Not so bad!

[Seeing the good in the bad that happens] we should practice and work on first of all - like the man who threw a stone at his dog but missed and hit his stepmother. "Not so bad!" he said. For it is possible to change what we get out of things that do not go as we wish. Diogenes  was driven into exile: "Not so bad!" - for it was after his banishment that he took up philosophy.

- Plutarch, On Tranquility of Mind.

Hippomachus

They say that the trainer Hippomachus, when an athlete he was training competed in wrestling and everyone who was present applauded, struck the student with his staff. "You did it badly, and not as you should have," he said. "You should have done better. If you had done it artfully they would not have applauded you."

- from Various Histories, Aelian.

When some persons praised a tall fellow with a long reach as having the makings of a fine boxer, the trainer Hippomachus remarked: "Yes, if the crown were hung up and to be got by reaching."

- from Plutarch, On Love of Wealth.

For the stars

"He aimed for the stars, but sometimes he hit England."

- Mort Saul on Werner von Braun

the death of knowledge

"Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge." - Alfred North Whitehead

As quoted on the excellent futilitycloset.com

No misnomer

Gentleman in wigs and satin knee-britches composing philosophical tracts - the Founding Fathers (and their equally quaintly bedecked spouses) little resemble the 20th-century image of revolutionaries: Lenin atop a cannon rallying the sailors at Kronstadt, or Mao in peasant garb haranguing the troops on the Long March. But the American Revolution was no misnomer. It irreparably shattered the twin pillars of tradition: monarchical authority and hereditary privilege; it revivified an ancient experiment in democracy, conferring political form on a fractious people; and it loosened the bonds of society, giving free rein to acquisitive, religious, and reforming energies. More than its topographical constituents - mountains and farmlands, forests and towns - the new nation was an amalgam of ideas, extracted from classical Greece and Rome, from the Old and New Testaments, from peasant culture and Enlightenment philosophy, fused in the heat of war and invasion, and then poured, white hot, over much of North America, whose borders it eventually overspilled.

- from Mapping America's Past, pg. 60

From Asimov

- Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel, commander-in-chief of the British fleet, was murdered in 1707 by an old woman as he struggled ashore after the loss of his ship on the rocks of the Scilly Islands. She killed him in the belief, current at the time among coastal inhabitants, that a body washed up was a derelict, thus giving her legal possession of the emerald ring on the admiral's finger.

- The American paleontologist Edward Cope (1840 - 97), whose large collection of fossil mammals is at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, was a Quaker and consequently refused to carry a gun during his U.S. Western expeditions, despite the very real danger from Indians. He once flabbergasted hostile Indians surrounding him by removing his false teeth and putting them back, over and over. The Indians let him go.

- Ben Franklin wanted the turkey, not the eagle, to be the U.S. national symbol. He considered the eagle "a bird of bad moral character" because it lives "by sharping and robbing."

- Cyprus was one of the world's important mining centers in ancient times, but for reasons still unknown the Romans halted operations there and sealed the tunnels. Many of the tunnels were found and reopened in this century, thanks to clever detective work by an American mining engineer, D.A. Gunther. In the New York Public Library, he had happened to find an ancient account of the mines. Years of ingenious search in Cyprus led him to the tunnels, which he found complete with usable support timbers and oil lamps. Cyprus became an important mining center again.

- A well-intentioned philanthropist, Eugene Scheifflin, instituted a project in the 1890s to bring to America all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare. Unfortunately, Hotspur talks about the starling in Henry IV, Part I; starlings were therefore let loose in New York's Central Park. The noisy nuisances now number in the millions from Alaska to Mexico, and they will be with us for as long as the plays of Shakespeare. Maybe longer.

- from Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts

The History of Fishes

Halley's traumas were not yet quite over. The Royal Society had promised to publish the work, but now pulled out, citing financial embarrassment. The year before the society had backed a costly flop called The History of Fishes, and they now suspected that the market for a book on mathematical principles would be less than clamorous. Halley, whose means were not great, paid for the book's publication out of his own pocket. Newton, as was his custom, contributed nothing. To make matters worse, Halley at this time had just accepted a position as the society's clerk, and he was informed that the society could no longer afford to provide him with a promised salary of £50 per annum. He was to be paid instead in copies of The History of Fishes.

- from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, 49.

Always scribble, scribble!

