[Diogenes] ". . .used to say he followed the example of the trainers of choruses for they too set the note a little high to ensure that the rest should hit the right note." Diogenes Laertius, Diogenes
"He who devotes himself to any department of knowledge should aim at the highest." --Goethe
[As to a dramatic poets] "[o]ne should not study contemporaries and competitors, but the great men of antiquity, whose works have for centuries received equal homage and consideration. Indeed a man of really superior endowments will feel the necessity of his, and it is just this need for intercourse with great predecessors, which is the sign of a higher talent. Let us study Moliere, let us study Shakespeare, but above all things the old Greeks, and always the Greeks." Conversations of Goethe.
"Pliny gives mankind this alternative; either of doing what deserves to be written, or of writing what deserves to be read." --Earl of Chesterfield, Letters and Maxims of Lord Chesterfield.
"With eyes fixed on a happier state of society, the blessings of which he paints in most captivating colors, he allows himself to indulge in the most bitter invectives against every present establishment, without ... seeming to be aware of the tremendous obstacles that threaten, even in theory, to oppose the progress of man towards perfection." --Malthus
"After all, men of energy and character must have enemies: because there are two sides to every question, and taking one with decision, and acting on it with effect, those who take the other will of course be hostile in proportion as they feel that effect." Thomas Jefferson letter to John Adams, May 5, 1817 [encouraging Adams to ignore the calumny directed at him].
"We do not add to our culture when we simply set in motion without trouble or difficulty what already existed within us. Every artist, like every man, is only an individual being, and will always abide by one side; and therefore a man should take in himself as far as possible that which is theoretically and practically opposed to him. The lively should look about for strength and earnestness, the severe should keep in view the light and agreeable, the strong should look for loveliness, the delicate for strength, and each will thus best cultivate his peculiar nature." --Goethe
And not in this dead glass, which can reflect
Only the surfaces--the bending arm,
The leaning shoulder and the searching eye.
Oh, bend against the invisible; and lean
To symbols of descending night; and search
The glare of revelations going by!
See how the absent moon waits in a glade
Of your dark self, and how the wings of stars,
Upward, from unimagined coverts, fly.
--Wallace Stevens
"A few only in any age or nation love the best, follow after ideal aims; but when these few are wanting, all life becomes common-place, and the millions pass from the cradle to the grave and leave no lasting impression on the world. . . . [These few] should live in serene air . . . they should have leisure, which is the original meaning of school and scholar; for the mind, like the soul, is refreshed and strengthened by quiet meditation . . . . we do not hitch a race-horse to the plough, nor do we ask the best minds to do the common work of which every man is capable. They render the best service, when living in communion with the highest and most cultivated minds of the past and present. . . ." John L. Spalding [Bishop of Peoria] Education and the HigherLife
[Ah, but scratch an idealist and sometimes you get a Nazi:] "It is man's chief blessedness that there lie in his nature infinite possibilities of growth . . . Only those races are noble, only those individuals are worthy, who yield without reserve to the power of this impulse to ceaseless progress. Behold how the race from which we have sprung the Aryan breaks forth into ever new developments of strength and beauty in Greece, in Italy, in France, in England, in Germany, in America; creating literature, philosophy, science, art; receiving Christian truth, and through its aid rising to diviner heights of wisdom, power, freedom, love and knowledge." John L. Spalding [Bishop of Peoria] Education and the HigherLife
"The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and, the results being splendid and useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such, - watching days and months, sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; - must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation, he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept, - how often! poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one, who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart." Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar
"The highest achievement possible to a man is the full consciousness of his own feelings and thoughts, for that gives him the means of knowing intimately the hearts of others." Goethe, Shakespeare ad infinitum
gnothi sauton--["know thyself" said to have ben inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi.]
"Who am I; what is this ME? A Voice, a Motion an Appearance;--some embodied, visualized Idea in the Eternal Mind? Cogito, ergo sum. Alas, poor Cogitator, this takes us but little way." Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.
"The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the enquiring mind." --Justice Felix Frankfurter.
"This is, I think, the picture of the ripe, developed man: His mind is free from prejudices of every sort. He is master of the realm of ideas and looks out over the region of human truth as widely as possible." Johann Gottleib Fichte (1762-1814) from Philosophy of Masonry: Letters to [Benjamin] Constant.
