Personal collection of quotations -- Ernie Davis

Some of these are, it seems to me, relevant to AI and knowledge representation. All of them are quotes that I often think of.

I also have a small collection of cartoons and illustrations.

The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
Lest we should see where we are;
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the dark
Who have never been happy or good.
-- W.H. Auden, from "September 1, 1939"
[as excerpted and slightly misquoted (the original has "Children afraid of the night") without attribution by George Orwell in "Pleasure Spots". Personally, Orwell's version seems to me an improvement.]

Suprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.
-- Jane Austen, Emma [Mr. Knightly]

Fragmentary, pale, momentary; almost nothing; glimpsed and gone; as it were, a faint human hand thrust up, never to reappear, from beneath the rolling waters of Time, he forever haunts my memory and solicits my weak imagination. Nothing is told of him but that once, abruptly, he asked a question and received an answer.
-- Max Beerbohm, "A Clergyman" , And Even Now

If the children of today can get electric grain elevators and tin automobiles for Christmas, why aren't they that much better off than their grandfathers who got only wristlets? Learning the value of money, which seems to be the only argument of the stand-patters, doesn't hold very much water as a Christmas slogan. The value of money can be learned in just about five minutes when the time comes, but Christmas is not the season.
--- Robert Benchley, "A Good Old-Fashioned Christmas."

This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast --- man's laws, not God's --- and if you cut them down ... d'you really think you could stand upright, in the wind that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of the law, for my own safety's sake.
-- Robert Bolt, ``A Man for All Seasons''.

Let us admit what all idealists admit: that the nature of the world is hallucinatory. Let us do what no idealist has done; let us look for the unrealities that confirm that nature. We shall find them, I believe, in the antinomies of Kant and in Zeno's dialectic.

``The greatest sorcerer [writes Novalis memorably] would be the one who bewitched himself to the point of taking his own phantasmagoria for autonomous apparitions. Would not this be true of us?''

I believe that it is. We (the undivided divinity that operates within us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it strong, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and secure in time; but we have allowed tenuous, eternal interstices of injustice in its structure so we may know that it is false.
-- Jorge Luis Borges, ``Avatars of the Tortoise,'' Other Inquisitions.

[The quote from Novalis is from Teplitz Fragments #48.]

The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though it was supernatural. He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality.
-- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Circular Ruins"

That crowded day gave me three heterogeneous surprises: the physical happiness I experienced when they told me that Paris had been liberated; the discovery that a collective emotion can be noble; the enigmatic and obvious enthusiasm of many who were supporters of Hitler.
-- Jorge Luis Borges, "A Comment on August 23, 1944"

Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research)

Not with vain tears, when we're beyond the sun
We'll beat on the substantial doors, nor tread
Those dusty high-roads of the aimless dead
Plaintive for Earth; but rather turn and run
Down some close-covered by-way of the air,
Some low sweet alley between wind and wind,
Stoop under faint gleams, thread the shadows,find
Some whispering ghost-forgotten nook, and there

Spend in pure converse our eternal day;
Think each in each, immediately wise;
Learn all we lacked before; hear, know, and say
What this tumultuous body now denies;
And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes.

-- Rupert Brooke

Many of the high-flown metaphysical and moral conclusions drawn from `Celtic' art by its admiring critics are suspiciously like an elaboration of the idea that curves are more natural than corners. With a curve, like with a Celt, you might be anywhere and one thing flows into another; with a corner, like with an Anglo-Saxon, you know where you are: nature makes curves, humanity makes corners.
-- Malcolm Chapman, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth p. 226.

He began describing very minutely the incident of the kiss, and a moment later relapsed into silence. . . . In the course of that moment he had told everything, and it surprised him dreadfully to find how short a time it took him to tell it. He had imagined that he could have been telling the story of the kiss till next morning.
-- Anton Chekhov, "The Kiss"

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
-- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Common sense is a wild thing, savage and beyond rules.
-- G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study.

