If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going, then when we think we best know! We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that 'tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Experience," from In Praise of Good Bookstores
Stars and blossoming fruit trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give one an equal sense of eternity.
-- Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (p. 161)
In this ever-changing world where mountains crumble, rivers change their courses, roads are deserted, rocks are buried, and old trees yield to young shoots, it was nothing short of a miracle that this monument alone had survived the battering of a thousand years to be the living memory of the ancients. I felt as if I were in the presence of the ancients themselves, and, forgetting all the troubles I had suffered on the road, rejoiced in the utter happiness of this joyful moment, not without tears in my eyes.
-- Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (p. 113)
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
-- John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (p. 110 of the 1988 Sierra Club edition, Chapter 6)
The fact of our absolute, utter, complete dependence upon the earth is used by native teachers as a part of self-understanding. It is empirically obvious that we are not only children, sucking at our earth-mother's breast all of our lives, but that we are also mixed with, and part of, that which Europeans choose to call the environment. For us, truly, there are no "surroundings." I can lose my hands, and still live. I can lose my legs and still live. I can lose my eyes and still live. I can lose my hair, eyebrows, nose, arms and many other things and still live. But if I lose the air I die. If I lose the sun I die. If I lose the earth I die. If I lose the water I die. If I lose the plants and animals I die. All of these things are more a part of me, more essential to my every breath, than is my so-called body. What is my real body? We are not autonomous, self-sufficient beings as European mythology teaches. Such ideas are based upon deductive logic derived from false assumptions. We are rooted, just like the trees. But our roots come out of our nose and mouth, like an umbilical cord, forever connected with the rest of the world. Our roots also extend out from our skin and from our other body cavities. Nothing that we do, do we do by ourselves. We do not see by ourselves. We do not hear by ourselves. We do not breathe, eat, drink, defecate, piss, or fart by ourselves. We do not think, dream, invent or procreate by ourselves. We do not die by ourselves. [...] I live in a universe. I am a point of awareness, a circle of consciousness, in the midst of a series of circles. One circle is that which we call the body.
-- Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals (2008), pp. 181-3
Plans are useless, but planning is essential. -- maybe from Dwight Eisenhower
In other days, I understood mountains differently, seeing in them something that abides. Even when approached respectfully (to challenge peaks as mountaineers do is another matter) they appalled me with their "permanence," with that awful and irrefutable [rock]-ness that seemed to intensify my sense of my own transience. Perhaps this dread of transience explains our greed for the few gobbets of raw experience in modern life, why violence is libidinous, why lust devours us, why soldiers choose not to forget their days of horror: we cling to such extreme moments, in which we seem to die, yet are reborn. In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from life, we are life, our being fills us; in ecstasy with another being, loneliness falls away into eternity. But in other days, such union was attainable through simple awe. (pp. 244-5)
And then, almost everywhere, a clear and subtle illumination that lent magnificence to life and peace to death was overwhelmed in the hard glare of technology. Yet that light is always present, like the stars of noon. Man must perceive it if he is to transcend his fear of meaningless, for no amount of "progress" can take its place. We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread. (p. 59)
The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day. (p. 208)
-- Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (1978)
In complete control, pretending control, with dignified authority, we are charlatans. Or maybe just a goat's-hair brush in a painter's hand. We have no idea what we are.
-- Jalaluddin Rumi, The Book of Love (p. 165)
Nagasena: It is as if, your majesty, new milk were to change in process of time into sour cream, and from sour cream into fresh butter, and from fresh butter into clarified butter. And if any one, your majesty, were to say that the sour cream, the fresh butter, and the clarified butter were each of them the very milk itself--now would he say well, if he were to say so?
Milinda: Nay, verily, bhante. They came into being through connection with that milk.
Nagasena: In exactly the same way, your majesty, do the elements of being join one another in serial succession: one element perishes, another arises, succeeding each other as it were instantaneously. Therefore neither as the same nor as a different person do you arrive at your latest aggregation of consciousnesses.
-- Milindapanha (Questions of Milinda) 17a, between the Buddhist sage Nagasena and King Menander I (Milinda)
Themistocles quidem, cum ei Simonides an quis alius artem memoriae polliceretur, ‘Oblivionis,’ inquit, ‘mallem; nam memini etiam quae nolo, oblivisci non possum quae volo.’
