T.E. Lawrence, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom"

All men dream: but nor equally, Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

The everlasting battle stripped from us care of our own lives or of others'. We had ropes about our necks, and on our heads prices which showed that the enemy intended hideous tortures for us if we were caught. Each day some of us passed; and the living knew themselves just sentient puppets on God's stage: indeed, our taskmaster was merciless, merciless, so long as our bruised feet could stagger forward on the road. The weak envied those tired enough to die; for success looked so remote, and failure a near and certain, if sharp, release from toil. We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling. This impotency was bitter to us, and made us live only for the seen horizon, reckless what spite we inflicted or endured, since physical sensation showed itself meanly transient. Gusts of cruelty, perversions, lusts ran lightly over the
surface without troubling us; for the moral laws which had seemed to hedge about these silly accidents must be yet fainter words. We had learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were humdrum once more.

Pray God that men reading the story will not, for love of the glamour of strangeness, go out to prostitute themselves and their talents in serving another race.

This square of land, as large as India, formed the homeland of our Semites, in which no foreign race had kept a permanent footing, though Egyptians, Hittites, Philistines, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Turks and Franks had variously tried. All had in the end been broken, and their scattered elements drowned in the strong characteristics of the Semitic race. Semites had sometimes pushed outside this area, and themselves been drowned in the outer world. Egypt, Algiers, Morocco, Malta, Sicily, Spain, Cilicia and France absorbed and obliterated Semitic colonies. Only in Tripoli of Africa, and in the everlasting miracle of Jewry, had distant Semites kept some of their identity and force.

To the north of the oases lay a belt of sand, and then an immense gravel and lava plain, filling up everything between the eastern edge of Syria and the banks of the Euphrates where
Mesopotamia began. The practicability of this northern desert for men and motor-cars enabled the Arab revolt to win its ready success.

The hills of the west and the plains of the east were the parts of Arabia always most populous and active. In particular on the west, the mountains of Syria and Palestine, of Hejaz and Yemen, entered time and again into the current of our European life. Ethically, these fertile healthy hills were in Europe, not in Asia, just as the Arabs looked always to the Mediterranean, not to the Indian Ocean, for their cultural sympathies, for their enterprises, and particularly for their expansions, since the migration problem was the greatest and most complex force in Arabia, and general to it, however it might vary in the different Arabic districts.

The camel markets in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt determined the population which the deserts could support, and regulated strictly their standard of living. So the desert likewise overpeopled itself
upon occasion; and then there were heavings and thrustings of the crowded tribes as they elbowed themselves by natural courses towards the light.

This was the circulation which kept vigour in the Semitic body. There were few, if indeed there was a single northern Semite, whose ancestors had not at some dark age passed through the desert. The mark of nomadism, that most deep and biting social discipline, was on each of them in his degree.

In the very outset, at the first meeting with them, was found a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitation, and repellent in its unsympathetic form. Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. Their thoughts were at ease only in extremes. They inhabited
superlatives by choice. Sometimes inconsistents seemed to possess them at once in joint sway; but they never compromised: they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity. With cool head and tranquil judgement, imperturbably unconscious of the flight, they oscillated from asymptote to asymptote.

They were a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellects lay fallow in incurious resignation. Their convictions were by instinct, their activities intuitional. Their largest manufacture was of creeds: almost they were monopolists of revealed religions. Three of these efforts had endured among them: two of the three had also borne export (in modified forms) to non-Semitic peoples. Christianity, translated into the diverse spirits of Greek and Latin and Teutonic tongues, had
conquered Europe and America. Islam in various transformations was subjecting Africa and parts of Asia. These were Semitic successes. Their failures they kept to themselves. The fringes of their deserts were strewn with broken faiths.

The Arabs said there had been forty thousand prophets: we had record of at least some hundreds. None of them had been of the wilderness; but their lives were after a pattern. Their birth set them in crowded places. An unintelligible passionate yearning drove them out into the desert. There they lived a greater or lesser time in meditation and physical abandonment; and thence they returned with their imagined message articulate, to preach it to their old, and now doubting, associates. The founders of the three great creeds fulfilled this cycle: their possible coincidence was proved a law by the parallel life-histories of the myriad others, the unfortunate who failed, whom we might judge of no less true profession, but for whom time and disillusion had not heaped up dry souls ready to be set on fire.

The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. There was no human effort, no fecundity in Nature: just the heaven above and the unspotted earth beneath. There unconsciously he came near God. God was to him not anthropomorphic, not tangible, not moral nor ethical, not concerned with the world or with him, not natural: but the being [GREEK] thus qualified not by divestiture but by investiture, a comprehending Being, the egg of all activity, with nature and matter just a glass reflecting Him.

The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God. He could not conceive anything which was or was not God, Who alone was great; yet there was a homeliness, an everyday-ness of this climatic Arab God, who was their eating and their fighting and their lusting, the commonest of their thoughts, their familiar resource and companion, in a way impossible to those whose God is so wistfully veiled from them by despair of their carnal unworthiness of Him and by the decorum of formal worship. Arabs felt no incongruity in bringing God into the weaknesses and appetites of their least creditable causes. He was the most familiar of their words; and indeed we lost much eloquence when making Him the shortest and ugliest of our monosyllables.

To live, the villager or townsman must fill himself each day with the pleasures of acquisition and
accumulation, and by rebound off circumstance become the grossest and most material of men. The shining contempt of life which led others into the barest asceticism drove him to despair. He squandered himself heedlessly, as a spendthrift: ran through his inheritance of flesh in hasty longing for the end. The Jew in the Metropole at Brighton, the miser, the worshipper of Adonis, the lecher in the stews of Damascus were alike signs of the Semitic capacity for enjoyment, and expressions of the same nerve which gave us at the other pole the self-denial of the Essenes, or the early Christians, or the first Khalifas, finding the way to heaven fairest for the poor in spirit. The Semite hovered between lust and self-denial.

Arabs could be swung on an idea as on a cord; for the unpledged allegiance of their minds made them obedient servants. None of them would escape the bond till success had come, and with it responsibility and duty and engagements. Then the idea was gone and the work ended--in ruins. Without a creed they could be taken to the four corners of the world (but not to heaven) by being shown the riches of earth and the pleasures of it; but if on the road, led in this fashion, they met the prophet of an idea, who had nowhere to lay his head and who depended for his food on charity or birds, then they would all leave their wealth for his inspiration. They were incorrigibly children of the idea, feckless and colour-blind, to whom body and spirit were for ever and inevitably opposed. Their mind was strange and dark, full of depressions and exaltations, lacking in rule, but with more of ardour and more fertile in belief than any other in the world. They were a people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing. They were as unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail. Since the dawn of life, in successive waves they had been dashing themselves against the coasts of flesh. Each wave was broken, but, like the sea, wore away ever so little of the granite on which it failed, and some day, ages yet, might roll unchecked over the place where the material world had been, and God would move upon the face of those waters. One such wave (and not the least) I raised and rolled before the breath of an idea, till it reached its crest, and toppled over and fell at Damascus. The wash of that wave, thrown back by the resistance of vested things, will provide the matter of the following wave, when in fullness of time the sea shall be raised once more.

The first great rush round the Mediterranean had shown the world the power of an excited Arab for a short spell of intense physical activity; but when the effort burned out the lack of endurance and
routine in the Semitic mind became as evident.

Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and intellectual rather than applied; and their lack of public spirit made their excellent private qualities futile. They were fortunate in their epoch: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin learning was fading from men's minds. By contrast the imitative exercise of the Arabs seemed cultured, their mental activity
progressive, their state prosperous.

[Aside re: Young Turks:  Living in the urban centers of the southern Balkans made this generation acutely aware of the increasing gap between the Christian bourgeoisie on the one hand and the Muslim middle class on the other. This gap was evident in education, with superior schools being established both by the non-Muslim communities themselves and by European missionary organizations... The gap was also increasingly evident in the economy... The sons of the Muslim middle class... increasingly found their place in the state bureaucracy (which grew thirtyfold in the Nineteenth Century) and the officer corps of the armed forces. As such, they were in a paradoxical situation: they represented the authority and prestige of the state, but at the same time they lived in relative poverty, wages often being in arrears for months if not years... Young Turk memoirs show us very clearly how aware they were of the growing gap between Muslims and non-Muslims. Born in the traditional Muslim quarters they gazed in awe at the villas the Greek and Armenian industrialists built along newly laid-out avenues with tramways and streetlights. The contrast defined their loyalties... The Young Turks developed a fierce Ottoman-Muslim nationalism, which defined the "other" very much in religious terms...[T]he Muslim – Non-Muslim divide would completely dominate politics and lead to the tragedies of the expulsion of Muslims from the Balkans and Greek-Orthodox from Anatolia, as well as to the wholesale slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians.]

However, the Arabs had tasted freedom: they could not change their ideas as quickly as their conduct; and the staffer spirits among them were not easily to be put down. They read the Turkish papers, putting 'Arab' for Turk' in the patriotic exhortations. Suppression charged them with unhealthy violence. Deprived of constitutional outlets they became revolutionary. The Arab societies went underground, and changed from liberal clubs into conspiracies. The Akhua, the Arab mother society, was publicly dissolved. It was replaced in Mesopotamia by the dangerous Ahad, a very secret brotherhood, limited almost entirely to Arab officers in the Turkish Army, who swore to acquire the military knowledge of their masters, and to turn it against them, in the service of the Arab people, when the moment of rebellion came.

It was a large society, with a sure base in the wild part of Southern Irak, where Sayid Taleb, the young John Wilkes of the Arab movement, held the power in his unprincipled fingers. To it belonged seven out of every ten Mesopotamian-born officers; and their counsel was so well kept that members of it held high command in Turkey to the last. When the crash came, and Allenby rode across Armageddon and Turkey fell, one vice-president of the society was commanding the broken fragments of the Palestine armies on the retreat, and another was directing the Turkish forces across-Jordan in the Amman area. Yet later, after the armistice, great places in the Turkish service were still held by men ready to turn on their masters at a word from their Arab leaders.

The Armenians had been well armed and organized; but their leaders had failed them. They had been disarmed and destroyed piecemeal, the men by massacre, the women and children by being driven and overdriven along the wintry roads into the desert, naked and hungry, the common prey of any passer-by, until death took them. The Young Turks had killed the Armenians, not because they were Christians, but because they were Armenians; and for the same reason they herded Arab Moslems and Arab Christians into the same prison, and hanged them together on the same scaffold. Jemal Pasha united all classes, conditions and creeds in Syria, under pressure of a common misery and
peril, and so made a concerted revolt possible. At last the Turks found that they needed the Hejaz under their unquestioned sway as part of the stage furniture for their new pan-Islamic notion.

To become popularly effective this must be endorsed by Mecca; and if endorsed it might plunge the East in blood. Hussein was honourable, shrewd, obstinate and deeply pious. He felt that the Holy War was doctrinally incompatible with an aggressive war, and absurd with a Christian ally: Germany. So he refused the Turkish demand, and made at the same time a dignified appeal to the Allies not to starve his province for what was in no way his people's fault.

Hussein trusted so much in God that he let his military sense lie fallow, and thought Hejaz able to fight it out with Turkey on a fair field.