"There are strong minds in every walk of life that will rise superior to the disadvantages of situation and will command the tribute due to their merit, not only from the classes to which they particularly belong, but from society in general. The door ought to be equally open to all . . ." --Publius [James Madison], Federalist No. 36
[One cannot hope to create a standard education for leadership:] " . . . only flair, intelligence and, above all, the latent eagerness to play a part which alone enables a man to develop ability and strength of character, can be of service. It all comes to this, that nothing great will be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so. Disraeli, in his youth, trained himself to be prime Minister. Foch, even when he was an obscure instructor, showed by the way in which he taught, that in him there was a future commander in chief. . . What is important is that the ambitious, more especially those who hold high rank, should be filed with the spirit of enthusiasm, and be obsessed by the necessity of finding in life an opportunity to leave their mark upon events; that, from the shore on which they live their uneventful lives, they should direct their eyes with longing to the stormy seas of history." --Charles de Gaulle, The Edge of the Sword.
"[On Icelandic folk tales of taciturn chieftons]: [l]istening to these grim phrases or watching these grimmer silences, we remember that Iceland is a country where the nights are long and the mountain snows are endless, but the volcanoes smoke from time to time, and then, with long pent-up violence, erupt." Gilbert Highet, A Clerk of Oxenford
Hamlet:
Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw,
When honour's at stake. How stand I then?
--William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince
of Denmark.
"There is a strange power and active force, as it were, in nature, my dear Witz, which I infer from this fact among others that, though in my boyhood the humanities were banished from our schools and there was no supply of books and teachers, and they had no prestige to spur on a gifted student-- quite the reverse, discouragement of them was universal and drove one into other subjects-- in spite of this a sort of inspiration fired me with devotion to the Muses, sprung not from judgement (for I was then too young to judge) but from a kind of natural feeling. I developed a hatred for anyone I knew to be an enemy of humane studies and a love for those who delighted in them . . . . I see clearly how cold, how maimed and blind a thing is learning when deprived of the patronage of the Muses. In any case it is a shameful story, the stupidity with which some men reject what is far the most excellent province of knowledge, dismissing as 'poetry' all that belongs to an ancient and more civilized culture . . . I had planned to take my revenge in pen and ink, with one proviso, that I would attack no man by name." Erasmus, The Antibarbarians.
"Mr. [Theodore] Roosevelt is the most formidable disaster that has befallen upon the country since the Civil War--but the vast majority of the nation loves him, is frantically fond of him, even idolizes him. This is the simple truth. It sounds like a libel upon the intelligence of the human race but it isn't: there isn't any way to libel the intelligence of the human race." --Mark Twain
". . . Schopenaur says the whole human race ought on a given day after a strong remonstrance firmly but respectfully urged on God, to walk into the sea and leave the world tenantless, but of course some skulking wretches would hide and be left behind to people the world again, I am afraid." --Oscar Wilde, letter to William Ward, 16 July 1876
"The difficulty for democracy is, how to find and keep high ideals. The individuals who compose it are, the bulk of them, persons who need to follow an ideal, not to set one . . . " Matthew Arnold, Democratic Education
"The pedagogical problem is how to produce the kind of man that the country wants to produce. But . . .the loss of an intelligible and attainable ideal lies at the root of the troubles of American education." --Robert Maynard Hutchins, Some Observations on American Education
"No man, it has been said, is a hero to his valet, and this is probably true; but the fault is at least as likely to be the valet's as the hero's; for it is certain that to the vulgar eye few things are wonderful that are not distant." Thomas Carlyle, An Essay on Robert Burns.
"Thus it is that great men live far less in the memory of their countrymen than in the stones, rocks, or buildings with which it pleases people to connect their names. For in the first place, the popular mind craves what is definite and concrete. It wishes to identify the precise spot on which he stood, the tree that gave him shelter, the house in which he lodged." --Père Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints.
"I have always wondered at the passion many people have to meet the celebrated. The prestige you acquire by being able to tell your friends that you know famous men proves only that you are yourself of small account." W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up.