The great churchmen of the eleventh and twelfth centuries came from all over Europe. Anselm came from Aosta, via Normandy, to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Lanfranc had made the same journey, starting from Pavia. ... It couldn't happen in the Church, or politics, today; one can't imagine two consecutive archbishops of Canterbury being Italian. But it could happen --- does happen --- in the field of science; which shows that where some way of thought or human activity is really vital to us, internationalism is accepted unhesitatingly.
-- Kenneth Clark, Civilisation

The occupational vice of academics is vanity.
--- Philip J. Davis, in conversation.

All the other swindlers on earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own as good money! An obliging stranger, under pretense of compactly folding up my bank-notes for security's sake, abstracts the notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine, when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them to myself as notes!
-- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations chapter 28.

"That is a curious association of ideas, is it not, mamma?"

"Upon my word, my dear, I don't know" replied Mrs. Nickleby. "Roast pig --- let me see. On the day five weeks after you were christened, we had a roast --- no that couldn't have been a pig, either, because I recollect there were a pair of them to carve, and your poor papa and I could never have thought of sitting down to two pigs --- they must have been partridges. Roast pig! I hardly think we ever could have had one, now I come to remember, for your papa could never bear the sight of them in the shops, and used to say they always put him in mind of very little babies, only the pigs had much fairer complexions; and he had a horror of little babies, too, because he couldn't very well afford any increase to his family and had a natural dislike to the subject. It's very odd now, what can have put that in my head. I recollect dining once at Mrs. Bevan's, in that broad street, round the corner by the coachmaker's, where the tipsy man fell through the cellar-flap of an empty house nearly a week before quarter-day and wasn't found till the new tenant went in --- and we had roast pig there. It must be that, I think that reminds me of it, especially as there was a little bird in the room that would keep on singing all the time of dinner --- at least, not a little bird, for it was a parrot, and he didn't sing exactly, for he talked and swore dreadfully, but I think it must be that."
-- Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, chapter 41.

There are three adjectives in English that are generally used pejoratively, but, if things were rightly understood, would be terms of the highest praise: "pharisaical", "puritanical", and "jesuitical".
-- Louis Finkelstein, in addressing a meeting of Jesuits [quoted from memory]

The company of the ruler is the darkness of the longest night. Seek light from the sun, and be hopeful for its rise.
-- Hafez.

Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Wakefield", Twice Told Tales

To believe that wherever a best manuscript gives possible readings it gives true readings, and that only where it gives impossible readings does it give false readings is to believe that an incompetent editor is the darling of Providence, which has given its angels charge over him lest at any time his sloth and folly should produce their natural results and incur their appropriate penalty. Chance and the common course of nature will not bring it to pass that the readings of an MS are right whenever they are possible and impossible wherever they are wrong; that requires divine intervention; and when one considers the history of man and the spectacle of the universe I hope one may say without impiety that divine intervention might have been better employed elsewhere.
-- A.E. Housman, Preface to Manilius

And oh, my son, be, on the one hand, good,
And do not, on the other hand, be bad,
For that is very much the safest plan.
-- A.E. Housman, "Fragment of a Greek Tragedy"

The night is freezing fast
    Tomorrow comes December
        And winterfalls of old
Are with me from the past;
    And chiefly I remember
        How Dick would hate the cold.

Fall, winter, fall; for he,
    Prompt hand and headpiece clever,
        Has woven a winter robe,
And made of earth and sea
    His overcoat for ever,
        And wears the turning globe.