Feisal found Medina full of Turkish troops, with the staff and headquarters of the Twelfth Army Corps under Fakhri Pasha, the courageous old butcher who had bloodily 'purified' Zeitun and Urfa of Armenians. Clearly the Turks had taken warning, and Feisal's hope of a surprise rush, winning success almost without a shot, had become impossible. However, it was too late for prudence. From Damascus four days later his suite took horse and rode out east into the desert to take refuge with Nuri Shaalan, the Beduin chieftain; and the same day Feisal showed his hand. When he raised the Arab flag, the pan-Islamic supra-national State, for which Abdul Hamid had massacred and worked
and died, and the German hope of the co-operation of Islam in the world-plans of the Kaiser, passed into the realm of dreams. By the mere fact of his rebellion the Sherif had closed these two fantastic
chapters of history.

Rebellion was the gravest step which political men could take, and the success or failure of the Arab revolt was a gamble too hazardous for prophecy. Yet, for once, fortune favoured the bold player, and the Arab epic tossed up its stormy road from birth through weakness, pain and doubt, to red victory. It was the just end to an adventure which had dared so much, but after the victory there came a slow time of disillusion, and then a night in which the fighting men found that all their hopes had failed them. Now, at last, may there have come to them the white peace of the end, in the knowledge that they achieved a deathless thing, a lucent inspiration to the children of their race.

Turkey was dying of overstrain, of the attempt, with diminished resources, to hold, on traditional terms, the whole Empire bequeathed to it. The sword had been the virtue of the children of Othman, and swords had passed out of fashion nowadays, in favour of deadlier and more scientific weapons. Life was growing too complicated for this child-like people, whose strength had lain in simplicity, and patience, and in their capacity for sacrifice.

We could see that a new factor was needed in the East, some power or race which would outweigh the Turks in numbers, in output, and in mental activity. No encouragement was given us by history to think that these qualities could be supplied ready-made from Europe. The efforts  of European Powers to keep a footing in the Asiatic Levant had been uniformly disastrous, and we disliked no Western people enough to inveigle them into further attempts. Our successor and solution must be local; and fortunately the standard of efficiency required was local also.

The Sherifs rebellion had been unsatisfactory for the last few months (standing still, which, with an irregular war, was the prelude to disaster), and my suspicion was that its lack was leadership: not
intellect, nor judgement, nor political wisdom, but the flame of enthusiasm that would set the desert on fire. My visit was mainly to find the yet unknown master-spirit of the affair, and measure his capacity to carry the revolt to the goal I had conceived for it. As our conversation continued, I became more and more sure that Abdulla was too balanced, too cool, too humorous to be a prophet: especially the armed prophet who, if history be true, succeeded in revolutions. His value would come perhaps in the peace after success. During the physical struggle, when singleness of eye and magnetism, devotion and self-sacrifice were needed, Abdulla would be a tool too complex for a simple purpose, though he could not be ignored, even now.

Englishmen being sure of their own absolute excellence would persist in help without grumbling overmuch; but the Egyptians lost faith. They had neither that collective sense of duty towards their State, nor that feeling of individual obligation to push struggling humanity up its road. The vicarious policemanship which was the strongest emotion of Englishmen towards another man's muddle, in their case was replaced by the instinct to pass by as discreetly far as possible on the other side.

Sections of Beni Ali tribesmen approached the Turkish command with an offer to surrender, if their villages were spared. Fakhri played with them, and in the ensuing lull of hostilities surrounded the Awali suburb with his troops: then suddenly he ordered them to carry it by assault and to massacre every living thing within its walls. Hundreds of the inhabitants were raped and butchered, the houses fired, and living and dead alike thrown back into the flames. Fakhri and his men had served together and had learned the arts of both the slow and the fast kill upon the Armenians in the North.

This bitter taste of the Turkish mode of war sent a shock across Arabia; for the first rule of Arab war was that women were inviolable: the second that the lives and honour of children too young to fight
with men were to be spared: the third, that property impossible to carry off should be left undamaged. The Arabs with Feisal perceived that they were opposed to new customs, and fell back out of touch to gain time to readjust themselves. There could no longer be any question of submission: the sack of Awali had opened blood feud upon blood feud, and put on them the duty of fighting to the end of their force: but it was plain now that it would be a long affair, and that with muzzle-loading guns for sole weapons, they could hardly expect to win. Feisal mused a little and said, I am not a Hejazi by upbringing; and yet, by God, I am jealous for it. And though I know the British do not want it, yet what can I say, when they took the Sudan, also not wanting it? They hunger for desolate lands, to build them up; and so, perhaps, one day Arabia will seem to them precious. Your good and my good,  perhaps they are different, and either forced good or forced evil will make a people cry with pain. Does the ore admire the flame which transforms it? There is no reason for offence, but a people too  weak are clamant over their little own. Our race will have a cripple's temper till it has found its feet.'

The tribes had followed the smoke of their racial fanaticism. The towns might sigh for the cloying inactivity of Ottoman rule: the tribes were convinced that they had made a free and Arab Government, and that each of them was It. They were independent and would enjoy themselves--a conviction and resolution which might have led to anarchy, if they had not made more stringent the family tie, and the bonds of kin-responsibility. But this entailed a negation of central power. The Sherif might have legal sovereignty abroad, if he hiked the high-sounding toy; but home affairs were to be customary. The problem of the foreign theorists--Is Damascus to rule the Hejaz, or can Hejaz rule Damascus?' did not trouble them at all, for they would not have it set. The Semites' idea of nationality was the independence of clans and villages, and their ideal of national union was episodic combined resistance to an intruder. Constructive policies, an organized state, an extended empire, were not so much beyond their sight as hateful in it. They were fighting to get rid of Empire, not to win it.

This well-peopled province, from Una Lejj to Kunfida, more than a fortnight's camel march, had suddenly changed its character from a rout of casual nomad pilferers to an eruption against Turkey, fighting her, not certainly in our manner, but fiercely enough, in spite of the religion which was to raise the East against us in a holy war. Beyond anything calculable in figures, we had let loose a passion of anti-Turkish feeling which, embittered as it had been by generations of subjection, might die very hard.

In mass they were not formidable, since they had no corporate spirit, nor discipline nor mutual confidence. The smaller the unit the better its performance. A thousand were a mob, ineffective against a company of trained Turks: but three or four Arabs in their hills would stop a dozen Turks.

It was a natural phenomenon, this periodic rise at intervals of little more than a century, of ascetic creeds in Central Arabia. Always the votaries found their neighbours' beliefs cluttered with inessential things, which became impious in the hot imagination of their preachers. Again and again they had arisen, had taken possession, soul and body, of the tribes, and had dashed themselves to pieces on the urban Semites, merchants and concupiscent men of the world. About their comfortable possessions the new creeds ebbed and flowed like the tides or the changing seasons, each movement with the seeds of early death in its excess of Tightness. Doubtless they must recur so long as the causes--sun, moon, wind, acting in the emptiness of open spaces, weigh without check on the unhurried and uncumbered minds of the desert-dwellers.

Emerson quotes

"Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition."

"There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact."

"Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever."

"The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself ... The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives."

"All the thoughts of a turtle are turtles, and of rabbits, rabbits."

"The Religion that is afraid of science dishonours God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates, tyrannizes over a village of God's empires but is not the immutable universal law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion and making way for truth."

"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."

"Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth."

"To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature."

"Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts."

"The progress of the intellect is to the clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences."

"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts."

"I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching."

"Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet."

"Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in."

"Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them."

On Gustave Flaubert

"In September 1849, Flaubert completed the first version of a novel, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. He read the novel aloud to Louis Bouilhet and Maxime du Camp over the course of four days, not allowing them to interrupt or give any opinions. At the end of the reading, his friends told him to throw the manuscript in the fire, suggesting instead that he focus on day to day life rather than on fantastic subjects."

"Flaubert's curious modes of composition favored and were emphasized by these peculiarities. He worked in sullen solitude, sometimes occupying a week in the completion of one page, never satisfied with what he had composed, violently tormenting his brain for the best turn of a phrase, the final adjective. His incessant labors were rewarded. His private letters show that he was not one of those to whom easy and correct language came naturally; he gained his extraordinary perfection with the unceasing sweat of his brow. Many critics consider Flaubert's best works to be models of style."

"The publication of Madame Bovary in 1857 was followed by more scandal than admiration; it was not understood at first that this novel was the beginning of something new: the scrupulously truthful portraiture of life."

Quotes:

"To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."

"She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins."

"She might have been glad to confide all these things to someone. But how to speak about so elusive a malaise, one that keeps changing its shape like the clouds and its direction like the wind? She could find no words; and hence neither occasion nor courage came to hand."

"But her life was as cold as an attic facing north; and boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart."

"She wanted to die. And she wanted to live in Paris."

"My God is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, of Béranger! My credo is the credo of Rousseau! I adhere to the immortal principles of '89! I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later! Those things aren't only absurd in and of themselves, Madame -- they're completely opposed to all physical laws!"

"And they talked about the mediocrity of provincial life, so suffocating, so fatal to all noble dreams."

"She looked at him sadly. "Whatever it was," she said, "I suffered a great deal." He answered philosophically: "Existence is thus!"

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."

"We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands."

"Exuberance is better than taste."

On Joseph Conrad, and Nostromo

"Conrad, like Flaubert, from whom he learned so much...was simply a disillusioned humane liberal who hated the established order but saw the futility -- and pathos -- of revolution."

"Few writers have paid so dearly for their achievements: Conrad's egocentricity never brought him the least happiness; it is sadly instructive that it was necessary to him."

On the character Charles Gould: "Gould is early shown, in a very subtle passage, to have the sadistic and murderous impulse of dictators in his breast.  The 'breathing image' of his father, now dead, is said to be no longer in Gould's power:

This consideration, closely affecting his own identity, filled his breast with a mournful and angry desire for action...Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates.

"Gould's identity had been built on his psychic antagonism to his father...Dying, Mr. Gould upset the equilibrium of his son's personality."  Gould could have been a "truly enlightened man, a liberator, instead of which he is simply a corrupt colonialist...Gould acts in a familiar Western pattern: that of imposing 'idea' on what seems to him to be chaos."

On Conrad's construction, paradise of snakes: "The implication of the beautifully paradoxical phrase 'paradise of snakes' is that it is human interpretation of the 'knowledge' imparted by the snake that is wrong, not the knowledge itself."

On Conrad's profound pessimism: "man is bound to fall, because he brings a power-seeking curiosity to natural knowledge, so that he corrupts it."

Decoud uses the silver mine to keep himself "swallowed up in the immense indifference of things."

Quote: "A man haunted by a fixed idea is insane...may he not bring the heaven down pitilessly upon a loved head?"  [Me: something M__ took to heart.]

Decoud is "the intellectual, turned false mystic by fear, only half defeated."

A Flaubertian liberal is "a disillusioned liberal who puts imagination above political philosophy."

Conrad was a "true pathological depressive...[who] needed, for his successful creativity, to be ill, broke and in a state of despairing self-hatred."

Conrad himself:
"The first hint of Nostromo came to me in the shape of a vagrant anecdote completely destitute of valuable detail."

"Nostromo, a fellow in a thousand..."

"Though he disliked priests...he believed in God."

"Too many kings and emperors flourished yet in the world which God had meant for the people."

"...the indifference of a man of affairs to nature, whose hostility can always be overcome by the resources of finance..."

"In the transparent air of the high altitudes everything seemed very near, steeped in a clear stillness as in an imponderable liquid..."

"She dispensed them with simplicity and charm because she was guided by an alert perception of values.  She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists of delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension."