Themistocles at all events, when Simonides or some one offered to teach him the art of memory, replied that he would prefer the art of forgetting; ‘for I remember,’ said he, ‘even things I do not wish to remember, but I cannot forget things I wish to forget.’
-- Cicero, De finibus bonorum et malorum, 2.104-5
The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?
-- Zhuangzi, "External Things" (Wài wù), translated by Burton Watson (1968)
If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
-- C.S. Lewis, "On Living in an Atomic Age," 1948
It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.
-- Bilbo Baggins in J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Nothing is sufficient for the man to whom the sufficient is too little. (Vatican 68)
Against all else it is possible to provide security; but as far as death is concerned, we all dwell in an unfortified city. (Vatican 31)
-- Epicurus, The Essential Epicurus (translated by Eugene O'Connor)
Had our ancestors been asked to predict what would happen in an age of widespread prosperity in which most religious and cultural proscriptions had lost their power, how many would have guessed that our favourite activities would not be fiery political meetings, masked orgies, philosophical debates, hunting wild boar or surfing monstrous waves, but shopping and watching other people pretending to enjoy themselves? How many would have foreseen a national convention—in public and in private—that revolves around the three R's: renovation, recipes and resorts? How many would have guessed that people possessed of unimaginable wealth and leisure and liberty would spend their time shopping for onion goggles and wheatgrass juicers? Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores.
-- George Monbiot, in Annie Raser-Rowland and Adam Grubb, The Art of Frugal Hedonism (p. 77)
Media theorist Neil Postman warned that a “technopoly” arises when societies surrender judgment to technological imperatives—when efficiency and innovation become moral goods in themselves. Once metrics like speed and optimization replace reflection and dialogue, education mutates into logistics: grading automated, essays generated in seconds. Knowledge becomes data; teaching becomes delivery. What disappears are precious human capacities—curiosity, discernment, presence. The result isn’t augmented intelligence but simulated learning: a paint-by-numbers approach to thought.
-- Ronald Purser, in this excellent article on Current Affairs
Tolle, lege, tolle, lege -- St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions 8.12.29
We appear to have created a society that looks disparagingly on people who use their hands to earn a living. […] As a wider consequence, fabrication, construction, energy, waste and by-product are largely monetary abstractions to a society of non-makers. It occurred to me that if we spent more time individually converting raw materials into useful objects; we might be better placed to contextualise the challenges that face a society addicted to excessive and often conspicuous consumption. Perhaps more importantly, we might be a little bit happier.
-- Alexander Langlands, Cræft (pp. 22-3)
Broadly speaking, short words are best, and the old words, when short, are best of all.
-- Winston Churchill, speech on receiving the London Times Literary Award, 1949
Ad Graecas literas totum animum applicui; statimque ut pecuniam accepero, Graecos primum autores, deinde vestes emam.
I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.
-- Desiderius Erasmus, in a letter to Jacob Batt (April 12, 1500)
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
-- Oscar Wilde, De profundis (1905)
Somos lo que hacemos para cambiar lo que somos. (We are what we do to change who we are.)
-- Eduardo Galeano, Celebración de las contradicciones/2 (2006)
Heraclitus, I believe, says that all things pass and nothing stays, and comparing existing things to the flow of a river, he says you could not step twice into the same river.
-- Plato, Cratylus 402a
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-- Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973)
Man is born with legs, not roots.
-- said by Buckminster Fuller, described in this piece in the New Yorker
A nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Without proper care for the soil, we can have no life. -- Wendell Berry
Two persons have toiled in vain and laboured without benefit. One is he who has saved and not consumed, and the other is he who has learned and not acted. No matter how much learning you acquire, if you don’t act, you are ignorant. Neither scholar nor sage, he is an animal on whom are a few books. What knowledge or awareness does that empty-headed one have? Is he carrying kindling or notebooks?
-- Sa‘di, Gulistan (chapter on suhbat)
Whether the archaeologist is considered to be a scientist or a humanist, whether archaeology itself is a science or an arts subject, matters little because it is one subject that strikes across artificial boundaries, and which seeks to unite those studies which bear upon the origin and the physical and cultural development of man. Archaeology seeks the evidence and experience of life, in the hope and the knowledge that by so doing mankind will better understand why life is as it is, and why man behaves as he does.
-- John Coles, Experimental Archaeology (1979), p. 1.