[An episode in Boswell's journal worthy of a Henry James novel: Boswell has been social-climbing through London--] "After dinner my Lord and I went to Ranelagh in his chariot by ourselves, where. . . I met Lady Margaret Hume, whom I had really used ill by not waiting upon her Sunday evening, as I engaged to do. I apologized for myself by saying that I was an odd man. She seemed to understand my worth, and said it was a pity that I would be lost in the common stream of people here." Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763
"For some reason celebrities of a certain kind are treated as messiahs whether they like it or not; people encapsulate them in myths that touch their deepest yearnings and needs . . . We make up any excuse to preserve myths about people we love, but the reverse is also true; if we dislike an individual we adamantly resist changing our opinion, even when someone offers proof of his decency, because its vital to have myths both about the gods and the devils in our lives. . . . I've never had any respect for Hollywood, It stands for avarice, phoniness, greed, crassness and bad taste, but when you act in a movie, you only have to work three months a year, then you can do as you please for the rest." -Marlon Brando
"John Wayne is the hero of the thirties and forties and most of the sixties. Before the creeps came creeping in. Before, in the sixties, the male hero slid right down into the valley of the weak and the misunderstood. Before the women began dropping any pretense of virginity into the gutter. With a disregard for truth which is indeed pathetic. And unisex was born. The hair grew long and the pride grew short. And we were off to the anti-hero and heroine. . . Well, as one goes through life one learns that if you don't paddle your own canoe, you don't move." Katherine Hepburn, Me.
"Dear Miss Hepburn-- . . . Hooray for you--3 cheers for excellence and style and class and honor and warmth. 3 cheers for your decency--" [then Vice President] George Bush, letter congratulating Katherine Hepburn on her Oscar for On Golden Pond, March 30, 1982.
"As I told Bill Clinton, I felt the same sense of wonder and majesty about this office today as I did when I first walked in here. I've tried to serve here with no taint or dishonor; no conflict of interest; nothing to sully this beautiful place and this job I've been privileged to hold . . . " --[former President] George Bush, last White House diary entry, January 20, 1993.
"I was honored and blessed to be President of the USA, but I am dead certain that what trully matters in life is not the political office you hold or held, not the famous people you know, or the things that history might say you accomplished--what really matters are life's true values and your faith, and your family, and your friends. I am a very lucky man." --[former President] George Bush, speech at Greenwich Country Day School.
"When you come from privilege as Bush did, well, you just don't have to try as hard. When you come from a much more modest background like Truman you have to fight for everything you get." Richard M. Nixon [nb--whatever the general truth of this sentiment, here Nixon had it backwards. Truman the unassuming Midwestern haberdasher was handed his Senate seat by a political machine. Roosevelt then offered Truman the Vice Presidency since he was considered a harmless, inoffensive drudge known for thrift and frugality on Defense contracts. Roosevelt's unexpected death made Truman President. Bush, in contrast, worked his own way up from the grubby Texas oil fields.]
"One of the proofs of Washington's greatness as a commander-in-chief was his ability (and willingnes) to select men greater than himself in their special fields to help him do his work--Greene, Hamilton, Wayne and others. Instead of weakening his individual control. He fortified it. Washington quickly detected ability in a man, and knew how to make the most of it." John Hyde Preston, A Gentleman Rebel: Mad Anthony Wayne
"I know that some individuals react against the strongest impediments, and owe succces and greatness to the efforts which they are thus forced to make. But the question is not about individuals. The question is about the common bulk of mankind, persons without extraordinary gifts or exceptional energy, and who will ever require, in order to make the best of themselves, encouragement and directly favoring circumstances." --Matthew Arnold, Democratic Education.