"But to be robbed under the forms of legality and business was intolerable to his imagination."

'"Charles Gould did not open his heart to her in any set speeches.  He simply went on acting and thinking in her sight.  This is the true method of sincerity."

"He was in his talks with her the most anxious and deferential of dictators, an attitude that pleased her immensely.  It affirmed her power without detracting from his dignity."

"It was imperative sometimes to know how to disobey the wishes of the dead."

"A woman with a masculine mind is not a being of superior efficiency; she is simply a phenomenon of imperfect differentiation -- interestingly barren and without importance...She could converse charmingly, but she was not talkative.  The wisdom of the heart having no concern with the erection or demolition of theories any more than with the defence of prejudices, has no random words at its command."

"The parrot, catching the sound of a word belonging to his vocabulary, was moved to interfere.  Parrots are very human."

"I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made."

"I have, all my life long, been lying till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good."

"A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing."

"Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult."

"Round numbers are always false."

"I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read."

"A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek."

" Exhausted worlds, imagined new..."

"A transition from an author's book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke."

"It is therefore of the utmost importance that those, who have any intention of deviating from the beaten roads of life, and acquiring a reputation superior to names hourly swept away by time among the refuse of fame, should add to their reason, and their spirit, the power of persisting in their purposes; acquire the art of sapping what they cannot batter, and the habit of vanquishing obstinate resistance by obstinate attacks."

"Frugality may be termed the daughter of Prudence, the sister of Temperance and the parent of Liberty."

Preface to Johnson's Dictionary: "Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language."

"I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven."

"He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty." -- [me: though not what he is saying, it is even more apt to say "He is no wise man that will quit a certainty of uncertainty." -- this type of certainty reifies uncertainty, levels-up perspective to the meta, conceives in topologies and supersessions.]

"The world is not yet exhausted..."

"Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings."

"He delighted to tread upon the brink of meaning."

"If the man who turnips cries,
Cry not when his father dies,
'Tis a proof that he had rather
Have a turnip than his father."

"The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public."

"The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality..."

Me: Sometimes a kicked stone is adequate, and proper, refutation.  "I refute it thus!."  August 6, 1763, p. 134

• Said as he kicked a stone, speaking of Berkeley's "ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter"

"A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden."

"There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn."

"...he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy."

"Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding."

Nietzsche: On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

"In my account of the conversation already mentioned, I shall be able to make myself completely understood only to those among my audience who will be able to guess what I can do no more than suggest, who will supply what I am compelled to omit, and who, above all, need but to be reminded and not taught." [me: channeling Pope's dictum: Men should be taught as if you taught them not,  
And things unknown propos'd as things forgot.]

"I fear I must once again divest you, however reluctantly, of the skin of modern culture which you have donned meanwhile;—and what do I find beneath it? The same immutable `intelligible' character forsooth, according to Kant; but unfortunately the same unchanged `intellectual' character, too—which may also be a necessity, though not a comforting one. I ask myself to what purpose have I lived as a philosopher, if, possessed as you are of no mean intelligence and a genuine thirst for knowledge, all the year you have spent in my company have left no deeper impression upon you. At present you are behaving as if you had not even heard the cardinal principle of all culture, which I went to such pains to inculcate upon you during our former intimacy. Tell me,—what was that principle?"
"I remember," replied the scolded pupil, "you used to say no one would strive to attain to culture if he knew how incredibly small the number of really cultured people actually is, and can ever be. And even this number of really cultured people would not be possible if a prodigious multitude, from reasons opposed to their nature and only led on by an alluring delusion, did not devote themselves to education. It were therefore a mistake publicly to reveal the ridiculous disproportion between the number of really cultured people and the enormous magnitude of the educational apparatus. Here lies the whole secret of culture—namely, that an innumerable host of men struggle to achieve it and work hard to that end, ostensibly in their own interests, whereas at bottom it is only in order that it may be possible for the few to attain to it."
"That is the principle," said the philosopher,—"and yet you could so far forget yourself as to believe that you are one of the few? This thought has occurred to you—I can see. That, however, is the result of the worthless character of modern education. The rights of genius are being democratised in order that people may be relieved of the labour of acquiring culture, and their need of it."

"The purpose of education, according to this scheme, would be to rear the most `current' men possible,—`current' being used here in the sense in which it is applied to the coins of the realm. The greater the number of such men, the happier a nation will be; and this precisely is the purpose of our modern educational institutions: to help every one, as far as his nature will allow, to become `current'..."

"In this quarter all culture is loathed which isolates, which sets goals beyond gold and gain, and which requires time: it is customary to dispose of such eccentric tendencies in education as systems of `Higher Egotism,' or of `Immoral Culture—Epicureanism.' According to the morality reigning here, the demands are quite different; what is required above all is `rapid education,' so that a money-earning creature may be produced with all speed; there is even a desire to make this education so thorough that a creature may be reared that will be able to earn a great deal of money."

"In all cultivated circles people are in the habit of whispering to one another words something after this style: that it is a general fact that, owing to the present frantic exploitation of the scholar in the service of his science, his education becomes every day more accidental and more uncertain. For the study of science has been extended to such interminable lengths that he who, though not exceptionally gifted, yet possesses fair abilities, will need to devote himself exclusively to one branch and ignore all others if he ever wish to achieve anything in his work. Should he then elevate himself above the herd by means of his specialty, he still remains one of them in regard to all else,—that is to say, in regard to all the most important things in life."

"`Fidelity in small things,' `dogged faithfulness,' become expressions of highest eulogy..."

"In the newspaper the peculiar educational aims of the present culminate, just as the journalist, the servant of the moment, has stepped into the place of the genius, of the leader for all time, of the deliverer from the tyranny of the moment."

"Imagine how useless the most energetic work on the part of the individual teacher must be, who would fain lead a pupil back into the distant and evasive Hellenic world and to the real home of culture, when in less than an hour, that same pupil will have recourse to a newspaper, the latest novel, or one of those learned books, the very style of which already bears the revolting impress of modern barbaric culture—"

""I have heard too much from your lips at various times," the straightforward pupil said, "and have been too long in your company, to surrender myself blindly to our present systems of education and instruction."

""Let any one examine the pedagogic literature of the present; he who is not shocked at its utter poverty of spirit and its ridiculously awkward antics is beyond being spoiled. Here our philosophy must not begin with wonder but with dread; he who feels no dread at this point must be asked not to meddle with pedagogic questions. The reverse, of course, has been the rule up to the present; those who were terrified ran away filled with embarrassment as you did, my poor friend, while the sober and fearless ones spread their heavy hands over the most delicate technique that has ever existed in art—over the technique of education."

"It was precisely the public schools which drove me into despair and solitude, simply because I feel that if the struggle here leads to victory all other educational institutions must give in; but that, if the reformer be forced to abandon his cause here, he may as well give up all hope in regard to every other scholastic question." [me: how do you attack stolid and slippery shape-shifting principles.]

"What would be the duty of a higher educational institution, in this respect, if not this—namely, with authority and dignified severity to put youths, neglected, as far as their own language is concerned, on the right path, and to cry to them: `Take your own language seriously! He who does not regard this matter as a sacred duty does not possess even the germ of a higher culture. From your attitude in this matter, from your treatment of your mother-tongue, we can judge how highly or how lowly you esteem art, and to what extent you are related to it."

"The same teacher would also have to take our classical authors and show, line for line, how carefully and with what precision every expression has to be chosen when a writer has the correct feeling in his heart and has before his eyes a perfect conception of all he is writing."

Old story ideas for Twilight, or "≠"

Random Thought -- A great mystery surrounds M and his writings.  J goes looking for the true author, and finds him in more or less our present state, minimally employed, fluttering in and out at the margins of sophisticated society, grandiose in self-image and yet disarmingly self-aware and self-deprecating toward his current circumstances and future prospects.  The mask of humility slips only occasionally and contingently, though consistently. 

Why do his writings have such a profound impact?  Their breadth and width of insight, the multi-disciplinary advances he makes (he solves the most obscure and entrenched problems of several fields, almost as asides in the text).  What's initially mysterious about him is the comprehensiveness of his thought, the surreal thoroughness with which it pushes the entire intellectual establishment into self-reflective crisis.  His work is as astonishing as Einstein's Miracle Year papers (1905), and yet it's entirely unclear where all of it came from.

Also, M, I think, is fully idiosyncratic; where what initially seem like eccentric affectations become, perhaps, emblematic of a deeper truth later on.  At the beginning of their relationship, J seizes on these idiosyncrasies with something of a sporting attitude, with a type of sympathetic, entertained scrutiny.  This evolves, however, over the course of the story; what were once innocent quirks become somehow meaningful -- markers of M's alien-ness and signifiers of the mystery that shrouds him.

Another thought I had was that we could viral-market this by recording supposedly real audio interviews that are then used by J as reference notes for his book.  Maybe even a short video or two, these short clips being the only ones that didn't disappear or mysteriously decay.  We then post the audio and video to the book site, along with tons of scanned, handwritten notes, and a single picture of M that survived.  All with the goal of blending fiction and reality, of maintaining mystery and disturbance.

I also like the idea of M and J being two contemporaries; where they know each other tenuously, briefly, as teenagers attending some kind of young intellectual retreat like Governor school.  M stood out absolutely, his exceptional quality already obvious at the tender age of 16.  J was a studious, introverted kid who was fascinated by M's antics, his intellectual aggressiveness, and his unadulterated contempt for all figures of authority.

Human, All Too Human

"But everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths."

"Now, everything essential in the development of mankind took place in primeval times, long before the four thousand years we more or less know about; during these years mankind may well not have altered very much. But the philosopher here sees "instincts" in man as he now is and assumes that these belong to the unalterable facts of mankind and to that extent could provide a key to the understanding of the world in general: the whole of teleology is constructed by speaking of the man of the last four millennia as of an eternal man towards whom all things in the world have had a natural relationship from the time he began."

"But truths that are hard won, certain, enduring, and therefore still of consequence for all further knowledge are the higher; to keep to them is manly, and shows bravery, simplicity, restraint. Eventually, not only the individual, but all mankind will be elevated to this manliness, when men finally grow accustomed to the greater esteem for durable, lasting knowledge and have lost all belief in inspiration and a seemingly miraculous communication of truths."

"The moral man, however, presumes that that which is essential to his heart must also be the heart and essence of all things."

"Philosophy—the top of the whole scientific pyramid."

"All philosophers are tyrannized by logic: and logic, by its nature, is optimism."

"Philosophy divorced itself from science when it inquired which knowledge of the world and life could help man to live most happily."

"We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off. This is a purely scientific problem and one not very well calculated to bother people overmuch; but all that has hitherto mad metaphysical assumptions valuable, terrible, delightful to them, all that has begotten these assumptions, is passion, error and self-deception; the worst of all methods of acquiring knowledge, not the best of all, have taught belief in them. When one has disclosed these methods as the foundation of all extant religions and metaphysical systems one has refuted them!"

"With complete calm we will let physiology and the ontogeny of organisms and concepts determine how our image of the world can be so very different from the disclosed essence of the world."

"Logic too depends on presuppositions with which nothing in the real world corresponds, for example on the presupposition that there are identical things, that the same thing is identical at different points of time: but this science came into existence through the opposite belief (that such conditions do obtain in the real world). It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no real circle, no absolute magnitude."