--- A.E. Housman, "The Night Is Freezing Fast"

Thus says the Lord: Let not the wise glory in his wisdom; and let not the strong glory in his strength; let not the rich glory in his riches. But let him who glories, glory in this: that he understands and knows Me. For I the Lord act with kindness, justice, and righteousness in the world; for in these I delight, declares the Lord.
-- Jeremiah 9:22-23.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent; deliberation, which those who begin it by prudence, and continue it with subtilty, must, after long expence of thought, conclude by chance. To prefer one future mode of life to another upon just reasons, requires faculties which it has not pleased our Creator to give us. If therefore the profession you have chosen has some unexpected inconveniences, console yourself by reflecting that no profession is without them; and that all the importunities and perplexities of business are softness and luxury, compared with the incessant cravings of vacancy and the unsatisfactory expedients of idleness.
-- Samuel Johnson, Letter to James Boswell, Aug. 21, 1766.

Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to error. Truth, Sir, is a cow that will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.
-- Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson July 21, 1762.

As someone said to me -- I can't remember now who it was -- it is really remarkable that when you wake up in the morning you nearly always find everything in exactly the same place as the evening before. For when asleep and dreaming you are, apparently at least, in an essentially different state from that of wakefulness; and therefore, as that man truly said, it requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold as it were of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening. That was why, he said, the moment of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day.
-- Franz Kafka, deleted passage from The Trial.

The plain, discomfiting fact is that every one of us who has watched plays and films or read books or listened to music or looked at paintings and architecture is, in some measure, self-deceived. Filed away in the recesses of our minds are thousands of opinions that we have accumulated through our lives, and they make us think that we know what we think on all these subjects. We do not. All we know is what we once thought, and any earlier view of a work, if tested, might be hugely different from what we would think now.
-- Stanley Kaufmann, "In Our Heads," The New Republic August 21, 2000, pp. 32-34.

Refutations, inconsistencies, criticism in general in general are very important but only if they lead to improvement. A mere refutation is no victory. If mere criticism, even though correct, had authority, Berkeley would have stopped the development of mathematics and Dirac could not have found an editor for his papers.
-- Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations

Aorta (pronounced A-orta) is the vessel through which courses the life-blood of Strine [Australian] public opinion. Aorta is a composite but non-existant Authority which is held responsible for practically everything unpleasant in the Strine way of life; for the punishment of criminals; for the weather; for the Bomb and the Pill; for all public transport; and for all the manifold irritating trivia of everyday living. ...

Aorta is, in fact, the personification of the benevolently paternal welfare State to which all Strines - being fiercely independant and individualistic - appeal for help and comfort in moments of frustration and anguish. The following are typical examples of such appeals. ...

`Aorta stop all these transistors from cummer ninner the country. Look what they doone to the weather. All this rine! Doan tell me it's not all these transistors - an all these hydrigen bombs too. Aorta stoppem!'

`Aorta have more buses. An aorta mikem smaller so they don't take up half the road. An aorta put more seats innem so you doan tefter stann all the time. An aorta have more room innem - you carn tardly move innem air so crairded. Aorta do something about it.'
-- Afferbeck Lauder, Let Stalk Strine .

As we close it [Boswell's Life of Johnson], the club room is before us, and the table on which stand the omelet for Nugent and the lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live forever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke and the tall thin form of Langton, the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon tapping his snuffbox and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up, the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the ``Why, sir!'', and ``What then, sir!'' and the ``No, sir!'' and the ``You don't see your way through the question, sir!''

What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity! To be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries! That kind of fame which is commonly the most transient is in his case the most durable. The reputation of those writings which he probably expected to be immortal is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk, the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.
-- Thomas Macaulay, "Samuel Johnson".

The end result of artificial intelligence will be to show that intelligence is impossible, and that the reports of it have been due to experimental error.
-- Drew McDermott, in conversation [quoted from memory].

We are going farther and farther away from the light at Sinai, yet we do not come any closer to the light of the Messiah.
-- Menahem Mendel of Kotzk.

