blunted just now. I can hardly feel the difference, though I can see it, between a good novel and a bad one. I couldn't write one, good or bad, to save my life, I know that. And I've got to the stage when I wish other people wouldn't. I wish everyone would shut up, so that we could hear ourselves think...
"Save Me"
Song lyrics, Magnolia: Music from the Motion Picture (1999)
Context: You struck me dumb, Like radium
Like Peter Pan, or Superman,
You have come... to save me.
Come on and save me...
Why don't you save me?
If you could save me,
From the ranks of the freaks,
Who suspect they could never love anyone,
Except the freaks,
Who suspect they could never love anyone,
Except the freaks,
Who could never love anyone.
1860s
Context: I never was an abolitionist, not even what could be called anti-slavery, but I try to judge fairly and honestly and it became patent in my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without slavery. As anxious as I am to see peace established, I would not therefore be willing to see any settlement until the question is forever settled.
Letter to Elihu Washburne (30 August 1863)
Myth and Reality (1963)
Context: Whereas "false stories" can be told anywhere and at any time, myths must not be recited except during a period of sacred time (usually in autumn or winter, and only at night).... This custom has survived even among peoples who have passed beyond the archaic stage of culture. Among the Turco-Mongols and the Tibetans the epic songs of the Gesar cycle can be recited only at night and in winter.
Speech to Devonshire Conservatives (January 1892), as quoted in The Marquis of Salisbury (1892), by James J. Ellis, p. 185
Variant: The only true lasting benefit which the statesman can give to the poor man is so to shape matters that the greatest possible liberty for the exercise of his own moral and intellectual qualities should be offered to him by law.
As quoted in Salisbury — Victorian Titan (1999) by Andrew Roberts
1890s
Context: We must learn this rule, which is true alike of rich and poor — that no man and no class of men ever rise to any permanent improvement in their condition of body or of mind except by relying upon their own personal efforts. The wealth with which the rich man is surrounded is constantly tempting him to forget the truth, ad you see in family after family men degenerating from the position of their fathers because they live sluggishly and enjoy what has been placed before them without appealing to their own exertions. The poor man, especially in these days, may have a similar temptation offered to him by legislation, but this same inexorable rule will work. The only true lasting benefit which the statesman can give to the poor man is so to shape matters that the greatest possible opportunity for the exercise of his own moral and intellectual qualities shall be offered to him by the law; and therefore it is that in my opinion nothing that we can do this year, and nothing that we did before, will equal in the benefit that it will confer upon the physical condition, and with the physical will follow the moral too, of the labouring classes in the rural districts, that measure for free education which we passed last year. It will have the effect of bringing education home to many a family which hitherto has not been able to enjoy it, and in that way, by developing the faculties which nature has given to them, it will be a far surer and a far more valuable aid to extricate them from any of the sufferings or hardships to which they may be exposed than the most lavish gifts of mere sustenance that the State could offer.
Nonconformity (1953/1996)
Context: The American middle class's faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources. The shortcut to comfort is called “specialization,” and in an eye-ear-nose-and-throat doctor this makes sense. But in a writer it is fatal. The less he sees of other writers the more of a writer he will ultimately become. When he sees scarcely anyone except other writers, he is ready for New York.
Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XIX : Grand Pontiff, p. 316
Context: If not for slander and persecution, the Mason who would benefit his race must look for apathy and cold indifference in those whose good he seeks, in those who ought to seek the good of others. Except when the sluggish depths of the Human Mind are hroken up and tossed as with a storm, when at the appointed time a great Reformer comes, and a new Faith springs up and grows with supernatural energy, the progress of Truth is slower than the growth of oaks; and he who plants need not expect to gather. The Redeemer, at His death, had twelve disciples, and one betrayed and one deserted and denied Him. It is enough for us to know that the fruit will come in its due season. When, or who shall gather it, it does not in the least concern us to know. It is our business to plant the seed. It is God's right to give the fruit to whom He pleases; and if not to us, then is our action by so much the more noble.
