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.

Too Much Joy

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.

The Path To Truth

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.

The Joys We Dote Upon

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.

Consolation In Our Sorrows

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.

Gathering Knowledge

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.

To Each His Sorrow

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.

Selene

Sir Philip Sidney, from Astrophel and Stella:

        With how sad steps, O Moon! thou climb'st the skies,
        How silently, and with how wan a face!
        What may it be, that even in heavenly place
        That busy Archer his sharp arrows tries?
        Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes
        Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case;
        I read it in thy looks; thy languished grace
        To me, that feel the like, thy state descries.
        Then, even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,
        Is constant love deemed there but want of wit?
        Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
        Do they above love to be loved, and yet
        Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?
        Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?

Being Driven Out Of One's Centrum

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.

From Infancy To Manhood

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?

Cultivating One's Knowledge

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.