To Live And To Die

J. G. Zimmermann, Aphorisms and Reflections, (London, 1800), p. 229:

Be fit to live; be ready to die! Never can I peruse these words without the strongest agitation. What has been undergone, what has been suffered, what struggles have been made, before we are fit to live! and, the point once attain'd, we are to be ready to enter into a state totally unconnected with life! Oh, 'tis a melancholy reflection, that those creatures who are fit to live shou'd ever die. What do the present and the future lose by one such death?

Two Kinds Of Man, And A Third

Hesiod, Works and Days 293-297 (tr. Glenn W. Most, Loeb Classical Library, 2006, p. 111):

The man who thinks of everything by himself, considering what will be better, later and in the end—this man is the best of all. That man is fine too, the one who is persuaded by someone who speaks well. But whoever neither thinks by himself nor pays heed to what someone else says and lays it to his heart—that man is good for nothing.

οὗτος μὲν πανάριστος, ὃς αὐτὸς πάντα νοήσει

φρασσάμενος τά κ' ἔπειτα καὶ ἐς τέλος ᾖσιν ἀμείνω·

ἐσθλὸς δ' αὖ καὶ κεῖνος, ὃς εὖ εἰπόντι πίθηται·        

ὃς δέ κε μήτ' αὐτὸς νοέῃ μήτ' ἄλλου ἀκούων

ἐν θυμῷ βάλληται, ὃ δ' αὖτ' ἀχρήιος ἀνήρ.

Turning Death Into A Weapon

William Edward Lecky, History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. I., (New York: 3rd edt., 1897), ch. II., The Pagan Empire, pp, 210-212:

The main object of the pagan philosophers was to dispel the terrors the imagination had cast around death, and by destroying this last cause of fear to secure the liberty of man. The main object of the Catholic priests has been to make death in itself as revolting and appalling as possible, and by representing escape from its terrors as hopeless, except by complete subjection to their rule, to convert it into an instrument of government. By multiplying the dancing or warning skeletons, and other sepulchral images representing the loathsomeness of death without its repose; by substituting inhumation for incremation, and concentrating the imagination on the ghastliness of decay; above all, by peopling the unseen world with demon phantoms and with excruciating tortures, the Catholic Church succeeded in making death in itself unspeakably terrible, and in thus preparing men for the consolations it could offer. Its legends, its ceremonies, its art, its dogmatic teaching, all conspired to this end, and the history of its miracles is a striking evidence of its success. The great majority of superstitions have ever clustered around two centres—the fear of death and the belief that every phenomenon of life is the result of a special spiritual interposition. Among the ancients they were usually of the latter kind. Auguries, prophecies, interventions in war, prodigies avenging the neglect of some rite or marking some epoch in the fortunes of a nation or of a ruler, are the forms they usually assumed. In the middle ages, although these were very common, the most conspicuous superstitions took the form of visions of purgatory or hell, conflicts with visible demons, or Satanic miracles. Like those mothers who govern their children by persuading them that the dark is crowded with spectres that will seize the disobedient, and who often succeed in creating an association of ideas which the adult man is unable altogether to dissolve, the Catholic priests resolved to base their power upon the nerves; and as they long exercised an absolute control over education, literature, and art, they succeeded in completely reversing the teaching of ancient philosophy, and in making the terrors of death for centuries the nightmare of the imagination.

. . . That man is not only an imperfect but a fallen being, and that death is the penal consequence of his sin, was a doctrine profoundly new to mankind, and it has exercised an influence of the most serious character upon the moral history of the world.

Radical Cure

Lord Bolingbroke, Reflections Upon Exile:

Instead of palliating remedies, let us use the incision knife and the caustic, search the wound to the bottom, and work an immediate and radical cure.

The recalling of former misfortunes serves to fortify the mind against later. He must blush to sink under the anguish of one wound, who surveys a body seamed over with the scars of many, and who has come victorious out of all the conflicts wherein he received them. Let sighs, and tears, and fainting under the lightest strokes of adverse fortune, be the portion of those unhappy people whose tender minds a long course of felicity has enervated; while such, as have passed through years of calamity, bear up, with a noble and immoveable constancy, against the heaviest. Uninterrupted misery has this good effect, as it continually torments, it finally hardens.

Finding The Middle Path

Lord Bolingbroke, The Occasional Writer, No. II.:

Between all extremes there is a certain middle point, which men of genius perceive, and to which men of honor adhere in private and in public life.

Thus avarice and prodigality are atan immense distance; but there is a space marked out by virtue between them, where frugality and generosity reside together. Thus again, to abandon those, whom it is our interest to support, is an excess of folly; and to support the interests of other people, to the ruin of our own, is an excess of folly likewise. But there are lines described by prudence , between these two excesses, within which our common interests meet, and may proceed together.

Silence

Says Palladas, in: The Greek Anthology, IV., tr. W. R. Paton (Loeb Classical Library, 1918), bk. X., §46, p. 27:

Silence is men's chief learning. The sage Pythagoras himself is my witness. He, knowing himself how to speak, taught others to be silent, having discovered this potent drug to ensure tranquillity.

