A cornucopia of elegant excerpts, a collectanea of passages, a florilegium of ideas, a gallimaufry of aperçus, musing flowers of yore, an anthologia of verse (a Parnassus), an omnium gatherum of etymologies and origins, all singled out carefully by hand.
Robinson Jeffers, from The Tower Beyond Tragedy:
Too much joy is a message-bearer of misery.
A little is good; but come too much and it devours us. Therefore we give of a great harvest
Sheaves to the smiling Gods; and therefore out of a full cup we pour the quarter. No man
Dare take all that God sends him, whom God favors, or destruction
Rides into the house in the last basket.
Friedrich Schiller, Philosophical Letters, Prefatory Remarks, trans. unknown, (George Bell and Sons, 1875), p. 373:
Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error, and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of tranquil wisdom.
John Norris (1657-1711), The Parting, IV.-VI.:
How fading are the Joys we dote upon,
Like Apparitions seen and gone:
But those which soonest take their flight,
Are the most exquisite and strong,
Like Angels visits, short and bright;
Mortality's too weak to bear them long.
No pleasure certainly is so divine
As when two Souls in Love combine:
He has the substance of all bliss,
To whom a Vertuous Friend is given,
So sweet harmonious Friendship is,
Add but Eternity, you'll make it Heaven.
The Minutes in your conversation spent
Were Festivals of true content.
Here, here, an Ark of pleasing rest,
My Soul had found that restless Dove,
My present State methought was best,
I envy'd none below, scarce those above.
Mr. Catcott, The Story of Hippolytus, bk. XV. from Ovid's Metamorphoses:
How oft (in vain) the Son of Theseus said,
Thy stormy Sorrows be with Patience laid;
Nor are thy Fortunes to be wept alone,
Weigh others' Woes, and learn to bear thine own.
José Ortega y Gasset, Notes on the Novel, tr. Helene Weyl:
Let everybody look in his own past for the circumstances under which he learned most about the world, and he will find that it was not when he deliberately set himself to seeing and nothing but seeing. It is not the countryside we visited as sightseers that we know best. Tourists, although exclusively preoccupied with observing and thus in a position to carry home the richest booty of knowledge, are known to gather superficial information; their contact with a city or a country is not intimate enough to reveal the peculiar conditions. Peasants, on the other hand, whose relation to the land is one of pure interest, are apt to betray, as anyone who has traveled in rural districts will know, an amazing ignorance of their own country. Of all that surrounds them they know only such things as bear directly on their agricultural concerns.
This indicates that the most favorable position for gathering knowledge—that is, for absorbing the largest number and the best quality of objective data—lies somewhere in between pure contemplation and pressing interest. Some vital interests that are not too narrow and oppressive are required for organizing our contemplation; they must limit and articulate it by imposing upon it a perspective of attention. With respect to the countryside the hunter that hunts for sport may, coeteris paribus, be said to know a region best and to come into most profitable touch with all the manifold sides of the terrain. As to cities, we have seen none so well as those in which we lived in love. Love, in gathering all our soul around its delightful object, endowed us with a keener sensibility that took in the environment without making it the deliberate center of vision.
André Chénier, Elégies XXV, tr. Arthur Symons, in: The Modern Book of French Verse, 1920, pp. 94-5:
Every man has his sorrows; yet each still
Hides under a calm forehead his own ill.
Each pities but himself. Each in his grief
Envies his neighbor: he too seeks relief;
For one man's pain is of no other known:
They hide their sorrows as he hides his own;
And each, with tears and aching heart, can sigh:
All other men are happy, but not I.
They are unhappy all. They, desolate,
Cry against heaven and bid heaven change their fate.
Their fate is changed; they soon, with fresh tears, know
They have but changed one for another woe.
Tout homme a ses douleurs. Mais aux yeux de ses frères
Chacun d'un front serein déguise ses misères.
Chacun ne plaint que soi. Chacun dans son ennui
Envie un autre humain qui se plaint comme lui.