The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)
Context: Except in the rare cases of great dynamic thinkers whose thoughts are as turning-points in the history of our race, it is by Style that writers gain distinction, by Style they secure their immortality. In a lower sphere many are remarked as writers although they may lay no claim to distinction as thinkers, if they have the faculty of felicitously expressing the ideas of others; and many who are really remarkable as thinkers gain but slight recognition from the public, simply because in them the faculty of expression is feeble. In proportion as the work passes from the sphere of passionless intelligence to that of impassioned intelligence, from the region of demonstration to the region of emotion, the art of Style becomes more complex, its necessity more imperious.
"Introduction" in The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973)
General sources
Context: !-- I must admit the title of this book gives me pause. Who says the enclosed stories are my ‘best’? Do I? Does the editor? Or some critic? Some reader? A general vote among the entire population of the world?
And whoever says it — can it be so? --> Can the word ‘best’ mean anything at all, except to some particular person in some particular mood? Perhaps not — so if we allow the word to stand as an absolute, you, or you, or perhaps you, may be appalled at omissions or inclusions or, never having read me before, may even be impelled to cry out, ‘Good heavens, are those his best?
Lost Worlds : A visit with John Howe (May 2009) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGaxYZX-N3Q
Context: History is like a jigsaw puzzle, except every piece is from a different puzzle, and you try to make them all fit. Although you many never have a finished picture, the time you spend, I think you end up understanding at least the pieces.
“There was one exception to the rule that all our foes have committed the Decadence Assumption.”
A rant about stupidity... and the coming civil war... (2009)
Context: There was one exception to the rule that all our foes have committed the Decadence Assumption. Ho Chi Minh never underestimated America. His avowed hero was George Washington and he remained in awe of the U. S., all his life. He remains the only enemy leader who ever defeated us at war, and then only because our hubris (not decadence) got the better of us.
The Gander, in Book Seven : What Saraïde Wanted, Ch. XLV : The Gander Also Generalizes
The Silver Stallion (1926)
Context: Nothing … nothing in the universe, is of any importance, or is authentic to any serious sense, except the illusions of romance. For man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. These axioms — poor, deaf and blinded spendthrift! — are none the less valuable for being quoted.
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 6
Identifying his "destroyed" personality as "Phædrus"
Context: Now I want to begin to fulfill a certain obligation by stating that there was one person, no longer here, who had something to say, and who said it, but whom no one believed or really understood. Forgotten. For reasons that will become apparent I'd prefer that he remain forgotten, but there's no choice other than to reopen his case.
I don't know his whole story. No one ever will, except Phædrus himself, and he can no longer speak. But from his writings and from what others have said and from fragments of my own recall it should be possible to piece together some kind of approximation of what he was talking about.
The Farmer Refuted (1775)
Context: The origin of all civil government, justly established, must be a voluntary compact, between the rulers and the ruled; and must be liable to such limitations, as are necessary for the security of the absolute rights of the latter; for what original title can any man or set of men have, to govern others, except their own consent? To usurp dominion over a people, in their own despite, or to grasp at a more extensive power than they are willing to entrust, is to violate that law of nature, which gives every man a right to his personal liberty; and can, therefore, confer no obligation to obedience.
Source: The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 230
The Poems of a Jew (1958)
On his character in The Colbert Report in an interview on Larry King Live (11 October 2007) http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/larry.king.live/
Context: We worked very hard to keep him from being a jerk by keeping in mind he's well intentioned. Just poorly informed. He wants to do the right thing but has none of the tools to achieve it. Because he has no curiosity, he doesn't like to read and he won't listen anybody, except the voices in his head.
Part I, ch. XXXI.
Letters of Two Brides (1841-1842)
Context: A child is tied to our heart-strings, as the spheres are linked to their creator; we cannot think of God except as a mother's heart writ large. It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.