"I suppose: as man even now infers in dreams, mankind inferred for many thousands of years also when awake; the first causa that occurred to the mind to explain anything that required explanation sufficed and was considered the truth. (According to the tales of travelers, savages proceed this way even today.)"

"Resonance.— All intense moods bring with them a resonance of related feelings and moods; they seem to stir up memory. Something in us remembers and becomes aware of similar states and their origin. Thus habitual, rapid associations of feelings and thoughts are formed, which, when they follow with lightning speed upon one another, are eventually no longer felt as complexes, but rather as unities. In this sense, one speaks of moral feelings, religious feelings, as if they were all unities; in truth they are rivers with a hundred sources and tributaries. As is so often the case, the unity of the word does not guarantee the unity of the thing."

"A feeling is deep because we hold the accompanying thought to be deep. But the deep thought can nevertheless be very far from the truth, as is, for example, every metaphysical thought. If one subtracts the added elements of thought from the deep feeling, what remains is intense feeling, which guarantees nothing at all about knowledge except itself, just as strong belief proves only its own strength, not the truth of what is believed."

"Because we have for millennia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color—but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things. Only late, very late, does the intellect stop to think..."

"That which we now call the world is the result of a host of errors and fantasies which have gradually arisen in the course of the total evolution of organic nature, have become entwined with one another and are now inherited by us as the accumulated treasure of the entire past—as a treasure: for the value of our humanity depends on it. Rigorous science is in fact able to detach us from this ideational world only to a slight extent (something we by no means desire), in that it is unable to break significantly the power of ancient habits of feeling. But it can gradually and step by step illuminate the history of how this world as idea arose—and raise us above the whole thing at least for moments at a time."

"Whenever we establish something scientifically, we are inevitably always reckoning with some incorrect quantities; but because these quantities are at least constant (as is, for example, our feeling of time and space), the results of science do acquire a perfect strictness and certainty in their relationship to each other. One can continue to build upon them-up to that final analysis, where the mistaken basic assumptions, those constant errors, come into contradiction with the results, for example, in atomic theory. There we still feel ourselves forced to assume a "thing" or a material "substratum" that is moved, while the entire scientific procedure has pursued the task of dissolving everything thing-like (material) into movements."

"To a world that is not our idea, the laws of numbers are wholly inapplicable: these are valid only in the human world."

"One level of education, itself a very high one, has been reached when man gets beyond superstitious and religious concepts and fears and, for example, no longer believes in the heavenly angels or original sin, and has stopped talking about the soul's salvation. Once he is at this level of liberation, he must still make a last intense effort to overcome metaphysics. Then, however, a retrograde movement is necessary: he must understand both the historical and the psychological justification in metaphysical ideas. He must recognize how mankind's greatest advancement came from them and how, if one did not take this retrograde step, one would rob himself of mankind's finest accomplishments to date."

"For one should look out over the last rung of the ladder, but not want to stand on it."

"One crucial disadvantage about the end of metaphysical views is that the individual looks his own short life span too squarely in the eye and feels no strong incentives to build on enduring institutions, designed for the ages. He wants to pick the fruit from the tree he has planted himself, and therefore no longer likes to plant those trees which require regular care over centuries, trees that are destined to overshade long successions of generations."

"Can science, too, awaken such a belief in its results? To be sure, its truest allies must be doubt and distrust. Nevertheless, the sum of indisputable truths, which outlast all storms of skepticism and all disintegration, can in time become so large (in the dietetics of health, for example), that one can decide on that basis to found "eternal" works."

"The less men are bound by their tradition, the greater the internal stirring of motives; the greater, accordingly, the external unrest, the whirling flow of men, the polyphony of strivings. Who today still feels a serious obligation to bind himself and his descendants to one place? Who feels that anything is seriously binding?"

"This is the age of comparisons! That is its pride—but also by rights its sorrow. Let us not be afraid of this sorrow! Instead, we will conceive the task that this age sets us to be as great as possible. Then posterity will bless us for it—a posterity that knows it has transcended both the completed original folk cultures, as well as the culture of comparison, but that looks back on both kinds of culture as on venerable antiquities, with gratitude."

"The new, conscious culture kills the old culture, which, seen as a whole, led an unconscious animal-and-vegetable life; it also kills the distrust of progress: progress is possible. I mean to say, it is premature and almost nonsensical to believe that progress must of necessity come about; but how could one deny that it is possible?"

"Since belief has ceased that a God broadly directs the destinies of the world and that, all the apparent twists and turns in its path notwithstanding, is leading mankind gloriously upward, man has to set himself ecumenical goals embracing the whole earth."

"In any event, if mankind is not to destroy itself through such conscious universal rule, it must first of all attain to a hitherto altogether unprecedented knowledge of the preconditions of culture as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals. Herein lies the tremendous task facing the great spirits of the coming century."

"Reaction as progress.— Sometimes there appear rough, violent, and impetuous spirits, who are nevertheless backward; they conjure up once again a past phase of mankind. They serve as proof that the new tendencies which they are opposing are still not strong enough, that something is lacking there; otherwise, those conjurers would be opposed more effectively."

"But in the end one also has to understand that the needs that religion has satisfied and philosophy is now supposed to satisfy are not immutable; they can be weakened and exterminated."

"Beginning with art, one can more easily move on to a truly liberating philosophical science."

"What thinking person still needs the hypothesis of a god?"

"All theology and its opposition aside, it is self-evident that the world is not good and not evil, let alone the best or the worst, and that these concepts "good" and "evil" make sense only in reference to men."

"One does not understand the essence of things through art and religion, although nearly everyone is of that opinion."

"Whoever revealed to us the essence of the world would disappoint us all most unpleasantly."

The first statement of the Naturalistic Fallacy: "The most common false conclusions of men are these: a thing exists, therefore it is legitimate. Here one is concluding functionality from viability, and legitimacy from functionality...The reversal of the proposition is: if a thing cannot prevail and maintain itself, it must be wrong; if an opinion tortures and agitates, it must be false."

"Among the things that can drive a thinker to despair is the knowledge that the illogical is necessary for man and that much good comes from it. It is so firmly lodged in the passions, in speech, in art, in religion, and generally in everything which endows life with value, that one cannot extricate it without doing irreparable harm to these beautiful things."

"Man cannot experience a drive to or away from something without the feeling that he is desiring what is beneficial and avoiding what is harmful, without evaluating knowingly the merit of the goal. We are from the start illogical and therefore unfair beings, and this we can know: it is one of the greatest and most insoluble disharmonies of existence."

"Every belief in the value and worth of life is based on impure thinking and is only possible because the individual's sympathy for life in general, and for the suffering of mankind, is very weakly developed." [Me: here, he errs, but only somewhat.  life has no ultimate value in a universe doomed to perish a heat death into nothingness; this much is true.  Nothing can change the ultimate destination of the universe; at least, nothing we can as yet imagine. Thus, it can be said that whatever happens in the middle of the time axis, existence is book-ended by the void.  Nevertheless, life is not entirely arbitrary.  It is something special, even here; life is "distinguished" as a peak, an altitude, an increase in value on the Y-axis of Somethingness.]

"But does not our philosophy then turn into tragedy? Does not truth become an enemy of life, an enemy of what is better? A question seems to weigh down our tongues, and yet not want to be uttered: whether one is capable of consciously remaining in untruth, or, if one had to do so, whether death would not be preferable? For there is no "ought" anymore. Morality to the extent that it was an "ought" has been destroyed by our way of reflection, every bit as much as religion."

On the necessity of "psychological sharpsightedness": "...it has been demonstrated in many instances how the errors of the greatest philosophers usually have their point of departure in a false explanation of certain human actions and sensations."

"Without the errors inherent in the postulates of morality, man would have remained an animal."

"La Rochefoucauld certainly hits the mark when he warns all reasonable men against pity, when he advises them to leave it to those common people who need passions (because they are not directed by reason) to bring them to the point of helping the sufferer and intervening energetically in a misfortune [La Rochefoucauld: R�flexions, sentences et maximes morales.]. For pity, in his (and Plato's) judgment, weakens the soul."

"Even when in the deepest distress, the actor ultimately cannot cease to think of the impression he and the whole scenic effect is making, even for example at the burial of his own child; he will weep over his own distress and the ways in which it expresses itself, as his own audience. The hypocrite who always plays one and the same role finally ceases to be a hypocrite. Priests, for example, who are usually conscious or unconscious hypocrites when they are young men, finally end by becoming natural, and then they really are priests, with no affectation."

"In all great deceivers there occurs a noteworthy process to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception, among all the preparations, the horror in the voice, expression, gestures, amid the striking scenery, the belief in themselves overcomes them. It is this that speaks so miraculously and convincingly to the onlookers."

"Likewise, people do not want to admit that all those things which men have defended with the sacrifice of their lives and happiness in earlier centuries were nothing but errors. Perhaps one calls them levels of truth. Basically, however, one thinks that if someone honestly believed in something and fought for his belief and died it would be too unfair if he had actually been inspired by a mere error. Such an occurrence seems to contradict eternal justice....Therefore the hearts of sensitive men always decree in opposition to their heads that there must be a necessary connection between moral actions and intellectual insights. Unfortunately, it is otherwise, for there is no eternal justice."

"If a child has been raised in complicated domestic circumstances, however, he will employ the lie naturally, and will always say instinctively that which corresponds to his interests. A feeling for truth, a distaste for lying in and of itself, is alien to him and inaccessible; and so he lies in complete innocence."

"A good author whose heart is really in his subject wishes that someone would come and annihilate him by presenting the same subject with greater clarity and resolving all the questions contained in it."

"One can promise actions, but not feelings, for the latter are involuntary. He who promises to love forever or hate forever or be forever faithful to someone is promising something that is not in his power. He can, however, promise those actions that are usually the consequence of love, hatred, or faithfulness, but that can also spring from other motives: for there are several paths and motives to an action."

"The tragedy in the lives of great men often lies not in their conflict with the times and the baseness of their fellow men, but rather in their inability to postpone their work for a year or two. They cannot wait."

"It is an act of primitive culture to bring someone to silence by making physical savageness visible, by inciting fear."

"...success can take the place of more substantial arguments."

"Any character lacking in ambition must not be without a moral sense. Ambitious people make do without it, and have almost the same success. Thus the sons of humble families with no ambition will usually turn into complete cads very quickly, having once lost their moral sense."

"Simply the inherited feeling of being a higher being, with higher pretensions, makes one rather cold, and leaves the conscience at peace. Indeed, none of us feels anything like injustice when there is a great difference between ourselves and some other being, and we kill a gnat, for example, without any twinge of conscience."

"Malice is rare.— Most men are much too concerned with themselves to be malicious."

"In the vain man, interest in himself, his wish to please himself, reaches such a peak that he misleads others to assess him wrongly, to overvalue him greatly, and then he adheres to their authority; that is, he brings about the error and then believes in it."

"Rights originally extend just as far as one appears valuable, essential, permanent, invincible, and the like, to the other. In this regard even the weaker of the two has rights, though they are more modest. Thus the famous dictum: "unusquisque tantum juris habet, quantum potentia valet" (or, more exactly, "quantum potentia valere creditur"). [Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, ch. 2, section 8: "each man has as much right as he has power"; "as he is believed to have power." Quoted by Schopenhauer in Parerga and Paralipomena 2, 258.]"

"The first sign that an animal has become human is that his behavior is no longer directed to his momentary well-being, but rather to his enduring well-being..."