Someone once described Shelley as a beautiful and ineffective angel beating his luminous wings against the void in vain.
Which is certainly describing with might and main.
But probably means that we are all brothers under our pelts.
And that Shelley went around pulling doors marked PUSH and pushing doors marked PULL just like everybody else.
-- Ogden Nash, You and Me and P.B. Shelley

The common belief that we gain "historical perspective" with increasing distance seems to me utterly to misrepresent the actual situation. What we gain is merely confidence in generalizations which we would never dare make if we had access to the real wealth of contemporary evidence.
--- Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity

And if I went inside ... I think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in myself!
-- George Orwell, "Such, Such were the Joys"

Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
-- George Orwell, "Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali"

[P]olitical language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets; this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry; this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps; this is called elimination of unreliable elements.
--- George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

It is fashionable to say that in poetry only the words count and the "meaning" is irrelevant, but in fact every poem contains a prose meaning, and when the poem is any good, it is a meaning that the poet urgently wishes to express. All art is to some extent propaganda. ...

Mr Eliot speaks also of

the intolerable wrestle
with words and meaning. The poetry does not matter.

Plenty of people who are quite capable of being objective about sea urchins, say, or the square root of 2, become schizophrenic if they have to think about the sources of their own income.
-- George Orwell, "Antisemitism in Britain".

If one has once read Shakespeare with attention, it is not easy to go a day without quoting him.
-- George Orwell, "Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool."
[For myself, I can't say I find this with Shakespeare, but I do find it with Orwell himself. -- ESD]

Inside the strongest citadel he can construct, the human being awaits his beseiger.
-- Clara Claiborne Park, The Siege

The main point about Gattling's Limelight Play was, of course, his essential modesty. He was one of the most ignorant and ill-educated men I have ever met, and it was therefore always a particular pleasure to hear him say, to a perfectly ordinary question, "I don't know" slowly, kindly, and distinctly. He was able to indicate, by the tone of his voice, that although he know practically everything about practically everything, and almost everything about this really, yet the mere fact that he knew such a tremendous lot about it made him realise, as we couldn't possibly, that the question was so intextricably two-sided that only a smart-Alec would ever dream of trying to pass judgement either way.
--- Stephen Potter, Lifemanship

The reader who will, throughout this essay on the ambiguity of truth, substitute "butter" for "truth" and "margarine" for "falsehood", will find that the point involved is one which has no special relevance to the nature of truth.
--- Bertrand Russell, "Pragmatism" in Philosophical Essays

I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must, of course, admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system; since both are at present perfect, this must weigh against it.
--- Bertrand Russell, "Introduction: On the Value of Skepticism" in Skeptical Essays

Indeed, such inadequacies as we have seemed to find in empiricism have been discovered by strict adherence to a doctrine by which empiricist philosophy has been inspired: that all human knowledge is uncertain, inexact, and partial. To this doctrine we have not found any limitation whatever.
-- Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits

What is our impression of Tevye so far? An indulgent and understanding father, something of a weakling as well. For he could not pretend to himself that he had acted in the best interests of his daughters. Who was to guarantee that either Zeitel or Hodel had character enough to justify their decisions? Love dies, revolutionary ardor fades, the bitter pressure of the world remains.
-- Maurice Samuel, The World of Sholom Aleichem

To me it is one of the most horrible of the horrible deeds ascribed to [the Bible's] heroes or its villains: this exuberant killing of an extra hundred Philistines, this exuberant mutilation of an extra hundred corpses, as though the first hundred, the condition of the bargain, were unworthy of the esteem in which David held himself or of his regard for Princess Michal.

... I, who see David as the most passionate of the God-seekers, have never ceased to recoil from it. Almost as much as the murder of Uriah, I juxtapose it with the words so often spoken of David: "For the Lord was with him".