Why I Am an Agnostic (1896)
Context: The truth is that this belief in eternal pain has been the real persecutor.... It has darkened the lives of many millions. It made the cradle as terrible as the coffin. It enslaved nations and shed the blood of countless thousands. It sacrificed the wisest, the bravest and the best. It subverted the idea of justice, drove mercy from the heart, changed men to fiends and banished reason from the brain. Like a venomous serpent it crawls and coils and hisses in every orthodox creed. It makes man an eternal victim and God an eternal fiend. It is the one infinite horror. Every church in which it is taught is a public curse. Every preacher who teaches it is an enemy of mankind. Below this Christian dogma, savagery cannot go. It is the infinite of malice, hatred, and revenge. Nothing could add to the horror of hell, except the presence of its creator, God.
Nonconformity (1953/1996)
Context: To see life steadily, and see it whole, as a creature of the deep sees it, from below. Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards.
Massachusetts v. United States, 333 U.S. 611, 639-40 (1948) (dissenting)
Judicial opinions
Source: The Art of Loving (1956)
Context: To speak of love is not "preaching," for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need of every human being. That this need has been obscured does not mean it does not exist. To analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man.
Source: The Nature of Personal Reality (1974), p. 22, Session 614
(25 November 2006)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2004
Context: No matter what you may have heard elsewhere or however you may have romanticized the life of working writers, know this: it is, with very, very few exceptions, a brutal, ugly, and unrelentingly difficult existence. It is a grind, no matter how much you may love to write or feel driven to tell stories. Personal demons aside, you will encounter at almost every turn no shortage of idiots and shitheels upon whom you must depend to get your work to readers. Occasionally, there will be a fortunate aberration: a wonderful, brilliant editor, or a copyeditor who doesn't try to express herhimitself vicariously by attempting to rewrite your work, or an agent who busts hisherits ass for you. You may even be so fortunate as to encounter a publisher who cares more about herhisits authors than the bottom line. Those things do happen. But don't ever fucking count on it. If you come to this life, and if you "make it" and can actually eek out some sort of living writing, you will likely learn these things for yourselves. Plenty of people will tell you I'm full of shit on this account. And you are certainly free to listen to whomever you please. But after fourteen years as a full-time writer, during which time I have had great successes and profound failures, seen modest fortune and considerable poverty and everything in-between, been appreciated and reviled, awarded and ignored, helped and hindered — one thing remains true. It's a tough row to hoe, as my Grandfather Ramey would have said. And you do yourself and all working authors a disservice if you dare believe otherwise.
The Relation of the State to the Invididual (1890)
Context: What relations should exist between the State and the Individual? The general method of determining these is to apply some theory of ethics involving a basis of moral obligation. In this method the Anarchists have no confidence. The idea of moral obligation, of inherent rights and duties, they totally discard. They look upon all obligations, not as moral, but as social, and even then not really as obligations except as these have been consciously and voluntarily assumed. If a man makes an agreement with men, the latter may combine to hold him to his agreement; but, in the absence of such agreement, no man, so far as the Anarchists are aware, has made any agreement with God or with any other power of any order whatsoever. The Anarchists are not only utilitarians, but egoists in the farthest and fullest sense. So far as inherent right is concerned, might is its only measure.
Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning (2003) <!-- | date = 2003-03-18
Context: Once the threshold is crossed when there is a self-sustaining level of life in space, then life's long-range future will be secure irrespective of any of the risks on Earth (with the single exception of the catastrophic destruction of space itself). Will this happen before our technical civilisation disintegrates, leaving this as a might-have-been? Will the self-sustaining space communities be established before a catastrophe sets back the prospect of any such enterprise, perhaps foreclosing it for ever? We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos, not just for our Earth.
The Syntax of Sorcery (2012)
Context: Except in the areas of civil rights and medical marijuana, the legacy of the sixties counterculture has been largely superficial. Still, though the light has dimmed and gone underground, something in me would like to think the sixties phenomenon was a dress rehearsal for a grander, wider leap in consciousness yet to come. However, since Seafood Kabob is likely to win the Belmont Stakes before a psychic jailbreak of that magnitude materializes, my strategy is to try to live as if that day were already here.
Civilization on Trial (1948), chapter 2, p. 23.