"A still higher state is reached when man acts according to the principle of honor [me: reputation], by means of which he finds his place in society, submitting to commonly held feelings; that raises him high above the phase in which he is guided only by personal usefulness. Now he shows and wants to be shown—respect; that is, he understands his advantage as dependent on his opinion of others and their opinion of him. Finally, at the highest stage of morality until now, he acts according to his own standard of things and men; he himself determines for himself and others what is honorable, what is profitable."

"Now too we wish to work for our fellow men, but only insofar as we find our own highest advantage in this work; no more, no less."

"The champions of truth are hardest to find, not when it is dangerous to tell it, but rather when it is boring."

"Life as the product of life.— However far man may extend himself with his knowledge, however objective he may appear to himself—ultimately he reaps nothing but his own biography."

"There is no pre-established harmony between the furthering of truth and the good of mankind."

"Greatness means: to give a direction.— No river is great and bounteous through itself alone, but rather because it takes up so many tributaries and carries them onwards: that makes it great. It is the same with all great minds."

"The unexplained, obscure matter is taken as more important than the explained, clear one."

"A profession makes us thoughtless: therein lies its greatest blessing."

"In order to predict the behavior of ordinary men, we must assume that they always expend the least possible amount of intellect to free themselves from a disagreeable situation."

"When we have just gotten out of the way of a vehicle, we are most in danger of being run over."

"Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person..."

"There are people for whom a constant inner repose and a harmonious ordering of all their capabilities is so characteristic that any goal-directed activity goes against their grain. They are like a piece of music consisting entirely of sustained harmonious chords, with no evidence of even the beginning of a structured, moving melody. At any movement from the outside, their boat at once gains a new equilibrium on the sea of harmonic euphony. Modern people are usually extremely impatient on meeting such natures, who do not become anything though it may not be said that they are not anything. In certain moods, however, their presence evokes that rare question: why have melody at all?"

"If one has not passed through various convictions, but remains caught in the net of his first belief, he is in all events, because of just this unchangeability, a representative of backward cultures; in accordance with this lack of education (which always presupposes educability), he is harsh, injudicious, unteachable, without gentleness, eternally suspect, a person lacking scruples, who reaches for any means to enforce his opinion because he simply cannot understand that there have to be other opinions."

"All in all, scientific methods are at least as important as any other result of inquiry: for the scientific spirit is based on the insight into methods, and were those methods to be lost, all the results of science could not prevent a renewed triumph of superstition and nonsense. Clever people may learn the results of science as much as they like, but one still sees from their conversation, especially from their hypotheses in conversation, that they lack the scientific spirit: they do not have that instinctive mistrust of the wrong ways of thinking, a mistrust which, as a consequence of long practice, has put its roots deep into the soul of every scientific man. For them it is enough to find any one hypothesis about a matter; then they get fired up about it and think that puts an end to it. For them, to have an opinion means to get fanatical about it and cherish it in their hearts henceforth as a conviction. If a matter is unexplained, they become excited at the first notion resembling an explanation that enters their brain: this always has the worst consequences, especially in the realm of politics."

"To the extent that that kind of genius keeps up the heat of convictions and awakens mistrust of the cautious and modest spirit of science, he is an enemy of truth, however much he may believe he is its suitor." [Al Gore]

"The Wanderer.— He who has come only in part to a freedom of reason cannot feel on earth otherwise than as a wanderer—though not as a traveler towards a final goal: for this does not exist."

CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE -- by Isaac Disraeli

"The life of every man is full of incidents, but the incidents are insignificant, because they do not affect his species..."  Pg. vii

"An author may influence the fortunes of the world to as great an extent as a statesman or a warrior..."  Id.

"A Book may be as great a thing as a battle..."  Id.

"In the biographic spell, no ingredient is more magical than predisposition."

Me: The introduction to this book by Disraeli's son is a good benchmark for the kind of backgrounding we might use in our profile of M (M being the genius).

"...solitary walk home through Mr. Mellish's park was dangerous to the sensibilities that too often exploded when they encountered on the arrival at the domestic hearth a scene which did not harmonise with the fairy-land of reverie."

"The crisis arrived, when, after months of unusual abstraction and irritability, my father produced a poem. For the first time, my grandfather was seriously alarmed."

"This preceptor was a man of letters, though a wretched writer, with a good library, and a spirit inflamed with all the philosophy of the eighteenth century, then (1780-1) about to bring forth and bear its long-matured fruits. The intelligence and disposition of my father attracted his attention, and rather interested him. He taught his charge little, for he was himself generally occupied in writing bad odes, but he gave him free warren in his library, and before his pupil was fifteen, he had read the works of Voltaire and had dipped into Bayle."

"His parents looked upon him as moonstruck, while he himself, whatever his aspirations, was conscious that he had done nothing to justify the eccentricity of his course, or the violation of all prudential considerations in which he daily indulged."  Pg. xv

"He sought by this publication neither reputation nor a coarser reward, for he published his work anonymously, and avowedly as a compilation..."  Pg. xx  [me: was our posited text published online?  Anonymously?]

"It so happened, that about the year 1795, when he was in his 29th year there came over my father that mysterious illness to which the youth of men of sensibility, and especially literary men, is frequently subject—a failing of nervous energy, occasioned by study and too sedentary habits, early and habitual reverie, restless and indefinite purpose. The symptoms, physical and moral, are most distressing: lassitude and despondency."  Pg. xxi

"I should think that this illness of his youth, and which, though of a fitful character, was of many years' duration,[Pg xxiv] arose from his inability to direct to a satisfactory end the intellectual power which he was conscious of possessing. He would mention the ten years of his life, from twenty-five to thirty-five years of age, as a period very deficient in self-contentedness. The fact is, with a poetic temperament, he had been born in an age when the poetic faith of which he was a votary had fallen into decrepitude, and had become only a form with the public, not yet gifted with sufficient fervour to discover a new creed."

"He was himself a complete literary character, a man who really passed his life in his library. Even marriage produced no change in these habits; he rose to enter the chamber where he lived alone with his books, and at night his lamp was ever lit within the same walls. Nothing, indeed, was more remarkable than the isolation of this prolonged existence"

Of Libraries:

"The passion for forming vast collections of books has necessarily existed in all periods of human curiosity; but long it required regal munificence to found a national library. It is only since the art of multiplying the productions of the mind has been discovered, that men of letters themselves have been enabled to rival this imperial and patriotic honour."

The first national library founded in Egypt seemed to have been placed under the protection of the divinities, for their statues magnificently adorned this temple, dedicated at once to religion and to literature. It was still further embellished by a well-known inscription, for ever grateful to the votary of literature; on the front was engraven,—"The nourishment of the soul;" or, according to Diodorus, "The medicine of the mind."

"One of the Ptolemies refused supplying the famished Athenians with wheat, until they presented him with the original manuscripts of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides"

"Literature, like virtue, is often its own reward, and the enthusiasm some experience in the permanent enjoyments of a vast library has far outweighed the neglect or the calumny of the world, which some of its votaries have received. From the time that Cicero poured forth his feelings in his oration for the poet Archias, innumerable are the testimonies of men of letters of the pleasurable delirium of their researches."

"...as indolent as that animal called the Sloth, who perishes on the tree he climbs, after he has eaten all its leaves."

"...this bibliothèque as a literary heaven, furnished with as many books as there were stars in the firmament."

"Charles V. surnamed the Wise, ordered that thirty portable lights, with a silver lamp suspended from the centre, should be illuminated at night, that students might not find their pursuits interrupted at any hour."

"...in Germany, Trithemius, the celebrated abbot of Spanheim, who died in 1516, had amassed about two thousand manuscripts; a literary treasure which excited such general attention, that princes and eminent men travelled to visit Trithemius and his library."

"Heinsius was mewed up in the library of Leyden all the year long, and that which, to my thinking, should have bred a loathing, caused in him a greater liking. 'I no sooner,' saith he, 'come into the library, but I bolt the door to me, excluding Lust, Ambition, Avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is Idleness, the mother of Ignorance and Melancholy. In the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine souls, I take my seat with so lofty a spirit, and sweet content, that I pity all our great ones and rich men, that know not this happiness.'"

"There is, however, an intemperance in study, incompatible often with our social or more active duties. The illustrious Grotius exposed himself to the reproaches of some of his contemporaries for having too warmly pursued his studies, to the detriment of his public station."

Books and Manuscripts

"Lucian has composed a biting invective against an ignorant possessor of a vast library, like him, who in the present day, after turning over the pages of an old book, chiefly admires the date."

"...it is the opinion of some that a first edition is only to be considered as an imperfect essay, which the author proposes to finish after he has tried the sentiments of the literary world."

"The collector we have noticed frequently said, as is related of Virgil, "I collect gold from Ennius's dung." I find, in some neglected authors, particular things, not elsewhere to be found. He read many of these, but not with equal attention—"Sicut canis ad Nilum, bibens et fugiens;" like a dog at the Nile, drinking and running."

"At length, a taste for literature spread through the body of the people; vanity induced the inexperienced and the ignorant to aspire to literary honours. To oppose these forcible entries into the haunts of the Muses, periodical criticism brandished its formidable weapon; and the fall of many, taught some of our greatest geniuses to rise."

"Our ancient classics had a very narrow escape from total annihilation. Many have perished: many are but fragments; and chance, blind arbiter of the works of genius, has left us some, not of the highest value; which, however, have proved very useful, as a test to show the pedantry of those who adore antiquity not from true feeling, but from traditional prejudice."

"That the Monks had not in high veneration the profane authors, appears by a facetious anecdote. To read the classics was considered as a very idle recreation, and some held them in great horror. To distinguish them from other books, they invented a disgraceful sign: when a monk asked for a pagan author, after making the general sign they used in their manual and silent language when they wanted a book, he added a particular one, which consisted in scratching under his ear, as a dog, which feels an itching, scratches himself in that place with his paw—because, said they, an unbeliever is compared to a dog! In this manner they expressed an itching for those dogs Virgil or Horace!"

"In those times, manuscripts were important articles of commerce; they were excessively scarce, and preserved with the utmost care. Usurers themselves considered them as precious objects for pawn. A student of Pavia, who was reduced, raised a new fortune by leaving in pawn a manuscript of a body of law; and a grammarian, who was ruined by a fire, rebuilt his house with two small volumes of Cicero."

"Poggio the Florentine stands distinguished; but he complains that his zeal was not assisted by the great. He found under a heap of rubbish in a decayed coffer, in a tower belonging to the monastery of St. Gallo, the work of Quintilian. He is indignant at its forlorn situation; at least, he cries, it should have been preserved in the library of the monks; but I found it in teterrimo quodam et obscuro carcere—and to his great joy drew it out of its grave! The monks have been complimented as the preservers of literature, but by facts, like the present, their real affection may be doubted." -- The Monks did not hold in high veneration the "profane" and "pagan".

"Raimond Soranzo, a lawyer in the papal court, possessed two books of Cicero "on Glory," which he presented to Petrarch, who lent them to a poor aged man of letters, formerly his preceptor. Urged by extreme want, the old man pawned them, and returning home died suddenly without having revealed where he had left them. They have never been recovered. Petrarch speaks of them with ecstasy, and tells us that he had studied them perpetually. Two centuries afterwards, this treatise on Glory by Cicero was mentioned in a catalogue of books bequeathed to a monastery of nuns, but when inquired after was missing. It was supposed that Petrus Alcyonius, physician to that[Pg 22] household, purloined it, and after transcribing as much of it as he could into his own writings, had destroyed the original. Alcyonius, in his book De Exilio, the critics observed, had many splendid passages which stood isolated in his work, and were quite above his genius."