"Dr. Donne's verse are like the peace of God; they pass all understanding."
- James I, on John Donne

"Reading him is like wading through glue."
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, on Ben Jonson

"I remember, the Players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand."
- Ben Jonson, on William Shakespeare

"Another damned thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?"
- The Duke of Gloucester, to Edward Gibbon

"I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, with, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer is...marriageableness...Suicide is more respectable."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Jane Austen

"Henry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs from the Chicago stockyards."
- H.L. Mencken, on Henry James

"He spares no resource in telling of his dead inventions...Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits infinitives and fills them with adverbial stuffing. His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle; they could not sweat and elbow and struggle more if God Himself was the processional meaning to which they sought to come."
- H.G. Wells, on Henry James

"Why don't you write books people can read?"
- Nora Joyce, to her husband, James Joyce

"Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as "great literature" by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake."
- Vladimir Nabokov, on Ezra Pound and great literature

"I don't like him one bit. He was a poseur. He was married to this woman who was very pretty. My husband [H.G. Wells} and I were asked to see them, and my husband roamed around the flat and there were endless photographs of T.S. Eliot and bits of his poetry done in embroidery by pious American ladies, and only one picture of his wife, and that was when she was getting married. Henry pointed it out to me and said, "I don't think I like that man."'
- Rebecca West, on T.S. Eliot

"A Woollcott second edition."
- Franklin Pierce Adams, replying to Alexander Woollcott's boast, "What is so rare as a Woollcott first edition?"

"I don't like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn't a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don't like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality, and it's so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. I simply can't stand it."
- Mary McCarthy, on J.D. Salinger

- Excerpts from Fighting Words, ed. James Charlton

Love is not just for professionals, after all.

But as anyone who actually has made the effort to play the piano knows, it is also infinitely more satisfying and moving to make the music yourself, even if you can't play very well. It's the difference between watching a romantic movie and being in love. Love is not just for professionals, after all. And what makes love so heartbreaking and beautiful is that we are not perfect, that it is ultimately beyond our control and that we must struggle for joy and wrestle with our shortcomings.

Smitten, Cooke recalls a world much of which has faded or vanished, not least the spanking new Steinway baby grands for $985 he helpfully lists along with the $3 rentals. But the music he exalts hasn't. Nor have the benefits of learning to play the music. They go on forever.

- Michael Kimmelman, from the introduction to Charles Cooke's 1941 Playing the Piano for Pleasure

No guide is needed.

Americans love to be told what to do. "You are what you eat!" sells innumerable quack diet books, just as "You are what you read!" brought us the Great Books, the Five-Foot Shelf, and now this colossal act of hubris: the mind-shaping favorites of a hundred professors, annotated. See them astride Plato, Darwin and Freud. Read what they read and be what they be.

I have no list to submit. I care not for this cargo cult. Books are cheap and readily available. To read is the thing, voraciously and eclectically. No guide is needed. Was Moby Dick more important to me than the latest Len Deighton thriller, or is browsing through the Oxford English Dictionary even more significant? And who should care?

Scientists are often regarded as illiterate oafs, unable to write and unwilling to read, captives of their narrow expertise, deserving candidates for humanists' contempt. Yet, most of us are well-read and can hold our own with historians, literary critics and whatever. Humanists, on the other hand, are often (though not always) scientifically and mathematically inept and proudly so. Our conversations must turn on matters of their concern, not ours. We are disadvantaged because we are compelled by their ignorance to match wits on their territory.

Membership in the community of educated men and women demands competence in science and awareness of its history. Many would dispute this claim. Here, I say, lies one explanation for the decline of American intellectualism. We have strayed from the path set by Franklin and Jefferson, who both admired and appreciated Lavoisier as much as they did Shakespeare.

- Sheldon Glashow, The Harvard Guide to Influential Books, 1986

You ought to be seated solemnly upon your stately throne

Amasis established the following daily routine for himself. He worked diligently on serious matters of government from dawn until the peak market hour*, but after that he would drink and banter with his drinking companions. His close friends and family were disturbed by this behavior and admonished him: "Sire, you are not conducting yourself properly by pursuing worthless pastimes. You ought to be seated solemnly upon your stately throne, conducting affairs of state throughout the day; that way, the Egyptians would know they were being governed by a competent man, and your reputation would improve. But as it is, you are not acting like a king." Amasis retorted: "When archers need to use their bows, they string them tightly, but when they have finished using them, they relax them. For if a bow remained tightly strung all the time, it would snap and be of no use when someone needed it. The same principle applies to the daily routine of a human being: if someone wants to work seriously all the time and not let himself ease off for his share of play, he will go insane without even knowing it, or at the least suffer a stroke. And it is because I recognize this maxim that I allot a share of my time to each aspect of life." This is how Amasis answered them.

- Herotodus, Histories, Book Two. Peak market hour was from 9 - 10 AM.

Look at this as you drink and enjoy yourself

At drinking parties of wealthy Egyptians, they always follow the end of their dinner by having a man carry around a corpse made of wood inside a coffin. The wooden corpse is crafted so as to be most realistic, both in the way it is painted and in the way it is carved, and it measures altogether on to three feet in length. As the man displays it before each of the guests, he says, "Look at this as you drink and enjoy yourself, for you will be like this when you are dead."

- Herotodus, Histories, Book Two

the books of the hour

For all books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hour, and the books of all time. Mark this distinction — it is not one of quality only. It is not merely the bad book that does not last, and the good one that does. It is a distinction of species. There are good books for the hour, and good ones for all time; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for all time.

- John Ruskin, as quoted on the excellent futilitycloset.com