Context: Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case, in extremis or post mortem, we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two. To date, these two plagues have been deadly enough, in partnership, to kill off nineteen out of twenty representatives of this recently evolved species of human society; but, up to now, the deadliness of these scourges has had a saving limit.
"Fads and Public Opinion" http://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/what-i-saw-in-america/10/
What I Saw in America (1922)
Context: A foreigner is a man who laughs at everything except jokes. He is perfectly entitled to laugh at anything, so long as he realises, in a reverent and religious spirit, that he himself is laughable. I was a foreigner in America; and I can truly claim that the sense of my own laughable position never left me. But when the native and the foreigner have finished with seeing the fun of each other in things that are meant to be serious, they both approach the far more delicate and dangerous ground of things that are meant to be funny. The sense of humour is generally very national; perhaps that is why the internationalists are so careful to purge themselves of it. I had occasion during the war to consider the rights and wrongs of certain differences alleged to have arisen between the English and American soldiers at the front. And, rightly or wrongly, I came to the conclusion that they arose from the failure to understand when a foreigner is serious and when he is humorous. And it is in the very nature of the best sort of joke to be the worst sort of insult if it is not taken as a joke.
Letter from the field of Waterloo (June 1815), as quoted in Decisive Battles of the World (1899) by Edward Shepherd Creasy. Quoted too in Memorable Battles in English History: Where Fought, why Fought, and Their Results; with the Military Lives of the Commanders by William Henry Davenport Adams; Editor Griffith and Farran, 1863. p. 400.
Context: My heart is broken by the terrible loss I have sustained in my old friends and companions and my poor soldiers. Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won: the bravery of my troops hitherto saved me from the greater evil; but to win such a battle as this of Waterloo, at the expens of so many gallant friends, could only be termed a heavy misfortune but for the result to the public.
Source: The Thinking Reed (1936), Chapter VII
Context: These women were fatuous with a fatuity which had threatened her all her life, as it threatened all people of means, and which was of mournful significance for humanity in general, since it proved the emptiness of one of man's most reasonable expectations. No more sensible form of government could be imagined than aristocracy. If certain able stocks in the community were able to amass enough wealth to give their descendants beautiful houses to grow up in, the widest opportunities of education, complete economic security, so that they need never be influenced by mercenary considerations, and easy access to any public form of work they chose to undertake — why, then, the community had a race of perfect governors ready made. Only, as the Lauristons showed, the process worked out wholly different in practice. There came to these selected stocks a deadly, ungrateful complacence, which made them count these opportunities as their achievements, and belittle everybody else's achievements unless they were similarly confused with opportunities; and which did worse than this, by abolishing all standards from their minds except what they themselves were and did.
“They searched all over the world for a motive, except for one place: the scene of the crime.”
Part V: More Rage. More Rage., page 184.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
Context: Americans wanted to blame everything but Columbine High for the massacre- they blamed a violent media, Marilyn Manson, Goth culture, the Internet, the Trench Coat Mafia, video games, lax gun control laws, and liberal values. And still skipping over the school, they peered into the opposite direction, blaming the moral and/or mental sickness, or alleged homosexuality, of these two boys, as if they were exceptional freaks in a school of otherwise happy kids. They searched all over the world for a motive, except for one place: the scene of the crime.
“To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: p>But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come,Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,The fiction of an absolute — Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.
“Relativism and the Use of Language,” p. 132-133.