"Machiavelli acted more adroitly in a similar case; a manuscript of the Apophthegms of the Ancients by Plutarch having fallen into his hands, he selected those which pleased him, and put them into the mouth of his hero Castrucio Castricani."

Criticism

"Sophocles was brought to trial by his children as a lunatic."

"Plato—who has been called, by Clement of Alexandria, the Moses of Athens; the philosopher of the Christians, by[Pg 25] Arnobius; and the god of philosophers, by Cicero—Athenæus accuses of envy; Theopompus of lying; Suidas of avarice; Aulus Gellius, of robbery; Porphyry, of incontinence; and Aristophanes, of impiety."

"Livy has been reproached for his aversion to the Gauls; Dion, for his hatred of the republic; Velleius Paterculus, for speaking too kindly of the vices of Tiberius; and Herodotus and Plutarch, for their excessive partiality to their own country: while the latter has written an entire treatise on the malignity of Herodotus. Xenophon and Quintus Curtius have been considered rather as novelists than historians; and Tacitus has been censured for his audacity in pretending to discover the political springs and secret causes of events."

"Some have said of Cicero, that there is no connexion, and to adopt their own figures, no blood and nerves, in what his admirers so warmly extol. Cold in his extemporaneous effusions, artificial in his exordiums, trifling in his strained raillery, and tiresome in his digressions. This is saying a good deal about Cicero."

Persecution of the Learned

"Those who have laboured most zealously to instruct mankind have been those who have suffered most from ignorance; and the discoverers of new arts and sciences have hardly ever lived to see them accepted by the world. With a noble perception of his own genius, Lord Bacon, in his prophetic Will, thus expresses himself: "For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages."'

"Galileo was condemned at Rome publicly to disavow sentiments, the truth of which must have been to him abundantly manifest. "Are these then my judges?" he exclaimed, in retiring from the inquisitors, whose ignorance astonished him. He was imprisoned, and visited by Milton, who tells us, he was then poor and old. The confessor of his widow, taking advantage of her piety, perused the MSS. of this great philosopher, and destroyed such as in his judgment were not fit to be known to the world!"

"In those times, it was a common opinion to suspect every great man of an intercourse with some familiar spirit."

"Even the learned themselves, who had not applied to natural philosophy, seem to have acted with the same feelings as the most ignorant; for when Albert, usually called the Great, an epithet it has been[Pg 29] said that he derived from his name De Groot, constructed a curious piece of mechanism, which sent forth distinct vocal sounds, Thomas Aquinas was so much terrified at it, that he struck it with his staff, and, to the mortification of Albert, annihilated the curious labour of thirty years!"

"Petrarch was less desirous of the laurel for the honour, than for the hope of being sheltered by it from the thunder of the priests, by whom both he and his brother poets were continually threatened. They could not imagine a poet, without supposing him to hold an intercourse with some demon."

"Descartes was horribly persecuted in Holland, when he first published his opinions. Voetius, a bigot of great influence at Utrecht, accused him of atheism, and had even projected in his mind to have this philosopher burnt at Utrecht in an extraordinary fire, which, kindled on an eminence, might be observed by the seven provinces. Mr. Hallam has observed, that "the ordeal of fire was the great purifier of books and men."

Poverty of the Learned

"Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius: others find a hundred by-roads to her palace; there is but one open, and that a very indifferent one, for men of letters."

"Xylander sold his notes on Dion Cassius for a dinner. He tells us that at the age of eighteen he studied to acquire glory, but at twenty-five he studied to get bread."

"Cervantes, the immortal genius of Spain, is supposed to have wanted food; Camöens, the solitary pride of Portugal, deprived of the necessaries of life, perished in an hospital at Lisbon."

"The great Tasso was reduced to such a dilemma that he was obliged to borrow a crown for a week's subsistence. He alludes to his distress when, entreating his cat to assist him, during the night, with the lustre of her eyes—"Non avendo candele per iscrivere i suoi versi!" having no candle to see to write his verses."

Imprisonment of the Learned

"Cervantes composed the most agreeable book in the Spanish language during his captivity in Barbary."

"In prison Bœthius composed his work on the Consolations of Philosophy; and Grotius wrote his Commentary on Saint Matthew, with other works: the detail of his allotment of time to different studies, during his confinement, is very instructive."

"Sir Walter Raleigh's unfinished History of the World, which leaves us to regret that later ages had not been celebrated by his eloquence, was the fruits of eleven years of imprisonment."

"The plan of the "Henriade" was sketched, and the greater part composed, by Voltaire during his imprisonment in the Bastile; and "the Pilgrim's Progress" of Bunyan was performed in the circuit of a prison's walls."

Amusement of the Learned

"Among the Jesuits it was a standing rule of the order, that after an application to study for two hours, the mind of the student should be unbent by some relaxation, however trifling. When Petavius was employed in his Dogmata Theologica, a work of the most profound and extensive erudition, the great recreation of the learned father was, at the end of every second hour, to twirl his chair for five minutes. After protracted studies Spinosa would mix with the family-party where he lodged, and join in the most trivial conversations, or unbend his mind by setting spiders to fight each other; he observed their combats with so much interest, that he was often seized with immoderate fits of laughter. A continuity of labour deadens the soul, observes Seneca, in closing his treatise on "The Tranquillity of the Soul," and the mind must unbend itself by certain amusements. Socrates did not blush to play with children; Cato, over his bottle, found an alleviation from the fatigues of government; a circumstance, Seneca says in his manner, which rather gives honour to this defect, than the defect dishonours Cato."

"Erasmus composed, to amuse himself when travelling, his panegyric on Moria, or folly; which, authorised by the pun, he dedicated to Sir Thomas More."

"It seems, Johnson observes in his life of Sir Thomas Browne, to have been in all ages the pride of art to show how it could exalt the low and amplify the little. To this ambition, perhaps, we owe the Frogs of Homer; the Gnat and the Bees of Virgil; the Butterfly of Spenser; the Shadow of Wowerus; and the Quincunx of Browne."

"Cardinal de Richelieu, amongst all his great occupations, found a recreation in violent exercises; and he was once discovered jumping with his servant, to try who could reach the highest side of a wall. De Grammont, observing the cardinal to be jealous of his powers, offered to jump with him; and, in the true spirit of a courtier, having made some efforts which nearly reached the cardinal's, confessed the cardinal surpassed him. This was jumping like a politician; and by this means he is said to have ingratiated himself with the minister."

"Contemplative men seem to be fond of amusements which accord with their habits. The thoughtful game of chess, and the tranquil delight of angling, have been favourite recreations with the studious. Paley had himself painted with a rod and line in his hand; a strange characteristic for the author of "Natural Theology." Sir Henry Wotton called angling "idle time not idly spent:" we may suppose that his meditations and his amusements were carried on at the same moment."

"An ingenious writer has observed, that "a garden just accommodates itself to the perambulations of a scholar, who would perhaps rather wish his walks abridged than extended."

Destruction of Works

"The Romans burnt the books of the Jews, of the Christians, and the Philosophers; the Jews burnt the books of the Christians and the Pagans; and the Christians burnt the books of the Pagans and the Jews. The greater part of the books of Origen and other heretics were continually burnt by the orthodox party. Gibbon pathetically describes the empty library of Alexandria, after the Christians had destroyed it. "The valuable library of Alexandria was pillaged or destroyed; and near twenty years afterwards the appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator, whose mind was not totally darkened by religious prejudice. The compositions of ancient genius, so many of which have irretrievably perished, might surely have been excepted from the wreck of idolatry, for the amusement and instruction of succeeding ages; and either the zeal or avarice of the archbishop might have been satiated with the richest spoils which were the rewards of his victory."

"The pathetic narrative of Nicetas Choniates, of the ravages committed by the Christians of the thirteenth century in Constantinople, was fraudulently suppressed in the printed[Pg 48] editions. It has been preserved by Dr. Clarke; who observes, that the Turks have committed fewer injuries to the works of art than the barbarous Christians of that age."

"Conquerors at first destroy with the rashest zeal the national records of the conquered people; hence it is that the Irish people deplore the irreparable losses of their most ancient national memorials, which their invaders have been too successful in annihilating. The same event occurred in the conquest of Mexico; and the interesting history of the New World must ever remain imperfect, in consequence of the unfortunate success of the first missionaries. Clavigero, the most authentic historian of Mexico, continually laments this affecting loss. Everything in that country had been painted, and painters abounded there as scribes in Europe. The first missionaries, suspicious that superstition was mixed with all their paintings, attacked the chief school of these artists, and collecting, in the market-place, a little mountain of these precious records, they set fire to it, and buried in the ashes the memory of many interesting events."

"The story of the Caliph Omar proclaiming throughout the kingdom, at the taking of Alexandria, that the Koran contained everything which was useful to believe and to know, and therefore he commanded that all the books in the Alexandrian library should be distributed to the masters of the baths, amounting to 4000, to be used in heating their stoves during a period of six months, modern paradox would attempt[Pg 49] to deny."

"On this Abdoolah observed, that those of his country and faith had nothing to do with any other book than the Koran; and all Persian MSS. found within the circle of his government, as the works of idolaters, were to be burnt. Much of the most ancient poetry of the Persians perished by this fanatical edict."

"The works of the ancients were frequently destroyed at the instigation of the monks. They appear sometimes to have mutilated them, for passages have not come down to us, which once evidently existed; and occasionally their interpolations and other forgeries formed a destruction in a new shape, by additions to the originals. They were indefatigable in erasing the best works of the most eminent Greek and Latin authors, in order to transcribe their ridiculous lives of saints on the obliterated vellum. One of the books of Livy is in the Vatican most painfully defaced by some pious father for the purpose of writing on it some missal or psalter, and there have been recently others discovered in the same state. Inflamed with the blindest zeal against everything pagan, Pope Gregory VII. ordered that the library of the Palatine Apollo, a treasury of literature formed by successive emperors, should be committed to the flames!"

"This pope is said to have burnt the works of Varro, the learned Roman, that Saint Austin should escape from the charge of plagiarism, being deeply indebted to Varro for much of his great work "the City of God."'

Quodlibets

"The scholastic questions were called Questiones Quodlibeticæ; and they were generally so ridiculous that we have retained the word Quodlibet in our vernacular style, to express anything ridiculously subtile; something which comes at length to be distinguished into nothingness."

"Then burst into birth, from the dark cave of metaphysics, a numerous and ugly spawn of monstrous sects; unnatural children of the same foul mother, who never met but for mutual destruction. Religion became what is called the study of Theology; and they all attempted to reduce the worship of God into a system! and the creed into a thesis! Every point relating to religion was debated through an endless chain of infinite questions, incomprehensible distinctions, with differences mediate and immediate, the concrete and the abstract, a perpetual civil war carried on against common sense in all the Aristotelian severity. There existed a rage for Aristotle; and Melancthon complains that in sacred assemblies the ethics of Aristotle were read to the people instead of the gospel. Aristotle was placed a-head of St. Paul; and St. Thomas Aquinas in his works distinguishes him by the title of "The Philosopher;" inferring, doubtless, that no other man could possibly be a philosopher who disagreed with Aristotle."

