Life is what happens to us while we're busy making other plans.
-- Allen Saunders
There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.
-- Sir Joshua Reynolds
-- Peter Drucker
-- John Keats
Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most manage to pick themselves up and run off as if nothing happened.
-- Winston Churchill
From "The Lessons of History," by Will and Ariel Durant
Chapter X, Government and History
Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.
-- George Eliot
When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.
-- Lord Kelvin
From "The Lessons of History," by Will and Ariel Durant
Conclusion to Chapter I, Hesitations
It is a precarious enterprise, and only a fool would try
to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions.
We begin.
The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints. (p. 72)
Every advance in the complexity of the economy puts an added premium upon superior ability, and intensifies the concentration of wealth, responsibility, and political power. (p.77)
A right is not a gift of God or nature but a privilege which it is good for the group that the individual should have. (p. 79)
Chapter XII, Growth and Decay
When the group or a civilization declines, it is through no mystic limitation of a corporate life, but through the failure of its political or intellectual leaders to meet the challenges of change. (p. 92)
From "Middlemarch," by George Eliot
(Young Ladislaw was not at all deep himself in German writers; but...) very little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings. [Book 2, Chapter 21 (p. 154)]
Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating. [Book 1, Chapter 2 (p. 15)]
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. [Book 2, Chapter 20 (p.144)]
He had formerly observed with approbation her capacity for worshipping the right object; he now foresaw with sudden terror that this capacity might be replaced by presumption, this worship by the most exasperating of all criticism,-- that which sees vaguely a great many fine ends, and has not the least notion what it costs to reach them. [Book 2, Chapter 20 (p. 149)]
With a favour to ask we review our list of friends, do justice to their more amiable qualities, forgive their little offences, and concerning each in turn, try to arrive at the conclusion that he will be eager to oblige us, our own eagerness to be obliged being as communicable as other warmth. [Book 3, Chapter 23 (p. 169)]
Solomon's Proverbs I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes. [Book 3, Chapter 31 (p. 220)]
Mary was fond of her own thoughts, and could amuse herself well sitting in twilight with her hands in her lap; for, having early had strong reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time in astonishment and annoyance at that fact. And she had already come to take life very much as a comedy in which she had a proud, nay, generous resolution not to act the mean or treacherous part. Mary might have become cynical if she had not had parents whom she honoured, and a well of affectionate gratitude within her, which was all the fuller because she had learned to make no unreasonable claims. [Book 3, Chapter 35 (p. 232)]
For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. [Book 8, Finale (p. 612)]
Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent upon unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. [Book 8, Finale (p. 613)]
[note that page numbers refer to the Riverside Edition, published by Houghton Mifflin Co., Copyright 1956 by Gordon S. Haight]
From "Madame Bovary," by Gustav Flaubert
(Translated by Francis Steegmuller ©1957, 1985)
… the more flowery a person’s speech, he thought the more suspect the feelings, or lack of feelings, it concealed. Whereas the truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
-- part 2, chapter XII (p. 267, large print edition)
It wasn’t the first time in their lives that they had seen trees, blue sky and lawn, or heard the flowing of water or the rustle of the breeze in the branches, but never before, certainly, had they looked on it all with such wonder: it was as though nature had not existed before, or had only begun to be beautiful with the slaking of their desires.
-- part 3, chapter III (p. 360, large print edition)
Besides, nothing was worth looking for: everything was a lie! Every smile concealed a yawn of boredom; every joy, a curse; every pleasure, its own surfeit; and the sweetest kisses left on one’s lips but a vain longing for fuller delight.
-- part 3, chapter VI (p. 399, large print edition)
There isn’t a bourgeois alive who in the ferment of his youth, if only for a day or for a minute, hasn’t thought himself capable of boundless passions and noble exploits. The sorriest little woman-chaser has dreamed of Oriental queens; in a corner of every notary’s heart lie the moldy remains of a poet.
-- part 3, chapter VI (p. 408, large print edition)
… dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began the unctions. First he anointed her eyes, once so covetous of all earthly luxuries; then her nostrils, so gluttonous of caressing breezes and amorous scents; then her mouth, so prompt to lie, so defiant in pride, so loud in lust; then her hands, that had thrilled to voluptuous contacts; and finally the soles of her feet, once so swift when she had hastened to slake her desires, and now never to walk again.
-- part 3, chapter IX (p. 455, large print edition)
From "Truth & Beauty," by Ann Patchett
Lucy and I had ceased to be distinguishable from everyone else and every day the ground was getting softer, swallowing us up a little bit more. We had each come to realize that no one was going to save our lives, and that if we wanted to save them ourselves, we only had one skill that afforded us any hope at all. Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon. In her hospital bed or in her lonesome room back at her flat, Lucy brought out the sentences she knew and she twisted them into poems and chapters, the same way I stood in the kitchen every night at the end of my shift at Friday's and rolled 150 silverware packets, dreaming up characters with problems more beautiful and insurmountable than my own. [p. 62, at the very bottom]
Karl wanted to hear Lucy's entire medical history, which was a little bit like asking to hear the political history of China over eggs and toast. [p. 149]
From "Look Homeward, Angel," by Thomas Wolfe
[from Chapter 40]
“What happens, Ben? What really happens?” said Eugene. [more…]
“What do you want to remember?” said Ben.
A stone, a leaf, an unfound door. And the forgotten faces.