Language is Sermonic (1970)
Context: This is what has happened to the word “liberalism.” In the nineteenth century, this word referred to an ideal of maximum individual liberty and minimum state interference, to put it generally. Today, it is being used to refer to something like the ideal of the welfare state, which involves many restrictions upon liberty. Now if those who use the word thus could be brought into a semantic disputation, I think they would argue that the new meaning is justified because the old meaning is no longer possible. And if we pushed them to explain why it is no longer possible, I think they would answer that “circumstances have changed.” I would want to ask them next what changed circumstances have to do with an ideal construct. What they have done is to take the old term “liberalism,” whose meaning polarized around a concept of personal liberty, and to use this to mean something like philanthropic activity through the machinery of the state. The two ideas are manifestly discrete, but they have used the word for the second idea because it carries with it some of the value connotations of the old one. The second idea is, according to them, the only context in which a benevolent man can now operate. In fact, however, liberalism in the old sense is still there as a viable ideal if the mind is disposed to receive that ideal. When they say that the old meaning is no longer possible in the circumstances, what they are really indicating is that they prefer the new circumstances. Then they make the substitution, in disregard of the transcendental basis of language. I believe that this is a very general truth. When a person blames a change of meaning upon changed facts, he is yielding to the facts and using them to justify a change that should not be made except by “ideal” consent. He is committing the fallacy of supposing that the reason for such change can lie outside the realm of discourse itself — that meaning must somehow tag along after empirical reality. All of this seems to reflect a purely materialist or “physicalist” view of the world. But if one believes that physical reality is the sole determinant of all things, including meanings, one collapses the relationship between what is physical and what is symbolic of meaning and value. it is another evidence of bow the modem mind is trying to surrender its constitutive powers to the objective physical world.
Let's Be Frank (1957)
Context: These people, scattered all over the country, a few of them on the continent, were much like normal people. To outsiders, their relationship was not apparent; they certainly never revealed it; they never met. They became traders, captains of ships that traded with the Indies, soldiers, parliamentarians, agriculturists; some plunged into, some avoided, the constitutional struggles that dogged most of the seventeenth century. But they were all — male or female — Franks. They had the inexpressible benefit of their progenitor's one hundred and seventy-odd years' experience, and not only of his, but of all the other Franks. It was small wonder that, with few exceptions, whatever they did they prospered.
1990s, The Rum Diary (1998)
Context: Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception — especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they are scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.
“Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal.”
Introduction
The Culture of Cities (1938)
Context: Nothing is permanent: certainly not the frozen images of barbarous power with which fascism now confronts us. Those images may easily be smashed by an external shock, cracked as ignominiously as the fallen Dagon, the massive idol of the heathen; or they may be melted, eventually, by the internal warmth of normal men and women. Nothing endures except life: the capacity for birth, growth, and renewal. As life becomes insurgent once more in our civilization, conquering the reckless thrust of barbarism, the culture of cities will be both instrument and goal.
Source: A Higher Standard (2015), p. 200
Context: I have to laugh when people ask, "How's retired life?" I'm as busy as I've ever been, except now I make my own schedule. I see my husband every day. I finally get to spend regular quality time with family and friends. I no longer miss milestone events such as baby showers, birthdays, graduations, and weddings. I wrote this book. I started a consulting company, First 2 Four, LLC. I serve on multiple boards. I even continue to give speeches at universities and corporate gatherings, despite my continued fear of public speaking. But nothing- absolutely nothing- can replace the pride and purpose of being a soldier.
Address at Bennington College (30 October 1984) as published in "Reflections of a Writer: Long Work, Short Life" in The New York Times (20 March 1988)
Context: I have written almost all my life. My writing has drawn, out of a reluctant soul, a measure of astonishment at the nature of life. And the more I wrote well, the better I felt I had to write.
In writing I had to say what had happened to me, yet present it as though it had been magically revealed. I began to write seriously when I had taught myself the discipline necessary to achieve what I wanted. When I touched that time, my words announced themselves to me. I have given my life to writing without regret, except when I consider what in my work I might have done better. I wanted my writing to be as good as it must be, and on the whole I think it is. I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.
Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one's fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing: The men and things of today are wont to lie fairer and truer in tomorrow's meadow, Henry Thoreau said.
I don't regret the years I put into my work. Perhaps I regret the fact that I was not two men, one who could live a full life apart from writing; and one who lived in art, exploring all he had to experience and know how to make his work right; yet not regretting that he had put his life into the art of perfecting the work.
The Epilogue : Which is the proper ending of all comedies; and heralds, it may be, an afterpiece.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
Context: I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are...