"One of the subtile questions which agitated the world in the tenth century, relating to dialectics, was concerning universals (as for example, man, horse, dog, &c.) signifying not this or that in particular, but all in general. They distinguished universals, or what we call abstract terms, by the genera and species rerum; and they never could decide whether these were substances—or names! That is, whether the abstract idea we form of a horse was not really a being as much as the horse we ride! All this, and some congenial points respecting the origin of our ideas, and what ideas were, and whether we really had an idea of a thing before we discovered the thing itself—in a word, what they called universals, and the essence of universals; of all this nonsense, on which they at length proceeded to accusations of heresy, and for which many learned men were excommunicated, stoned, and what not, the whole was derived from the reveries of Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno, about the nature of ideas, than which subject to the present day no discussion ever degenerated into such insanity."

"However, a great part of these peculiar productions are loaded with the most trifling, irreverent, and even scandalous discussions. Even Aquinas could gravely debate, Whether Christ was not an hermaphrodite? Whe[Pg 65]ther there are excrements in Paradise? Whether the pious at the resurrection will rise with their bowels? Others again debated—Whether the angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary in the shape of a serpent, of a dove, of a man, or of a woman? Did he seem to be young or old? In what dress was he? Was his garment white or of two colours? Was his linen clean or foul? Did he appear in the morning, noon, or evening? What was the colour of the Virgin Mary's hair? Was she acquainted with the mechanic and liberal arts? Had she a thorough knowledge of the Book of Sentences, and all it contains?"

"The following question was a favourite topic for discussion, and the acutest logicians never resolved it: "When a hog is carried to market with a rope tied about his neck, which is held at the other end by a man, whether is the hog carried to market by the rope or the man?"

Miscellany

"Nothing is so capable of disordering the intellects as an intense application to any one of these six things: the Quadrature of the Circle; the Multiplication of the Cube; the Perpetual Motion; the Philosophical Stone; Magic; and Judicial Astrology."

"Some writers, usually pedants, imagine that they can supply, by the labours of industry, the deficiencies of nature."

"Cicero has boasted of the great actions he has done for his country, because there is no vanity in exulting in the performance of our duties; but he has not boasted that he was the most eloquent orator of his age, though he certainly was; because nothing is more disgusting than to exult in our intellectual powers."

"Boldly to confess the truth, his way of writing, and that of all other long-winded authors, appears to me very tedious; for his preface, definitions, divisions, and etymologies, take up the greatest part of his work; whatever there is of life and marrow, is smothered and lost in the preparation."

"A preface, being the entrance to a book, should invite by its beauty. An elegant porch announces the splendour of the interior...The Italians call the preface La salsa del libra, the sauce of the book, and if well seasoned it creates an appetite in the reader to devour the book itself."

"In prefaces an affected haughtiness or an affected humility are alike despicable. There is a deficient dignity in Robertson's; but the haughtiness is now to our purpose. This is called by the French, "la morgue littéraire," the surly pomposity of literature."

"The invention of what is now called the Italic letter in printing was made by Aldus Manutius, to whom learning owes[Pg 78] much. He observed the many inconveniences resulting from the vast number of abbreviations, which were then so frequent among the printers, that a book was difficult to understand; a treatise was actually written on the art of reading a printed book, and this addressed to the learned! He contrived an expedient, by which these abbreviations might be entirely got rid of, and yet books suffer little increase in bulk. This he effected by introducing what is now called the Italic letter, though it formerly was distinguished by the name of the inventor, and called the Aldine."

"Accident has frequently occasioned the most eminent geniuses to display their powers. "It was at Rome," says Gibbon, "on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the City first started to my mind."

"Singular inequalities are observable in the labours of genius; and particularly in those which admit great enthusiasm, as in poetry, in painting, and in music. Faultless mediocrity industry can preserve in one continued degree; but excellence, the daring and the happy, can only be attained, by human faculties, by starts."

"Trublet justly observes—The more there are beauties and great beauties in a work, I am the less surprised to find faults and great faults."

"It was observed of one pleader, that he knew more than he said; and of another, that he said more than he knew."  [me: I would rather know more than I say, than say more than I know.]

"Lucian happily describes the works of those who abound with the most luxuriant language, void of ideas. He calls their unmeaning verbosity "anemone-words;" for anemonies are flowers, which, however brilliant, only please the eye, leaving no fragrance."

"The student or the artist who may shine a luminary of learning and of genius, in his works, is found, not rarely, to lie obscured beneath a heavy cloud in colloquial discourse."

"If you love the man of letters, seek him in the privacies of his study. It is in the hour of confidence and tranquillity that his genius shall elicit a ray of intelligence more fervid than the labours of polished composition."

"Descartes, whose habits were formed in solitude and meditation, was silent in mixed company; it was said that he had received his intellectual wealth from nature in solid bars, but not in current coin; or as Addison expressed the same idea, by comparing himself to a banker who possessed the wealth of his friends at home, though he carried none of it in his pocket; or as that judicious moralist Nicolle, of the Port-Royal Society, said of a scintillant wit—"He conquers me in the drawing-room, but he surrenders to me at discretion on the staircase." Such may say with Themistocles, when asked to play on a lute—"I cannot fiddle, but I can make a little village a great city."

"Mediocrity can talk; but it is for genius to observe."

"A man of letters, more intent on the acquisitions of literature than on the intrigues of politics, or the speculations of commerce, may find a deeper solitude in a populous metropolis than in the seclusion of the country."
Descartes residing in the commercial city of Amsterdam, writing to Balzac, illustrates these descriptions with great force and vivacity.
"You wish to retire; and your intention is to seek the solitude of the Chartreux, or, possibly, some of the most beautiful provinces of France and Italy. I would rather advise you, if you wish to observe mankind, and at the same time to lose yourself in the deepest solitude, to join me in Amsterdam."

"The Jews have their Talmud; the Catholics their Legends of Saints; and the Turks their Sonnah. The Protestant has nothing but his Bible."

"The Talmud is a collection of Jewish traditions which have been orally preserved. It comprises the Mishna, which is the text; and the Gemara, its commentary. The whole forms a complete system of the learning, ceremonies, civil and canon laws of the Jews; treating indeed on all subjects; even gardening, manual arts, &c."

"Even Aristotle has delivered some considerable nonsense on this custom; he says it is an honourable acknowledgment of the seat of good sense and genius—the head—to distinguish it from two other offensive eruptions of air, which are never accompanied by any benediction from the by-standers. The custom, at all events, existed long prior to Pope Gregory. The lover in Apuleius, Gyton in Petronius, and allusions to it in Pliny, prove its antiquity; and a memoir of the French Academy notices the practice in the New World, on the first discovery of America. Everywhere man is saluted for sneezing."

"An amusing account of the ceremonies which attend the sneezing of a king of Monomotapa, shows what a national concern may be the sneeze of despotism.—Those who are near his person, when this happens, salute him in so loud a tone, that persons in the ante-chamber hear it, and join in the acclamation; in the adjoining apartments they do the same, till the noise reaches the street, and becomes propagated throughout the city; so that, at each sneeze of his majesty, results a most horrid cry from the salutations of many thousands of his vassals. When the king of Sennaar sneezes, his courtiers immediately turn their backs on him, and give a loud slap on their right thigh."
"Paschal, historiographer of France, had a reason for these ingenious inventions; he continually announced such titles, that his pension for writing on the history of France might not be stopped. When he died, his historical labours did not exceed six pages!"

"Vanity in this cardinal levelled a great genius. He who would attempt to display universal excellence will be impelled to practise meanness, and to act follies which, if he has the least sensibility, must occasion him many a pang and many a blush."

"Diogenes Laertius describes the person of the Stagyrite (Aristotle).—His eyes were small, his voice hoarse, and his legs lank. He[Pg 143] stammered, was fond of a magnificent dress, and wore costly rings. He had a mistress whom he loved passionately, and for whom he frequently acted inconsistently with the philosophic character; a thing as common with philosophers as with other men. Aristotle had nothing of the austerity of the philosopher, though his works are so austere: he was open, pleasant, and even charming in his conversation; fiery and volatile in his pleasures; magnificent in his dress. He is described as fierce, disdainful, and sarcastic."

"The genius of Plato is more polished, and that of Aristotle more vast and profound. Plato has a lively and teeming imagination; fertile in invention, in ideas, in expressions, and in figures; displaying a thousand turns, a thousand new colours, all agreeable to their subject; but after all it is nothing more than imagination. Aristotle is hard and dry in all he says, but what he says is all reason, though it is expressed drily: his diction, pure as it is, has something uncommonly austere; and his obscurities, natural or affected, disgust and fatigue his readers. Plato is equally delicate in his thoughts and in his expressions. Aristotle, though he may be more natural, has not any delicacy: his style is simple and equal, but close and nervous; that of Plato is grand and elevated, but loose and diffuse. Plato always says more than he should say: Aristotle never says enough, and leaves the reader always to think more than he says. The one surprises the mind, and charms it by a flowery and sparkling character: the other illuminates and instructs it by a just and solid method. Plato communicates something of genius, by the fecundity of his own; and Aristotle something of judgment and reason, by that impression of good sense which appears in all he says. In a word, Plato frequently only thinks to express himself well: and Aristotle only thinks to think justly."

Addison: "Sitting in some company, and having been but a little before musical, I chanced to take notice that, in ordinary discourse, words were spoken in perfect notes; and that some of the company used eighths, some fifths, some thirds; and that his discourse which was the most pleasing, his words, as to their tone, consisted most of concords, and were of discords of such as made up harmony. The same person was the most affable, pleasant, and best-natured in the company...."

"From this difference of Music in Speech, we may conjecture that of Tempers. We know the Doric mood sounds gravity and sobriety; the Lydian, buxomness and freedom; the Æolic, sweet stillness and quiet composure; the Phrygian, jollity and youthful levity; the Ionic is a stiller of storms and disturbances arising from passion; and why may we not reasonably suppose, that those whose speech naturally runs into the notes peculiar to any of these moods, are likewise in nature hereunto congenerous? C Fa ut may show me to be of an ordinary capacity, though good disposition. G Sol re ut, to be peevish and effeminate. Flats, a manly or melancholic sadness. He who hath a voice which will in some measure agree with all cliffs, to be of good parts, and fit for variety of employments, yet somewhat of an inconstant nature. Likewise from the Times: so semi-briefs may speak a temper dull and phlegmatic; minims, grave and serious; crotchets, a prompt wit; quavers, vehemency of passion, and scolds use them. Semi-brief-rest may denote one either stupid or fuller of thoughts than he can utter; minimrest, one that deliberates; crotchet-rest, one in a passion. So that from the natural use of Mood, Note, and Time, we may collect Dispositions."

"Whatever is addressed to the times, however great may be its merits, is doomed to perish with the times..."

"Salmasius sometimes reproaches Milton as being but a puny piece of man; an homunculus, a dwarf deprived of the human figure, a bloodless being, composed of nothing but skin and bone; a contemptible pedagogue, fit only to flog his boys: and, rising into a poetic frenzy, applies to him the words of Virgil, "Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum."

"Impartiality of criticism obliges us to confess that Milton was not destitute of rancour. When he was told that his adversary boasted he had occasioned the loss of his eyes, he answered, with ferocity—"And I shall cost him his life!" A prediction which was soon after verified; for Christina, Queen of Sweden, withdrew her patronage from Salmasius, and sided with Milton. The universal neglect the proud scholar felt hastened his death in the course of a twelve-month."