Cast from you then all other things, retaining these few. Remember also that every man lives only this present moment, which is a fleeting instant: the rest of time is either spent or quite unknown. Short is the time which each of us has to live, and small the corner of the earth he has to live in. Short is the longest posthumous fame, and this preserved through a succession of poor mortals, soon themselves to die; men who knew not themselves, far less those who died long ago. (III.10)
Asia and Europe are mere corners of the Universe: the whole sea is but a drop, Athos a clod. All the present is but an instant in eternity. All things are small, changeable, and fleeting. (VI.36)
-- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated by George Chrystal (1902)
τίς γὰρ ἂν ἄξιον ἐγκώμιον διάθοιτο τῆς τῶν μαθήσεως; διὰ γὰρ τούτων μόνων οἱ μὲν τετελευτηκότες τοῖς ζῶσι διαμνημονεύονται...
What man, indeed, could compose a worthy laudation of the knowledge of letters? For it is by such knowledge alone that the dead are carried in the memory of the living...
-- Diodorus Siculus XII 13.2, translated by C. H. Oldfather (1989)
Nec levis ingenuas pectus coluisse per artes / Cura sit et linguas edidicisse duas.
Nor let it be a slight care to cultivate your mind in liberal arts, or to learn the two languages well.
-- Ovid, Ars amatoria 2.121-2
The history of the human race is a continual struggle from darkness toward light. It is therefore to no purpose to discuss the use of knowledge; man wants to know and when he ceases to do so, he is no longer man.
-- Fridtjof Nansen
Τῶν ἐκείνου ποιημάτων λελυμένον μὲν ἐκτῆσθαι οὐ πολλῆς τινὸς ἄξιόν ἐστι τιμῆς, ὥσπερ δραπέτην ἄνθρωπον· οὐ γὰρ παραμένει· δεδεμένον δὲ πολλοῦ ἄξιον· πάνυ γὰρ καλὰ τὰ ἔργα ἐστί. πρὸς τί οὖν δὴ λέγω ταῦτα; πρὸς τὰς δόξας τὰς ἀληθεῖς. καὶ γὰρ αἱ δόξαι αἱ ἀληθεῖς, ὅσον μὲν ἂν χρόνον παραμένωσι, καλὸν τὸ χρῆμα καὶ πάντα τἀγαθὰ ἐργάζονται· πολὺν δὲ χρόνον οὐκ ἐθέλουσι παραμένειν, ἀλλὰ δραπετεύουσιν ἐκ τῆς ψυχῆς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου, ὥστε οὐ πολλοῦ ἄξιαί εἰσιν, ἕως ἄν τις αὐτὰς δήσῃ αἰτίας λογισμῷ. τοῦτο δ᾿ ἐστίν, Μένων ἑταῖρε, ἀνάμνησις, ὡς ἐν τοῖς πρόσθεν ἡμῖν ὡμολόγηται. ἐπειδὰν δὲ δεθῶσι, πρῶτον μὲν ἐπιστῆμαι γίγνονται, ἔπειτα μόνιμοι· καὶ διὰ ταῦτα δὴ τιμιώτερον ἐπιστήμη ὀρθῆς δόξης ἐστί, καὶ διαφέρει δεσμῷ ἐπιστήμη ὀρθῆς δόξης.
It isn’t worth a great deal to own one of [Daedalus’s] creations if it’s loose; like a runaway, it will not stay. But it is worth quite a great deal when bound, for his works are very beautiful. What am I getting at? This bears on true opinions. For in fact, true opinions, as long as they stay, are beautiful possessions and accomplish all that is good, but they are unwilling to stay very long. They run away from the soul of a man, so that they are not worth much until someone binds them by reflection on the reason for them. And that, my friend Meno, is recollection, as we agreed before. When bound, they in the first place become knowledge; and secondly, they abide. That is why knowledge is more to be valued than right opinion: Knowledge differs from right opinion by its bond.
-- Plato, Meno 97e-98a
Master: Ic ahsige eow, forhwi swa geornlice leorni ge?
Pupils: Forþam we nellaþ wesan swa stunte nytenu, þa nan þingc witaþ, buton gærs ond wæter.
M: Ond hwæt wille ge?
P: Wyllaþ wesan wise.
M: I will ask you why you are so diligent in learning?
P: It is because we do not wish to be like brute animals, that know nothing but grass and water.
M: And what then is your wish?
P: We wish to be wise.