[3 more pages, then…]
He stood naked and alone in darkness, far from the lost world of the streets and faces; he stood upon the ramparts of his soul, before the lost land of himself; heard inland murmurs of lost seas, the far interior music of the horns. The last voyage, the longest, the best.
[4 lines more, then…]
… And no leaf hangs for me in the forest; I shall lift no stone upon the hills; I shall find no door in any city. But in the city of myself, upon the continent of my soul, I shall find the forgotten language, the lost world, a door where I may enter, and music strange as any ever sounded; I shall haunt you, ghost, along the labyrinthine ways until — until? O Ben, my ghost, an answer?
John Updike quotes:
The daring passes into the classic in our very lifetimes, while we age and die.
-- From "A Constellation of Events," a short story in Trust Me
He was like a man who, having miraculously survived a shipwreck, wants to warn all others back at the edge of the sea.
-- From "Learn a Trade," a short story in Trust Me
The car was a Japanese model, as cunning and tawdry as a music-box. It had four forward gears and a reverse tucked somewhere in the lower right quadrant, where New Zealand is on a map.
-- From "One More Interview," a short story in Trust Me
The house's huge content of protoplasm ebbs in little stages into quiet, into sleep: twenty-six other human beings -- he counts them up, including the boys in the barn -- soaking up restorative dreams, leaving him stranded, high and listening, his ears staring into the tense, circumambient wilderness.
-- From "Leaf Season," a short story in Trust Me
The children were conveniently scattered to summer jobs and to friends' houses, but for the youngest, who after dinner wrapped himself in the mumble of television in his room upstairs.
-- From "The Other Woman," a short story in Trust Me
And in those days a large and not laughable sexual territory existed within the borders of virginity, where physical parts were fed to the partner a few at a time, beginning with the lips and hands.
-- From "The Other," a short story in Trust Me
From "Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am?" by John Powell, S.J.
(1969, Argus Communications, Niles, Ill.; ISBN 0-913592-02-1)
p. 44 - This is the real meaning of authenticity as a person, that my exterior truly reflects my interior.
p. 84 - If all this is true, and you have only to experience it to know its truth, it is obvious that the little phrase we have used so conveniently, "I'm sorry, but that's the way I am," is nothing more than a refuge and delusion. It is handy if you don't want to grow up; but if you do want to grow up, you try to rise above this fallacy.
p. 98 - A person can confide all of his secrets to the docile pages of his personal diary, but he can know himself and experience the fullness of life only in the meeting with another person. Friendship becomes a great adventure. There is a continuously deeper discovery of myself and my friend, as we continue to reveal new and deeper layers of ourselves. It opens my mind, widens my horizons, fills me with new awareness, deepens my feelings, gives my life meaning.
p. 100 (which is from a dozen or more pages earlier) - The fully human person is in deep and meaningful contact with the world outside of him. He not only listens to himself, but to the voices of his world. The breadth of his own individual experience is infinitely multiplied through a sensitive empathy with others. He suffers with the suffering, rejoices with the joyful. He is born again in every Springtime, feels the impact of the great mysteries of life: birth, growth, love, suffering, death. His heart skips along with the "young lovers," and he knows something of the exhilaration that is in them. He also knows the ghetto's philosophy of despair, the loneliness of suffering without relief, and the bell never tolls without tolling in some strange way for him.
From "The Count of Monte Cristo," by Alexandre Dumas
To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other.
Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,"Wait and hope."
From work (once upon a time)
There isn't really a way to say this delicately, but a little background will help put it in context. From the fall of 1976 through the spring of 1979 I was the assistant band director in a suburb of Pittsburgh. Somewhere in that period the high school marching band was getting new uniforms and as part of the process a salesman brought in a number of samples for several of us to select from.
Naturally, the uniform samples ranged from very traditional to gaudy, and actually, beyond. Most of us looked at the gaudier samples with wide eyes of disbelief. Who would want that stuff? The band director, unfazed, offered this quotable observation: "Some people have a taste for s---."
From church, Feb. 22, 2015, where Pastor Rex offered this quote:
Brutal honesty is always better than false hope.
This thought came to mind upon reading a friend's recent Facebook post:
Life is what happens to us while we're making other plans.
-- cartoonist Allen Saunders, 1957
From a friend's recent Facebook post:
"The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."
-- Ralph Waldo EmersonFrom a March 2017 LinkedIn article by Benjamin Cardullo
Everything changed the day she figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in her life.
-- Ariana Huffington quoting a passage by writer Brian Andreas
From "The Book of Merlyn," by T. H. White
There is nothing so wonderful as to be out on a spring night
in the country; but really in the latest part of night, and, best of
all, if you can be alone. Then, when you can hear the wild
world scamper, and the cows chewing just before you tumble
over them, and the leaves living secretly, and the nibblings and
grass pluckings and the blood's tide in your own veins: when
you can see the loom of trees and hills in deeper darkness and
the stars twirling in their oiled grooves for yourself: when
there is one light in one cottage far away, marking a sickness
or an early riser upon a mysterious errand: when the horse
hoofs with squeaking cart behind plod to an unknown market,
dragging their bundled man, in sacks, asleep: when the
dogs' chains rattle at the farms, and the vixen yelps once, and
the owls have fallen silent: then is a grand time to be alive and
vastly conscious, when all else human is unconscious, homebound,
bed-sprawled, at the mercy of the midnight mind.
-- the first paragraph of Chapter 18
-- cartoonist Allen Saunders
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