"We are indebted to the Italians for the idea of newspapers. The title of their gazettas was, perhaps, derived from gazzera, a magpie or chatterer; or, more probably, from a farthing coin, peculiar to the city of Venice, called gazetta, which was the common price of the newspapers."

"Newspapers, then, took their birth in that principal land of modern politicians, Italy, and under the government of that aristocratical republic, Venice. The first paper was a Venetian one, and only monthly; but it was merely the newspaper of the government."

"We are indebted to the wisdom of Elizabeth and the prudence of Burleigh for the first newspaper. The epoch of the Spanish Armada is also the epoch of a genuine newspaper. In the British Museum are several newspapers which were printed while the Spanish fleet was in the English Channel[Pg 156] during the year 1588. It was a wise policy to prevent, during a moment of general anxiety, the danger of false reports, by publishing real information. The earliest newspaper is entitled "The English Mercurie," which by authority was "imprinted at London by her highness's printer, 1588."

"Devoted to political purposes, they soon became a public nuisance by serving as receptacles of party malice, and echoing to the farthest ends of the kingdom the insolent voice of all factions. They set the minds of men more at variance, inflamed their tempers to a greater fierceness, and gave a keener edge to the sharpness of civil discord."

"...siding with the rout and scum of the people, he made them weekly sport by railing at all that was noble, in his Intelligence, called Mercurius Britannicus, wherein his endeavours were to sacrifice the fame of some lord, or any person of quality, and of the king himself, to the beast with many heads." He soon became popular, and was known under the name of Captain Needham, of Gray's Inn; and whatever he now wrote was deemed oracular."

"The strange trials to which those suspected of guilt were put in the middle ages, conducted with many devout ceremonies by the ministers of religion, were pronounced to be the judgments of God! The ordeal consisted of various kinds: walking blindfold amidst burning ploughshares; passing through fires; holding in the hand a red-hot bar; and plunging the arm into boiling water: the popular affirmation—"I will put my hand in the fire to confirm this," was derived from this custom of our rude ancestors. Challenging the accuser to single combat, when frequently the stoutest champion was allowed to supply their place; swallowing a morsel of consecrated bread; sinking or swimming in a river for witchcraft; or weighing a witch; stretching out the arms before the cross, till the champion soonest wearied dropped his arms, and lost his estate, which was decided by this very short chancery suit, called the judicium crucis."

"Judicial combat appears to have been practised by the Jews. Whenever the rabbins had to decide on a dispute about property between two parties, neither of which could produce evidence to substantiate his claim, they terminated it by single combat."

"Those accused of robbery were put to trial by a piece of barley-bread, on which the mass had been said; which if they could not swallow, they were declared guilty."

"These ordeals probably originate in that one of Moses called the "Waters of Jealousy." The Greeks likewise had ordeals, for in the Antigonus of Sophocles the soldiers offer to prove their innocence by handling red-hot iron, and walking between fires. One cannot but smile at the whimsical ordeals of the Siamese. Among other practices to discover[Pg 165] the justice of a cause, civil or criminal, they are particularly attached to using certain consecrated purgative pills, which they make the contending parties swallow. He who retains them longest gains his cause!"

"Once all were Turks when they were not Romanists."

"Torquemada, indefatigable in his zeal for the holy chair, in the space of fourteen years that he exercised the office of chief inquisitor, is said to have prosecuted near eighty thousand persons, of whom six thousand were condemned to the flames."

Voltaire attributes the taciturnity of the Spaniards to the universal horror such proceedings spread. "A general jealousy and suspicion took possession of all ranks of people: friendship and sociability were at an end! Brothers were afraid of brothers, fathers of their children."

"In the cathedral at Saragossa is the tomb of a famous inquisitor; six pillars surround this tomb; to each is chained a Moor, as preparatory to his being burnt."

"The Inquisition punished heretics by fire, to elude the maxim, "Ecclesia non novit sanguinem;" for burning a man, say they, does not shed his blood. Otho, the bishop at the Norman invasion, in the tapestry worked by Matilda the queen of William the Conqueror, is represented with a mace in his hand, for the purpose that when he despatched his antagonist he might not spill blood, but only break his bones! Religion has had her quibbles as well as law."

"Granger assures us, that in his remembrance a horse that had been taught to tell the spots upon cards, the hour of the day, &c., by significant tokens, was, together with his owner, put into the Inquisition for both of them dealing with the devil!"

"The Maldivian islanders eat alone. They retire into the most hidden parts of their houses; and they draw down the cloths that serve as blinds to their windows, that they may eat unobserved."

"A people transplanted, observes an ingenious philosopher, preserve in another climate modes of living which relate to those from whence they originally came."

"Many monarchs are infected with a strange wish that their successors may turn out bad princes."

"Princes, says Gracian, are willing to be aided, but not surpassed."

"...chess entirely depends on the genius of the players, and not on fortune..."

"...an excellent philosopher proves but an indifferent king."

"Fortune never appears in a more extravagant humour than when she reduces monarchs to become mendicants."

"In the year 1595, died at Paris, Antonio, king of Portugal. His body is interred at the Cordeliers, and his heart deposited at the Ave-Maria. Nothing on earth could compel this prince to renounce his crown. He passed over to England, and Elizabeth assisted him with troops; but at length he died in France in great poverty. This dethroned monarch was happy in one thing, which is indeed rare: in all his miseries he had a servant, who proved a tender and faithful friend, and who only desired to participate in his misfortunes, and to soften his miseries; and for the recompense of his services he only wished to be buried at the feet of his dear master. This hero in loyalty, to whom the ancient Romans would have raised altars, was Don Diego Bothei, one of the greatest lords of the court of Portugal, and who drew his origin from the kings of Bohemia."

"The savage and the civilized, the illiterate and the learned, are alike captivated by the hope of accumulating wealth without the labours of industry."

"...a French physician, one Eckeloo, who published in 1569, De Aleâ, sive de curandâ Ludendi in Pecuniam cupiditate, that is, "On games of chance, or a cure for gaming." The treatise itself is only worth notice from the circumstance of the author being himself one of the most inveterate gamblers; he wrote this work to convince himself of this folly. But in spite of all his solemn vows, the prayers of his friends, and his own book perpetually quoted before his face, he was a great gamester to his last hour! "

"A strong spirit of play characterises a Malayan. After having resigned everything to the good fortune of the winner, he is reduced to a horrid state of desperation; he then loosens a certain lock of hair, which indicates war and destruction to all whom the raving gamester meets. He intoxicates himself with opium; and working himself into a fit of frenzy, he bites or kills every one who comes in his way. But as soon as this lock is seen flowing, it is lawful to fire at the person[Pg 189] and to destroy him as fast as possible. This custom is what is called "To run a muck.""

"For such is the stupid superstition of the Arabs, that they pride themselves on being ignorant of whatever has passed before the mission of their Prophet."

"It is not requisite for poets to be historians, but historians should not be so frequently poets."

On Jocular Preachers:
"These preachers flourished in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries; we are therefore to ascribe their extravagant mixture of grave admonition with facetious illustration, comic tales which have been occasionally adopted by the most licentious writers, and minute and lively descriptions, to the great simplicity of the times, when the grossest indecency was never concealed under a gentle periphrasis, but everything was called by its name. All this was enforced by the most daring personalities, and seasoned by those temporary allusions which neither spared, nor feared even the throne. These ancient sermons therefore are singularly precious, to those whose inquisitive pleasures are gratified by tracing the manners of former ages. When Henry Stephens, in his apology for Herodotus, describes the irregularities of the age, and the minutiæ of national manners, he effects this chiefly by extracts from these sermons. Their wit is not always the brightest, nor their satire the most poignant; but there is always that prevailing naïveté of the age running through their rude eloquence, which interests the reflecting mind. In a word, these sermons were addressed to the multitude; and therefore they show good sense and absurdity; fancy and puerility; satire and insipidity; extravagance and truth."

"Even in more modern times have Menot and Maillard found an imitator in little Father André, as well as others. His character has been variously drawn. He is by some represented as a kind of buffoon in the pulpit; but others more judiciously observe, that he only indulged his natural genius, and uttered humorous and lively things, as the good Father observes himself, to keep the attention of his audience awake.[Pg 257] He was not always laughing. "He told many a bold truth," says the author of Guerre des Auteurs anciens et modernes, "that sent bishops to their dioceses, and made many a coquette blush. He possessed the art of biting when he smiled; and more ably combated vice by his ingenious satire than by those vague apostrophes which no one takes to himself. While others were straining their minds to catch at sublime thoughts which no one understood, he lowered his talents to the most humble situations, and to the minutest things. From them he drew his examples and his comparisons; and the one and the other never failed of success." Marville says, that "his expressions were full of shrewd simplicity. He made very free use of the most popular proverbs. His comparisons and figures were always borrowed from the most familiar and lowest things." To ridicule effectually the reigning vices, he would prefer quirks or puns to sublime thoughts; and he was little solicitous of his choice of expression, so the things came home. Gozzi, in Italy, had the same power in drawing unexpected inferences from vulgar and familiar occurrences."

"No enemy is indeed so terrible as a man of genius."

"Puttenham, p. 249, has also recorded an honourable anecdote of Elizabeth, and characteristic of that high majesty which was in her thoughts, as well as in her actions. When[Pg 267] she came to the crown, a knight of the realm, who had insolently behaved to her when Lady Elizabeth, fell upon his knees and besought her pardon, expecting to be sent to the Tower: she replied mildly, "Do you not know that we are descended of the lion, whose nature is not to harme or prey upon the mouse, or any other such small vermin?""

"The education of Elizabeth had been severely classical; she thought and she wrote in all the spirit of the characters of antiquity; and her speeches and her letters are studded with apophthegms, and a terseness of ideas and language, that give an exalted idea of her mind. In her evasive answers to the Commons, in reply to their petitions to her majesty to marry, she has employed an energetic word: "Were I to tell you that I do not mean to marry, I might say less than I did intend; and were I to tell you that I do mean to marry, I might say more than it is proper for you to know; therefore I give you an answer, Answerless!""

"I will give you an example of their words. They told me chou signifies a book: so that I thought whenever the word chou was pronounced, a book was the subject. Not at all! Chou, the next time I heard it, I found signified a tree. Now I was to recollect; chou was a book or a tree. But this amounted to nothing; chou, I found, expressed also great heats; chou is to relate; chou is the Aurora; chou means to be accustomed; chou expresses the loss of a wager, &c. I should not finish, were I to attempt to give you all its significations."

"The Jewish and many oriental authors were fond of allegorical titles, which always indicate the most puerile age of taste."

"Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.."

"When Dante published his "Inferno," the simplicity of the age accepted it as a true narrative of his descent into hell.  It was a long while after publication that many readers were convinced that Gulliver's Travels were fictitious."

"But the most singular blunder was produced by the ingenious "Hermippus Redivivus" of Dr. Campbell, a curious banter on the hermetic philosophy, and the universal medicine; but the grave irony is so closely kept up, that it deceived for a[Pg 321] length of time the most learned. His notion of the art of prolonging life, by inhaling the breath of young women, was eagerly credited. A physician, who himself had composed a treatise on health, was so influenced by it, that he actually took lodgings at a female boarding-school, that he might never be without a constant supply of the breath of young ladies." [me: reminds me of Dr. Strangelove.]

Chaucer:
Marriage is such a rabble rout; That those that are out, would fain get in; And those that are in, would fain get out.

"In short, a big book is a scare-crow to the head and pocket..."