What do these words mean? ... David's career was brilliant in the light of the after ages; to one who wrote shortly after his death it was a mixed thing; and whatever successes he scored were more than offset by failures and by personal wretchedness ... In what sense, then was God with him? In a literal sense that perhaps even the chronicler did not always mean; for the chronicler himself is an evolving figure, and we who interpret him are also chroniclers. God was with David in a terrifically literal sense; for David was possessed, haunted, inhabited, and harassed by God-consciousness. His earthly passions were demonic; equally demonic, if one may so put it, was his anguish over them, and his longing to find himself in God. The heart that could riot in blood-lust and well with self-righteousness, could tremble like a child's before the denunciation of the prophet Nathan, accepting punishment without protest; and it could beat to strains of unearthly music, to give it forth again for our everlasting consolation.
-- Maurice Samuel, Certain People of the Book.
[The incident of David killing and circumcising 200 Philistines is in I Samuel 18:20-27.]

``All great men are bad,'' says Lord Acton flatly. We certainly do not know of anyone who has achieved and maintained wordly greatness without dishonesty, without letting down friends, withing hitting rivals below the belt; and, above all, without instinctively weighing most persons, as and when met, for usefulness in the cause. No matter how noble the cause, this automatic reduction of human beings to functional units is of the essence of badness. No matter, too, how well subordinated the love of power, the need of it for effective worldly action is a corrupting reality which will not disappear from the human scene until the Messianic era.
-- Maurice Samuel, Certain People of the Book.

He who withdraws completely from the worldly struggle without actually leaving this world does not diminish the volume of the struggle; he only lets his share be taken over.
-- Maurice Samuel, Prince of the Ghetto

[I]f a "renegade" Jew is homesick for the Passover as the "renegade" Christian for Christmas, and the two are in these respects equally miserable, there is a particular toment reserved for the Jew at Passover time. He too is surrounded by reminders, but they are of a terrible and ambiguous character. The Passover coincides with the time of the Christian Easter; and in certain lands Easter is the season for whipping up vengeful emotions round the death of Christ. Then the Jew must feel rising all about him that ancient, recurrent annual flood-tide of fury against his people. Let us assume that he has not accepted the Christian faith --- he has lost only his Judaism, not his self-respect. Still he must feel he has betrayed someone. For the sake of "intellectual honesty" he is not there, in the beleaguered citadel. For the sake of intellectual honesty he is on the outside, living with safety (at least transient) among the armies of the besiegers.

And then he remembers incidents out of the past. There mingle in him mind poignant recollections of his own childhood seders and the seders of neighbors; the solemnity and the fun, the divinity and the earthliness; parents, brothers, sisters. His mind casts back to the antiquity of the ritual. He thinks of seders in other climes, celebrants in other costumes; and with the seders he remembers the lowering, threatening world outside.
-- Maurice Samuel, Prince of the Ghetto

CANDIDA. Wouldn't you like to present me with a new [scrubbing brush] with an ivory back inlaid with mother-of-pearl?

MARCHBANKS [softly and musically but sadly and longingly] No, not a scrubbing brush but a boat: a tiny shallop to sail away in, far away from the world, where the marble floors are washed by the rain and dried by the sun; where the south wind dusts the beautiful green and purple carpets. Or a chariot! to carry us up into the sky, where the lamps are stars and don't need to be filled with parafin oil every day.

MOREL [harshly] And where there is nothing to do but to be idle, selfish, and useless.

CANDIDA [jarred] Oh James! How could you spoil it all?

MARCHBANKS [firing up] Yes, to be idle, selfish, and useless: that is, to be beautiful, free and happy; hasnt every man desired that with all his soul for the woman he loves?

-- George Bernard Shaw, Candida.

[The quotations are from Leviticus 26:42, 26:45, 26:44; Deuteronomy 30:3, 30:4; Isaiah 44:22, 43:25, 1:18; Ezekiel 36:25; Deuteronomy 4:31, 30:6, 4:29; and Isaiah 56.7.]

Gratitude isn't an emotion. But the expectation of gratitude is a very lively one.
-- C.P. Snow, The Masters chap. 25.

