Beyond Life
James Branch Cabell
I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life. I appeal for charity, and implore that literature afford me what I cannot come by in myself….
(more…)By The Railway Side
Alice Meynell
My train drew near to the Via Reggio platform on a day between two of the harvests of a hot September; the sea was burning blue, and there were a sombreness and a gravity in the very excesses of the sun as his fires brooded deeply over the serried, hardy, shabby, seaside ilex-woods.
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Intellectual Trains
Frank Crane
There is no way to get the values of the countryside so good as walking. If you have a horse he gets in between you and the glory of the landscape, and if you whiz along the road in an automobile you had as well, save for the fresh air, be at a moving-picture show. Only when you walk do you get that personal, minute, and intimate acquaintance with nature.
(more…)Irony And Pity
Frank Crane
Of the great soul there are two characteristics, irony and pity.
By irony I mean nothing hard or cruel, but only that gentle laughter which arises from the realization that most things make no matter. Most tempests are in a teapot, much of the world’s ado is about nothing, most frantic medicines are for diseases that would best cure themselves if let alone.
(more…)On Lying Awake At Night
Stewart Edward White
About once in so often you are due to lie awake at night. Why this is so I have never been able to discover. It apparently comes from no predisposing uneasiness of indigestion, no rashness in the matter of too much tea or tobacco, no excitation of unusual incident or stimulating conversation.
(more…)It Can’t Be Done
Frank Crane
If you’re looking about for something to do, something big, something that will bring you fame and money, find something that can’t be done and do it.
(more…)Anger Poison
Frank Crane
All the poisons are not kept in chained bottles on drug-store shelves.
All the cases of strange illness and wasting are not due to subtle drops from India nor mysterious powders sold by old witches.
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From The Chin Up
Frank Crane
From your chin down you are worth about a dollar and a half a day.
From the chin up you are worth — anything. There’s no limit.
(more…)Are The Rich Happy?
Stephen Leacock
Let me admit at the outset that I write this essay without adequate material. I have never known, I have never seen, any rich people. Very often I have thought that I had found them. But it turned out that it was not so. They were not rich at all. They were quite poor. They were hard up. They were pushed for money. They didn’t know where to turn for ten thousand dollars.
(more…)The Wise Man
Anonymous
If you see a man who shows you what is to be avoided, who administers reproofs, and is intelligent, follow that wise man as you would one who tells of hidden treasures; it will be better, not worse, for him who follows him.
(more…)On The Acquisition Of Friends
Henry Mackenzie
The praises of friendship, and descriptions of the happiness arising from it, I remember to have met with in almost every book and poem since first I could read.
(more…)Justifiable Homicide
Kenneth Grahame
This is a remedial age, an age of keys for all manner of locks; so he cannot be said to ask too much who seeks for exact information as to how a young man ought, in justice to himself and to society, to deal with his relations.
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The Almost Perfect State
Don Marquis
No matter how nearly perfect an Almost Perfect State may be, it is not nearly enough perfect unless the individuals who compose it can, somewhere between death and birth, have a perfectly corking time for a few years. The most wonderful governmental system in the world does not attract us, as a system; we are after a system that scarcely knows it is a system; the great thing is to have the largest number of individuals as happy as may be, for a little while at least, some time before they die.
(more…)A Father’s Letter
Bill Nye
My dear son.—Your letter of last week reached us yesterday, and I enclose $13, which is all I have by me at the present time. I may sell the other shote next week and make up the balance of what you wanted. I will probably have to wear the old buffalo overcoat to meetings again this winter, but that don’t matter so long as you are getting an education.
(more…)The Life Of Adventure
Edgar J. Goodspeed
‘Adventures,’ said the gifted Mr. Disraeli, ‘are to the adventurous.’ Stevenson somewhere recommends the conception of life as a series of adventures, each morning witnessing as it were a new embarkation upon some treasure-quest or feat of arms. And I have often observed that my adventurous friends have a knack of reporting with all the flavor of genuine adventures, experiences which upon sober reflection seem rather to fade into the light of common day. It would appear, therefore, that it is they who put the adventurous into life, rather than that life is responsible.