The Philosophical Emperor, a Political Experiment, or, The Progress of a False Position: (1841)
Context: After hearing incessantly that the people follow him without sense or discretion, he [the political leader] is liable to fall a victim of the delusion which he has created, and to imagine that he possesses some personal attraction, by virtue of which he is followed. The delusion soon develops itself. He will diverge from the authorized track... From habit, the people will move a little in his erratic course. Their compliance augments his delusion, and he will become increasingly regardless of the popular will, and more obstinately intent on his own. He soon becomes monomaniac, and is abandoned except by a few stragglers as crazy as himself; while he interprets the abandonment into ingratitude or heterodoxy, and grows scurrilous, turbulent, and impotent.
“Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful. Except for nothing.”
"Birthmark" in Paris Review (Spring 2003) http://guccipiggy.objectis.net/prose/birthmark
Context: Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful. Except for nothing. Only winners will know what this feels like. Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it. Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be.
In a letter dated August 1, 1918
Context: Getting down to brass tacks, how in the Hell are you going to explain general American n- 'I' except genetically? It's disturbing, I know, but (more) non-committal conservatism is only dodging, after all, isn't it? Great simplifications are in store for us. … It seems to me that only now that is American linguistics becoming really interesting, at least in its ethnological bearings.
On his motivations to write Lord of the Flies, from his essay "Fable", p. 85
The Hot Gates (1965)
Context: The overall intention may be stated simply enough. Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society..... but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another... I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head... I am thinking of the vileness beyond all words that went on, year after year, in the totalitarian states. It is bad enough to say that so many Jews were exterminated in this way and that, so many people liquidated — lovely, elegant word — but there were things done during that period from which I still have to avert my mind less I should be physically sick. They were not done by the headhunters of New Guinea or by some primitive tribe in the Amazon. They were done, skillfully, coldly, by educated men, doctors, lawyers, by men with a tradition of civilization behind them, to beings of their own kind.
My own conviction grew that what had happened was that men were putting the cart before the horse. They were looking at the system rather than the people. It seemed to me that man’s capacity for greed, his innate cruelty and selfishness, was being hidden behind a kind of pair of political pants. I believed then, that man was sick — not exceptional man, but average man. I believed that the condition of man was to be a morally diseased creation and that the best job I could do at the time was to trace the connection between his diseased nature and the international mess he gets himself into. To many of you, this will seem trite, obvious, and familiar in theological terms. Man is a fallen being. He is gripped by original sin. His nature is sinful and his state is perilous. I accept the theology and admit the triteness; but what is trite is true; and a truism can become more than a truism when it is a belief passionately held....
I can say in America what I should not like to say at home; which is that I condemn and detest my country's faults precisely because I am so proud of her many virtues. One of our faults is to believe that evil is somewhere else and inherent in another nation. My book was to say you think that now the war is over and an evil thing destroyed, you are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could it could happen in any country. It could happen here.
White House Correspondents' Association Dinner (2006)
Context: As excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America — with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president's side, and the vice president's side. But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they're super-depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good — over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.
Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation (1943)
Context: It is impossible to feel equal respect for things that are in fact unequal unless the respect is given to something that is identical in all of them. Men are unequal in all their relations with the things of this world, without exception. The only thing that is identical in all men is the presence of a link with the reality outside the world.
All human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter.
only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow. I like to think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as that keystone is, if it were ever taken away the universe itself would collapse.
Paris Review interview (1958)
“A charity ball is like a dance except it's tax deductible.”
Modern Manners (1983)
Man in the Modern Age (1933)
Context: When the titanic apparatus of the mass-order has been consolidated, the individual has to serve it, and must from time to time combine with his fellows in order to renovate it. If he wants to make his livelihood by intellectual activity, he will find it very difficult to do this except by satisfying the needs of the many. He must give currency to something that will please the crowd. They seek satisfaction in the pleasures of the table, eroticism, self-assertion; they find no joy in life if one of these gratifications be curtailed. They also desire some means of self-knowledge. They desire to be led in such as way that they can fancy themselves leaders. Without wishing to be free, they would fain be accounted free. One who would please their taste must produce what is really average and commonplace, though not frankly styled such; must glorify or at least justify something as universally human. Whatever is beyond their understanding is uncongenial to them.