Nul des autres mortels ne mesure les peines,
Qu'ils savent tous cacher comme il cache les siennes;
Et chacun, l'oeil en pleurs, en son coeur douloureux
Se dit: «Excepté moi, tout le monde est heureux.»
Ils sont tous malheureux. Leur prière importune
Crie et demande au ciel de changer leur fortune.
Ils changent; et bientôt, versant de nouveaux pleurs,
Ils trouvent qu'ils n'ont fait que changer de malheurs.
Sir Philip Sidney, from Astrophel and Stella:
With how sad steps, O Moon! thou climb'st the skies,Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, tr. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt, 2006, p. 47:
The fear [Angst] of life itself drives man out of the centrum into which he was created: for this centrum, as the purest essence of all willing, is for each particular will a consuming fire; in order to be able to live within it the man of all particularity must become extinct [absterben], which is why the attempt to step out of this center into the periphery is almost necessary in order to seek there some calm.
Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit), tr. T. Churchill, 1800, bk. VIII., ch. 2, last para.:
Great Spirit of the world, with what eyes dost thou contemplate all the shadowy forms and visions that course each other on this our globe! For we are shadows, and dreams of shadows are all that our fancies imagine. As little as we are capable of respiring pure air, as little can pure reason impart itself wholly at present to our compound clay-formed shell. Yet, amid all the errors of the imagination, the human species is molding to it; men are attached to figures because they express things, and thus through the thickest clouds they seek and perceive rays of truth. Happy the chosen few who proceed, as far as is possible in our limited sphere, from fancies to essences, that is, from infancy to manhood, and whose clear understandings go through the history of their brethren with this end in view. The mind nobly expands when it is able to emerge from the narrow circle which climate and education have drawn around it, and learns from other nations at least what may be dispensed with by man. How much that we have been accustomed to consider as absolutely necessary do we find others live without, and consequently perceive to be by no means indispensable! Numberless ideas, which we have often admitted as the most general principles of the human understanding, disappear in this place and that with the climate, as the land vanishes like a mist from the eye of the navigator. What one nation holds indispensable to the circle of its thoughts has never entered into the mind of a second, and by a third has been deemed injurious. Thus we wander over the earth in a labyrinth of human fancies; but the question is: where is the central point of the labyrinth to which all our wanderings may be traced, as refracted rays to the Sun?
Isocrates 1.18-19, To Demonicus (Loeb edition, vol. I., tr. George Norlin, p. 15):
If you love knowledge, you will be a master of knowledge. What you have come to know, preserve by exercise; what you have not learned, seek to add to your knowledge; for it is as reprehensible to hear a profitable saying and not grasp it as to be offered a good gift by one's friends and not accept it. Spend your leisure time in cultivating an ear attentive to discourse, for in this way you will find that you learn with ease what others have found out with difficulty. Believe that many precepts are better than much wealth; for wealth quickly fails us, but precepts abide through all time; for wisdom alone of all possessions is imperishable. Do not hesitate to travel a long road to those who profess to offer some useful instruction; for it were a shame, when merchants cross vast seas in order to increase their store of wealth, that the young should not endure even journeys by land to improve their understanding.
ἐὰν ᾖς φιλομαθής, ἔσει πολυμαθής. ἃ μὲν ἐπίστασαι, ταῦτα διαφύλαττε ταῖς μελέταις, ἃ δὲ μὴ μεμάθηκας, προσλάμβανε ταῖς ἐπιστήμαις· ὁμοίως γὰρ αἰσχρὸν ἀκούσαντα χρήσιμον λόγον μὴ μαθεῖν καὶ διδόμενόν τι ἀγαθὸν παρὰ τῶν φίλων μὴ λαβεῖν. κατανάλισκε τὴν ἐν τῷ βίῳ σχολὴν εἰς τὴν τῶν λόγων φιληκοΐαν· οὕτω γὰρ τὰ τοῖς ἄλλοις χαλεπῶς εὑρημένα συμβήσεταί σοι ῥᾳδίως μανθάνειν. ἡγοῦ τῶν ἀκουσμάτων πολλὰ πολλῶν εἶναι χρημάτων κρείττω· τὰ μὲν γὰρ ταχέως ἀπολείπει, τὰ δὲ πάντα τὸν χρόνον παραμένει· σοφία γὰρ μόνον τῶν κτημάτων ἀθάνατον. μὴ κατόκνει μακρὰν ὁδὸν πορεύεσθαι πρὸς τοὺς διδάσκειν τι χρήσιμον ἐπαγγελλομένους· αἰσχρὸν γὰρ τοὺς μὲν ἐμπόρους τηλικαῦτα πελάγη διαπερᾶν ἕνεκα τοῦ πλείω ποιῆσαι τὴν ὑπάρχουσαν οὐσίαν, τοὺς δὲ νεωτέρους μηδὲ τὰς κατὰ γῆν πορείας ὑπομένειν ἐπὶ τῷ βελτίω καταστῆσαι τὴν αὑτῶν διάνοιαν.
Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country (Edinburgh, 1881), ch. XI., Books and Gardens, pp. 246, 248-9:
Most men seek solitude from wounded vanity, from disappointed ambition, from a miscarriage in the passions; but some others from native instinct, as a duckling seeks water. I have taken to my solitude, such as it is, from an indolent turn of mind, and this solitude I sweeten by an imaginative sympathy which re-creates the past for me,—the past of the world, as well as the past which belongs to me as an individual,—and which makes me independent of the passing moment. . . .
In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past. I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the Pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the march of Cambyses. I sit as in a theatre,—the stage is time, the play is the play of the world. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp, what processions file past, what cities burn to heaven, what crowds of captives are dragged at the chariot-wheels of conquerors! I hiss, or cry "Bravo," when the great actors come on the shaking stage. I am a Roman emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift Homer, and I shout with Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the unpeopled Syrian plains, the out-comings and in-goings of the patriarchs, Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob's guile, Esau's face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph's splendid funeral procession,—all these things I find within the boards of my Old Testament. What a silence in those old books as of a half-peopled world; what bleating of flocks; what green pastoral rest; what indubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood and war I hear the bleating of Abraham's flocks, the tinkling of the bells of Rebekah's camels. O men and women so far separated yet so near, so strange yet so well known, by what miraculous power do I know ye all! Books are the true Elysian fields, where the spirits of the dead converse; and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What king's court can boast such company? What school of philosophy such wisdom? The wit of the ancient world is glancing and flashing there. There is Pan's pipe, there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are not collections of printed pages, they are ghosts. I take one down, and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men and things of which it alone possesses knowledge. I call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than ever did Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in my library, but it is the dead, not the living, that attend my levees.
Thomas Hope, Anastasius; or, Memoirs of a Greek (2nd edt. in three volumes, London, 1820), vol. III., pp. 103-4:
Alas! what am I to believe? Do not philosophers maintain that the passions are the only road to knowledge, to power, and to virtue? that the inert being who never has felt their influence on his own mind knows not how to guide the will of others, sees man as a machine whose movements baffle his skill, constantly miscalculates the views and conduct of his fellow creatures, and, only attempting to move men like blocks by physical force, must find a resistance which mocks his inadequate impulse. Without the passion of love would women encounter the pangs which preserve our species? without that of ambition would man endure the toil of maintaining public order, through means of a complicated polity? Is it not the passion of avarice alone that brings in contact, for universal benefit, the industry and the produce of the most distant countries? and what but the passion for fame makes man risk health, fortune, nay life itself, for the advantages, perhaps the amusement, of generations yet unborn? Like the heat of the sun, that of the passions may strengthen a few poisons, but alone it brings forth all the sweets and healthful plants of the creation.
H— shook his head. «It is feeling,» said he, «which, like the sun's genial warmth, ripens each fairest fruit. Passions, like a scorching blaze, only burn them to ashes. Would you behold the effects of the former; look at my young friend here. Calm, healthful and blooming, he is the bee that sucks the flowers of every clime, some day to add their honey to the stores of his grateful countrymen. Would you know the consequence of the latter; look in the brook beside you.»