Why won't they see what matters? I want a man who knows something about himself. And is appalled. And has to forgive himself to get along.
-- C.P. Snow, The Masters

There was, had he looked, a sadder sight beside him, the no longer quite human faces of the afflicted girls [the accusers in the Salem witch trials]. Seven months of carefully cultivated hysteria had not improved these flowers of Puritan maidenhood. They had coarsened and toughened and become nearly as insensible to normal feeling as so many automata. People who shrank from the cruelty of their jests at the dying misjudged them, for they were no more capable of conscious cruelty than of any other really human feeling. The very violence of their apparent emotion disguised a sick inner apathy. Given over so long to a world of dark fantasy, they were no longer capable of response to the electric shock of reality.

... They were famous; they were powerful; no one in Massachussetts had such power over life and death as they. But they were also alone. They created a little lifeless vacuum about them wherever they moved. ...

They did not mind, for they lived in a dream, their senses so spellbound that they did not know how bad a dream it was, how stale with repetition, without the interpolation of a fresh idea since they had fallen into it. They went on and on in the old bad dream, responding to suggestion as insensately as a machine responds to the touch of a hand.

--- Marion Starkey, The Devil In Massachusetts.

Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.
The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;
In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey;
In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men's tears;
With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years:
With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour;
And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that devour:
And its vapour and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be;
And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of the sea:
And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air:
And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is made bare.
Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods ?
Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods ?
All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past;
Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last
In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of things,
Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you for kings.
Though the feet of thine high priests tread where thy lords and our forefathers trod,
Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead art a God,
Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her head,
Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead.
-- Algernon Swinburne, from "Hymn to Proserpine"

When one state is completely dependent on another, it is the weaker that can call the tune; it can threaten to collapse unless supported, and its protector has no answering threat to return.
--- A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe pp. 29-30 (a propos of the Papal States and France under Louis Napoleon).

Twenty years ago there was still living at Blérancourt a great-niece of St. Just, who would show to the visitor a few relics of her ``poor Uncle Anthony.'' That was all he was to her. But can history, after all, say anything truer about him? There are a few men who seem to be masters of their destiny, and to out-top their times. They must be described as the public knew them. Their portraits must be painted full-length, in uniform and orders, sword and cocked hat, framed in a food of gilt, and hung on the line in the big room of history. They have ceased to belong to themselves: they belong to the nation. They have ceased even to be themselves: they have become something else that they thought better. It would be improper for history to represent them in undress, or off their guard. The public would not recognize them: they would hardly know themselves.

But it is not to those pictures that we go even for the best examples of an artist: he has not been able, or has not been allowed, to get behind the conventional figure of his sitter. If we want art, if we want life, if we want the portrayal of character, we are more likely to find it in the ``portrait of an unknown gentleman'' that the artist painted for the love of his subject, not for cash; or in the likenesses of those who were the victims rather than the masters of their destiny. They may have ruined their causes, they may have sacrificed their lives, but they did not lose themselves. We need show them no conventional deference. We can treat them on the only footing that is proper between man and man --- one of friendly understanding and fellow feeling. And that is the fittest medium of historical portraiture.

Poor Uncle Anthony! ``I have done badly,'' he had written; ``but I shall be able to do better.'' He had made that the rule of his life. He had sent away his mistress, and forsworn women. He had atoned for the robbery of his home by public incorruptibility. The writer of indecent verse had become the preacher of a virtuous republic. Only, though it all he had kept, as a symbol of his unalterable pride, the smart coat and the high collar. They had been through strange experiences --- battles and executions, committees and speeches, cruel attacks and heroic defenses, flattery and hatred, success suddenly changed into failure. To leap to fame at twenty-three, and die in infamy at twenty-seven --- that was his career. There was no one with more to give to his country --- youth, courage, ability, and enthusiasm: yet there was not one of its instruments that the blind force of the Revolution more contemptuously used, and broke, and flung aside.

--- J.M. Thompson, Leaders of the French Revolution, 1948.