One who would influence the masses must have recourse to the art of advertisement. The clamour of puffery is to-day requisite even for an intellectual movement. The days of quiet and unpretentious activity seem over and done with. You must keep yourself in the public eye, give lectures, make speeches, arouse a sensation. Yet the mass-apparatus lacks true greatness of representation, lacks solemnity. <!-- pp. 43 - 44
Letter to James Baldwin (21 November 1962).
General sources
Context: In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes. Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford them only in private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free.
moments don’t usually come at the keyboard. They come when I’m lying on the floor, staring into space (or banging my head against the wall in frustration). All of a sudden the Unconscious Camera turns on, a movie starts playing in my head-and there it is: The Big Moment. Or the Whole Damn Story. And, in many ways, I had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
A Conversation With The Legendary J.M. DeMatteis! (2004)
Source: No Ordinary Genius (1994), p. 251-252, from interview in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1981): video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEwUwWh5Xs4&t=45m21s
(Also in book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999) p. 23.)
Context: People say to me, "Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?" No, I'm not. I'm just looking to find out more about the world and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it; that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers and we're just sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that's the way it is!… And therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn’t pre-decide what it is we are trying to do except to find out more about it… My interest in science is to simply find out more about the world.
Journal Intime (1882), Quotes used in the Introduction by Ward
Context: There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute; for feeling except in the infinite; for the soul except in the divine. Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me. There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being through the whole of Being.
First Mansions, Ch. 2 : The Human Soul, as translated by the Benedictines of Stanbrook (1911), revised and edited by Fr. Benedict Zimmerman
Interior Castle (1577)
Context: We shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavoring to know God; for, beholding His greatness we realize our own littleness; His purity shows us our foulness; and by meditating upon His humility we find how very far we are from being humble.
As quoted and paraphrased in "I Have Been a Babe and a Boob" by Joe Winkworth, in Collier's (October 31, 1925), p. 15
Context: "I am through—through with the pests and the good-time guys. Between them and a few crooks I have thrown away more than a quarter of a million dollars. I have been a Babe—and a Boob. I'm through." [Ruth] confesses he faces either oblivion or the hard task of complete reformation. [He] realizes that he must make good all over again. "I am going to do it," he said. "I was going to be the exception, the popular hero who could do as he pleased. But all those people were right. Babe and Boob—that was me all over. Now, though, I know that if I am to wind up sitting pretty on the world I've got to face the facts and admit I have been the sappiest of saps. All right, I admit it. I haven't any desire to kid myself."
Augustus (1937)
Context: History does not repeat itself except with variations, and it is idle to look for exact parallels, but we can trace a resemblance between the conditions of his time and those of to-day. Once again the crust of civilization has worn thin, and beneath can be heard the muttering of primeval fires. Once again many accepted principles of government have been overthrown, and the world has become a laboratory where immature and feverish minds experiment with unknown forces. Once again problems cannot be comfortably limited, for science has brought the nations into an uneasy bondage to each other. In the actual business of administration there is no question of today which Augustus had not to face and answer.
Source: Mathematical Monads (1889), p. 268
Context: As the mathematics are now understood, each branch — or, if you please, each problem, — is but the study of the relations of a collection of connected objects, without parts, without any distinctive characters, except their names or designating letters. These objects are commonly called points; but to remove all notion of space relations, it may be better to name them monads. The relations between these points are mere complications of two different kinds of elementary relations, which may be termed immediate connection and immediate non-connection. All the monads except as serve as intermediaries for the connections have distinctive designations.
“All, without any exception, will certainly know their real Self.”
Source: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), p. 818
Context: All will surely realize God. All will be liberated. It may be that some get their meal in the morning, some at noon, and some in the evening; but none will go without food. All, without any exception, will certainly know their real Self.
“Success is having to worry about every damn thing in the world, except money. ”
“But in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. ”
“There is no reality except in action.”
“An old definition of a gentleman: someone who is never rude except on purpose.”
2000s, 2001, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)
Vol. 1, Chap. 10.
The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire: Volume 1 (1776)
