Is there one you can talk to?
If so, you are fortunate. For one of the most important discoveries a man or woman makes, on the little trip from the cradle to the grave, is the intelligent, likable, appreciative, stimulative companion in talk.
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Sometimes, on one of these sunny autumn mornings, when I turn my back on the town and take to the highway, I seem to have the world to myself.
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Would you?
Would you blow Bill Nye the science guy?
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The first effect of what used to be called natural philosophy is to fill its devotee with wonder at the marvels of God.
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The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen—which is (apparently) much easier.
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Despite the common delusion to the contrary the philosophy of doubt is far more comforting than that of hope.
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It is a great mistake to think, as many are apt to do when some terrible war overwhelms some part of the world, that war is on the increase among men and that we are probably on the eve of a portentous new era of it.
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Do men and women generally want a better world than this?
Do they want a world free from war, general economic security, a higher level of general health, long life, freedom and hope for everyone, beauty as the common quality of their daily lives?
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It is the misfortune of humanity that its history is chiefly written by third-rate men. The first-rate man seldom has any impulse to record and philosophise; his impulse is to act; life, to him, is an adventure, not a syllogism or an autopsy. Thus the writing of history is left to college professors, moralists, theorists, dunder-heads.
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I had the most wonderful dream last night. I dreamt he came down the pipe and appeared surprisingly before us all, and his name was Mr. In. Queer name, wasn’t it? Sort of Japanesy. He did the most amazing things for us, made a great hit, the critics said. It was prize-fighting or piano-playing or speechifying or something; anyway we all thought he was remarkable, and, come to find out, he was the baby! — our baby, you know, that’s all!
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Winter, the sworne enemie to summer, the friend to none but colliers and woodmongers: the frostbitten churl that hangs his nose still over the fire: the dog that bites fruits, and the devil that cuts down trees, the unconscionable binder up of vintners’ faggots, and the only consumer of burnt sack and sugar: This cousin to Death, father to sickness, and brother to old age, shall not show his hoary bald-pate in this climate of ours (according to our usual computation) upon the twelfth day of December, at the first entering of the sun into the first minute of the sign Capricorn, when the said Sun shall be at his greatest south declination from the equinoctial line, and so forth, with much more such stuff than any mere Englishman can understand—no, my countrymen, never beat the bush so long to find out Winter, where he lies, like a beggar shivering with cold, but take these from me as certain and most infallible rules, know when Winter plums are ripe and ready to be gathered.
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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….
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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.
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Two whetstones met on the street.
“Queer, isn’t it?”
“What’s queer?”
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When I am gone, that is the end of the world.
All its movements, of government, of wars, of business, of social redemption, of eugenics and women’s rights, of church, of art, of education, of finance, sport, romance, vengeance – the whole boiling kettle of human affairs will have disappeared, and “like an insubstantial fabric vanished leave not a wrack behind.”
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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.
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“I live,” said a friend, “on the sunny side of the hill.”
Why not? Every hill has two sides. It may be a long way around to the other one, but it’s there. Move! Why live in the gloom?
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I sometimes fancy that every great city must have been built by night. At least, it is only at night that every part of a great city is great. All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
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It is reported that the last words of Charles Frohman before he went down on the ill-starred “Lusitania” were: “Why should we fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure of life.”
It was a great heart said that, holding it-self a bit aloof from the game, not too entangled with earth’s interests. For the fine soul is always above his pleasures, above his pains.
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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.
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On the mouldering citadel of Troy lies the lizard like a thing of green bronze. The owl has built her nest in the palace of Priam. Over the empty plain wander shepherd and goatherd with their flocks, and where, on the wine-surfaced, oily sea, οινοψ ποντος, as Homer calls it, copper-prowed and streaked with vermilion, the great galleys of the Danaoi came in their gleaming crescent, the lonely tunny-fisher sits in his little boat and watches the bobbing corks of his net.
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Certain plants never grow except in certain soils, edelweiss in the Alps, bananas in the tropics, and cacti in the sands of the desert. Wherever you find the plant called Humility in the human garden you will always discover real wisdom in the brain-soil that produces it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Simplicity is not virginal in the modern world. She has a penitential or a vidual singleness. We can conceive an antique world in which life, art, and letters were simple because of the absence of many things; for us now they can be simple only because of our rejection of many things.
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Whatever you get you pay for, one way or another.
The cheapest plan is to pay cash.
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To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the history of the Creation, saying:
“The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be performed.
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Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
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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?
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This emptiness finds its expression in the whole form of existence, in the infiniteness of Time and Space as opposed to the finiteness of the individual in both; in the flitting present as the only manner of real existence; in the dependence and relativity of all things; in constantly Becoming without Being; in continually wishing without being satisfied; in an incessant thwarting of one’s efforts, which go to make up life, until victory is won.
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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.
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I woke up empty inside.
I went to work, pretended to work, got mad, got bored, browsed 4chan, browsed Pornhub, and fell asleep in my cubicle during the lunch break.
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For some time I had been wandering in quiet streets in the curious town of Besançon, which stands like a sort of peninsula in a horse-shoe of river.
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I could tell my story in two words—the two words “I drank.” But I was not always a drinker. This is the story of my downfall—and of my rise—for through the influence of a good woman, I have, thank Heaven, risen from the depths.
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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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I like to repeat this magic formula over and over.
It is not provable. The deepest truths of life never are.
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I went to see my friend in the hospital. He had been there a month, with a bad foot. His only locomotion was being lifted from his chair to his bed and back.
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“A young man married is a man that’s marred.” That’s a golden rule, Arthur; take it to heart.
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I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer holidays when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up a walking-stick, and put six very bright-coloured chalks in my pocket.
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I awake at an unearthly hour on Sunday morning, after which I turn over and go to sleep again. This second, or beauty sleep, I find to be almost invaluable. I do it also with much more earnestness and expression than that in the earlier part of the night. All the other people in the house gradually wake up as I begin to get in my more fancy strokes.
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