[I do not at all endorse this as a view of Antoine St. Just, who, from everything I have ever seen, including most of this essay, was a horrible, murderous, totalitarian avant la lettre, whose death on the guillotine was much less to be regretted than the thousands of innocent victims for whose deaths he was in part responsible. I cannot imagine how J.M. Thompson could view him with "fellow feeling". But, ignoring the particular subject, the passage seems to me very moving. Certainly, it stuck in my mind quite clearly over a period of three decades, between the time that I lost the book moving to graduate school and the time in 2011 when I recalled it at the library to look up this passage. --- ESD]

At present, our houses are cluttered and defiled with it [furniture], and a good housewife would sweep the greater part into the dust hole and not leave her morning's work undone. Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's morning work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust.
-- H.D. Thoreau, Walden

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the rails by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come, and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, -- determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed by that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion that covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.
-- H.D. Thoreau, Walden

"Do you remember that bit of rabbit, Mr. Frodo?" he said. "And our place under the warm bank in Captain Faramir's country, the day I saw an oliphaunt?"

"No, I am afraid not, Sam," said Frodo. "At least, I know that such things happened, but I cannot see them. No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades."
-- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

During the night, A, though sleeping with B, dreams of C. C stands at the furthest extremity or (if the image is considered two-dimensionally) the apogee of a curved driveway, perhaps a dream-refraction of the driveway of the house that had once been their shared home. Her figure, though small in the perspective, is vivid, clad in a tomato-red summer dress; he head is thrown back, her hands are on her hips, and her legs have taken a wide, confident stance. She is flaunting herself, perhaps laughing; his impression is of intense, female vitality. He awakes troubled. The sleep of B beside him is not disturbed; she rests in the certainty that A loves her. Indeed, he has left C for her, to prove it.

PROBLEM: Which has he more profoundly betrayed, B or C?
-- John Updike, "Problems", New Yorker, November 3, 1975.

As the years went by and age overtook her [Katharine White], there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion --- the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.
-- E.B. White, Introduction to Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katharine White.

...

They say that she's sunken, they say that she fell
From the narrow and virtuous path,
But her formal French gardens are sunken as well
And so is her pink marble bath.

--- Ruth and Eugene Willis "We Never Mention Aunt Clara" See here for the authorship.

As a general rule, in my dealings with the delicately-nurtured, I am the soul of knightly chivalry --- suave, genial, and polished. But I can on occasion say the bitter, cutting thing, and I said it now.

"Oh," I said.

-- P.G. Wodehouse, "Jeeves and the Kid Clementina", Very Good, Jeeves!

[Note: Somewhere P.G. Wodehouse repeats this joke, with a similar build up, but with the punchline " `Oh,' I said and I meant it to sting." But I haven't been able to find this again. -- ESD]

"It is a recognized fact, sir, that there is nothing that so satisfactorily unites individuals who have been so unfortunate as to quarrel amongst themselves as a strong mutual dislike for some definite person. ... Remembering this, it occurred to me that were you, sir, to be established as the person responsible for the ladies and gentlemen being forced to spend the night in the garden, everybody would take so strong a dislike to you that in this common sympathy they would sooner or later come together."

I would have spoken, but he continued.

"And such proved to be the case. All, as you see, sir, is now well. After your departure on the bicycle, the various estranged parties agreed so heartily in their abuse of you that the ice, if I may use the expression, was broken, and it was not long before Mr Glossop was walking beneath the trees with Miss Angela, telling her anecdotes of your career at the university in exchange for hers regarding your childhood, while Mr Fink-Nottle, leaning against the sun-dial, held Miss Bassett enthralled with stories of your school-days."
-- P.G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves.

Zuangzi and Huizi were strolling one day on the bridge over the River Hao. Zhaungzi observed, "See how the minnows come out and dart around where they please! That's what fish really enjoy!"

"You are not a fish," said Huizi, "How do you know what fish enjoy?"

"You are not I," replied Zhuangzi, "so how do you know I don't know what fish enjoy?"

-- Zhuangzi