"There is a word which still means much to the English and which was for many years a rod to my back, a spur to prick the sides of my intent, a fury from which to flee, a nemesis, an enemy, an anathema, a totem, a bugaboo and an accusation. I still recoil at its usage and its range of connotation. The word stands for everything I have always wanted not to be and everything and everyone I have felt apart from. It is the shibboleth of the club I would never join, could never join, the club outside whose doors I might stand jeering while all the while a secret part of me watched with wretched self-loathing as the elected members pushed through the revolving doors, whistling, happy and self-assured. The word is HEALTHY. . . . A boy who knows that he is other, who knows that the world is not made for him, who reads he code implicit in words like 'healthy' and 'decent,' he may well been drawn to the glaring light and savage dark of the ancient world and the poisonous colors and heavy, dangerous musks that lie the other side of the door into the secret garden, the door held open by Pater, Wilde, Douglas, Firbank . . . even Forster himself, misah and prim as he could be." Stephen Fry
"The mechanism went a bit like this (since then I've kept on using it): with each charge lodged against me, no matter how unfair, in my heart of hearts I answered yes. Scarcely had I muttered this word--or a phrase that meant the same thing--that I felt within myself the need to become what I'd been accused of being. . . . I recognized that I was the coward, the traitor, the thief, the faggot that they saw in me. . . Slowly I grew accustomed to this condition. I admitted it with tranquility. The scorn people felt for me changed into [their] hatred: I'd succeeded." --Jean Genet
"Dorian Grey, having led a life of mere sensation of pleasure, tries to kill conscience, and at that moment kills himself."--Oscar Wilde. letter to the Editor, St. James's Gazette, 25 June 1890.
"Bernard Shaw is an excellent man; he has not an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him." --Oscar Wilde.
"Most of us live in a crowd and the present moment. Yeats was solitary, gave himself only to a few friends, existed chiefly in the past and the unseen." --Gilbert Highet
idiotikos: 1)-of or for a private person, private; 2) not done by rules of art, unprofessional, amateur [as in not privy to the jargon; out of the loop]--Liddel & Scott Greek/English Lexicon.
" . . . and he who is by nature and not by mere accident without a state, is either above humanity or below it; he is the tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,' whom Homer denounces--the outcast who is a lover of war; he may be compared to an unprotected piece in a game of chess." --Aristotle, Politics
In heaven, but by the blind self of the storm
Spun off, each driven individual
Perfected in the moment of his fall.
--Howard Nemerov
Hamlet:
Will you play upon this pipe?
Guildenstern:
My lord, I cannot.
Hamlet:
I pray you.
Guildenstern:
Believe me, I cannot.
Hamlet:
I do beseech you.
Guildenstern:
I know no touch of it, my lord.
Hamlet:
It is as easy as lying.
Govern these ventages with your fingers and thumbs, give it breath
with your mouth, and it will discourse most excellent music.
Look you, these are the stops.
Guildenstern:
But these I cannot command to any utt'rance
of harmony. I have not the skill.
Hamlet:
Why, look you now, how unworthy
a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem
to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery;
you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass;
and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ,
yet you cannot make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier
to be play'd on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will,
though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.
-- William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
"[Rupert Brooke was] a creature on whom the gods had smiled their brightest, and half of whose manifestation was by the simple act of presence and of direct communication . . . . in a world in which difficulty and disaster are frequent, the most wavering and flickering of all fine flames has escaped extinction." --Henry James
"That fellow? He's handsome, though duck-like." --Brady Earnhart, remark at a September 24, 1993 dinner, following which he passed out on my couch.
[Raymond Chandler] ". . . had a strong notion of what counted and what didn't in a life of limited years." Aristides [pseudonym of Jospeh Epstein], An Extremely Well-Informed SOB.
"I think that independence and absolute freedom in the conduct of his life were imperative to Graham Greene; and that any restriction, unless self-imposed, was not only galling to him, as to many high-strung natures, but intolerable. The most difficult elements of his personality turned on that issue. Resentment of a real or fancied imposition, or the inability to prevail in his view or desire, could ignite a sense of infringement that seemed like madness." Shirley Hazzard, Greene on Capri
[Shelley remarks about the poetic personality:]
The lake-reflected sun illume
The honey-bees in the ivy bloom
Nor hear nor see what things they be.
"These things are praiseworthy in a poet, but not--shall we say--in a postman." -- Bertrand Russell, Education and the Good Life
"[Of Professor Teufelsdrockh--his countenance] is probably the gravest ever seen: yet it is not of the cast-iron gravity frequent enough among our own Chancery suitors; but rather the gravity as of some silent, high-encircled mountain--pool, perhaps the crater of an extinct volcano; into whose black deeps you fear to gaze: those eyes, those lights that sparkle in it, may indeed be reflexes of the heavenly Stars, but perhaps also glances from the region of Nether Fire!" Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.