Sincerity's Rarity

S. S. Knight, Human Life, 1910, ch, vii., Love, p. 158:

Of all virtues, sincerity is the greatest, yet, broadly speaking, how extremely rare! There is almost no trouble and pains which people will not take to make the world think that they are something other than they really are, when but a fraction of the cost might make them what they are trying to seem to be.

The Sweetest Of All Fruits

Alfred Biese, The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times, 1905, ch. II., pp. 32-33:

It was no ascetic renouncing the world and solitude; but rather a sensitive man, thoughtful and dreamy at once, who wrote as follows (Basil the Great to Gregory Nazianzen):

 It is a lofty mountain overshadowed with a deep wood, irrigated on the north by cold and transparent streams. At its foot is spread a low plain, enriched perpetually with the streams from the mountains. The wood, a virgin forest of trees of various kinds and foliage which grows around it, almost serves it as a rampart; so that even the Isle of Calypso, which Homer evidently admired as a paragon of loveliness, is nothing in comparison with this. For indeed it is very nearly an island, from its being enclosed on all sides with rocky boundaries. On two sides of it are deep and precipitous ravines, and on another side the river flowing from the steep is itself a continuous and almost impassable barrier. The mountain range, with its moon-shaped windings, walls off the accessible parts of the plain. There is but one entrance, of which we are the masters. My hut is built on another point, which uplifts a lofty pinnacle on the summit, so that this plain is outspread before the gaze, and from the height I can catch a glimpse of the river flowing round, which to my fancy affords no less delight than the view of the Strymore as you look from Amphipolis. For the Strymore broadens into lakes with its more tranquil stream, and is so sluggish as almost to forfeit the character of a river. The Iris, on the other hand, flowing with a swifter course than any river I know, for a short space billows along the adjacent rock, and then, plunging over it, rolls into a deep whirlpool, affording a most delightful view to me and to every spectator, and abundantly supplying the needs of the inhabitants, for it nurtures an incredible number of fishes in its eddies.

 Why need I tell you of the sweet exhalations from the earth or the breezes from the river? Other persons might admire the multitude of the flowers, or of the lyric birds, but I have no time to attend to them. But my highest eulogy of the spot is, that, prolific as it is of all kinds of fruits from its happy situation, it bears for me the sweetest of all fruits, tranquillity; not only because it is free from the noises of cities, but because it is not traversed by a single visitor except the hunters, who occasionally join us. For, besides its other advantages, it also produces animals—not bears and wolves, like yours—heaven forbid! But it feeds herds of stags, and of wild goats and hares, and creatures of that kind. Do you not then observe what a narrow risk I ran, fool that I was, to change such a spot for Tiberine, the depth of the habitable world? I am now hastening to it, pardon me. For even Alcmæon, when he discovered the Echinades, no longer endured his wanderings.1

1. Basilii opera omnia. Parisus, 1730.

Burthen and Value

J. G. Zimmermann, Aphorisms and Reflections, (London, 1800), p. 5:

The burthen increases with the value. Those we love, anxiously do we watch; and we merit their esteem by our disquietude. 

Singular Men

Montesquieu, My Thoughts (Mes Pensées), §52, tr. Henry C. Clark:

As soon as a man thinks and has a character, they say: “He’s a singular man.”

Most people resemble each other in that they do not think: eternal echos, who have never said anything but have always repeated; crude artisans of others’ ideas.

Singularity has to consist in a fine manner of thinking that has eluded others, for a man who can distinguish himself only by a special footwear would be a fool in any country.

The thoughts and actions of a singular man are so particular to him that another man could not employ them without betraying and diminishing himself.

Boring People

Montesquieu, My Thoughts (Mes Pensées), §47, tr. Henry C. Clark:

BORING. There are quite a few types. Some are so uniform in their conversation that nothing ever comes of it. Others are so lazy that they let everything drop; in vain do you exhaust yourself trying to revive the conversation; you toss out some topics to them, they abandon them all. Others make us go into the void, trahunt per inania.1

 1. «Drag us through the emptiness.»

What A Book Requires And Of Style

William Edward Lecky, in: A Memoir of the Right Hon. William Edward Hartpole Lecky, Elisabeth Lecky, 1909, ch. II., pp. 48 & 49:

A book requires endless patience, for I at least rarely finish a chapter without finding it necessary to recast it thoroughly. There are also innumerable little difficulties of style, arrangement, and research, which no one but an author can know, and there falls upon one not infrequently an utter brain weariness, a despondency which is very painful. But by long patience something really comes at the end. As far as my own experience goes, the chief motive of writing seems to be that one has thought much, has crowds of arguments, tendencies, speculations, &c., floating, often half formed, through the mind, which it at last becomes almost necessary to rescue from a subjective to an objective state. To develop one's being to its full capacity is, perhaps, on the whole, the least vain thing in this vain world. (From a letter, August 28, 1866)

I have always cared much for style, and have endeavoured to improve my own by reading a great deal of the best English and French prose. In writing, as in music, much of the perfection of style is a question of ear; but much also depends on the ideal the writer sets before himself. He ought, I think, to aim at the greatest possible simplicity and accuracy of expression, at vividness and force, at condensation. The last two heads will usually be found to blend; for condensation, when it is not attained at the sacrifice of clearness, is the great secret of force. I should say, from my own experience, that most improvements of style are of the nature either of condensation or of increased accuracy and delicacy of distinction.