I advanced my head over the glassy pool: but from its deep bosom up rose to meet my searching eye, a countenance so pale and ghastly—a cheek so wan and so feverish—that I started back with horror. I felt the reproof, bowed assent, and said no more.
Francis Quarles (1592 – 1644), The Vanity of the World:
False world, thou ly'st: thou canst not lend
The least delight:
Thy favors cannot gain a friend,
They are so slight:
Thy morning pleasures make an end
To please at night:
Poor are the wants that thou supply'st,
And yet thou vaunt'st, and yet thou vy'st
With heaven: fond earth, thou boasts; false world, thou ly'st.
Thy babbling tongue tells golden tales
Of endless treasure;
Thy bounty offers easy sales
Of lasting pleasure;
Thou ask'st the conscience what she ails,
And swear'st to ease her;
There's none can want where thou supply'st;
There's none can give where thou deny'st.
Alas! fond world, thou boasts; false world, thou ly'st.
What well-advisèd ear regards
What earth can say?
Thy words are gold, but thy regards
Are painted clay:
Thy cunning can but pack the cards,
Thou canst not play:
Thy game at weakest, still thou vy'st;
If seen, and then revy'd, deny'st:
Thou art not what thou seem'st; false world, thou ly'st.
Thy tinsel bosom seems a mint
Of new-coined treasure;
A paradise, that has no stint,
No change, no measure;
A painted cask, but nothing in 't,
Nor wealth, nor pleasure:
Vain earth! that falsely thus comply'st
With man; vain man! that thou rely'st
On earth; vain man, thou dot'st; vain earth, thou ly'st.
What mean dull souls, in this high measure,
To haberdash
In earth's base wares, whose greatest treasure
Is dross and trash?
The height of whose enchanting pleasure
Is but a flash?
Are these the goods that thou supply'st
Us mortals with? Are these the high'st?
Can these bring cordial peace? false world, thou ly'st.
Isaac Disræli, Curiosities of Literature, Poets, Philosophers, and Artists, made by Accident:
Father Malebranche having completed his studies in philosophy and theology without any other intention than devoting himself to some religious order, little expected the celebrity his works acquired for him. Loitering in an idle hour in the shop of a bookseller, and turning over a parcel of books, L'Homme de Descartes fell into his hands. Having dipt into parts, he read with such delight that the palpitations of his heart compelled him to lay the volume down. It was this circumstance that produced those profound contemplations which made him the Plato of his age.
Cowley became a poet by accident. In his mother's apartment he found, when very young, Spenser's Fairy Queen; and, by a continual study of poetry, he became so enchanted by the Muse, that he grew irrecoverably a poet.
Sir Joshua Reynolds had the first fondness for his art excited by the perusal of Richardson's Treatise. . . .
Corneille loved; he made verses for his mistress, became a poet, composed Mélite and afterwards his other celebrated works. The discreet Corneille had else remained a lawyer. . . .
Ignatius Loyola was a Spanish gentleman, who was dangerously wounded at the siege of Pampeluna. Having heated his imagination by reading the Lives of the Saints during his illness, instead of a romance, he conceived a strong ambition to be the founder of a religious order; whence originated the celebrated society of the Jesuits. . . .
La Fontaine, at the age of twenty-two, had not taken any profession, or devoted himself to any pursuit. Having accidentally heard some verses of Malherbe, he felt a sudden impulse, which directed his future life. He immediately bought a Malherbe, and was so exquisitely delighted with this poet that, after passing the nights in treasuring his verses in his memory, he would run in the day-time to the woods, where, concealing himself, he would recite his verses to the surrounding dryads. . . .
Georg Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (New York, 1902), vol. II., The Romantic School in Germany, IV., p. 68:
The great question of the relation of poetry to life, despair over the deep, bitter discord between them, the unwearied struggle to bring about a reconciliation—this is what lies at the foundation of the whole of German literature from the Sturm und Drang period to the death of Romanticism.
Hippolyte Taine, A Tour Through the Pyrenees , tr. J. Safford Fiske (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1875), 149-51: This valley is solitar...