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Futurists
Frank Crane
“If,” writes Sir Francis Younghusband, “we stand a two-foot rule on end and take it to represent the period which has elapsed since man first appeared, it will be only the top inch that will represent the distance of time since the dawn of civilization, and only the last eighth of an inch that will denote the period of European civilization.”
(more…)Punishment
Anonymous
All men tremble at punishment, all men fear death; remember that you are like unto them, and do not kill, nor cause slaughter.
(more…)Hidden Happiness
Frank Crane
Happiness is rarely visible to the multitude, says a shrewd observer; it lies hidden in odd corners and quiet places.
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A Boy’s Essay On Girls
Anonymous
Girls are very stuckup and dignefied in their manner and behaveyour.
(more…)Photographers And Me
P. G. Wodehouse
I look in my glass, dear reader, and what do I see? Nothing so frightfully hot, believe me.
(more…)The Pleasures Of Friendship
Samuel Johnson
Life has no pleasure higher or nobler than that of friendship. It is painful to consider that this sublime enjoyment may be impaired or destroyed by innumerable causes, and that there is no human possession of which the duration is less certain.
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Moral Indignation
H. L. Mencken
The ill-fame of the Turks in the English-speaking world is not due to their political medievalism, as is usually alleged, but to their practise of polygamy.
(more…)Poisoning The Child Mind
Frank Crane
One of the recent discoveries in the art of healing is the therapeutic value of suggestion. That is to say, the physician, by suggesting to the patient, particularly the patient suffering from nervous disorder, sane and helpful thoughts about himself, can work a cure better oftentimes than by the use of drugs.
(more…)The Question Of Free Will
Remy de Gourmont
Those physicians were wise who, at a recent congress, voted to refuse making any statement upon the problems of responsibility propounded to them by the courts. What does responsibility mean? Where does it begin? What are its boundaries?
(more…)The Animal That Thinks
H. L. Mencken
That the great majority of human beings, even under our perfected Christian civilization, are still almost as incapable of rational thought as so many diamond-back terrapin—this is a fact to which we have all been made privy of late by the babbling of eminent psychologists. Granted. But let us not rashly assume that this infirmity is confined strictly to the nether herd—that, above the level where thinking may be said genuinely to begin, it goes on, level by level, to greater and greater heights of clarity and acumen.
(more…)Life The Fallacious Model
Oscar Wilde
Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent.
(more…)Everlasting Youth
Edmund Hamilton Sears
Old age, in some of its aspects, is a most interesting and solemn mystery, though to the outward eye it is merely the gradual waning and extinction of existence.
(more…)The Pressure
Frank Crane
Always the pressure is on us.
Like a low ceiling, it makes us forever stoop, often crawl, sometimes grovel.
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The Art Of Happy Memory
Frank Crane
The most significant step a mind takes is that wherein it realizes that it can control its own operation; when it learns that it can command those things in itself commonly considered automatic.
(more…)The Sadness Of It
Clipski
The great Patrice O'Neal 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/UB5ETNQSsG
— Axidava (@axidava) February 1, 2024
The Colors Of Life
Remy de Gourmont
It was formerly the custom in such provinces as Normandy, for example, or Britanny, to consecrate children to the color blue. The vow was limited to a certain number of years,—seven, fourteen, or twenty-one,—probably because of the virtues of the number seven, as considerable as they are mysterious.
(more…)Half-Science
Frank Crane
There is a kind of bastard science which is very dangerous.
It gets a glimpse of the great law of “The Survival of the Fittest.” It explains so many things. And the apprentice mind in its enthusiasm imagines it explains everything.
(more…)A Reflection
Kate Chopin
Some people are born with a vital and responsive energy. It not only enables them to keep abreast of the times; it qualifies them to furnish in their own personality a good bit of the motive power to the mad pace. They are fortunate beings. They do not need to apprehend the significance of things. They do not grow weary nor miss step, nor do they fall out of rank and sink by the wayside to be left contemplating the moving procession.
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The Vision
Lucian of Samosata
When my childhood was over, and I had just left school, my father called a council to decide upon my profession. Most of his friends considered that the life of culture was very exacting in toil, time, and money: a life only for fortune’s favourites; whereas our resources were quite narrow, and urgently called for relief.
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