That Life Is No Joke

John Stuart Blackie, The Wisdom of Goethe, 1883, Preface, xi-x:

There is nothing fills me with more sorrow occasionally than to see how foolishly some people throw away their lives. It is a noble thing to live; at least a splendid chance of playing a significant game—a game which we may never have the chance to play again, and which it is surely worth the while to try to play skilfully; to bestow at least as much pains upon as many a one does on billiards or lawn-tennis. But these pains are certainly not always given; and so the game of life is lost, and the grand chance of forming a manly character is gone; for no man can play a game well who leaves his moves to chance; and so, instead of fruitful victories, brilliant blunders are all the upshot of what many a record of distinguished lives has to present. The only remedy for this evil that I know is to impress on young men with all seriousness that life, though a pleasant thing, is no joke; and that, if they will go to sea without chart, compass, or pilot, they have a fair chance to be wrecked. But who is to impress such a lesson? Some name with authority, of course; for the individual, like the great world, is governed, as Goethe well says, by wisdom, by authority, and by show; and, though wisdom is wisely put first in this triad of directing powers, it is on authority that the great masses of men have to rely, when they look out, as they must do, in nine cases out of ten, for a guidance outside of their own experience; for authority is the form that wisdom must always take, before it can be generally recognised and become permanently influential.

Personal Love

Predrag Cicovacki, The Analysis of Wonder: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann (Bloomsbury, 2014), pt. 2, ch. 4, Four Forms of Love, pp. 92-94:

Brotherly love is related to the humanity in general of those who are near us; we love them for who they are, not for what they can become. In love of the remote, our sight is raised toward the ideal of humanity in general, toward the most noble and the best that humanity can become. In radiant virtue, we return to the individual, to the person who radiates goodness and spirituality around himself. In personal love, affirmative devotion is directed from one individual toward another. More precisely, it is directed toward the ideal of that unique individual. In every existing, empirically given and limited person there is an individual ideal of that person: the ideal of personality. Personal love “brings to light the otherwise hidden and neglected essence of one’s individuality.”

We habitually say that personal love is blind, but Hartmann corrects this opinion. Personal love is blind to the surface of personality and its general empirical and humanitarian aspects. Despite that, or just because of it, personal love is capable of taking us much deeper toward the essence of personality, toward its individual ideal, than any other form of cognition, than any other form of love. When it comes to such depth, “he who loves is the only one who sees; while he who is without love is blind.” We do not see that this is the case because we have too narrow a conception of knowledge. Just as the highest values are the individual values, so the highest form of knowledge is the knowledge of the individual. It is entirely wrong to limit knowledge to a thinking, reflective, or rational consciousness of an object. “Valuational knowledge,” as Hartmann calls it, is knowledge of the individual and unique, and it is based on feeling, on sharpened and sensitive intuition for the richness of values.

Hartmann also wants to distinguish this conception of personal love from the oft-repeated clichés regarding romantic love. He reminds us that the bliss that a person experiences in love consists not in being in love, but in loving. In loving, in striving toward uniting our own innermost depth with the innermost depth of another person, personal love does not simply aim at happiness. Speaking about happiness even obscures the understanding of personal love more than it clarifies it. To shed more light on the issue, he maintains that personal love is “beyond happiness and unhappiness.” Happiness is secondary in love; love always involves both suffering and joy. Ever a lover of aporias and paradoxes, Hartmann even claims that, “The suffering of one who loves can even be happy, his happiness [can] be painful.”

Hartmann is not playing with words. In fact, he emphasizes that the experience of love is one of those that shows the limitations and inflexibility of our ordinary language. Personal love overcomes such limitation. The lovers develop their own language, their own signs and signals, by which they can in one glance gain the knowledge they need of the soul of their lovers. Here every gesture is important. Every movement, every smile conveys a message: the two souls are united and yet they remain two. Personal love makes possible the participation in each other’s souls. It makes possible the intuitive vision of the best and the highest. The penetrating knowledge of personal love may be one of the greatest mysteries of the universe, perhaps the greatest mystery of all.

Safety And Sanity

Henry David Thoreau, Journal, November 18, 1857:

The cheaper your amusements, the safer and saner. They who think much of theatres, operas, and the like, are beside themselves. Each man's necessary path, though as obscure and apparently uneventful as that of a beetle in the grass, is the way to the deepest joys he is susceptible of; though he converses only with moles and fungi and disgraces his relatives, it is no matter if he knows what is steel to his flint.

Freedom For Its Own Sake

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1843, February 8:

Democracy with us is charged with being malignant, and I think it aimless, selfish resistance, pulling down, and wild wish to have physical freedom,—but for what ? Only for freedom; not to any noble end.

Not Noticing The Pearls

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1843, February 8:

We are all chemists who only know our own gold. Men cast pearls about in large companies where I go, and none but I seems to know that they are pearls.